An Aspect of the Decline of Citizenship in the Later Roman Empire

Abstract

THIS paper' contains little or nothing that new. It merely an attempt to examine once more a very old problem, that of the decline of citizenship in the Roman world. main question discussed here whether the causes for this decline which we can sum up under the category of political, or those which we can most conveniently designate as intellectual, were primary and fundamental. Of course there were many other causes. one put forward by Rostovtzeff may be quoted as an example. The main phenomenon which underlies the process of decline, he says, is the gradual absorption of the educated classes by the masses and the consequent simplification of all the functions of political, social, economic, and intellectual life, which we call the barbarization of the ancient world.2 cause suggested by Professor Rostovtzeff sociological rather than political or intellectual. Perhaps this indicates how arbitrary it to define the problem as it has been defined above. In the last analysis, it probable, the cause of the failure of any civilization can only be explained in terms of the whole. Yet if any one cause to be selected as fundamental, it perhaps one of the two which have been suggested. Political life, as it reflected in the forms of government and collective living, sums up and expresses the most vital elements in any organized society. Intellectual life might seem to be fundamental, in that the ultimate source of all action in a society lies in what takes place in the individual To reach down to this, would seem to touch the very foundations of the historical process; and a long line of historians seem to have acted on the assumption that it did. Professor Cochrane, to whose important book Christianity and Classical Culture I have been deeply indebted, was of this company. What here confronts us, he wrote of the decline of the Empire, is in the last analysis a moral and intellectual failure, a failure of the GraecoRoman mind. He accepted the two main alternatives suggested above, only to reject the former. No one but political liberals, he believed, would explain the decay of Roman citizenship as being due fundamentally to the failure of the forms of political life. It clear that the choice of either of these alternatives involves the whole problem of causation in history. It involves both philosophy and metaphysics, a discussion of which would here be out of place. attractiveness of Professor Cochrane's choice lies in the fact that it ex-