Posted on 04/10/2011 1:29:58 PM PDT by 0beron
Eunuchs were used well into the Byzantine period and later, but they weren’t particularly numerous. They may have played a role in corruption, but the issue is really dealing with homosexuality and immorality, which does have a marked influence on a society on all levels and was remarked upon by contemporaries in Periclean Athens, for example, and by St. Augustine in his Confessions.
You’ll also notice Nixon’s point just after Archbishop Sheen’s. They’re all making the same argument for immorality, and homosexuality, as the source of the decline. of course, there’s also Sodom and Gomorrah...
You clearly have a problem with the content. Your false accusations and insulting verbiage don’t really do whatever it is you’re trying to say much credit.
You’re violating your own forum rules there.
Ahem. Post #39 is all Jim Robinson’s words, not mine. Take up your disagreement with him if you dare.
I’ve been posting here before and the question was dealth with before by the management. As far as I understood there was no problem.
You keep harassing me if you wish, but after your frankly infantile yammering, I’m not interested in talking to you.
I left high school a long time ago and I recognize it for what it is, and I’m fairly certain that you’re derailing the thread because you actually object to the content.
If I’m incorrect in that admittedly gratuitous assertion, then I’ll at least apologize to you, though you don’t deserve one.
Your incivility is remarkable.
At the same time, though, I can’t but think that homosexuals were more a symptom than a cause.
The best evidence of this is that at its height, there would have been at least some homogeneity (no pun, really), throughout the major centers of the Roman Empire. But it was a thousand years after the collapse of the western empire that the eastern, Byzantine empire folded.
Far more geographic oriented, with the western empire under pressure from the barbarians.
I think the professor is making a bold claim to throw the gauntlet down, but I agree with your assessment; they’re one factor out of many.
So posting Jim Rob's words to you is harassment? Who knew?
I’m fairly certain that you’re derailing the thread because you actually object to the content.
Trying to call me gay....again?
Your incivility is remarkable.
MY incivility? ROFL!
The Barbarians were always a factor in Roman history, it’s just that she was always better equipped in terms of manpower to field an effective military and social response, but by the time we’re talking about, owing to the decay of the societies morality, so say Nixon, +Sheen and other historians, they were incapable of keeping the political integrity of the Empire intact as it was before, and the outer borders deteriorated.
It’s like a disease which attacks the structure of the bones, eventually, the mass of the body itself is insupportable because of the decay.
First, DeoVindiceSicSemperTyrannis is a she. So if she likes guys, it’s fine with me.
Second, you’ve been asked why you don’t post your whole blob. Do you have something worth saying? I don’t know, but you think you do. Why not actually post it? Are you trying to contribute, or divert traffic for blob hits? If it’s the latter, I consider you a user, not a contributor.
That is exceedingly hard to determine in the perpetual soap opera that were the Roman monarchy. It would be easier to say that the fall of the western empire was due to multiculturalism than to moral decay.
It could even be asserted that Christianity was responsible, Constantine I taking over just a little over a hundred years before it fell.
It would be easy to make an educated guess because you can look at the written record, consider how much it influenced court society and society at large and why.
Also, you’d have to account for how Eunuchs were employed before during and after the Empire’s resurgence in the Sixth, Eighth and Thirteenth Centuries.
Of course, multiculturalism is accompanied by moral decay, especially the soft Marxism of the Frankfurt School. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School
Of course, I suspect that despite the fact that the Eastern Empire was a multi-ethnic society, it was still able to forge a critical unity based upon the moral influence of the Orthodox Church which perpetuated the Classical heritage of the ancients and kept people’s mores in check to bring stability to the society, accounting for its tremendous resiliency.
It’s interesting in the tape of Nixon that he starts off by denying that his concerns are moral, but the more he talks about it, the more he realizes that his concerns are indeed moral ones. He’s worried about the children who will watch the cultural marxism of Karl Reiner on All in the Family, a supposedly family show showing indecent filth like that to children... in fact, I think I was 12 myself when I watched the episode that Nixon is talking about.
Are you familiar with Nixon’s controversial tapes dealing with this issue? They’re available on youtube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TivVcfSBVSM
It was a combination of many things of which two are: (1) the barbarians absorbed Roman military tactics and devised ways to defeat them and (2) an endless series of succession battles - including an era that saw 20 emperors in 60 years - exhausted Roman manpower and finances. Despite its decline and fall, Rome was significant for being one of the few empires to last over 1000 years. Its wars of succession were bloody, but these wars ensured that the new leader was, first and foremost, a military leader.
A combination of effects with a single cause which was an immoral agency acting on the individuals in the society which led to the things you describe.
I’d point out that the plague around 300 effected the Empires enemies too.
Also, most Roman Emperors were military leaders throughout the Byzantine period all the way up till the Fall in 1453. If I understand you correctly, simply being a military leader in itself wouldn’t be problematic.
Given that the Eastern empire survived for another 1000 years, that’s not a very strong argument.
Homosexuality wasn't exclusive to the Roman empire. Empire-wide succession battles every few years were. At the inception of empire, Roman military methods were also unique, superior and unknown to the barbarians. Once the barbarians caught on and adapted, Roman victories became much more costly. Eventually, what used to be hard-fought victories became defeats. Every empire of note has run into this problem - there are ambitious men of ability outside of the empire who want to get their hands on the brass ring. The ones who figure out what to do get to become the successors to existing empires. Rome fell to superior military minds which created something out of nothing, despite Rome's ability to call on centuries of military tradition and accumulated military knowledge.
We don’t really know much about the Germans except for what the Romans and the Greeks wrote about them, and homosexuality wasn’t much mention, so I don’t know how you could make that claim.
I’d welcome it if you had it, but from what I remember from some desultory reading was the Germans didn’t admit that people like that existed.
I meant to say that for a while, the Emperors themselves were successful military leaders - it wasn't possible to become Emperor without winning a (civil) war of succession.
And actually, if you can say that Rome fell at all, looking at the tremendous drop in central authority, collapsing infrastructure and administration following the transfer of power in the West to the successors, whoever they were and wherever they were as they chose to call themselves Vandals, Goths, Franks and so forth, the result of this dramatic transformation which brought such a qualitative and quantitative change to the Empire, was part of a chain of causation going back to the moral decay described by St. Augustine, St. Martin of Tours and others living at the time.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.