Russian-born scholar Michael Ivanovitch Rostovtzeff , who taught at Yale 1925-1944, was one of the most influential 20th-century historians of ancient Greek and Roman society. He has been denigrated in later years by modern academics because of his aristocratic birth (he was a refugee from Soviet communism) and refusal to see everything in terms of race, class and gender, those current excuses for non-thinking.

I remember Rostovtzeff mainly from one phrase: In the crisis of the Roman Empire the upper classes “could not be roused from their dream of pleasure.” Nor, he wrote, did emperors try to arouse them, because an energetic and committed social leadership would be “dangerous” to Caesarism, one-man rule.

I think too much attention has been paid to how easily the masses may be bought off by benefits — Tacitus' “panem et circenses” (bread and entertainment) said it all — and too little paid to how the uppers can be seduced to surrender liberty by guaranteeing their privileges. The Roman republican senate was a classic example of probity and patriotism. The Roman Imperial aristocracy still reminds us of immoral luxury and the Bacchanalian behavior of a rich leisure class. It avoided service and lived in its own dream-world as the Lower Empire vanished piece by piece.

The emperor Augustus established the empire as a military dictatorship, mollified the masses by welfare, and while depriving senators of real power, let them retain vast wealth and prestige as servants of the state. Romans were not ashamed to be on the bread rolls; some boasted of that hereditary status on their tombstones. However, the senatorial aristocracy was eventually barred from military command and lost public function, though entry was still desirable because it was not, like the middle ranks, taxed. Accounts from the Lower Empire show the now-idle rich living in a luxurious dream-world with the barbarians at the gates.

A senator required a fortune of one million sesterces and was banned from commerce or industry. Most Roman wealth was tied up in gold or land, while productive groups were gradually destroyed by the demands of the state.

The Roman example was by no means unique. Louis XIV destroyed the independence of the French nobility by luring it to reside at his splendid court at Versailles while protecting all its feudal privileges. The aristocracy, losing actual power, wallowed in wealth, status, and high culture, making it politically harmless to the regime. France was a classic case of taming of this sort. Another example was pre-revolutionary Mexico, where the government guaranteed the wealth and privileges of hacendados, the land-owning class, so long as it rode herd on the peasantry and abstained from politics. Compare this with the 18th-19th-century English gentry, who had a shabby royal court and who remained an untamed (and liberating) force on their estates in the countryside. Or with a historically successful nation such as the U.S. where the higher classes have been deeply engaged in both economics and politics, commerce and state — and fortunately, our idle rich never became an adornment.

Russia and Cuba are prime examples of societies that exterminated or exiled their managerial groups and are still suffering from it.

T.R. Fehrenbach is an author and historian.