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.
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.
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