There was a lot of good discussion centering around slavery and its negative effect on technical innovation.\u00a0 After all, why would you need automation to increase the effectiveness of farming or other industrial work if you can just buy another thousand or even ten thousand war slaves for use as laborers on your farm or in your copper mine?\u00a0 Sure, they cost something but not much and if you keep them starved to the edge of death you don\u2019t even need to feed them much.\u00a0 Just replace them with younger, stronger slaves.<\/p>\n
Of course, every once in a while, the slaves will produce a Spartacus who decides to burn the whole thing down but that\u2019s what the legions are for anyway.\u00a0 And crucifying a few thousand slaves along the Appian Way is a good reminder of who\u2019s boss.<\/p>\n
But even slavery is not the whole story.\u00a0 When the majority of Romans were plebians living on family farms, and these same farmers were the citizen soldiers who were legionnaires when an enemy threatened, there was a patriotism that made the Romans the greatest military force of their age.\u00a0 They might lose twenty or thirty thousand men against Hannibal and then come back and field an army just as large from volunteers who served to protect their nation, their families and their homes.<\/p>\n
But the patricians who ran the senate were greedy and selfish and after a soldier returned home from war, he stood to lose his land because he would default on the debts that he couldn\u2019t pay off due to his absence and loss of harvest.\u00a0 These patricians would scoop up these small farms and then use their connections to obtain the defeated enemies as slaves and outcompete the remaining small farmers who couldn\u2019t match the efficiency of the large plantations.\u00a0 And in addition, the patricians eventually discontinued the practice of plebians obtaining conquered lands as colonists.\u00a0 The patricians turned these foreign lands into even larger plantations for themselves.<\/p>\n
So eventually these landless plebians ended up as a discontented rabble living on the bread and circuses that the emperors provided in Rome.\u00a0 And eventually they ended up in the armies which was the profession of last resort.\u00a0 So essentially the Roman elites eliminated the middle class.\u00a0 And eventually that reduced the effectiveness of the legions too.\u00a0 And finally, manpower was so depleted through destruction of the actual Roman citizens that the legions more and more were populated with barbarians from the fringes of the empire.\u00a0 So much so that by the fourth and fifth centuries the Franks, Germans, Goths and other pastoral peoples in Gaul and the northern border were the legions.<\/p>\n
When Atilla finally invaded the western empire, it was Frankish legionnaires and even generals who resisted him most effectively.\u00a0 But at this point, the jig was up.\u00a0 The barbarians realized that the empire was a paper tiger.\u00a0 Its citizens were downtrodden serfs who couldn\u2019t or maybe wouldn\u2019t take up arms to defend their \u201cnation.\u201d\u00a0 Being ruled by a Roman emperor or an Ostrogothic \u201cking\u201d was a matter of complete indifference to them.\u00a0 In point of fact the barbarian could probably provide better protection and possibly the taxes would be lower if the imperial bureaucracy ceased to exist.<\/p>\n
So, whether the Romans could have produced more defensible borders against the nomadic Eurasian pastoral peoples, whether Huns, Alans or even the westernmost tribes like the Goths and Vandals is probably immaterial.\u00a0 If a nation doesn\u2019t have a population willing to defend its homeland, then it is as good as done.<\/p>\n
And this was known all the way back in the time of Aristotle.\u00a0 Strong states had a large prosperous middle-class.\u00a0 Because this is the group that produces children and believes in the value of the nation.\u00a0 Not the very rich and not the desperately poor.\u00a0 Rome committed slow suicide when it allowed the patricians to destroy the plebian farmer\/soldiers.\u00a0 Because the early Romans so thoroughly defeated the neighboring peoples it took five hundred years to produce new enemies to tear down the rotted corpse of Rome but by the time of Marcus Aurelius the damage had already been done.\u00a0 It just took three hundred more years for Atilla to show up and prove to the Germans that there was nothing there to stop them.<\/p>\n
As a footnote I think it\u2019s interesting to see that our modern-day patricians (elites) are busy destroying the working and middle classes and importing migrants to act as cheap (slave) labor to replace them.\u00a0 What a brilliant plan.\u00a0 But not very original.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There was a lot of good discussion centering around slavery and its negative effect on technical innovation.\u00a0 After all, why would you need automation to<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1263],"tags":[195,3752,226,462,197,912,276],"class_list":["post-34477","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stuff-that-personally-interests-me-miscellaneous","tag-classical-history","tag-european-history","tag-fall-of-the-roman-empire","tag-h-g-wells","tag-history","tag-roman-empire","tag-rome"],"yoast_head":"\n