Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

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 R
OMAN
 V
ICES
Flavius Aetius was one of the larger-than-life characters of the late
Roman Empire, hailed as “the last of the Romans” by Edward Gibbon,
author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Between 
AD
433
and 454, until he was murdered by the emperor Valentinian III,
Aetius, a general, was probably the most powerful person in the
Roman Empire. He shaped both domestic and foreign policy, and

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fought a series of crucial battles against the barbarians, and also other
Romans in civil wars. He was unique among powerful generals
fighting in civil wars in not seeking the emperorship himself. Since
the end of the second century, civil war had become a fact of life in
the Roman Empire. Between the death of Marcus Aurelius in 
AD
180
until the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in 
AD
476, there was
hardly a decade that did not see a civil war or a palace coup against
an emperor. Few emperors died of natural causes or in battle. Most
were murdered by usurpers or their own troops.
Aetius’s career illustrates the changes from Roman Republic and
early Empire to the late Roman Empire. Not only did his involvement
in incessant civil wars and his power in every aspect of the empire’s
business contrast with the much more limited power of generals and
senators during earlier periods, but it also highlights how the fortunes
of Romans changed radically in the intervening centuries in other
ways.
By the late Roman Empire, the so-called barbarians who were
initially dominated and incorporated into Roman armies or used as
slaves now dominated many parts of the empire. As a young man,
Aetius had been held hostage by barbarians, first by the Goths under
Alaric and then by the Huns. Roman relations with these barbarians
are indicative of how things had changed since the Republic. Alaric
was both a ferocious enemy and an ally, so much so that in 405 he
was appointed one of the senior-most generals of the Roman army.
The arrangement was temporary, however. By 408, Alaric was
fighting against the Romans, invading Italy and sacking Rome.
The Huns were also both powerful foes and frequent allies of the
Romans. Though they, too, held Aetius hostage, they later fought
alongside him in a civil war. But the Huns did not stay long on one
side, and under Attila they fought a major battle against the Romans
in 451, just across the Rhine. This time defending the Romans were
the Goths, under Theodoric.
All of this did not stop Roman elites from trying to appease
barbarian commanders, often not to protect Roman territories but to
gain the upper hand in internal power struggles. For example, the

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Vandals, under their king, Geiseric, ravaged large parts of the Iberian
Peninsula and then conquered the Roman bread baskets in North
Africa from 429 onward. The Roman response to this was to offer
Geiseric the emperor Valentinian III’s child daughter as a bride.
Geiseric was at the time married to the daughter of one of the leaders
of the Goths, but this does not seem to have stopped him. He annulled
his marriage under the pretext that his wife was trying to murder him
and sent her back to her family after mutilating her by cutting off
both her ears and her nose. Fortunately for the bride-to-be, because of
her young age she was kept in Italy and never consummated her
marriage to Geiseric. Later she would marry another powerful
general, Petronius Maximus, the mastermind of the murder of Aetius
by the emperor Valentinian III, who would himself shortly be
murdered in a plot hatched by Maximus. Maximus later declared
himself emperor, but his reign would be very short, ended by his
death during the major offensive by the Vandals under Geiseric
against Italy, which saw Rome fall and savagely plundered.
B
Y THE EARLY
fifth century, the barbarians were literally at the gate.
Some historians argue that it was a consequence of the more
formidable opponents the Romans faced during the late Empire. But
the success of the Goths, Huns, and Vandals against Rome was a
symptom, not the cause, of Rome’s decline. During the Republic,
Rome had dealt with much more organized and threatening
opponents, such as the Carthaginians. The decline of Rome had
causes very similar to those of the Maya city-states. Rome’s
increasingly extractive political and economic institutions generated
its demise because they caused infighting and civil war.
The origins of the decline go back at least to Augustus’s seizure of
power, which set in motion changes that made political institutions
much more extractive. These included changes in the structure of the
army, which made secession impossible, thus removing a crucial
element that ensured political representation for common Romans.
The emperor Tiberius, who followed Augustus in 
AD
14, abolished the

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Plebeian Assembly and transferred its powers to the Senate. Instead of
a political voice, Roman citizens now had free handouts of wheat and,
subsequently, olive oil, wine, and pork, and were kept entertained by
circuses and gladiatorial contests. With Augustus’s reforms, emperors
began to rely not so much on the army made up of citizen-soldiers,
but on the Praetorian Guard, the elite group of professional soldiers
created by Augustus. The Guard itself would soon become an
important independent broker of who would become emperor, often
through not peaceful means but civil wars and intrigue. Augustus also
strengthened the aristocracy against common Roman citizens, and the
growing inequality that had underpinned the conflict between
Tiberius Gracchus and the aristocrats continued, perhaps even
strengthened.
The accumulation of power at the center made the property rights
of common Romans less secure. State lands also expanded with the
empire as a consequence of confiscation, and grew to as much as half
of the land in many parts of the empire. Property rights became