The Age of Cruelty: Looking at Ourselves in the Mirror of History

We are following the same path to collapse that the Roman Empire followed long ago

The front and back covers of the book by Daniel Mannix, “Those about to Die” (1960); overdramatic, but powerful. Mannix’s book was one of the first modern texts to outline the cruelty that was common during the Roman Empire. Cruelty may be typical of all the declining societies where the elites must maintain their domination by force. In our world, we are seeing a shift in that direction right now.

In a 2018 post on Cassandra’s legacy, I wrote (condensed and rearranged)

… if you could use a time machine to be transported to ancient Rome, you would find yourself in a familiar world in almost all respects. Except for one thing: you would be startled by the violence you would encounter. Real, harsh, brutal violence; blood and death right in front of you, in the streets, in the arenas, in theaters. It was violence codified, sanctioned, and enacted by the state. And most people accepted the idea as the natural way things should be.

The Roman courts meted out capital punishment with an ease which, for us, is bewildering. In those times, there was no such thing as a “humane” way of executing people. Condemned people were tortured, beaten, flogged, crucified, choked, dismembered, burned, drowned, and more. Public executions were popular in the arenas, and it seems that convicted criminals could also be killed for entertaining people watching theater plays.

As I describe in my book Exterminations, using violence to kill large numbers of people is a well-established trend over human history. But some methods developed by governments were especially cruel and inhumane. Think of crucifixion. After many centuries of Christianity, we are in some ways sanitized with regard to the cross, which we consider a holy symbol. But try to imagine what it must have been to be crucified; nailed to two pieces of wood and left there to agonize for hours or days. Below, you see the archaeological remnant of an actual crucifixion of Roman times. Imagine your foot being pierced by a 10 cm iron nail.

(Image by By Rubén Betanzo S. - Hombre_de_”Giv’at_ha-Mivtar”.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10053493)

Today, fortunately, we tend to believe that the punishment of criminals should not involve spectacular violence (so far, at least). But in the Roman Empire, the pain and suffering of the executed people were actively sought and believed to discourage potential criminals. It was an idea that was widely shared. Roman intellectuals often expressed their disgust for the practice of crucifixion, but they opposed it only for Roman Citizens. For slaves, the poor, foreigners, and rebels, it was perfectly acceptable. It was part of the justice system, accepted, condoned, and even considered virtuous.

We don’t have statistical data on how the practice of cruel punishments evolved in Roman times, but from the documents of the time, it seems clear that cruelty became more and more embedded in Roman society while moving from Republican to Imperial times. The increase in state violence went in parallel with the rise of emperors who had absolute power of life and death over everyone. Why did this happen? In my previous post, I proposed that it was because Roman society became gradually more dependent on foreign slaves.

Slaves were necessary for the Romans, but they could also rebel against their masters. So, no wonder that the Romans practiced preventive deterrence. For instance, when a slave killed his master, the law said that all the slaves of the household had to be killed. And that’s reported to have been done even in cases in which it involved thousands of slaves to be crucified along public roads.

But, upon rethinking the matter, I now believe that the problem was more general than involving just slaves. Everyone in the Empire could be sentenced to death, even simply for having displeased the Emperor. Citizens had only the privilege to be beheaded instead of crucified. Or, in some cases, they were given a chance to commit suicide to avoid a more painful death.

Why were the Romans behaving so aggressively toward their own people? It can only be explained by the extreme inequality that characterized their society. It is estimated that during Imperial times, the Roman elites (roughly 1.5% of the population) controlled perhaps 15-20% of total income. The slaves formed about 20% to 40% of the population, while most commoners lived near the subsistence level.

In turn, inequality had a clear origin in the economic decline of the Roman society. The Roman Empire had been built with the gold and silver produced by the mines of Northern Spain. Precious metals were used to buy slaves from traders or to pay soldiers to capture them from nearby regions. Gold was the indirect source of energy for the Roman Economy. No gold, no slaves. No slaves, no energy. No energy, no empire.

But the harsh law of depletion works for all mineral resources, including precious metals. With the 1st-2nd century AD, the production of the Spanish mines started declining, and the Empire moved along a trajectory that led it to disappear a couple of centuries later (figure from Sverdrup et al., 2013):

As it is typical of declining societies, the burden of increasing poverty was not distributed equally. The poorer the empire became, the more the elites accumulated riches, and the more they used violence to keep the poor in their place. Of course, the poor were not happy about that. Three major slave revolts took place during the late Republican times. Spartacus’s unsuccessful revolt in 73-71 BCE is well known. Earlier on, in 132 BCE, consul Publius Rupilius defeated a slave revolt in Sicily and is reported to have crucified 20,000 rebels in a single sweep. Imagine what spectacle that must have been. Deterrence, indeed.

