Decades ago, I was browsing in a used book store. A title intrigued me: Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace, by Roland H. Bainton. I’d just read a bunch of books by Augustine of Hippo, so I looked him up in the index. That led me to pages 99-100, where I read the following passage:

Augustine assumed that a just war can be just on one side only. To him it seemed obvious that the cause of Rome was just, that of the barbarians unjust. They were invaders. Not only would they commit injuries to property, life, and honor, but they would disrupt the order maintained by the empire.

We today, who are actually more informed than was the bishop of Hippo as to what was going on all over the empire in his own day, can make out a very good case for the barbarians. They were being pushed westward by hordes from the east. There was room for them in the empire. They had long been infiltrating by a process of controlled immigration. The Roman army in the imperial period had increasingly been recruited from among the barbarians. When Rome was taken by Alaric the Goth, the defender of the capital was Stilicho the Goth. Then arose an old Roman party which sought to purge the Goths within the empire. The spokesman of this group was Synesius, later to be the bishop of Cyrene. He argued before the emperor Arcadius that the barbarian Germans could not be the watchdogs of the Roman Empire, because they were wolf cubs not reared in the laws of Rome. Theodosius ought never to have admitted them. Let them be deported or made into helots. Actually the Gothic general Gainas was assassinated and thirty thousand of his men were butchered; consequently the weakened empire could not cope with barbarian inroads.

An army might not have been needed to cope with invasions had good faith and sagacity prevailed. The above-mentioned Theodosius had stepped in after Rome, through her own treachery, had suffered a severe disaster. Under Valens the Visigoths pressed by the Huns asked permission to settle in the empire with their families, to the number of a million souls. They were for the most part Christian. Fritigern was their leader. The emperor Valens promised admission. The horde came over the Danube, but instead of being settled was coralled by the forces of Rome and kept alive by a supply of dead dogs. The price for each dog was a child to be sold into slavery. The guard of Fritigern was treacherously murdered by the Romans. The Goths broke loose and ravaged Thrace. Valens met them in battle. The emperor himself perished, together with two thirds of the imperial army. Then it was that the Spanish general Theodosius restored order by honorably granting the settlement promised at the outset.

Had Rome practiced her ancient virtue of bona fides, the barbarian invasions might have continued to be a controlled immigration.

(Roland H. Bainton , Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace, New York, 1960, pp99f.)

I was very excited by that at the time. I was convinced that, if not for the influence of churchmen like Synesius and Augustine, there might have been a smooth flow of people into the Roman Empire that would have led to continuous prosperity from their time to ours. Now I know a little more about what was going on in the empire in those days, and I’m not so sure the case Bainton makes is particularly good.

My first objection is relatively minor. Our sources of information about any period of antiquity are painfully sparse, and the late fourth and early fifth centuries of our era are no exception. While we may be aware of many facts that Augustine could not have known, he knew the answers to countless questions we do not know enough even to ask. So Bainton gets off to quite an unfortunate start.

Second, Bainton ignores the change in the basic structure of the economic life of the empire which began a century before the time of Synesius and Augustine. In the course of the “Third Century Crisis,” an era of civil wars that went on from 235 to 284 CE, the currency of the empire was so severely debased that the empire stopped accepting tax payments in money. People had to pay in kind. So, if you were a baker, you would hand over a given number of loaves of bread to the tax collectors, and those would be distributed to the army. As a corollary to this, laws were enacted requiring men to continue in their occupations and to succeed their fathers in theirs. So the sons of a baker were required to become bakers. Since bakers were especially needed, men who married the daughters of bakers had to lay down their own occupations and become bakers. You might think you had an idea for a more productive use of your facilities than baking; you might want to sell up and go into a different line of work altogether. But the law insisted you remain a baker. Likewise for virtually every other form of livelihood. The whole economy was locked down, with no place for innovation or adaptation. The army and the church provided a few escape hatches for ambitious men, but only men with older brothers were free to try their luck even in those areas.

So, when Bainton says that “there was room for” the Germanic tribes in the empire, one is left wondering what he has in mind. Since landowners were not allowed to sell their land, newly arrived migrants could not buy farms. And since established residents were not allowed to change their occupations, there was no way to start businesses that would offer employment to landless men. One might imagine a program to settle newcomers on undeveloped tracts of land, a la Gaius Gracchus half a millennium before, but as Gaius learned too late that was not such an easy thing to do, as even wilderness makes its contribution to the agricultural economy.

I hold no brief for Augustine or Synesius. Their view of the Germanic tribes did indeed reflect a failure of imagination that left them worse than useless in the face of the events of their day. But I suspect that Bainton fails similarly when he does not notice the profound differences between the world in which the policies of which he speaks so highly operated and the world which in fact existed after the Third Century Crisis.