Op-Ed
December 1, 2023
Historian Ramsay MacMullen deftly described today’s U.S. Congress in his book “Corruption and the Decline of Rome.” It was published in 1988; MacMullen died a year ago.
In MacMullen’s eyes, the Roman Empire did not “decline and fall”; sections of it crumbled in the third and fourth centuries while other parts flourished; and government corruption created, or at least accelerated, the crisis, through privatization of government services: “public authority exercised for private profit.”
The “crisis of the third century” evokes the period from 235 to 284, during which time 26 men claimed title to the throne, and were accepted by the Senate. At least 16 of these 26 emperors were murdered by their own troops; two committed suicide.
All 26 had sought to be the speaker of the House of Representatives. (That’s a joke; the rest of this is true.)
Corruption became institutionalized in the third century, government all but reduced to bribery and extortion. When “barbarians” sacked Rome in the early fifth century, the lion’s share of their spoils came from the ruling class of extortioners.
Government corruption sparked many of the frequent revolts in the Late Empire, usually headed by an imperial official sent to a distant region where he was responsible for collecting taxes.
An angry Emperor Constantine wrote in 313: “The registrars of the municipalities through collusion are transferring the burden of the taxes of the potentiores (powerful ones) to inferiores.” Two generations later, in 384, all the senators in Thrace and Macedonia excused themselves from paying any taxes on their land.
As today, tax fraud benefited the wealthy and powerful. Roman officials extorted their inferiors while skimming from the meager amounts the plebes could afford to pay. Regional governors were sent abroad with orders limiting the amount they could skim from taxes, in coin or produce, to a certain percent, as high as 15%. Corruption was institutionalized and privatized.
MacMullen relates the sad tale of Pamonthius the wine dealer in Egypt, who, “being long importuned by the magistrates of his native place with exactions beyond his means, and having for this reason borrowed a great sum of money, and being asked for this and not being able to meet his liabilities, he was compelled by his creditors to sell all that he had, even to the garments that cover his shame, and when these were sold, scarcely could he get together the half of the money for his creditors, who, those pitiless and godless men, carried off all his children,” and sold them into slavery.
But taxes were not the root of Pamonthius’s problems: It was the corrupt officials who extorted him, wielding their state powers for their own gain.
Emperor Julian (reigned 361-63), lamented that his prefect in Gaul demanded from his subjects three and a half times more taxes than he was authorized, no doubt skimming 250% of it. MacMullen commented: “Three hundred and fifty percent is a lot.”
Among the privatized government “services” were prisons. Great landowners, whether government officials or not, kept their own prisons, where they could terrify peasants and townspeople without fear of interference from judges. (Corruption is rampant today in privatized U.S. prisons: See the monthly reports from Prison Legal News.)
Political corruption today of course is not limited to prisons. In one of his 625 footnotes (!) to 197 pages of text, MacMullen cites a 1985 report from the New York Commission of Investigation: “Corruption seems to be the normal way of life in the construction industry,” which added “10-15 percent to costs.” The same rakeoff permitted to some Roman governors.
(In the last paragraph of his excellent book, supplemented by a footnote of course, MacMullen mentions the Iran-Contra scandal, in which high government officials engaged in “illicit sales of weapons to their country’s enemies at enormous profit.”)
A Roman judge, MacMullen wrote, “felt accountable not so much to a system or a discipline as to the general values of the social strata which he served … [who] did not tolerate insolence, meaning the claim to justice as a right by persons too low to deserve it.”
When the barbarians finally arrived at the gates of Rome, why would the plebes defend their own government, which ruled through extortion and bribery? Social bonds had dissolved, under “the higher level of violence employed by government; the ambiguity of law; the greater number and intrusiveness of laws, as of government servants likewise; and the isolation of the emperor.” And the guardsmen — the Roman parallel to our police — “had been promoted to the ius gladii, the legal right to inflict capital punishment.”
As for the emperors themselves, who not-quite reigned over an empire descending into barbarity and widespread torture, one might see parallels in our own society, roughly half of whom accept the corruption of a 91-times-indicted former emperor, apparently believing that “an ill-defined and all the more insidious sacrosanctity radiated from the throne and cast some shadow of treason on many wrongful acts not otherwise very serious.”
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