Understanding Western and Eastern Roman Civilization

From around 80 BC, Rome was an "empire."

If Rome before that was closer to a strong city-state, a republic, the dominant power of the Italian peninsula,

from around 80 BC it became something that began to bind the entire Mediterranean into a single order.

From around 80 BC, the point when Rome took firm hold of Mediterranean hegemony,

until 476 AD, when the Western Roman emperor was deposed,

the order known as the Roman Empire ran for more than 500 years.

But

there is one stretch within this history that we need to look at separately.

Namely, the "Western Roman Empire" after the East-West split.

Looking at this stretch alone, Western Rome was a state that held out for about 80 years and then ended.

Only here does the phrase "a failure model that lived briefly and was gone" hold true.

The character of late Western Rome is clear.

And yet Western Rome

kept hold of its territory,

kept the name "Rome,"

and clung obsessively to keeping up the empire's appearances.

The capacity to actually run things was gone,

yet it was a system that held on to symbols and appearances to the very end.

I see this, quite literally,

as "Rome's failure model."

Eastern Rome, by contrast, was the same Rome yet made a completely different choice.

Eastern Rome

did not try to save the West to the bitter end,

did not overreach to hold on to territory,

moved its capital to a defensible location,

and focused on maintaining its systems of administration, taxation, law, and bureaucracy.

As a result,

the Eastern Roman Empire, even after Western Rome was gone,

lasted about 1,000 years longer.

The same "Rome,"

but the difference was not military power;

it was what they gave up and what they kept,

that is, a difference in "operating strategy."

So this is how I sum up Rome.

The Roman Empire as a whole

from around 80 BC to 476 AD

was a long-term success model that lasted at least 500 years.

But

the late Western Roman operating model

was a short-term failure model that ended about 80 years after the East-West split.

Obsessed with territory, name, and appearances,

it was a structure that ended leaving behind nothing but operating costs.

The Eastern Roman model, meanwhile,

took Western Rome's failure as a lesson,

kept only the core it could actually run,

and was a revised, managed model that held on for another 1,000 years.

Rome did not fail, but

even after its capacity to operate was gone,

there is a lesson in the history of late Western Rome, which clung to the "shell of an empire."

What matters is the eye to recognize this difference.

Some structures last 500 years,

and some hold out for 80 years and then end.

Late Western Rome was a failure model.

But Eastern Rome lasted 1,000 years.

Western Rome

did not fall because of foreign invasion.

Nor did it collapse because the barbarians suddenly grew stronger.

Internally, already,

its fiscal, military, and administrative systems had dried up,

and, running on nothing but inertia in that state,

it was closer to an organization that came to a merely formal end.

On the outside it was an empire, but

in reality

taxes were not being collected,

the legions had turned into mercenaries,

and law and citizenship no longer functioned.

Western Rome's core failure is this:

it was obsessed with maintaining symbols and territory over the capacity to operate.

Even into domains it could not sustain,

it kept embracing them under the name "this is Rome,"

and in the end it could not bear the cost.

Eastern Rome, by contrast, was different.

Eastern Rome

did not try to save Western Rome.

Nor did it try to hold on to all of its territory.

Instead,

it moved its capital to a defensible location,

unified its administrative language,

and its operating systems — taxation, bureaucracy, law —

it kept alive to the very end.

As a result,

the Eastern Roman Empire,

even after the fall of Western Rome,

lasted about 1,000 years longer.

This difference

was not one of superiority in military power or culture,

but a difference in operating strategy.

Western Rome

died clinging to an expansion model,

and Eastern Rome

lived by choosing a management model.

So, historically speaking,

Western Rome

was not a great fall

but closer to a failed experiment.

And Eastern Rome

analyzed that failure precisely

and was the second, corrected model.

The lesson to be drawn here is clear.

Grab all three of these at once

and a state does not last long.

Conversely,

keep to this

and you survive a long time, even if no one notices.

History

does not remember who was more splendid.

It remembers who kept working longer.

Western Rome held out on past glory, but

in the end it was a failure model.

Eastern Rome, by contrast, sustained itself for 1,000 years as a model of endurance.

Whether you can tell this difference apart

is, I think, what may divide the choices we make now.