Posted on 10/03/2014 5:10:05 PM PDT by Vinylly
I was doing a Google Search on 'Why The Roman Empire Fell'. I was sincerely shocked at the reason. The United States is now in the same position as when the Roman Empire fell. History is repeating itself and very few people realize this.
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I always laugh when some homosexual story comes up and everyone says, ah, just like Rome.
If you have to cite Nero and Tiberius, you might as well throw in Caligua and Claudius’s wife.
In fact the empire lived on centuries after the most decadent and was in fact predominantly Christian.
The empire was split up and power began to gravitate east and north.
The article cites fast growth, but the empire grew fast centuries before the fall.
Ask your self how could a city be the heart of such a fast empire for such a long time. Amazing accomplishment.
How long could it last paying others to be their army in the provinces.
Too big to keep sustaining control over such a vast area.
I never had to use Google to figure that out. I wake up every day and I see more and more of the decay created by the Socialist, communists and the rest of the goose stepping college professors that want to destroy the last free nation. Teaching liberal crap that has nothing to do with building a nation. So now it has come to head.
Don’t confuse Roman civilization with the Roman Empire founded by Augustus, which did last 500 years, though it took only a couple centuries for it to become unrecognizable compared to its early years.
Thanks, I knew I had to be confused about something. ;-)
http://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/the_history_of_rome/page/5/
FYI
Gibbons is a collection of books. I recommend for college students serious about becoming woman scholars. For high schoolers seeking general education I would start with Livy and read forward in chronological order from several sources you could ID with internet sources.
You can mix contemporary historians with people like Michael Grant.
Good videos like HBO’s Rome and I Claudius (PBS) but not suitable for those under 21 in my opinion.
Good luck.
The Roman Republic may have started around 700 B.C. but the Empire didn’t officially start until Augustus in 27 B.C. and then you have to consider the Eastern Roman Empire which didn’t die until 1453 A.D.
look up the sources for the graph in post 16 for contemporary historians.
Global warming? Emperor Caesar-Bush?
Sorry, but this is a really poor attempt at an explanation.
It combines various trends and events over 4+ centuries as if they were all happening at the same time.
The Praetorian Guard, for example, was destroyed several times in civil wars, and was finally disbanded in the early 300s, 175 years before Rome fell.
The dole in Rome was for the inhabitants of Rome itself, and possibly a few of the larger other cities. IOW, it’s as if we had something resembling a welfare state in NYC but nowhere else in the country. Not a major cause of social decay, in and of itself.
The major cause, imo, of the Fall was glossed over. The article mentions Constant Wars and the resultant expense. That expense, btw, was immensely greater than money spent on the games. But it doesn’t mention why there were so many wars.
The main reason was civil wars between rebels and the “legitimate” emperor. But why were there so many rebels?
Simple. The Romans simply never developed a logical and consistent method of succession. The most common method was to seize the throne yourself by coup or civil war, or to be the son of a guy who did.
This meant every emperor had to constantly be leary of his generals, especially the competent ones, because they might overthrow and kill him. So he tended to bump them off pre-emptively. As might be imagined, killing your most competent military leaders is not exactly the best strategy for a state with many foreign enemies.
OTOH, those same generals were legitimately paranoid about the emperor and were thus prone to rebellion in self-defense, whether they might have preferred to have remained loyal or not.
A civil war is, of course, infinitely more destructive to a nation than a foreign war. Look at how much our own single war still affects us 150 years later. The Romans had dozens of them.
IMO that’s too technical. I think the empire started when they took over all of Italy, Gaul and North Africa, maybe after the Punic Wars.
Wasn’t Julius claiming the title of Imperator and didn’t they already expand into Egypt. I would associate the word with the fact that Roma controlled an empire.
My education continues to grow ... thanks.
Roman scholars
“I was under the impression that the Roman Empire began in 753 B.C. and lasted until 476 A. D. That is slightly longer than 200 - 300 years.”
The Roman Kingdom started in 753 BC and ended in 509 BC, the “Republic” dated from 509 BC to 27 BC, the “Empire” dated to AD 476 and then morphed into the Byzantine Empire that lasted until 1453 AD.
A 2100 year run, sort of.
“Imperator” was a military honorific - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperator
History doesn’t repeat as much as it rhymes.
Someone said that. Einstein I think.
Enemies foreign, enemies domestic.
Interesting, thanks.
Lots of parallels between Rome and the USA. You get the sense that all it’d take is a little push and over the edge we go. And Obama is shoving with all his might.
My pleasure. Rome gifted us many things. Our culture is grounded in the Graeco-Roman and Judeo-Christian history. The left HATES that truth.
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