Rome Fell and Nobody Noticed

Post by fkozlowski » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 10:12 PM UTC

vintermann wrote: post #44

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.

Post by fkozlowski » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 10:22 PM UTC

derbOac wrote: post #4

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 els…

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.

Re: Rome Fell and Nobody Noticed

Re: Rome Fell and Nobody Noticed