Why Nations Fail

particularly Mark Anthony and Octavian, and his foes. After
Anthony and Octavian won, they fought each other, until
Octavian emerged triumphant in the battle of Actium in 31
BC
. By the following year, and for the next forty-five years,
Octavian, known after 28 
BC
as Augustus Caesar, ruled
Rome alone. Augustus created the Roman Empire, though
he preferred the title princep, a sort of “first among equals,”
and called the regime the Principate. 
Map 11
shows the
Roman Empire at its greatest extent in 117 
AD
. It also
includes the river Rubicon, which Caesar so fatefully
crossed.
It was this transition from republic to principate, and later
naked empire, that laid the seeds of the decline of Rome.
The partially inclusive political institutions, which had
formed the basis for the economic success, were gradually
undermined. Even if the Roman Republic created a tilted
playing field in favor of the senatorial class and other
wealthy Romans, it was not an absolutist regime and had
never before concentrated so much power in one position.
The changes unleashed by Augustus, as with the Venetian

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Serrata
, were at first political but then would have
significant economic consequences. As a result of these
changes, by the fifth century 
AD
the Western Roman
Empire, as the West was called after it split from the East,
had declined economically and militarily, and was on the
brink of collapse.
…
 R
OMAN
 V
ICES

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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
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

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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 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.

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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 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