page 19
Even before the crisis of the third century, even before the margin of security was reduced by the Principate of Marcus Aurelius (161-180), there were factors which stifled initiative and killed enterprise. 
The seeds of decay were germinating beneath the surface and soon sprouted under the favoring circumstances of foreign war and internal chaos.
Long ago Rome had granted or acknowledged the freedom of cities, especially in the East, to manage local affairs through their own senates and municipal magistrates, their own financial systems, and their own courts.
The imperial government had always retained the right to exercise an overriding control, but in general it did not infringe upon the wide sphere of local self-government.
This generous privilege had encouraged a loyalty to Rome and a pride in the Empire as well as a civic pride which at least in the governing class of the municipalities had served as a powerful psychological stimulus to mental and material achievement.

Page 20
Despite their apparently flourishing condition, the cities of the Empire, focal points of ancient civilization, were showing symptoms of economic decline and their inhabitants were displaying signs of a loss of civic initiative.
Membership in the Empire was still highly prized, but Romans and non-Romans alike were yielding their municipal liberties to a paternalistic and increasingly autocratic central government which more and more bent ment to its will.
Regulation had not yet become regimentation, but the imperial administration was holding the control reins more tightly and more often than before was drawing upon them.
Local and imperial taxes mounted, towns overspent their resources on civic improvements, and a bureaucratic central government required more funds for the amenities of peace and the necessities of war.
Wars had once enabled Rome to balance the budget by adding new areas for exploitation and by bringing in vast sums as booty.
The Roman economy had expanded with the Empire.
Now, as wars were mainly defensive and as the frontiers remained fixed, the economy itself became static or even contracted. 
The imperial government found itself hard pressed to raise the funds required to maintain an army of soldiers and civil servants.
Since excessive finincial demands were made upon the municipalities and the local officeholders, many of these men sought escape from what had once been an honor but was now a costly burden.

Page 21
The aversion to municipal office was not yet widespread, but the signs were ominous and forshadowed the breakdown of the system of local government.
A period of incessant wars on the strategic northern and eastern frontiers succeeded peace.
Soon after his accession, the northern defense line was stripped of large detachments of troops for service in the Parthian Wars in the East.
Barbarian tribes, especially the Marcomanni and Quadi living beyond the Upper Rhine and Danube, overwhelmed the weakened garrisons in 167, breached the northern frontiers, swarmed into the border provinces, and invaded northern Italy itslef.
Only with difficulty was their advance halted, and only after long years of heavy fighting were they defeated in the Marcomannic Wars.
The emperor's troubles multiplied as an epidemic brought back by the troops returning from the Parthian Wars spread like wildfire through the western provinces and caused thousands of deaths.
Famine was widespread as farmers died of plague or deserted their fields in the face of enemy advance, and a weakening economy was further depressed.
Meanwhile the expenses of the state mounted.
The prolonged series of campaigns was costly, the bureaucracy was expanding rapidly, extravagance in imperial court circles was great.
The financial structure of the Empire was essientially unsound.

Page 22
In peacetime there were generally ample revenues, but in time of war there was no capital reserve nor was it possible to create a national debt in order to meet the extraordinary expenses.
The auctioning of the crown jewels in order to procure money for war was a desparate expedient to which Marcus was reduced.
It was the provincials, the inhabitants of towns, who were called upon to bear heavier burderns, to undertake fresh liturgies or so-called voluntary services, either by furnishing additional sums in cash or by providing food, lodging, and transport for imperial troops.
Not until the third century were the full effects of this policy felt, but while Marcus Aurelius was still alive there were signs that the vitality and prosperity of th ecities were being undermined.
The middle and upper classes were being increasingly subjected to the overriding needs and interests of the central government.
In its quest for money the government imposed heavier burdens than the towns could assume and thereby throttled enterprise.
In its search for efficiency the imperial bureaucracy ultimately destroyed local self-government.
Imperial commissioners, for example, were imposed upon cities whose financial condition was precarious.
As early as Trajan's reign (98-117) such special administrative experts (called correctores, curatores, or logistai) had been appointed by the emperor to supervise and overhaul the disordered finances of cities and even whole provinces.
Begun as an emergency measure to end financial mismanagement, imperial control over local administration tended to become a regular practice.
Thus the action of the second-century emperors paved the way for the thigher control of local affairs by the central government in the following century.
The process of civic decay had begun within the cities themselves, but the corrosive action of the state rapidly wearing away municipal liberty, a keystone of the structure of roman civilization.