Slave revolts died out with the tightening of the Imperial power: rebels couldn’t possibly match the military power of the Roman Legions. Yet, the power of emperors was eventually restrained by Christianity. All three major global religions, Hebraism, Christianity, and Islam, were promoting the same concepts: the rule of law has a divine origin, and everyone must obey it, no matter how rich or powerful they are. None of them claimed that slavery should be abolished, but they claimed that all human beings had rights and had to be treated humanely.

It took time before these ideas could have an impact on the Roman society, but in 429 CE, a Christian Empress, Galla Placidia, enacted the “Digna Vox” edict in the name of her son, Valentinian III. In the edict, the Emperor explicitly declared that it was his duty to uphold and respect the law. It was the culmination of a political project that involved reining in the absolute power of Emperors, using Christianity as the backbone of the legal system. It worked because, afterward, there was no more need for an Emperor in the Western Roman Empire, which moved into a more sustainable structure that we call today the “Middle Ages.”

How about our situation? Today, we don’t have slaves, or at least people formally classed as slaves. But according to some estimates, each American citizen today uses fossil energy equivalent to an average of 400 slaves. Fossil fuels won’t take up arms against their human masters, but they can revolt against us in different ways. They are leaving us in terms of depletion, and they are hitting back at us in the form of pollution and global warming. And you can’t nail fossil fuels to a cross.

Fossil fuel depletion is generating the typical pattern of declining empires. Energy becomes more expensive, the economy stops growing, and inequality increases. The super-rich, in particular, are gaining a disproportionate share of the national wealth (source).

Today, our society is probably more unequal than the Roman one. It is true that we have “soft” control and surveillance methods that the ancient Romans couldn’t even imagine. But, evidently, they don’t work well enough, because we are seeing a clear increase in the violence used by the state. The US President is not yet wearing the purple of the ancient Roman Emperors, but he has explicitly declared that his decisions are above the law. We are not yet back to lining up crucified people along roads as a warning. But if you are not part of the elite, or if you are a foreigner (even the president of a foreign government), you can be killed or abducted at any moment.

Just like in Roman times, today the public and our thought leaders seem to condone and approve violence and the disregard of the rule of law. Just think that it is reported that the ICE agent who killed Renee Good received sums in the hundreds of thousands of dollars by crowfunding. This is not confirmed, but not denied, either. Evidently, a significant fraction of the US society believes that it is legal and proper for the police to kill people without due process. And it is not just a question of internal violence. The scale of the slaughter in the international arena in recent years has become monstrous. Yet, the global response is silence. Silence from leaders, a numbness from populations.

Is there a possibility of regaining freedom and dignity in our declining empire? Today, US citizens are discovering that they can’t fight guns with whistles, so a rebellion looks impossible. Maybe we could restart by following the path that Christianity and Islam had indicated more than a millennium ago. Or, maybe we could learn from the Chinese example. The Chinese Emperor was not supposed to be a despot. He ruled only as long as he could be said to embody the mandate of heaven (天命). That is, his rule was in the service of the people, not the reverse. Of course, that was not always true in the real world, and the ancient Chinese government could be extremely violent on occasions. But the Chinese system didn’t rely on mineral resources as much as the Roman one, so it was less aggressive in foreign policy and more moderate in its treatment of its citizens.

In the end, the underlying principle of this story is that a society that relies on non-renewable resources is condemned to the trajectory that takes the name of the Seneca Effect: growth is slow, but ruin is rapid. And when society starts going down the cliff, you can’t expect their leaders to behave nicely toward those they oppress to maintain their power. So, the way to avoid the Seneca rollercoaster is to work for a stable society. A society based on solar energy does not need slaves, and does not need to oppress and kill its citizens. One day, maybe, an American Emperor will enact an edict similar to the Roman Digna Vox, stating that everyone, even the Emperor, must obey the law.

Digna vox maiestate regnantis legibus alligatum se principem profiteri: adeo de auctoritate iuris nostra pendet auctoritas. Et re vera maius imperio est submittere legibus principatum. et oraculo praesentis edicti quod nobis licere non patimur indicamus.

It is a statement worthy of the majesty of a reigning prince for him to profess to be subject to the laws; for our authority is dependent upon that of the law. And, indeed, it is the greatest attribute of imperial power for the sovereign to be subject to the laws. By this present edict we forbid others to do what we do not permit ourselves.

Imperatores Theodosius, Valentinianus - 429 AD

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