Rome Dealt With an Immigration and Fertility Crisis Too
Rome Dealt With an Immigration and Fertility Crisis Too
It Went Unsolved, To the Empire's Detriment
A once-regional power grows into a global superpower and economic titan. With its cultural, economic, and military power, it transforms the world under its bootheel into its image. Once proud and independent towns and states in France, Germany, and the Mediterranean become its vassals, if sometimes under the guise of “alliance.” Everywhere you look you see its products, its soldiers, its culture.
But rot lies beneath the surface. Instead of gleaming beams of steel and rock-solid concrete, rotten beams and crumbling bricks lurk behind the facade of marble. Armies deemed invincible by conventional wisdom prove unable to stop hit-and-run attacks in the Middle East, much less armies of “newcomers” rolling across the border in search of a better life...and plunder. Corrupt bureaucrats pilfer the populace as the ruling class lounges in a degenerate torpor and forgets to have children, leaving their bloodlines to whither away forever.
Sound familiar? It should. While comparisons between the Roman Empire and the Globalist American Empire are often overblown and overdone, there are similarities. Particularly, the similarity lies in how a combination of immigration from without and childlessness from within rotted the structure that kept each empire stable, leaving a crumbling ghost of the glory that used to exist in its wake. This article will explore the intersection of that problem and show how it relates to America’s current malaise.
Thinking about Rome
In the fall of 2023, a popular TikTok video format was asking men how often they think about the Roman Empire.1 Most said “frequently,” or some version thereof, even if it was obvious they never read Gibbon or Livy and would have a hard time telling you how many cohorts there were in a legion. But, even if the people ostensibly thinking about Rome often don’t know much about it, they had good reason to think Roman history is relevant to their lives: its problems are ours.
Roman and American Issues with “Newcomers” and the Native (un)Born
A Quick Review of America’s Issues
Ever since Reagan gave amnesty to about three million illegal immigrants,2 undoing the deterrence posture created by Eisenhower’s massive deportation operation,3 America has suffered under the weight of an increasingly onerous illegal immigration problem. Even as advances in robotics make unskilled field and factory labor less and less needed,4 millions upon millions more unskilled, illegal laborers pour into the country. Some presidents, such as Trump, attempt to stop them. Others, like Biden, leave the gate wide open. These illegal immigrants cost the public coffers titanic sums each year, bring crime and third-world horror shows with them, and there are tens of millions of them.5
Meanwhile, Americans refuse to procreate. Whether because they’re depressed, something is in the water, it’s just too expensive, or some combination thereof, fertility is falling like a rock and is now well below replacement level. Some groups, such as religious conservatives, are at least close to replacing themselves. But, amongst the petty bourgeoise class, or the college-educated functionary class (think middle managers), fertility is extremely low and somehow getting even lower.6
To where will that lead? Unfortunately, probably not a Black Death-like Renaissance created by once overly expensive land becoming cheaper after the population starts to fall; the tidal wave of illegal immigration precludes that. Rather, we have to look forward to experiencing what Rome experienced: foreigners overtaking the “management” class as it fades from existence thanks to low fertility.
The Roman Example
Rome’s immigration problem, or at least a general impression of it, is well known. From Marcus Aurelius to the fall of Rome itself, vast hordes of barbarians from beyond the Rhine and Danube poured across the border. They caused the Crisis of the Third Century,7 composed the horde that weakened the Western Roman Empire for good at Adrianople,8 and sacked Rome and deposed the last Western Roman Emperor in the late 400s.9 As Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, while remarking on the cost of illegal immigration to Rome in 2021, put it, “When the Roman Empire fell, it was largely as a result of uncontrolled immigration. The empire could no longer control its borders, people came in from the east, all over the place, and we went into a Dark Ages.”10
But there’s more to it than just mass migration and “refugees” causing chaos and, eventually, the collapse of a once-omnipotent civilization. The other, related problem, one that was probably more disastrous in the end, is that Rome’s equites class had a miserable fertility rate that nothing could correct, and so that class, one that once composed the officer corps of the legions, gradually withered away and was replaced by freed slaves, men who no longer had the talent or inclination for leading the legions into battle and instead administered the empire corruptly.
