Decimation comes from a Roman military discipline procedure where a legion which had run away in battle had every tenth man in the legion chosen by lot, who was then clubbed to death by nine other men.
From Andrew Lintott's The Constitution of the Roman Republic:
The chief function of the Consuls, and an important function of the Praetors, was that of being military leaders. The authority of the Senate was most clearly demonstrated when it acted as a forum for the discussion of foreign and military policy. ... Rome's military needs determined the shape of the political year.The magistrates with imperium did have a role in domestic matters but Rome was a martial state with its political system ordered to the requirements of an expansive military policy.
In the late Roman Empire there was constant difficulty in raising sufficient troops. Like the high standards of the AIF in WWI, the Roman limits to military service changed with need. Emperor Valens passed laws stopping land owners substituting homeless men for able bodied men. But there were also laws passed to stop draft dodging. Pat Southern writes:
First of all, it was declared illegal for recruits to cut off their fingers or thumbs. The repitition of such laws show they [emperors] were unable to stop the practice.Valentinian passed laws apparently that would burn at the stake draft dodgers who mutilated themselves. Theodosius dealt with it by allowing thumbless soldiers to still serve.
Charles Van Doren writes in A History of Knowledge that the period from 450 to 550 AD were the darkest in the history of western civilization. The Byzantine Empire was unable to re-establish the Pax Romana that western Europe had known and the literacy, commerce and law became scarce.
Instead people were illiterate, their world shrunken to a small area around where they were born. Roads were too dangerous to travel as the law was one of arbitrary violence and force. Commerce shrunk to subsistence living and barter become the main mechanism of trade as the coins of the old Roman Empire were used up. The arts, philosophy and other leisure activities that the stability of the Roman political system had enabled was gone too. The population waned as a result of this instability. Van Doren writes:
It is hard to imagine them [these years]. Historically, they are almost a blank, we only know that at the end of this period of rapine and death the region now called Europe was utterly changed.Van Doren's argument as to why there was a fall into the Dark Ages when Europe has survived political collapse and invasions (barbarian and nation-state) since without the catastrophic collapse of society, commerce and civilization; is that it was the effect of Christianity and its cultural dominance that led to the Dark Ages. Van Doren writes that Rome was more like we are today; deeply devoted to the material world, and with out lust for adventure, travel, power, wealth and leisure - including exercise and health. With the collapse of the Empire and its replacement by the arbitrary nature of Dark Ages feudalism, Van Doren argues the people embraced Augustine's City of God rather than Rome's City of Man. Van Doren writes:
The new kind of Christians, after the fall, had little interest in their bodies as such. They cared about the health of their souls. They had no interest in consumption. They could lose their reputation rather than gain it for possessing wealth in a society where poverty was next to godliness.Roman wealth was replaced by Christian poverty. Van Doren notes that rationality is perfectly logical to the people living under it at the time. To a Dark Ages christian they did not see the Dark Ages as a fall, or as dark; they saw it perfectly rational and normal to devote their lives to their soul's ascent to heaven through living for God.
Alan : Cam the 'Dark Ages' never really happened. Two-thirds of the population of the Roman Empire lived in the East where the alleged benefits of the Roman way continued uninterrupted until at least the crisis of the Arab invasions.
A classic example of this Dark Age nonsense was the documentary series Buildings that shaped Britain which happily declared the Tower of London the tallest building in Europe at the time of its construction. The Tower is 96 feet high. Hagia Sophia, completed in 537, is close to twice that. Moreover, the whole Romans good barbarians bad equation is now deeply questioned. At least in the Byzantine empire, which then encompassed most of southern Europe, North Africa, Egypt, Syria and Anatolia, urban life flourished throughout the alleged Dark Ages. Recent archaeology suggests that even in sub-Roman Britain which is usually the type case for the Dark Age theory, the use of Latin, the construction of large buildings and long range trade continued.
The term itself is now largely replaced by Late Antiquity, the Migration Period, or the Early Middle Ages depending on the focus of the writer.
One of the contemporary problems of historiography is that extent to which specialist historians remain prisoners of ideas that are no longer accepted by the mainstream profession.
adam : You sound more up to date on it, but I swear I read recent results in economic history that showed a massive decline in GDP during the Dark / Migrational Ages. Can't remember where though.
Alan : There was certainly a massive decline in GDP in what had been the western Roman empire between 500 and 1000. There was probably an increase in GDP in the eastern Roman empire in the same period. Even the western decline has exceptions like the Cordoba caliphate, the Italian maritime republics, England after Alfred the Great, France after the Carolingian unification, the North African littoral, etc etc. In some places there was also a decline in the use of Latin, long-range trade and urbanisation. What did not happen was the effective extinction of civilisation emblematised in the term Dark Ages.
Tom Holland, "The fate of the Gracchi had conclusively proved that any attempt to impose root and branch reforms on the [Roman] Republic would be interpreted as tyranny. Programs of radical change, no matter how idealistic their inspiration, would inevitably disintegrate into internecine rivalries. By demonstrating this to the point of destruction, the Gracchi had ultimately stymied the very reforms for which they had died."