Page 23
So the cancer of slavery was not cured, the growing poverty of the urban population and the increasing misery of the rural folk were dealt with, if at all, by palliatives such as doles, subsidies, and benefactions.

Page 71
To Ammianus Marcellinus (born c.330), the last great Roman historian, a decline in personal morality was the cause of the ills which afflicted the Empire.
The earthly city of Rome was passing, not becaues of the abandonment of the pagan gods for Christianity, as some critics charged, but as the necessary and fortunate preparation for the triumph of the heavenly city where man's destiny was to be attained.
The events of Rome's history, therefore, were unrolling as part of the general plan of the universe.
Rostovtzeff's thesis fo the failure of ancient civilization to reach the masses and the resulting conflict between the educated, propertied urban classes and the ignorant and impoverished rural masses to whose level culture declined; and most recently Toynbee's view that a symptom of decay is the failure of a civilization to assimilate its "internal proletariat," those who have no real stake in society, or its "external proletariat," the barbarians on the frontiers.

Page 72
The decline of the Roman Empire was neither sudden nor cataclysmic, but was a gradual process extending over several centuries.
We have already examined many of the disquieting symptoms of decay and disintegration which appeared during the third and even second century A.D., and we have seen how successive emperors applied force and compulsion in order to maintain the integrity of the Empire.

Page 73
Roman armies had been defeated by Germanic invaders before, but the catastrophic defeat of the Romans in 378 at the battle of Adrianople, which will be treated later, was a dramatic proof that the imperial government was unable to offer effictive resistance to invasion.
This was underscored in 410, when the barbarians occupied and sacked Rome.
Finally in 476 Romulus Augustulus, the last Roman emperor in the West, lost his throne and soon the invaders gained full control of the western half of the Roman Empire.
Meanwhile the acceptance of Christianity by the emperors and the vast majority of their subjects was both cause and effect of a profound transformation in the civilization of the ancient world.

Page 74
We shall see, however, that the process of decline was due not to a single cause, but to a variety of interacting factors -- political, economic, social, cultural, and physhological.
To give priority to any one of them is virtually impossible, since each acted with and upon every other factor.
At the outset, therefore, we should recognize the principle of multiple causation.
Some of the symptoms of decay are obvious: economic collapse, inadequte revenues, insufficient armed forces to defeind the Empire, intellectualy stagnation.
Each is a symptom of decline and at the same time a cause of further decline, in other words, an effect of an antecedent cause and a cause itself.
The barbarization of the army and the civil service and Rome's dependence upon barbarian allies and mercenaries were undoubtedly one of the factors in the decline of Rome.
But more and more Germans were admitted into the army and the civil service because Rome desperately needed men to help defend her frontiers and administer her empire.
The barbarization of the Empire is, therefore a symptom of decay, an indication that there was a shortage of manpower in relation to the tasks which had to be performed.
Again, the insistent needs of the army and the bureaucracy imposed an enormous burden upon the treasury.
The high cost of continuous warfare, the shrinking revenues which followed the loss of provinces, the dislocaton of trade as a result of civil war, the depreciation of the coinage -- all these had a ruinous effect upon th economic life of the Empire.
The methods devised by the imperial government to meet soaring expenses reduced men to the level of slaves of the state, straining to support a costly machinery of defense and administration.
Individual and municipal freedom was destroyed by the central government, and with the loss of that freedom initiative and enterprise were paralyzed.

