The Roman Empire, once an ancient powerhouse, experienced a dramatic fall from its golden age to eventual collapse. Tristan Hughes and guest Dr. David Gwynn launch our new Ancients mini-series on The Fall of Rome by exploring how internal pressures, civil wars, economic instability, and the rise of Christianity contributed to the decline of the Western Roman Empire. They compare the structural changes made by emperors Diocletian and Constantine, the impact of class tensions, and the challenges posed by external threats, setting the stage for the empire's fall. Join them as they uncover the complex processes that led to one of history's most dramatic and world-changing collapses.MORE:The Origins of Rome:https://open.spotify.com/episode/26cmn3eQrPb0LQ7Jiu92cPRome's Crisis of the Third Century:https://open.spotify.com/episode/3VgvW43kHAxzSl43hWJiRZPresented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editors are Aidan Lonergan and Joseph Knight, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on
Chapter 1: What led to the fall of the Roman Empire?
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The Roman Empire, the beating heart of the ancient world. A dazzling expanse of marble and martial valour, of tow goods and trade routes that spanned three continents. It was constructed over the course of a thousand years and rose from a city that was once an overlooked backwater. Rome's sweeping imperium came to define the very concept of civilisation. But then the cracks started to emerge.
Rome, once a dominion of glory and gold, in just two centuries would become synonymous with decay and collapse. And over the next two weeks, the question we're asking on The Ancients is how? How was the most illustrious empire the world had yet seen brought to doom and destitution? You're listening to The Ancients. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and this is the story of The Fall of Rome.
Today, in the first of four special episodes, we're starting at the beginning, casting the net wide to trace the origins of the Western Roman Empire's collapse. From civil wars that pitted emperor versus emperor to the contested rise of Christianity, we'll explore the swirling maelstrom of internal pressures and tensions that pushed Rome to breaking point.
Chapter 2: How did internal conflicts contribute to Rome's decline?
Next, we'll journey north to the unruly borderlands along the rivers Rhine and Danube to mingle among the so-called barbarians who flooded across the empire's boundaries and carved out their own barbarian kingdoms from the husk of this fallen superpower.
Then we'll travel east, past the lands of the Goths and the Huns, to the fertile crescent of Mesopotamia and the faraway lands of East Africa, tracing the origins of a series of indiscriminate deadly plagues that ripped through the empire's population. We'll ask, was disease the main factor that brought Rome to its knees?
And finally, to bring things to a head, we'll tell the tale of Rome's last emperors, the rump Roman state they supposedly controlled, and we'll ask what happened next. Did Rome really fall, or did it evolve and continue by another name? Throughout it all, world-leading historians will bring their unique insights.
Together, we'll discover thrilling revelations and immerse ourselves in the world of ancient Rome to help us unpack its ultimate fate. But all of that is yet to come. First, let's wind back the clock and imagine Rome before its fall. Back to an empire that heralded the likes of Augustus and Trajan, Caesars who dripped with prestige and power.
to a dominion that bounded the azure swells of the Mediterranean and stretched from the damp and drizzly marshes of Caledonia in modern-day Scotland to the parched deserts and wild badlands of Parthia in the Middle East. For those who experienced it, the majesty of Rome in the first and second centuries was undisputed.
Its people were the mightiest of men and commanded the fairest portion of the earth, so claimed Salvian, a 5th century churchman looking back wistfully on the empire's greatest days. We can imagine a merchant vessel coming in to dock at the great lagoon port of Ostia, some 20 miles from Rome.
She is loaded with precious cargo, ceramic urns of aromatic spices from Arabia, oil and grain from Egypt, silk and pepper from the faraway lands of India and China. but also enslaved people captured on the battle-worn frontiers of the Empire.
Built to be nimble and weave through the waves, the wooden ship with its red cloth sail is dwarfed by the great public buildings which line the shore and snake back inland to the capital. The skyline is crowded by the roofs of basilicas, temples, theatres and markets. Slavers and traders barter and haggle. The chains of bondage clink and clank.
