The crown, the brothel and the internal barbarian: Rome’s collapse as a moral phenomenon

“If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous,” wrote Edward Gibbon, “he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus.” 

Between 96 and 180 AD, the Roman Empire was governed by a succession of rulers known to history as The Five Good Emperors—Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius. They were stewards of an empire at its zenith: stable in administration, confident in its military power, and flush with economic vitality. It was the age of imperial wisdom—a calm before the storm.

And then came Commodus.

With a single dynastic decision, Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher-emperor, brought the golden age to its knees. By elevating his son—vain, erratic, and unfit—to the throne, he inadvertently scripted the prologue to imperial decline. When Commodus inherited the empire in 180 AD, it was a realm still poised with potential. By the time of his assassination in his bath in 192, that realm was already showing signs of rot—military decay, political dysfunction, and moral despair.

The third century did not begin with reform; it began with resignation. Rome’s political institutions ossified into theatre, while its legions—once the steel backbone of the Republic—grew brittle and demoralized. The barbarians, from the Danubian plains to the steppe, sensed weakness. The sackings began. Rome, once the terror of the known world, now struggled to defend its own frontiers.

Romans understood, if only dimly, that their world was slipping away. They expressed their disillusionment in elegies, treatises, and laments. They pointed fingers—at emperors, generals, barbarians, and gods. But the empire, in truth, collapsed not from the outside in, but from the inside out. Reforms were few. Civil wars were many. Assassinations replaced elections. Coups masqueraded as change. Massacres passed for justice.

What emerged was a society desperate to forget itself. Escapism became a national pastime. Gladiatorial spectacles and chariot races offered a cruel parody of Rome’s former glory. Alcoholism surged, as did gambling and prostitution. Brothels—many state-owned—proliferated, and under Augustus’s own laws, women convicted of adultery were condemned to them. Citizens, crushed under economic duress, sold their bodies for bread.

As civic virtue declined, mysticism filled the void. Cults from Gaul, Carthage, Egypt, and Judea found willing converts in the imperial capital. With the collapse of public faith in republican institutions and reason, Romans turned to the gods—then to new gods, and finally, to the promise of salvation from beyond. In such a climate, even Christianity, once a persecuted sect, began its ascent to imperial orthodoxy.

Rome's decline was not just spiritual or moral—it was geopolitical. By the third century, a new notion had taken hold: that Italy was too decadent to produce strength. Power migrated from Rome to the provinces—Spain, North Africa, the Balkans, the Levant. Italy, cradle of the Republic, became its reliquary.

The emperors that followed Commodus were often not Roman by birth. Septimius Severus hailed from Africa; Alexander Severus from Judea; Maximinus from Thracia; Philip, famously, from Syria. Even Diocletian and Constantine—arguably Rome’s last strongmen—were born in Illyria, far from the Tiber. The “Roman” Empire was becoming, in essence, post-Roman.

The army, too, transformed. Its elite legions were now stationed on the empire’s peripheries—Gaul, Dacia, Mesopotamia. These units no longer looked to the Senate for leadership. They anointed emperors of their own, usually generals from among their ranks. Legitimacy came not from lineage or law, but from the sword. The emperors who emerged from this system—militarized, pragmatic, ruthless—tried to reverse the decline. But they fought with armies filled not with Romans, but with barbarian mercenaries. In a final twist of irony, the empire was now using the barbarians to fight the barbarians.

But no borrowed strength can last forever. In 378, the Gothic cavalry crushed the Roman legions at the Battle of Adrianople and killed the Emperor Valens—a defeat as psychologically shattering as it was militarily devastating. Rome would never again regain its aura of invincibility.

The floodgates opened. In 410, Alaric the Visigoth breached the sacred walls of Rome. In 455, the Vandals under Gaiseric plundered the Eternal City once more. And finally, in 476, the teenage emperor Romulus Augustulus was deposed by Odoacer, a Germanic general who declared himself King of Italy.

The Western Roman Empire was no more.

What followed was not the sudden end of a civilization, but its slow forgetting. Rome did not vanish—it transmuted. Its laws, its languages, its gods, even its ruins—these scattered like embers across Europe and the Mediterranean. But the idea of Rome as a coherent, moral, and military order had died. It died not in a battle, nor in a single sack, but in the collective resignation of a people who stopped believing that reform was possible.

In the end, Rome was not defeated by its enemies. It was abandoned by its citizens.