The Equites
The famous divide in Rome was between the patricians, or descendants of the first senators, and the plebeians, or everyone else. But, as could be expected, there were more distinctions than just “noble” and “common.” Amongst the commoners, the upper crust was the equites class. They began as the cavalry force of the republic, with their name loosely translated as “knight” and coming from equester, which means “mounted on a horse,” as they were rich enough to own a horse and ride it into battle. But, as the Republic transformed into an Empire, that role changed. Once the cavalry and officers,11 they became bureaucrats under Augustus. As one research paper describing that change put it:12
Under the principate of Augustus, a more intricate political system arose which was able to handle the growing administrative needs of the Roman empire. This need was no longer able to be filled solely by the main political body at the time, the senatorial class. In order to fill the gaps in the empire's new political infrastructure, Augustus built up a preexisting social class into a new order that would be able to complete the new bureaucracy of the principate. This class was the equites, a modern translation of which could be “knights” or “cavalry.” Augustus transformed this archaic class into an integrated political group of the principate.
Importantly, that socially distinct and administratively, though no longer militarily, important class was not just hereditary. Unlike the patricians, being an equites required mainly money, not blue blood:13
What set this class apart from the senatorial class and the plebeians was that it was a status which could not only be gained through inheritance, but could also be acquired. The status of this order could be gained through a combination of service and earnings.
As those new men came into their positions by acquiring wealth, they gradually transformed from being Rome’s cavalry and officers14 into her bureaucratic class. They became functionaries who sought to get wealthier by “serving” the empire:15
No longer did the name merely distinguish the cavalry of the Roman military who were able to afford a war horse and its upkeep. During the early period of the principate under Augustus, the equites transformed into a middle class of Rome, which was able to fill gaps in the political infrastructure caused by a growing Roman empire.
…
In financial matters, these men were often tax collectors, a task too mundane for the senators, but too serious to entrust to the plebeians. In administrative matters, equites were often chosen to govern provinces, including some very prominent locations such as Judea and even Egypt.
What’s more, the class was chosen because it would be loyal to Augustus and, later, to his successors:16
The transformation of the equites during the early principate was not a random occurrence of separate events, rather, the development of this group was driven by Augustus' need for a class loyal to him, able to fill positions in the new system of government. Although government during the principate was not fundamentally different from that of the republic, growth and certain influential changes led to a government not able to be completely filled by aspiring senators ascending the cursus honorum, the traditional political ladder among the Roman elites. Those of equestrian status were needed to govern, trusted by Augustus to do so without securing loyalty to themselves in preparation for an uprising.30 Therefore, the need for a middle class able to fill certain military, judicial, and civil roles aligned with the need for a loyal class, which together urged Augustus to develop the equites as a new, more important political group in Rome.
…
By selecting from those who qualified and appointing them to be equites, Augustus created a loyal group who would not only fulfill certain predestined roles in Roman politics but also support him politically.
Just as important to the patrician class as their loyalty to Augustus was to him, the equites didn’t threaten the patricians. Their blood wasn’t blue enough. So, though increasing in size and bureaucratic power, they weren’t enough of a threat to the power of the patricians to anger that class:17
The equites were suitable for certain civil, military, judicial, and administrative duties. Although they gained many benefits due to their earned status, there was a downside to this status as well. The equites, who were men of education and experience sometimes equal to even that of the senators, were limited by their middle class status. As a group, they were not able to surpass the political status of the senatorial class. Although the equites suffered this inability to reach Rome's top positions except in rare occasions, the group continued to grow under Augustus.
What we have then is a class of bureaucrats, functionaries, and administrators made up of strivers looking to further enrich themselves from “service” to the state and who gradually left their noble, military bearing behind as a once martial order transformed into Rome’s bureaucrats.
Not all of their military bearing was left behind. Marcus Agrippa, the man who helped Augustus seize power and then cement it through military victory, was an equites. Similarly, some of the officer positions in the legions remained staffed by the class.18 But, it was no longer a purely martial class, nor did it have the exclusive right to junior officer positions it once did,19 and its military bearing was increasingly left behind as time went on and Rome’s “striver” class became more bureaucrats than officers.20
The Great Replacement of the Equites
Originally, at least, this class was composed of Romans. Under the formalization of the class’ requirements in 23 AD, a man had to have a free-born father and grandfather, in addition to the requisite amount of money, to be an equites.
But soon that changed as well, as the emperors increasingly needed a loyal class of functionaries and bureaucrats on whom they could rely. In fact, the emperors were willing to leave the actual Romans behind and put former slaves in their place, giving them the golden ring that signified membership in the equites class. Pliny, describing Emperor Claudius doing so, wrote:21
Because of these differences, C. the prince added a fifth council, and the pride was so great that, which could not be filled under the divine Augustus, the councils did not take that order, and passed over to the ornaments even those freed from slavery, which had never been done before, because with an iron ring and knights and judges were understood. and it began to be promiscuous to such an extent that, in the censure of Claudius Caesar, one of his knights, Flavius Proculus, 300, demanded that he be guilty of that cause. so while the order is separated from the natives, it is shared with the services.