Gold coins, each stamped with the portrait of the reigning Augustus, are pulled from purses and change hands. The goods are distributed throughout the boot of Italy and beyond, along newly cobbled roads that slice through the empire into the lavish pantries of grand townhouses and country villas.
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Chapter 3: What role did Christianity play in the Roman Empire's transformation?
So now we're firmly in this world, let's find out more. To help us understand how an empire of such strength and majesty could fall so far and so quickly, I'm joined today by Dr. David Gwynne from Royal Holloway University. David, he's a great friend of the podcast. He's previously joined us to talk about the Goths and Rome's third century crisis.
And today we're delving into the origins of this incredible story of mass decline, a story of broken ambition, of destructive power and fated inevitability. This is the beginning of the end of Rome. David, it is wonderful to have you back on the podcast today. Thank you very much. Great to be here.
It feels important, first of all, to highlight how important it is to take a long-term approach when discussing this massive topic, which is the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
The fall of the Roman Empire in the West shaped subsequent medieval history. It destroyed the last great unity of the Mediterranean world, replaced it in the West with a mosaic that shaped medieval Europe and medieval Christendom. A change that great simply cannot happen fast. It's long, it is indeed complex.
A lot of Roman elements survived, even while the imperial superstructure collapsed, and we see those elements all around us. So we've got to take a long view. Yes, there are great individual episodes. The Gothic sack of Rome in 410. The fall of Romulus Augustulus, the titular last Western emperor, in 476. But there is no one moment. It's a process.
And how should we define fall then in this case? Because as you've mentioned, some parts of the Roman Empire, they really do endure.
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Chapter 4: How did Diocletian and Constantine attempt to save the Empire?
And this is a topic where definition genuinely matters. Edward Gibbon famously called his book The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. But the Roman Empire as a whole didn't fall in the 5th century in any case, because the Eastern Empire will survive for another 1,000 years. Is it decline?
That is a value judgment depending on whether you believe that the old Roman Empire was the greatest civilization, or whether you prefer the energy, dynamism, and occasional brutality of the early Germanic kingdoms. And if we're going to pinpoint a fall, 476 is the classic date. After that date, there is no Western Roman Emperor, not until Charlemagne will attempt to reclaim the title.
But a lot of those Roman elements that continue do blur the lines. All the Gothic kings who emerged in Italy, southern France, Spain, continued Roman elements. So did the Franks. The great anomaly, to a significant extent, being Britain, where there is a much more clear cutoff, partly because the Anglo-Saxons were much less interested.
Is there a sense then, and actually with some of those kind of, we say post-Roman kingdoms today, don't we, but would they maybe not have even considered themselves successors, but actually just the next in line?
It's always difficult. Every major written source from any of the post-Roman kingdoms was written by someone of Roman ancestry and distinct Roman Christian bias. Isidore of Seville in Spain, Cassiodorus in Ostrogothic Italy, Gregory of Tours in Francia. So our evidence is skewing us towards continuation. There was clearly also significant change. There's an awareness that these are new rulers.
But there's also a genuine attempt in a lot of those writers to bring these new peoples into an overall Roman story, to show where they fit in, to make their rulers a continuation, not emperors. They're usually very clear on that. It is not a Roman empire anymore, but it is now a series of kingdoms with Roman elements.
It's these people who hadn't known of a time before Rome as well. So I'm guessing it's almost like after the death of Alexander the Great, how that memory just endures and is actually very influential and important to those kingdoms, isn't it?
Exactly. All this background, it's part of their legitimacy. It's part of their identity. But it is interesting that many of the most fascinating sources we can read, Isidore of Seville, Gregory of Tours, they're actually writing a couple of generations after the kingdoms took shape. So they're emphasising a continuity in a very different world.
