One of the engines of collapse of Rome was the corrupt financial elite extending to the government that designed rules to extract maximum wealth for the elites, ignoring the long-term health of the economy. By the end, the government was essentially squeezing a dry sponge. Seems like civilisation has learned nothing.
This makes an important point, and is important to think about, but I'm also interested in how societies go to that brink and come back.
I suspect there's a bit of bias in this, as you don't hear as much about the nations that come to the point of collapse and then somehow immediately recover, you hear more about those that disintegrate into decades of chaos and disorganization.
The essay also points to something else on my mind a lot lately, which is, when does that continuation of the status quo stop, and why? At what point did these societies start to see themselves as something else, and why? Is it always due to some fundamental breaking down of some governmental or military covenant?
As other commenters noted — Rome did almost fall apart and come back a few times. Peter Brown has a bit about how the crisis of the 3rd century was reversible because it was fundamentally about control of the empire, rather than disassembling it.
My headcanon is that while the elites of the empire found more value in controlling the reins of power rather than carving out their own fief — that's what prevented collapse.
I've always liked stories about the post-Roman empire when you still had evidence of a richer and more civilized time that your ancestors lived in but you were stuck in your time. I know it's probably fiction, but I always got that fix from King Arthur stories.
It took a couple of hundred years after that before Charlemagne and law and civilization again.
I do not get the obsession with fall of Rome being a bad thing. Look at taxation, look at big part of population being in slavery. Their military machine, roads and civilisation was basically just to crash rebelions!
Today we have taxation around 30 to 70 percent. Imagine if taxes would be at 10% and we would not have to sponsor all sort of "adventures".
To be pedantic, the Roman Empire did not fall in 472. It lived on in the eastern Mediterranean for another one thousand years. The Eastern Romans even took back a fair amount of western Roman holdings for a bit. The people who actually killed the Roman Empire were the Franks, permanently weakening it during the Latin occupation.
Ironically enough, the thing that really did Roman Italy it was Justinian’s reconquest. The Gothic War was absolutely devastating. Yersinia pestis didn’t help either, of course.
This question depends as much on you as it does on history, because it's about identity: what made Rome Rome?
To say "Rome fell and nobody noticed", you have to have a different definition of Rome - or maybe we should say, assert a different essence of Rome - than the people who lived at the time.
Yeah, that's a good point. Even though Latin had diverged to the point that reading Cicero required explicit schooling — the post-476 Romans did consider themselves Roman and fully the descendants of the late Republican / early Imperial period.
I'm mostly arguing that people overindex on the political changes and don't see the ground level continuity. Map color changed != they're not Roman any more.
Regardless, I do enjoy asking "what made Rome Rome?" — I like the idea of the Byzantines being Roman in 1453 even though at that point it was tenuous.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 24.8 ms ] threadI suspect there's a bit of bias in this, as you don't hear as much about the nations that come to the point of collapse and then somehow immediately recover, you hear more about those that disintegrate into decades of chaos and disorganization.
The essay also points to something else on my mind a lot lately, which is, when does that continuation of the status quo stop, and why? At what point did these societies start to see themselves as something else, and why? Is it always due to some fundamental breaking down of some governmental or military covenant?
My headcanon is that while the elites of the empire found more value in controlling the reins of power rather than carving out their own fief — that's what prevented collapse.
It took a couple of hundred years after that before Charlemagne and law and civilization again.
Today we have taxation around 30 to 70 percent. Imagine if taxes would be at 10% and we would not have to sponsor all sort of "adventures".
The parallels are unmistakeable.
Sam Altman’s $27 Million House Burns: This Is How An Empire Dies https://youtu.be/OONViaKRs1k
To say "Rome fell and nobody noticed", you have to have a different definition of Rome - or maybe we should say, assert a different essence of Rome - than the people who lived at the time.
I'm mostly arguing that people overindex on the political changes and don't see the ground level continuity. Map color changed != they're not Roman any more.
Regardless, I do enjoy asking "what made Rome Rome?" — I like the idea of the Byzantines being Roman in 1453 even though at that point it was tenuous.