151–160 of 208 posts
One thing I really got out of the History of Rome podcast by Mike Duncan is if anyone tells you there was ONE cause of the fall of Rome, they're full of crap.
Is there even a clear indication that lead use was significantly higher in the Western empire? If anything I would expect far more lead to exist in the east.
In general, any analysis of 'Fall of Rome' that does not take into account the East and how id didn't Fall can be pretty much dropped instantly. It ends up that you are not really talking as a Fall, but more like a reduction in size of an empire.
Looking at it that way, its actually more reasonable to look at Roman history as one of continues success and then decline. One could argue that the first ~1000 years of Roman state were it consistently getting bigger and then 1000 years where it consistently gets smaller. It started out as city state with king and ended as city-state with an emperor (ie King with a different name).
How does lead factor into this story? As 1 of 10000s of different factors that played a role. It was likely used for a reason that made sense to people back then and the overall effect could still be positive overall effect.
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Another, related view is to look at how many was on the dole. During the late empire, around 20% of the population in Rome was effectively on welfare, getting food from the state. Instead of drafting these poeple into the empire, Rome recruited foreigners for the army, while the productivity of the domestic population kept going down. Eventually the state, needing to pay both the welfare receipients and the army, ran…
Wasn't the dole only implemented because land ownership had concentrated to a few extremely wealthy individuals? Only a few generations earlier, during the Second Punic War many landowners had either died or had their farms ruined to deny food to Hannibal, allowing the land to be bought at low prices.
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It's also how the Byzantine Empire went into its downwards trajectory starting with the late 1000s. In fact, it was a little more complicated, as the Empire had to resort to using mercenaries because its theme system had been basically broken into pieces by the Empire oligarchy and by the Church, so Byzantium having to resort to mercenaries in order to defend itself was mostly, by that time, a consequence of said oli…
I can agree that it ceased being the Roman Empire per se, but I don't see it as being that much different from the end of the Roman Kingdom or the Roman Republic. It's still a continuation.
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And if you really want to boil it down to a single reason, the best candidate would be "becoming militarily dependent on hired mercenaries and then not paying them" rather than something more interesting
It's also how the Byzantine Empire went into its downwards trajectory starting with the late 1000s. In fact, it was a little more complicated, as the Empire had to resort to using mercenaries because its theme system had been basically broken into pieces by the Empire oligarchy and by the Church, so Byzantium having to resort to mercenaries in order to defend itself was mostly, by that time, a consequence of said oli…
Combine that with the rise of a new powerful enemy and you have a disaster on your hands.
New evidence suggest that the Theme system was only barley function for a long time before the decline. In fact, going away from that system is partly why they were so powerful by the year 1000.
> by the end of Heraclius's [1] reign
I don't agree with that at all. If there is any reasonable point to talk about non-continuation it would be 1204.
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And if you really want to boil it down to a single reason, the best candidate would be "becoming militarily dependent on hired mercenaries and then not paying them" rather than something more interesting
I can see that happening. Thinking about Canada. The other day I calculated it would take 25 hours of work for the minimum wage worker to afford a weekend camping. And I think that's a pretty good indication we're pretty close collapse. Workers not being paid enough, and out of control inflation is how the soviet system collapsed.
No its not actually. If anything the Soviet system collapsed because the elites didn't really like it that much. The elites had lost interest in preserving the system. Elites didn't like the party discipline.
There is a reason why Soviet collapsed and China didn't. Just having demonstrations and unhappy population does magically lead to successful overthrows of governments.
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The eastern half of the empire was just as Christian and didn’t collapse for another thousand years, so you can’t really point to Christianity as the cause. I don’t know why people obsess over finding a cause for the fall of Rome when it was one of the world’s longest lasting empires. We should be more interested in how it endured for over a millennia (nearly two thousand years if you count the Republic) whereas most…
That's actually quite a good remark. The most compelling theory I have read on the fall of the western part of the empire was that a mode of production based a land based elite that relied on slavery came to have a lot of limitations. The war machine kept it going as new land could be given to fighting soldiers (that would become less of a threat when settled) and fueled the economy with ever more slave. When Rome in…
This whole theory came from the 60s where Marxist historiography was very popular and really is not based on much.
It just basically taking the Marxism 101 and plastering it over the historical empire and the source base for it is a few political speeches.
Modern history that looks this can almost universally not verify many of these claims based on the sources used. Making incredibly complex economic argument to analyses a society where we have almost 0 visibility on economic data is quite a tall order.
By the time the empire was at maximum size, the Roman citizenship was very broad and while large scale slave agriculture was still a thing the majority of the empire was not large scale slave agriculture. Certainty far less so then it was in late Republic where the amount of slaves compared to the amount of citizenship was far higher.
The reality is that by 300-400 century Roman was a pretty advanced economy that had a very significant private sector, banking, a mix of all kinds of agricultural system and a huge amount of trade. Modern research suggest analyzing Rome as some elite land based economy is a really bad idea.
> Another interesting point was that the adoption of Christianity made the elite even bigger with the whole Church apparatus now living the life and putting even more pressure on the system.
This fails to account for the fact that Paganism also had many state sponsored position and that the state spent a lot on religious festivals. Both in Rome and all over the empire.
Also, it has to be considered that Christianity only became relevant by the point where the problems of the Western empire were already very apparent and the constant civil wars of the 300rd century caused massive problems.
In effect, Christianity is really more the result of the Roman instability then the cause.
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As someone who made their living publishing scientific papers for over a decade and amassed a track record that showed that I was pretty good at it, I can tell you from first hand experience that you are absolutely wrong about this. A much better approximation to the truth would be something like this: How not to get published: "Other authors are wrong." How to get published: "These specific other authors are right,…
Is this because those other authors are the "peers" that get to peer review the paper?
This article argues against the fall of the roman empire being caused by severe lead poisoning. I would argue that it was more likely caused by widespread minor lead poisoning. If everyone is more forgetful and learns slower, then that isn't something that will be written in history books - the people themselves will just consider that 'normal'. Yet an empire of forgetful and slow-learning people won't be efficient.…
The Roman empire by 600 was arguably more powerful then it had been for 100s of years before.
Did they remove lead pipes in that time and that made everything go faster again?
What does the “Fall of Rome” actually mean? It’s not like everyone died or disappeared. They just stopped being ruled by a particular government.
Lots of people died and disappeared, whole cities were abandoned, those that weren’t often had a tenth of their previous populations, people receded to subsistence agriculture, and literacy went to almost zero. If you took an interest in a subject and read a few books, you could be the worlds foremost expert on it. This was most prevalent in the west. Rome was just a few sparks away from triggering an industrial revo…
Most of that happened far later and guess what, to a significant extent it also happened in the East where the empire continued to exist.
The Justinian plague had for more to do with the things you mentioned then anything about if you lived in the empire or outside.
> Rome was just a few sparks away from triggering an industrial revolution a thousand years early.
That's a waste extenuation.