Very different world indeed. Well, you mentioned sources there and you also touched on earlier that very important work that was Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Now, when was he writing that? When did he write that? Gibbon began writing his masterpiece in 1776.
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Chapter 5: What was the impact of the Third Century Crisis on Rome?
They've done pretty well, haven't they? He's done pretty well with the evidence he had at the time and the thoughts of the time.
Exactly. Gibbon was a very good historian as well as a brilliant writer, which is why his account's still well worth reading. He knew most of the textual sources we know now. Archaeology is where there have been massive changes since Gibbon's time. But also, of course, like any other modern historian today, Gibbon has his own biases. He's got his own vision.
He doesn't like the Eastern Roman Empire. He doesn't much like Christianity. And it makes his story very interesting to read. But more than anything else, that title, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, did significantly skew English scholarship because it's not the fall of the Roman Empire. It's the fall of the Western Roman Empire. And decline is a judgment. Doesn't make it wrong.
But it does mean it needs to be argued, not claimed.
Because I was going to ask you next, not even argue, the fact that now in the 21st century, we're sitting down here in 2025, how influential that book remains to people down to the present day, at least maybe not in scholarly circles, but at least in the popular perception of this idea of a complete collapse of the Roman Empire.
Can we say that Edward Gibbon's book, it still holds considerable influence for every day. I mean, just people wanting to learn more about this and maybe have heard one or two things in the past about it.
Yes. And they'll hear Gibbon's name. They'll hear his title. They may read his general observations on the fall of the empire, which is a little sandwich he inserted into the wider book, even if they'll probably never read the massive work. It's interesting. It's an English language bias.
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Chapter 6: How did the structure of the Roman Empire evolve post-Constantine?
I remember meeting a number of Greeks who were very unhappy that people thought Gibbon was a starting point because Gibbon didn't really much like later Byzantine Greek culture. So other linguistic, other scholarly traditions, perhaps not so much. But yes, in the English speaking world,
He is still influential, not because I don't think any modern academic historian would defend the exact interpretation Gibbon gives, but he raises the questions that matter.
So today we're going to be exploring the origins of the fall of Rome. So largely actually going to be covering events that occurred more than 100 years before that canonical date of 476 AD. The sources that we have for this and the various topics we're going to explore, what types of sources are we going to be looking at?
One of the problems studying this world of the 4th, 5th centuries AD is very few detailed narrative histories actually survived. Writing narrative history is a Greek creation. It's a Greek and Latin tradition in the Western world. And yet there is a marked gap where we have no intact historical narrative that covers the third century and none that covers the first half of the fourth century.
The only great narrative historian to survive from the later fourth century, which is where events really begin to accelerate, is a man named Ammianus Marcellinus, a Greek from somewhere near Antioch who actually wrote in Latin. And he is our key source on the arrival of the Goths and the first warnings of the Huns.
But his work, which originally covered the entire period from AD 96 to AD 378, is lost until the year 353. So all we've got is the last, probably biggest, block of his history, but not his summary of the events before.
Then we've got a lot of Christian historians, but the ecclesiastical historians know their job, and their job is primarily to tell the history of the church, not to tell the history of the empire. And then you've got an incredible array of individual texts, panegyrics, speeches given for a particular moment, orations that were written for circulation, letter collections.
And then we've got the inscriptions, the artwork, the architecture, the archaeology, which is so crucial for economic affairs, for example.
The coinage there, yeah.
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Chapter 7: Can we define when and how the Roman Empire actually fell?
And yet they do tell us how individual emperors, for example, wish to be perceived. So in the case famously of Constantine, we've got a panegyric from before his Christian commitment, which talks about the old gods like Apollo. Then we've got a panegyric written after 312, and suddenly all the old gods have disappeared.
What an amazing contrast to have in the surviving evidence there, David. And you mentioned Constantine. To start this off, We're going to cover briefly that incredibly turbulent period before the rise of Constantine, which is also a topic that we've explored in detail in our previous episode together, which is this third century crisis.