Page 78
The decline of ancient civilization ha sbeen attributed, by Rostovtzeff, to the upper classes to extend their culture to the rural and urban lower classes.
In the end, according to this argument, there was a prolonged social conflict between teh urban propertied classes and the rural masses who made up the bul of the army.
The masses put their leaders on the throne, absorbed the higher classes and lowered standards in general.
On the contrary, in its greed the army plundered town and country alike.
Yet so much of the argument must be granted: the Roman culture had not penetrated sufficiently inot the masses, had not inspired them with devotion to a high ideal to which all alike were committed, and that now in a time of mounting difficulties it failed to evoke their active effort and cooperation in its defense.
Another unsatisfactory hypothesis is that the lack of any clear constitutional provision for the succession on the death of an emperor led to military usurpation of power, anarchy, and all its concomitant evils.
Finally, the Empire was not suddenly destroyed by the barbarians, although their attack contributed to Rome's decline and eventually they took posession of the western half of the Roman Empire.

Page 79
If Rome had not already been weakened internally and demorealized, she might have put up an effective resistance, as she had to earlier onslaughts.
The municipal aristocracy, the backbone of that civilization, was crushed by a harsh and arbitrary despotism and old loyalties were weakened.
It has been suggested that rome acquired a larger empire than she could control effectively, that imperialism was the basic fault from which stemmed all other weakneses: an insubordinate army, a top-heavy bureaucracy, political corruption, opression of individuals and cities, class warfare, the growth of slavery, the influx of alien ideas.

Page 80
Each acquisition of territory obviously posed fresh problems, but it was a measure of Rome's greateness that for centuries she solved many of these problems, and a measure of her decline that ultimately she was unable to do so.
It may be argued, on the contrary, that a basic factor of decline was not overexpansion, but a cessation of expansion.
Rome quickly attained the maximum possibilities of exploitation under existing techniques and economic stagnation set in.
Since her wealth was no longer replenished by the plunder and resources of new provinces, there was a shift from an economy which had grown with the Empire to a static economy.
Meanwhile pressures on the frontiers increased, and the government was compelled to maintain more armed forces and administrative officials than she could afford.
Higher taxes, bureaucratic and autocratic controls, and the whole machinery of compulsion followed.
Further expansion, however, would have been neither feasible with the resources of manpower which Rome had available nor immediately profitable.

Page 81
We have seen how the normal requirements of defense adn administration adn the extraordinary costs of half a century of military anarchy led to higher taxes, depreciation of the coinage, extension of the system of compulsory requisitions and forced labor, and economic chaos.
The enforcement of the system called for an ever larger and more elaborate machinery of government and more repressive measures.
As men sought to escape the insatiable demands of the state, they were regimented and bound to their classes and callings.

Page 82
Men lost public spirit as well as individual initiative, and the failure of both was a portent of the decline of ancient civilization.
Economic decentralization was another factor.
The provincials either had their own industrial skills or quickly developed them.
Soon they began to manufacture goods themselves for local and even for imperial markets, and the market for Roman and Italian products shrank as competition for new provincial industries increased.
Although the Empire was linked by an excellent system of roads and seaways, the methods of transportation were relatively poor.
The normal difficulties of movement from one region to another were intensified by the disorders of a century of crisis.
Thus high costs and risks helped promote economic decentralization, and provincial autarchy in turn fostered political disintegration.

Page 83
To be sure, the Christian attitude of resignation to adversity and the Christian emphasis upon a life to come represented a surrender to the material difficulties which beset men rather than a struggle to overcome them.
As a result of the chaos and dislocation of life, there was a growing note of pessimism and despair which led to apathy and inertia.
A reflection of this was the shift of interest from the here to the hereafter.
There was a "loss of nerve," as it has been called, a breakdown of morale, a defeatist mentality.
Even if they had the means, men no longer had the will to maintain the empire against invasion and dissolution.
An intellectual collapse accompanied and hastened the decline of the Roman Empire.