Submitted 7 hours ago by ArchmageAzor@lemmy.world to [deleted]
Not sure what you mean by ‘this stupid’, but in general: no. It was a complex process that unfolded over centuries and in different places in different ways and at different speeds. The reasons were economic, political, climatic, cultural and military.
For a really well done deep-dive, I can recommend the Fall of Rome podcast: www.podbean.com/…/The-Fall-of-Rome-Podcast
Commenting to echo my agreement. Rome was bloody huge, and it was hard to administrate. Things like high quality roads and advanced administrative systems help to manage it all, but when you’re that big, even just distributing food across the empire is a challenge. Rome only became as large as it was because it was supported by many economic, military and political systems, but the complexity of this means that we can’t even point to one of them and say “it was the failure of [thing] that caused Rome to fall.”
An analogy that I’ve heard that I like is that it’s like a house falling into disrepair over many years. A neglected house will likely become unliveable long before it collapses entirely, and it’ll start showing the symptoms of its degradation even sooner than that. The more things break, the more that the inhabitants may be forced to do kludge repairs that just make maintaining the whole thing harder.
Thanks for the podcast recommendation, I’ll check it out. I learned about a lot of this stuff via my late best friend, who was a historian, so continuing to learn about it makes me feel closer to him
First of all, it’s beautiful you want to remember your late historian friend by learning more history. Kudos!
The fall of Rome is a deeply fascinating topic and it doesn’t disappoint in scale, complexity and nuance. Even the house-in-disrepair analogy doesn’t necessarily work, because in many places no one ever even realised something had fallen - though in other places they surely did. In 476 CE, typically the date we use for the fall of the western empire, no one at the time thought anything was more substantially wrong than anything that had happened over the preceding 200 or so years.
This podcast, also by an historian with a PhD on the topic of the fall, delves into all of it. The literature, the archeology, from the large political structures to the lives of individuals. Highly recommended, again.
Yes. Marked by opulence and a distracted upper class, depending on foreign born nationals and the impoverished to defend them from the mob. A military class they eventually spit on and denied access to anything “Roman” which wasn’t a great incentive for you know, defending them from their own disgruntled citizens or enemies at their door. They cared more about their money and orgies and pedophelia than they did at maintaining the cogs of Empire of which their lifestyle depended. Bread and circuses and a whole lot of arrogant prejudice.
They cared more about their money and orgies and pedophelia than they did at maintaining the cogs of Empire of which their lifestyle depended.
Well, the US was greatly inspired by Rome ao why not follow the fall?
Money, orgies, and pedoohelia? Why does that sound familiar?
Embattled Republican leader Matt Gaetz who will become the attorney general if cleared by the Senate, which is unlikely, has now been accused of attending at least 10 sex parties between 2017 and 2018 when he was serving his first term in Congress.
….
Lawyer Joel Leppard representing two women who already testified before the House Ethics Committee said his clients informed the probe panel that drugs were consumed at those sex parties. One of the women claimed to have seen Gaetz having sex with an underage friend up against a games table.
“Marked by opulence and a distracted upper class, depending on foreign born nationals and the impoverished to defend them from the mob.”
I’m not sure how linked to the Fall of Rome these things are when they existed throughout basically the entire history of the Roman Empire (and even the Republic before it). The “secession of the plebs” was effectively a general strike of the commoners that happened multiple times between the 5th venture BCE and the 3rd century BCE — many centuries before the Fall of Rome.
No, trump has got till the midterms or he’s gonna lose a significant amount of power, so he’s trying to speedrun the fascist dictatorship takeover. rome took hundreds of years to crumble and fall.
After the murder of Pertinax on 28 March 193, the Praetorian guard announced that the throne was to be sold to the man who would pay the highest price. Titus Flavius Claudius Sulpicianus, prefect of Rome and Pertinax’s father-in-law, who was in the Praetorian camp ostensibly to calm the troops, began making offers for the throne. Meanwhile, Julianus also arrived at the camp, and since his entrance was barred, shouted out offers to the guard. After hours of bidding, Sulpicianus promised 20,000 sesterces to every soldier; Julianus, fearing that Sulpicianus would gain the throne, then offered 25,000. The guards closed with the offer of Julianus, threw open the gates, and proclaimed him emperor. Threatened by the military, the Senate also declared him emperor. His wife and his daughter both received the title Augusta.
Strange women in ponds handing out swords sounds like a preferable system.
Our economy is based on magic already anyway so it’s not like it’s a particularly hard pivot.
We really did shape western society after Rome, didn’t we?
I mean, America is specifically patterned on the Roman Republic.
Which is part of the reason there’s a fasces in the House of Representatives.
