Alaric - 'Roman Officer'?

[Sean Manning]

some costs of Late Roman civilization... slaves in Egypt worked to death... soldiers who took out their frustration... uppity farmer murdered... talking tools from his weaving factory

Yes. But was this unique to 'late' Roman civilisation? Surely these things happened throughout Roman history? So the problem lies with Roman power and culture itself, rather than the late empire per se.

We would have to ask, I suppose, what alternative there was at the time. Was there a society of the 1st-5th centuries that offered something different? Or even  a contemporary culture that could have offered a reasoned critique of Roman mores?

If not, are we not just looking back from our present situation (full of injustice and abuses too) and decrying the immorality of the past?

We find that critique from the second century BCE onwards: even Roman literature (ie. what leisured slaveowning men wrote for other leisured slaveowning men, obviously there were other things which didn't get selected for preservation) is an extended meditation on "some of the things we do are pretty horrible, aren't they?" Many aspects of Roman imperialism shocked the ruling classes of neighbouring states, let alone people like Marcus Aurelius Serapion who were just trying to go about their lives and want us to know how they were wronged.

It looks to me like many aspects of life in the empire were getting more oppressive from Diocletian to Justinian, the same period as urban life was falling apart in the west, and lots of people who know more than I do suspect that the two changes might be related.