Now, we could do a whole series on the third century crisis, but David, very briefly, what is this period and how turbulent was it? How close did Rome come to falling during this 50 years or so in the third century?
If you study classics at school or university, there's a tendency to stop in the year 200. The reason for that is the third century crisis, which is when the old classic Roman Empire very nearly did break apart. At the worst moment of the third century crisis, when the frontiers are crumbling and emperors are being murdered,
The Roman Empire, which traditionally spans from Hadrian's Wall in Britain to the Sahara Desert, out towards the Crimea and the Euphrates River, the Roman Empire actually broke into three parts. Britain and Gaul had broken away. Syria, the Persian frontier, had broken away.
It really did look like the Roman Empire, which, remember, dominated the Mediterranean from the 2nd century BC onwards, was actually going to fall apart. What's perhaps the most remarkable feature of the third century crisis is that it didn't happen. And indeed, one of the great questions, why didn't the Roman Empire collapse in the third century when in the fifth century the West will go under?
But crucially, in the third century, while there are major threat pressures on the frontiers, there aren't huge migrations moving into the Roman Empire. And over a long, hard-fought period, particularly between 250 and 275, The Roman emperors, Gallienus, Aurelian in particular, managed to retake all the lost territories, stabilize the frontiers. So the Roman Empire looked like shatterings.
And yet it emerges from the third century still basically intact.
And some have argued that actually by the end of that crisis, when you get to the beginnings of the fourth century, that the Roman Empire, although transformed and different in its appearance, was actually stronger than it had been before. I mean, how do you buy into that?
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Chapter 8: What was the significance of the sack of Rome in 410?
Diocletian's solution was, in order to achieve significant wide-ranging reorganization, he needed help. The Roman Empire is vast, and this is a world without modern communications, without radio, without the internet.
So Diocletian shares power, first with one co-ruler, then with two others to make what's famously called the Tetrarchy, the rule of four, because it means there's one imperial figure in every major region. And once that's secure, what Diocletian set out to do was, firstly, they needed a better administration system. Above all, because the purpose of administration is tax collection.
You need the tax collection to pay for the army. It's always worth remembering one key thing that sets the Roman Empire apart from the later medieval kingdoms. The Roman Empire of Diocletian had a standing army of around 400,000 men. No one's coming near that figure in a thousand years later because it's got a tax system to pay for it.
But that meant dividing the provinces, so making individual provincial blocks smaller and easier to control, trying to reorganize the financial system, not always successfully, and making the tax collection a combination of money and kind.
So collecting taxes in food, for example, because if you're collecting taxes to pay and supply the army, you can just recruit the supplies and send them to the army. And the tax system, provincial system Diocletian put in place is still there under Justinian. Indeed, Justinian in the 6th century is the first emperor to significantly consider trying to revise it.
So that's more than 200 years after the time of Diocletian. So that once again emphasizes just how long lasting it is.
Exactly. It was clearly a solid structure. I mean, did it work brilliantly? No. Tax collection will always have the problem that people don't want to pay taxes, and it's not that the Roman Empire was ever some massive bureaucratic machine. By a famous older estimate, the Chinese Empire, same rough period, same rough size, had 10 times as many bureaucrats as the Roman Empire did.
The Roman emperors rely on their local aristocracies to do a lot of the heavy lifting of administration. So it's not that it isn't a flawed system. It definitely is. But it did seem to work remarkably well. And the proof is the Tetrarchs did stabilize the frontiers. They campaigned successfully in every direction. The Tetrarchy, as a division of power, is inherently unstable.
Four emperors are going to come into conflict eventually. But they delivered stability at the end of that period of crisis. And Constantine, who's actually the destroyer of the Tetrarchy, is the beneficiary, in a sense, of that stability. After Diocletian stands down, the Tetrarchy's instabilities come to the fore.
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