Yes
Yes.
The “Fall of Rome” conflates a lot of different events, covering over a thousand years:
The most commonly thought of event is the fall of the western empire… and while it was preceded by some stupid policy decisions, they weren’t notably more stupid than many other decisions the empire made over the previous five centuries.
This, people love to think Rome fell because of moral degeneracy and corruption, but that was probably at its height under Commodus or Nero when the empire was very stable and secure. The later emperors were relatively modest and to an increasing degree impotent, so it mattered less if they were incompetent, though many of them were, and that didn’t help.
The reality is empires all eventually fall, they lose the military edge that won them the empire, either by degrading or the “barbarians” learning and catching up, and the forces that were kept in check by the military tear the empire apart.
Something that I find interesting with Rome is that arguably one of the ways it managed to keep going for so long is that it was continuing to push its borders outwards through conquest. Assimilating a land and its people into the Republic/Empire is one way of dealing with the problem of invading “barbarians” (even if that is just transmuting the problem such that your external threat is a new group of “barbarians”, and the old potential invaders potentially pose a threat from within).
Continuing to push outwards is a way to continue developing the military though, and to distract the military from the potential option of seizing power for themselves. There’s only so far you can push before the borders you need to secure are too large to do effectively, and the sheer area to be administrated is too large, even for Rome.
As you highlight, it’s a common misconception that people don’t realise that the Fall of Rome was far more protracted and complex of a process than a single event. I think that’s a shame, because I find it so much more interesting that historians can’t even agree on when the Fall of Rome even was.
Absolutely. The circus is the biggest tell of an empire crumbling.
What the fuck, what even is real anymore lol
From what I’ve heard from friends who have Rome as their special interest: yes.
The decline and fall of the Roman empire was something that took place over the course of centuries, involved events largely out of the control of individuals and affected very large areas and very diverse and different cultures.
I simply may not know enough about it, but I wouldn’t call it “stupid”. It’s just not a word that I can see applying here. It wasn’t a historical even, more like some kind of plate tectonics process.
history happens slowly then suddenly.
the political class of the western empire had been pulling itself apart for centuries.
history happens slowly then suddenly
With how fast we are able to communicate, I’d say it’s likely to happen faster this time around. When the emperor does something that fucks over the populace, they can hear about it within minutes. During Roman times it could have taken months.
That’s how it always goes when the decadence sinks in.
I agree with your conceptualization of the process, but if there was a single underlying theme of the entire process besides ‘decadence’, it would likely be ‘stupidity’. At least on a collective scale.
Kind of.
Mostly yes. As others have written, it involved some money issues. There were also problems with logistics and agriculture, Rome had an absurdly high population for that time. That stuff just has to be managed and managed well.
And also you had some external factors.
And also the religious shift from the old greek gods to christianity, were suddenly a whole bunch of stuff was “against god” the way you would think it is now. It is unclear how much knowledge was lost and exactly why, but the facts remain that you have relatively skilled military doctors in one century and then that disappearing into thin air in the next.
The thing you can observe at the moment, the question of loyalty from universities, into giving positions to loyal or just compliant people over skilled people is roughly the same process.
Well we’re not gonna have that problem America just hit peak 18-year-old in colleges and it’s only going to be smaller class sizes in a couple years or maybe even now from here on out
Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
-Marx
Absolutely. There are soooooooo many similarities, just with a futuristic twist. Rome refused to change with the times and other city states that modernized and welcomed new people did swimmingly. You can’t force everyone to conform to your ideology unless you’re ways are obviously better and easier to incorporate into your own society. Look at the fall of Chinese dynasties. They tried so hard to stay isolated but (right or wrong how it happened) but if they opened up and simply took the parts they needed (guns, boats capable of traveling oceans, and trains.) t hey would have done much better. Kinda like Japan. Japan messed up by picking a fight with the country they were learning from.
I mean they were killing each other every opportunity they got so, maybe…
I’d say this is par for the course. Technology has made it much more public and more rapid fire
Also the complexity of modern society resists change. We have layers of procedure, checks and balances, even logistical realities that slow or disperse the kind of blunt demands being made at the top
So there’s a lot of stupid but effective things they could do back then, where today the same things are stupid and pointless
Full on clown shoes.
What’s that on the crazy-town-banana-pants scale?
Yes
Well they didn’t have banana pants, but the town was in fact crazy
No, definitely more stupid than this.
Compared to what in your country?
Harbinger01173430@lemmy.world 41 minutes ago
…are you really comparing the fall of the great Roman Empire to what that joke of a ‘country’ called the separated states of Muricah?
This is sacrilege