Standing armies are very, very expensive.

You're taking a group of fit, healthy young men the people who normally would be the most productive part of your workforce, engaging in
agriculture or industry - and getting them to stand around in barracks all day not producing
anything. Not only that, you have to pay them for that privilege, and supply them with food
and clothing and everything else they might need.
Modern societies can keep a standing army because with mechanisation and
industrialisation, we can produce vast surpluses of goods, and thus support a significant
number of non-productive people. In the modern USA only 2% of the population is engaged
in agriculture, yet they manage to supply food to the other 98% of the people and even
produce a large surplus for export. In mediaeval and ancient times, it was more like 90% of
the population had to engage in agriculture - and the remaining 10% had to provide all their
society's blacksmiths and carpenters and weavers and boatmen, and merchants and lawyers
and priests and nobles, as well as soldiers.
The fact that the Roman Empire managed to support a full-time, professional standing army
was, therefore, a remarkable achievement. Multiple factors combined to allow them to do
so: a prosperous continent-wide economy integrated by high-quality roads and water
transport; a sophisticated monetary system with large amounts of circulating coinage; strict
law and order imposed by military force on a population who - apart from the minority of
Roman citizens - had few rights, which in turn allowed for high taxation; a very effective
bureaucracy staffed by literate and well-educated personnel, which allowed them to collect
those taxes and allocate them efficiently; an ethos of public service which placed a high
value on serving in the army among the elite of society. All this allowed the Roman state to
raise large amounts of cash from its people, and use this money to support a full-time
professional army.
Even so, it must be realised that the Roman legions only made up a tiny fraction of the
population - less than 0.4%. Under Augustus the Empire had perhaps 57 million people, of
whom 250,000 were in the army (half of them citizen legionaries and the other half
auxiliary troops). The Roman roads and their navy allowed that small force to redeploy
quickly to anywhere in the Empire it was needed, and its superior training and experience
allowed it to usually win battles even when outnumbered.
The fall of the Western Roman Empire, although it was spread over several generations
rather than being sudden, was a catastrophe of apocalyptic proportions. Runaway inflation
destroyed the value of the currency, making it increasingly impossible to collect taxes or pay
the salaries of the troops. Plagues ravaged the population, reducing both the available tax
base and military manpower. Civil wars and barbarian invasions destroyed infrastructure
and disrupted long-distance trade. Instead of cultured, literate Roman patricians
administering the machinery of state in the provinces, there were local warlords and gangleaders holding power through the strength of their personal retinue of warriors, and being
paid protection money by the peasants to keep them safe from all the other warlords.
By around 550 CE throughout most of the former Western Roman Empire - outside of Italy
itself and a few small enclaves - there was no currency in circulation, hardly anybody able to
read or write outside of the Church; the roads were no longer maintained, the aqueducts
were running dry, buildings were collapsing into rubble. Power lay in the hands of petty
warlords and barbarian kings with a thin veneer of Roman culture. There was no longer the

infrastructure needed to produce an economic surplus, convert it into hard currency, and
recruit a professional standing army.

A reconstruction of Canterbury in ... (more)

Upvote737
Downvote
Comments39+
Share3

Ian Miller, Independent physical scientist, author

10 upvotes by Liu Hongtao, Megat Umar, Yossi Bukovza, (more)

The Roman army was unusual in that to start with it paid for itself, largely by conquest.
Julius Caesar's army in Gaul was not getting huge support from Rome; it was acquiring the
wealth it needed from Gaul, and it is at least arguable that Caesar invaded Gaul to get what
he needed to pay off his truly amazing debts.
Later on, it was paid for by taxation, but there were two other aspects to it. Further conquest
gained further income for the state, which enabled the state to pay the soldiers, and
secondly, the soldiers did not sit around doing nothing when not fighting. They acted partly
as a primitive police force, and they built things, like roads and bridges, and this additional
infrastructure helped increase wealth, which in turn increased taxation. As an aside Roman
taxation was not crippling. Some may have complained, but it was generally less than 5%.
Another important point was that a military career was an important way to get ahead in
Roman society, at least for the officer class. All your aediles, etc up to governors, came this
way. So much so that even Crassus wanted to lead military campaigns. Finally, following the
Punic wars, there was very heavy unemployment in Rome, as small land-owners who joined
the army to fight Hannibal found their land taken over by patricians. Joining the army was a
reasonable way to eventually get more land.
This was a great way of doing things until expansion stopped. Now Rome had to pay its own
way, it started hiring mercenaries, and before long the collapse of the military became
inevitable as the mercenaries had their own ways, and the legion, which depended critically
on the extreme discipline of the early Roman army, dissipated. The later legions were mere
shadows of, say, Caesar's legions.