Rome Fell and Nobody Noticed

mentalgear

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.

derbOac

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?

comrade1234

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.

theoeirjfb

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".

joshcsimmons

Yes! Partially this was due to various people complaining about the decline of Rome for centuries (sky is falling). The parallels are unmistakeable. Sam Altman’s $27 Million House Burns: This Is How An Empire Dies https://youtu.be/OONViaKRs1k

Gimpei

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.

mjhay

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.

brador

The fall of empire merely affects a nations ability to handle chaotic unexpected events.

vintermann

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.