Corruption and the decline of Rome

[Nathan Ross]

"Corruption and the Decline of Rome"... Has anyone else read this text

I haven't read it either, although it looks very interesting, and I have enjoyed some of Macmullen's other books (particularly this one).

As usual with any 'decline and fall' theory, we'd have to ask why this supposed corruption caused the west to collapse and not the east - there seems to have been plenty of corruption in the east (Procopius mentions a fair bit of it, as does Ammianus in an earlier age). Does Macmullen have any suggestions?

And is he able to give evidence for there being more corruption in the later era? I suspect you could find plenty of evidence of fairly rampaging corruption, bribery and nepotism in any period of the empire - if we can believe Juvenal and Petronius, the Principiate largely ran on it!

I find the idea (picked up from brief reading of online excerpts) that systems of imperial patronage broke down in the later empire quite intriguing though. If the emperor was no longer the ultimate giver-of-largesse then his authority would inevitably suffer. But, again, I'm not sure this didn't happen in the earlier empire too: the great aristocratic families, and the 'native' nobility of provinces in both east and west, were surely tremendously powerful nexuses for patronage in the 1st-2nd centuries, and their power seems to have been somewhat neutralised by the expanded powers of the later state. What more does Macmullen have to say about this?