Rome fell because lead was used for water pipes. The natives became brain-damaged.
All great empires have a 200-300 year shelf life. Ancient Egypt, Greece, Medo-Persians, Rome, British Empire, and now the US.
Been there, done that ..
Empires collapse all the time,, over vast scales of time.
We are not the first.. Or.. The last.. Well, maybe not.
Society decaying, respect for public authorities at a deficit, and many times , deservedly so, sounds like today..
There are interesting parallels between the US and Rome
1. Christianity
2. Barbarians and Vandals
3. Decay
4. Inflation
5. Lead
6. Economic
7. Division of the Empire
8. Hoarding and Deficit
And it took place over time.
I believe Victor Davis Hanson has described these parallels in several columns over the years.
Have you ever read The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire? If so, do you think it would be a good book for our older home schooled children?
"Rome kept raising taxes and twisting the law so people just walked away from their property. They could not pay the taxes and the population moved to the suburbs started farms and relied upon themselves returning to a Villa economy of self-sufficiency.This then was transformed into serfdom for protection from barbarian invasions. Taxes kill the economy and cause people to move just as I reported they are moving from North to South inside the USA." - Martin Armstrong
The Romans did give us some GREAT food...and Catherine de Medici took it out of Italy on her way to marry a Frog.
From Wikipedia: For a time Catherine de Medici ruled France as its regent. In 1533, at the age of fourteen, Caterina married Henry, second son of King Francis I and Queen Claude of France [. Queen Claude of France was queen consort of France and duchess regnant of Brittany. She was the eldest daughter of Louis XII of France and Anne of Brittany, as well as the first spouse of Francis I of France.].
Under the gallicised version of her name, Catherine de Médicis, was Queen consort of France as the wife of King Henry II of France from 1547 to 1559.
The Italians and French "marriage" was sure a gastronomic goodie for us.
NOW I want some pizza!
I always laugh hen some homosexual story comes up and everyone says, ah, just like Rome.
If you have the 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 gee fast centuries before the fall.
Ask your self how could a city be the heart of such a fast empire.
How long could it last paying others to be their army.
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.
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.
History doesn’t repeat as much as it rhymes.
Someone said that. Einstein I think.
Enemies foreign, enemies domestic.
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.
Rome failed when it ceased to be a Republic.
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In context, the Roman Empire didn’t really fall with Rome, because the capital of the Empire had shifted East to Constantinople.
A very interesting comparison of the Eastern Roman Empire to modern America was how its Empress, Theodora I, singlehandedly extended the life of the empire by 200 years or more.
Before you read this, imagine the political factions then as the political factions today: the whites and the reds being Republicans; the blues being liberal Democrats, and the greens being radical Democrats.
With blues and greens in the ascendancy, they decided to seize control of the crown. But their scheme didn’t go according to plan, and about 30,000 radical greens were killed.
And it was the absence of these hate-filled radicals that stabilized their nation. An interesting comparison, indeed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nika_riots