Why Rome Fell

Wise words: “civilization is hard work, barbarism is easy.”

One of the most interesting phenomena of recent years is the deep interest many young men have in the Roman Empire. And apparently, it’s not superficial or sensationalistic.

They will talk about the Gracchan reforms, the Social War, the Crisis of the Third Century, etc., etc., with great familiarity. One YouTube series, put together by a young man in his 20’s, is mainly a tongue-in-cheek hyper-jingoistic telling of Roman history from the beginnings to Heraclius’s recovery of the True Cross (with various figures depicted as “chads” or “soyjacks” or “crater-brains,” etc.).

But underneath it all is a deep love and sympathy for the dream of Rome–and it shows in several moving passages where he drops the parodic style, not least of which is the significance of the recovery of the True Cross and its return to Jerusalem.

Bob K., I agree about the hope at the end of “Canticle”. But I am also oddly unsettled by the ending. The escapees not only take the Church with them (good), but also all known human knowledge, including, presumably, the knowledge of those destructive technologies from which they flee. A new apple for a new Eden? Unsettling.

Art:
The old Latin student will agree with you on some points:

1. There was indeed a demographic implosion, which affected especially the always-underpopulated Western Empire. The cause seemed to be a series of pandemics, beginning in the mid-3rd century with the “plague of Cyprian” (thought now to have been measles).
2. Barbarian pressures were multiplied when (as Tacitus prophesied) the Germanic peoples (and Iranian allies like the Alans) learned to organize and fight like military units under unified commands.
3. Diocletian (284-306) saved the empire by strengthening the military, but at the expense of strangling civilian rights, infrastructure repairs and the small-holder economies of the Antonine era. What he built proved too expensive for the Western Empire to sustain, although the Eastern Empire survived and did quite well economically in the fifth and early sixth centuries.
4. The rivalries of Roman theater commanders, a problem since the late republic, never stopped and resulted (among other disasters) in the evacuation of Britain and the transport of the Vandals into Africa in the early 400s.
5. Roman and barbarian cooperation preserved more of the culture and economy than has often been recognized, although while Gibbon is too harsh, Brown is too generous on this point. The Goths in Spain (Hispana) and Italy were content to rule through Roman law and bureaucrats, as long they got paid.
6. Justinian’s reconquest of Italy was less the problem than how his bureaucrats governed and the subsequent Lombard invasions. Lombards did far greater damage than either Goths or East Romans. The retaking of Africa was easy, and the Roman hold on Africa fortuitous, because they were able to hold up the Arab conquest of Africa and Spain by 60 years, until the time of Charles Martel. One shudders to think of Muslim armies sweeping through hapless Merovingian France without the Hammer and Odo of Aquitaine to stop them.

I’ve been having my slave, Ubiquitus Goolgeplex, read Book 2 Ch20 of City of God – in between trips to the Theatre Primus and snacking on dainties imported from around the Empire…

Have to agree with St Augustine – love of pleasure, particularly sexual, greed, and low character was (and will be) the death of the Empire.

I learned a lot from all these great comments. Thank you, Everyone!

I never had a problem conquering all of Germania in Rome: Total War. I don’t understand why the real Romans couldn’t.

“I have recorded the triumph of barbarism and religion.” (Gibbon)

While the Empire fell in the West, the East managed to survive until 1453. The Ottoman Empire did not last nearly as long.

Pat Buchanan, who became an isolationist after Vietnam, long labeled the USA as an empire. He was and is wrong. No nation has or will have as many military bases around the world as the USA, but a military base is not equal to governing the nation in which it is located. Geez, we have put up with a Communist dictatorship in Cuba for over 60 years, turning that island into a hellhole where hostile foreign interests use it as a base to spy on the US.

No foreign nation will invade and destroy the US. If destruction happens we will do it to ourselves.

There have been others to point out the dangers but only Trump has had the back bone to take the fight to the bureaucratic dictatorship we find ourselves under…that would destroy this nation.

Canada may be too far gone. Western Europe, too.