Rome
A paradigm for a city in decline
Mille viae ducunt homines per saecula Romam
(A thousand roads lead men forever to Rome)
– Proverb.
An Introduction
I have been reading and hearing much about population decline in the last months — except for Israel. India takes over from China as the largest population, since it is less urbanized. Homes are found empty in Japan for years now. Predictions are made for war and growth with a declining population. Schools are shut with no students. And there lies the prophecy of Universe 25.
For those of you who do not know, Universe 25 is the 25th iteration of a behavioural study on rodents. The premise was simples: you have some rats in a utopia designed to feed and house then to perfection, no luxury spared. Having reached 2200 mice, the population founds its way to decline in less than 2 years, and it eventually completely died out.
For those who observe the unprecedented prosperity humanity has reached, Universe 25 may seem like a Morgana’s prophecy: “he is your destiny, and he is your doom”. Thankfully, we are far more complex than mice, we are not confined in an experimental setting (unless you count the planet as confined, while we do not even know the whole of it yet) and we have a knack for developing — our not-so-utopia was not handed down to us by some ET.
I would submit we have far too many differences, and though we may share in a certain decline, the history of humanity is lined with ascent and descent: empires, tribes, families, armies and much more. And as I could not keep out of everything… this has everything to do with Ancient Rome. As a matter of fact, I continue to agree and expand on prof. Oliveira Martins’ quote (translated from Portuguese): “the history of the Roman Republic is the paradigm of all known histories”. Though I would say: the history of Ancient Roman is the known paradigm of all known histories. And in that I mean the empire, the republic, the kingdom, the city, the economy, the politics, the rivalries, and everything else.
And, in this too, Rome has already declined and mostly faded, buried under the sands of time; the city has suffered an unprecedented demographic collapse from the height of what could have been a hugely dense 1.5 million people metropolis[*] by the year 100 A.D. to a few tens of thousands by the start of the Middle Ages. Adding the Western Roman Empire’s downfall to external conquest and the Byzantine slow, thousand-year, decline: one can only say the answers also lie in Rome.
The City in Decline
When we talk about the ancient city of Rome, it is difficult to know exactly what we are talking about. That is, the city changed so much from the kings to Odoacer that one would. Are we talking about the near-empty thatched huts before the Sabine women, are we talking about unprecedented marvels of marble and stone from all over the Mediterranean or are we talking about the mythical decadent figure bestowed unto us by artists and thinkers from the Renascence onward?
Well, we are talking about all of that, of course, but we cannot properly talk about all of that at the same time, lest we lose chronological sense.
Keeping that in mind, let us be orderly and start at the beginning. Rome would not look like a booming metropolis at the time of the kings. It had not sprawled over the seven hills, it had no Egyptian grain to distribute, no treasures of the mysterious East and none of the major marks (the Flavian Theatre, the Thermæ, the temples built by the greatest generals and so on). We are talking about a civilisation that is, in sooth, yet to be — though now we know it indeed was.
We may consider that the challenge posed to the Roman Kingdom and most of the republican times was there. A mission existed, be it to overcome Carthage, to attain general success or to rule the Sea. What I mean is: there is no place here for a weak, young society to ever act like a decadent empire. The opposite, in fact. There lies no path to power in imitating power. Brazil is an example of such a failure in our times: a country that looks up to “Scandinavian socialism”[†] and seeks to spend just like Sweden, while providing zero of the ambiance that gave way to Swedish prosperity — and we are not talking about an empire here. Needless to say, Brazil is not in the highway to prosperity, but threading the dangerous road to serfdom.
At any point, the fact is Rome stood far from the spoiling utopia of Universe 25 at this moment of its history.
After the fall of Carthage, we might say Rome has become the leading empire of its time, and of all time, we might add. That is, taking on the mantle of the cosmopolis, Rome is the universal empire that weaves the very legitimacy of the concept. And it did enjoy its time in the Sun, much like the USA after World War Two. Using the population of the actual city of Rome as a proxy, we must note that the population seems to have peaked by the end of the first century A.D., according to some estimations.
The precise movements of Roman prosperity are yet not detailed to be discussed, and are also not the main point of this essay, so here comes the question: what happened after that? Well, my readings indicate that the population fell just as quickly as it grew. It is important to observe that this was not a childless society. Romans died from plague and war; they moved back to the rural areas as Rome was politically and economically voided — and it would be possible that those who remained had less children, but who knows.
The point is: the urban population fell, and by the end of Antiquity, many estimates agree that it would not have even a hundred thousand people — and that it would continue to dim well into Medieval Times. We are talking here about a much more dangerous city, abandoned by the imperial structure, lacking a Senatorial class (or any such wealthy people who could turn anywhere they went into Monaco), partially abandoned and materially depreciating. This is no city of wonders, commerce, and opportunity. It is a hollow dream, voided by the decay and overextension of empire.
And for more than a thousand years, Rome would remain the seat of the papacy, de facto and de jure a Christian City (identified more by the Church than with the Byzantines over the Adriatic), mostly reduced to minor Italian squabbles, and depending on greater kingdoms to call upon its influence.
The Rural Setting
It is no mystery what the ancient Romans did: they fled to their farms. Large and small, senator or bum, the wandering search of safety, shelter and a life led the Romans to the countryside — and led properties to the hand of powerful men, who could defend the land/fiefs and the previous owners, now their servants or vassals. One might take note of the wording, but it is better to say it fully: feudalism had kicked down the door.
It is thus that some questions arise:
i. What was happening to population and fertility when feudalism began?
ii. Did moving away from Rome make less babies or more?
iii. How relevant was the barbarian influx?
iv. How and why did things change again?
One might observe that these are not trivial questions. To answer them accurately would require precise data from more than a thousand years ago, and we do not have that. In many ways, that may be a problem since the absence of this information makes way for all sort of fantasy storytelling, but let us propose some thoughts:
It is likely that fertility fell by the end of Antiquity, as that trend is observed for general times of crises, but it is unclear if that had any meaningful role to play in the social or economic setting. We know, as an example, that individual wealth grew at the time of the Black Death, since it led to concentration of inheritance and the scarcity of labour. It would be interesting to see how that would have worked out a thousand years prior. It is also not clear if there was a difference in urban and rural fertility, as there exists nowadays.
[*] 1.5 million people is the highest number found during my research on the topic, but I am not subscribing to that number, just using it as a reference for the scale of the collapse.
[†] It is unfortunately the case for Brazilian politics, that the Marxist/socialist left (allied to Maduro, Cuba, Ortega, …) conflates the Scandinavian political and economic setting with “socialism that works”, at the same time using the ludicrous claim that the USSR, Cambodia, and other such bloodthirsty regimes were not “real socialism” (at best, there are times when we can hear people defending gulags or saying they never existed in the first place). We should observe that such claims have been publicly refuted not only by simple facts, but also by Scandinavian leaders, but referring more commonly to claims made by American politicians: <https://www.vox.com/2015/10/31/9650030/denmark-prime-minister-bernie-sanders>
P.S.: the above is an informal essay, please do not consider it conclusive, fully researched or based.