Describing that passage and the gradual transformation of the class from wealthy, free, and once-martial Roman families into one composed of former slaves favored by the emperors, who were in desperate need of loyal bureaucrats, a paper on the equites class provided by the University of Chicago notes:22
In the ninth year of the reign of Tiberius an attempt was made to improve the order by requiring the old qualifications of free birth up to the grandfather, and by strictly forbidding any one to wear the gold ring unless he possessed this qualification. This regulation, however, was of little avail, as the emperors frequently admitted freedmen into the equestrian order (Plin. H. N. XXXIII.8). When private persons were no longer appointed judices, the necessity for a distinct class in the community, like the equestrian order, ceased entirely; and the gold ring came at length to be worn by all free citizens. Even slaves, after their manumission, were allowed to wear it by special permission from the emperor, which appears to have been usually granted provided the patronus consented.
Similarly, in his Élite Mobility in the Roman Empire, Keith Hopkins notes that the imperial period was dominated by former slaves filling administrative positions within the empire and using them to amass huge fortunes:23
In the first century A.D. some of the highest administrative positions of the empire and some of the largest personal fortunes ever amassed in Rome were in the hands of ex-slaves, the notorious imperial freedmen. In the later empire, in the fourth and fifth centuries, court eunuchs, who were ex-slaves and barbarians, were acknowledged to be at the centre of power. The chief eunuch, ex officio, ranked after the prefects and the very highest generals. If we consider freedmen and eunuchs as groups rather than as individuals, then the continuity is too great to be explicable only in terms of emperors' characters. Powerful eunuchs, for instance, were loathed by aristocrats, often sacrificed to their baying, exiled, even burnt only to be succeeded by'other eunuchs.
Imperial freedmen and court eunuchs provide dramatic examples of upward mobility. Their elevation is most easily explicable in terms of the conflict between the emperor and the aristocracy; for the aristocracy was angered by their power, yet the emperors, who could hardly be unaware of this hatred, repeatedly used them. The conventional explanation that freedmen traditionally did such jobs in large Roman households is hardly a sufficient explanation; it certainly does not explain the transition from freedmen to equites.
From about the beginning of the second century, imperial freedmen in the palace administration were supervised by equites who also held the chief positions in the imperial fiscal service.
Hopkins goes on to note that among the more dramatic examples of social mobility within the Roman Empire was the existence of “equestrian imperial freedmen in the First Century.”24 By the end of the 4th Century, at which point the class had changed dramatically and expanded greatly, losing its military roots nearly entirely as it became a class of middle manager and small-time bureaucrats.25
So, all that is to say that as Rome transitioned from an aristocratic republic ruled by the best to an Empire ruled by a few incredible leaders and a vast number of despots, that imperial structure increasingly relied on a functionary class. Further, though that class was originally composed of wealthy Romans who were not patricians but had family histories of service to the state stretching back centuries, the class was increasingly filled with striver ex-slaves from the far reaches of the Empire who were there to make fortunes off the state and loyal only to the despot who promoted them.
The Fertility Issue
Among those issues leading to the replacement of the old equites class with a motley collection of freedmen bureaucrats is fertility. While Rome had once been a city of iron-willed patriarchs of legend, men such as Titus Manlius Torquatus,26 that old way was, amongst the elite, out the door by the time of Augustus.
Replacing it was a society of debauchery and degenerate pleasure of the sort Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero were later known for. When combined with abortion and contraception, that led to a crash in birth rates amongst the nobility, including the equities. Hopkins, describing the demographic disaster amongst the aristocracy generally and how it led to social climbers taking their places, noted:27
I have tried to show that there was a steady and significant stream of mobility into the Roman aristocracy. This resulted partly in its expansion; in part its effects were muted by the low fertility of Roman aristocrats. Augustus offered rewards to aristocrats with three children, and later emperors re-enacted his laws. There is plenty of evidence that aristocrats regarded three children as an upper limit or as an unreachable target. This low figure was achieved mostly by abortion, much less by contraception and perhaps by infanticide.
Given the high mortality then prevalent, three children born was far below the level of replacement. Therefore as aristocratic families died out, posts once held by them were available to arrivistes.
Augustus attempted to pass laws to deal with the issue, as Hopkins noted. The Lex Julia de maritandis ordinibus required all citizens to marry in the hope that they would have kids, and the Lex Julia de adulteriis coercendis outlawed many forms of adultery.