Currently Reading: Rubicon. The last years of the Roman Republic. My knowledge of the civil wars between Caesar, Cicero and Pompey is poor. Tom Holland writes on the difficulty of Roman history;
One day perhaps, when the records of the twentieth century AD have grown as fragmentary as those of ancient Rome, a history of the Second World War will be written that relies solely on the broadcasts of Hitler and the memoirs of Churchill. It will be one cut off from whole dimensions of experience; no letters home, no combatant's diaries. The silence will be one which the ancient historian is all too familiar.Roman history is absent of the lives of noble women, ordinary men and women, soldiers and slaves. He continues:
In Roman history to search for details of anyone outside of the ruling class is to pan for gold.Archeology is a better record of normal existence than the written record.
Lintott argues that the solution to violence in 52 BC left control of the city in one group under Pompeius and consequently, any dispute between Pompeius, Caesar and the optimates (Senate) without constitutional compromise would elevate the violence immediately into civil war. The solution of 52 BC where constitutional mos had been stretched to achieve a political solution to demagoguery and urban violence. Lintott writes:
Though urban violence had been suppressed, the feelings associated with it lived on. The optimates, finding that they could not use legal means to control a man they considered the enemy of the republic, decided automatically for force. They could not see clearly enough the dangers of a new civil war, which, though it was not founded on the personally bitterness that characterized the previous one, was to spell the end of republican government. For Caesar the concept of the republic involved his right to maintain his dignitas, especially his position of patronage over his troops, by any constitutional means possible. When these were of no avail, violence had always been the way for a Roman to right undeserved wrongs.As Lintott notes, if Caesar had returned as a private citizen he most likely would have faced a political prosecution which Caesar feared would take the form of a biased court and his being surrounded by armed men.
Andrew Lintott explores the constitutional methods open to the Roman system where laws passed by violence could be over-turned by Senatorial veto. For instance if the Assemblies were under the sway of violence they would be unable to replace, modify or pass new laws to remove the bad laws that had been made under coercion.
Prior to the late republic, laws were not passed under the Roman Constitution that were repugnant to the Senate (the optimates). It was only in the later republic when the constitutional mechanisms, such as Tribunes, were in place to challenge the constitutional primacy of the Senate. Lintott writes:
Annulment was essentially a political weapon of the optimates reviving as it did the patrum auctoritas in a new form.He argues that this was intended to be used as a mechanism to stave off the passing of laws by violence because there was no statute offense against violence itself being used in this manner - a failing of the Roman Constitution in Lintott's view. The opening it allowed however, was political, and for the Senate as a social class, to use against plebian policies and demogogic leaders. Lintott continues:
At times when the authority of the Senate was strong this did not matter: at other times the evasion by the optimates of a direct challenge to violent legislation allowed an escape route to unscrupulous politicians and, indeed, was an encouragement to violence.Central to Lintott's thesis on the Roman Constitution and the increasing violence in the late republic is that violence was not only tolerated as part of the constitutional system it was seen as a legitimate mechanism for securing redress; privately, publicly and politically.
Gracchi from Westminster Wisdom: "Livy was a textual historian- his understanding was based on written materials because, as he says here, they were 'the only reliable' means for preserving the past. Therefore Livy's historical abilities were limited- by the fact that his hindsight went back as far as the history of literacy and the extant record. That is true of historians today: history is tied to writing." Lintott's book on the Roman Constitution concentrates on the constitution of the late republic for the same reason.
The Bush Administration was able to appoint two Supreme Court justices. Bush wanted diversity in the choices, such as a woman or a minority. Both his picks, Gonzalas and Miers, were shot down by both conservatives and public opinion.
Cheney, however, wanted justices that supported his view of the unitary executive in order to back up his actions in areas such as emergency, terror, torture, executive privilege, etc. Cheney led the panel that selected the final five candidates. Gellman writes:
Collectively, the group [of candidates] saw executive power in expansive terms and congressional authority more narrowly.The media concerns and political showmanship over abortion was a furphy as it turned out - more suited to scandal than judicaturial scholarship. With Roberts and Alito the Supreme Court of the USA became more executive friendly. The unitary executive is a cherry picked view of the Federalist Papers, namely Hamilton's No.70 where he argues that a vigorous executive is essential to good government. Hamilton writes:
That unity is conducive to energy will not be disputed. Decision, activity, secrecy, and despatch will generally characterize the proceedings of one man in a much more eminent degree than the proceedings of any greater number; and in proportion as the number is increased, these qualities will be diminished. This unity may be destroyed in two ways: either by vesting the power in two or more magistrates of equal dignity and authority; or by vesting it ostensibly in one man, subject, in whole or in part, to the control and co-operation of others, in the capacity of counsellors to him.Hamilton then goes on to argue against the Roman Consul system which was a two President style system. In reality though the Consuls were warrior kings and were off fighting the wars of Rome pretty much constantly, enough that new magistracies had to be made in Rome with imperium to deal with the domestic issues of the city. Cheney's view on executive authority is very similar to Thomas Jeffersons which is known as the Doctrine of Higher Obligation. I have often wondered if they would not have got more popular traction by claiming they were operating under Jefferson's view of executive power than the 'unitary president'. The presidential doctrine of executive power we know today is more Madison's and stems from his time as President when he pretty much over-rode Jefferson's machinations through practice and convention. Hamilton's argument doesn't bear for Cheney, especially not when it is backed by the whacko and extreme writings of John Yoo as legal precedent, and leaves the citizen wondering if the last eight years wasn't just an excuse for maximal power. The ultimate test is if the 'unitary executive' brought good government. It did not. This is already recognized as one of the worst Administrations in the history of the United States. For that reason alone the doctrine of the unitary executive is a failed one.
