Fall of the Roman Empire

Typology of Values
The author’s personality is often reflected in his or her narrative. As an example, consider reasons given by historians for the Fall of the Roman Empire. According to tradition, Rome was founded on April 21, 9247 HE (753 BCE) and April 21 is still a national holiday in Italy. According to a legend, Romulus and Remus, twin brothers abandoned at birth and raised by wolves, founded Rome. The brothers eventually quarreled, and Romulus killed Remus, becoming the sole ruler of Rome, a town that was to be the capital of the empire that left a lasting impression on the history of Western people. For about a thousand years, the Roman Empire was the Western Civilization. On August 28, 10476 HE (476 CE), Germanic warrior, Odoacer, dethroned the last Emperor, Romulus Augustulus, bringing the Roman Empire to an end. Why did the Roman Empire fall? Answering this question has occupied historians for centuries. After reading extensively about this subject I started to wonder whether the reasons given do not reflect personal values of their authors that could be captured by the Study of Values questionnaire.

In the 1930’s, Spranger wrote his seminal Menschentypen, made famous later by Allport, Vernon and Lindzey who based their Study of Values questionnaire on the typology used in Spranger’s book. An instance of results from the Study of Values questionnaire, shown above, displays a person’s profile on six clusters of values: Theoretical, Economic, Political, Social, Aesthetic, and Religious using the L scores with mean of 50 and standard deviation of 10. It may be hypothesized that a person scoring high on the religious scale of values would likely subscribe to Saint Augustine’s reasons given for the fall of Rome and a person scoring low on this scale would likely subscribe to Gibbon’s explanation of the same event. This correspondence can be found also for the other scales of the questionnaire.
I Theoretical Toward its end, the Roman Empire suffered debilitating epidemics of plague, the most severe of which was the plague of 166-180 CE. Ellsworth Huntington, one of the pioneers of the ecology movement, stressed as early as 1917 the role of deforestation of Italy in the decline of Roman civilization. Deforestation caused land erosion, not only ruining the farmers, but also silting the rivers. The gradual deposition of silt filled the rivers’ channels, altering their course. This, in turn, contributed to flooding and the creation of swamps, breeding grounds of malarial mosquitoes. However, the most intriguing factor in the Decline of Rome was hypothesized by Kobert in his Chronische Bleivergiftung im klassischen Altertume. Kobert claims that toward the end of the empire Romans started to convey drinking water in lead pipes and that the resulting chronic lead poisoning played a role in this historical process.

"When I wrote the Outline of History I slowly gained the conviction which crystallized itself later on into a positive idea, that the great Roman Empire was ruined not only from outside by the storming barbarians; but also by the internal financial difficulties, by the indebtedness of all social classes, and by the heavy burden of taxation, until, under these financial burdens, the whole scaffolding of imperialism broke down."

Max Weber in his General Economic History analyzes economic factors as reasons for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Other historians joined Weber in stressing the economic causes of this historical event, notably Westermann in his Economic Basis of the Decline of Ancient Culture, West in his Economic Collapse of the Roman Empire, and Bratianu in his Raisons Economiques de la Division de l’Empire Romain.

III Political Most historic books, describing the successions of emperors, events and intrigues preceding their ascension and eventual abdication or assassination, concentrate on this factor. A good example in this respect is the story of the Emperor Nero who "played the fiddle while Rome was burning." Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins comments on this phrase:

"The notion that Nero fiddled while Rome burned is nonsense because the fiddle wasn't invented until many centuries after he ruled Rome, from 54 to 68 CE."

When the big fire broke out in 64 A.D. (it burned nine days and destroyed two thirds of the city), Christians blamed the fire on Nero while the Emperor suspected that the fire was started by the Christians, as they hailed it as the sign of the second coming of Christ."

IV Social Factors According to Walbank (1946), the main reason behind Rome’s decline and fall was that the late Roman Empire was governed by an oppressive bureaucracy, resulting in the predominance of the State over the individual interests. Rome started out as a society that valued discipline and social cohesion. Roman society originally featured strong families bonded by duty. Conferring honor rather than disgrace upon the family name, was more important than fulfilling personal desires. However, after centuries of success the empire started to decline. Advanced militarism attracted men looking for spoils of victory. The character of the soldiers changed from armed men fighting to defend their homes and families to men signing up to fight as mercenaries. As demand increased for foreign goods, currency flowed out of Rome to foreign countries. Vast numbers of people from the conquered territories, attracted by the wealth of Roman society, migrated to the cities only to become dependent on welfare. Huge outlays went to support panem et circensem, feasts and gladiatorial conquests. A giant bureaucracy installed to administer the taxation and requisition of materials and labor gradually came to dominate Roman society, crushing the middle class. Eventually, the Roman people began to abdicate their social leadership.

V Aesthetic The Welsh's Figure Preference Test (1949) is a classic instrument to measure personal aesthetic preferences. The factor analysis of this questionnaire indicates, that its main factor differentiates between preferences for ruled, simple, geometric figures, as contrasted with preferences for convoluted, complicated figures. There are several studies by the associates of David McClelland which indicate that art or architecture, stressing straight geometric figures, tends to be predominant during the ascent phase of a civilization, while the convoluted designs predominate during its decline, as in the Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian architectural orders.

VI Religious Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), in his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1788) provides a panoramic picture of the Roman civilization and gives the reasons for its decline and fall. Based on an exhaustive analysis of the factors leading to its demise, Gibbon concluded that the fall of the Roman Empire was due to the supplanting of the classical tradition of the Roman community with Christian beliefs. He closes his discussion of the fall of the Roman Empire and subsequent history of Saeculum Obscurum and Middle Ages with the words:

The ‘Decline and Fall’ was banned in several countries for his critique of religion and is often published in abbreviated editions where many of Gibbon's opinions regarding Christianity are deleted. Apologists of religion objected to Gibbon's treatment of Christianity as a historical phenomenon and not as a special case admitting supernatural explanations and disallowing criticism of its adherents. With respect to the Judaic branch of the monotheistic religions Gibbon described its followers as

"fanatics, whose dire superstition earned them the implacable enemies
not only of the Roman government, but also of humankind."

Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was a prototype of Isaac Asimov's The Foundation Trilogy.

Factor analysis of the Study of Values The Study of values was factor analyzed by Lurie (1937) who found four factors. The theoretical, social, and religious factors loaded on their corresponding Study of Values scales. The economic, political, and aesthetic scales loaded on the mundane bipolar factor with the economic and political scales loading on one pole and aesthetic scales on the opposite pole. Eysenck (1954) describes this personality type as aggressive, go-getter, utilitarian, anti-cultural and fits these four factors into his circumplex as shown in Figure 1.

Fig. 1. The factor analytic structure of the Study
of Values scales.

The vertical axis in Figure 1 is the tough minded - tender minded dimension. The horizontal axis is the left - right, radical - conservative dimension.