Unfortunately, the laws didn’t work. The upper orders of Rome continued chasing pleasure at the expense of building dynasties, leading to a recurrent problem with fertility in the Empire. That problem, as Hopkins noted, meant high-ranking posts once held by the old families in the equites class eventually became the realm of freedmen-turned-equites, and they had no intention of being military men. Thus, the Empire lost a key source of junior officers as, by the time crisis struck again after Diocletian and Constantine, the equites were mere bureaucrats, and many of them were former slaves from the far reaches of the empire, or descendants thereof, not Romans of the sort that defeated Hannibal.
So, instead of Romans filling the ranks and leading the legions, the legions recruited Germans; bloody civil wars and disastrous fertility rates meant Rome herself was out of men. Those German mercenaries, like Arminius centuries before,28 turned on their Roman masters and eventually enslaved them,29 bringing the rotten remains of Augustus’ empire crumbling down.
Rome and America
Americans must take the proper lessons from the fall of Rome, particularly in how the equites class was first co-opted by the early emperors and filled with loyal freedmen willing to be loyal, and how the decline of the old members of that order because they refused to have kids contributed to the problem.
America’s fertility rate is now in a bad way, particularly among the smarter sort of people who tend to contribute to society rather than rely on the welfare rolls.30 That’s a problem. It’s particularly a problem because America has a military caste.31 Without them, the military can’t fill its ranks and is now looking to allow illegal immigrants to enlist,32 an idea that will go about as well as Rome welcoming Arminius and Odoacer into the legions.
Even outside of the military, America’s white-collar, bureaucratic class faces transformation similar to the equites class of years past. Bloodlines that were once independent yeomen now are mainly corporate or government bureaucrats, similarly to how Rome’s knights slowly transformed into her bureaucrats as the republic became an empire. Similarly to how the emperors appointed loyal freedmen to that class of bureaucrats, companies use H-1b visas to import workers who will work harder and complain less for roles that require a college degree.33 That change has been particularly pronounced in tech, where once-swashbuckling and exciting companies have been transformed into tame, woke, and stodgy behemoths at the same time as their leadership teams have been replaced by foreign strivers.34 It’s not the exact situation as the equites, of course, but it is similar.
Unfortunately, Rome also shows that, like Hungary right now,35 laws aimed at improving fertility can only do so much. Perhaps a small boost will come of it, but hardly enough to justify the effort, and certainly not enough to fix the problem. Fertility issues are solved at the root of a nation, in the psyche of its people, not by passing laws aimed at getting them to have kids. For, as Oswald Spengler said:36
Intelligence and sterility are allied in old families, old peoples, and old cultures, not merely because in each microcosm the overstrained and fettered animal-element is eating up the plant element, but also because the waking-consciousness assumes that being is normally regulated by causality. That which the man of intelligence, most significantly and characteristically, labels as "natural impulse" or "life-force", he not only knows, but also values, causally, giving it the place amongst his other needs that his judgment assigns to it. When the ordinary thought of a highly cultivated people begins to regard "having children" as a question of pros and cons, the great turning-point has come. For Nature knows nothing of pro and con. Everywhere, wherever life is actual, reigns an inward organic logic, an "it", a drive, that is utterly independent of waking-being, with its causal linkages, and indeed not even observed by it. The abundant proliferation of primitive peoples is a natural phenomenon, which is not even thought about, still less judged as to its utility or the reverse. When reasons have to be put forward at all in a question of life, life itself has become questionable.
Unfortunately, America now is that old culture of which he speaks, as Rome was under Augustus. That’s not to say it’s on its last legs. Rome lasted for centuries after Augustus noted the dearth of children in the houses of old families. But, the problem remains.
The equites were replaced so that the ruling regime could have a class of middle managers loyal to it, and their dismal fertility rate worsened the problem. Now, Americans are seeing their jobs disappear, particularly in well-paying, manager-type roles at tech firms, thanks to the importation of massive numbers of H-1b workers.37 Is that so different from former slaves being promoted into the equites class and muscling out the old families of Rome? Meanwhile, a tidal wave of what leftists call “newcomers”38 is flooding across the border and claiming refugee status, much like the German hordes before the disaster of Adrianople.
What ought we do? Unfortunately, Rome only holds the answer to what went wrong, not how that problem can be solved. Somehow, the problem of “sterility . . . in old families, old peoples, and old cultures” must be addressed, particularly amongst America’s productive classes. Without that, America will crumble. Rome wasn’t able to solve the problem, but perhaps we can.
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