Gibbon- Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter XVII

Project Guttenburg ^ | 1781 | Edward Gibbon

[eleni121]

old Romans worked harder at maintaining the world they lived in because it was all they had

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No because your conclusion is based in very simplistic logic...but not any more or less simplistic than the erroneous and narrow views of Gibbons.

[Flag_This]

"Notwithstanding all the other signs of decline, the most fatal defect was Rome's failure to solve the problem of succession. Every time an emporer died there was basically a free for all for power, which sometimes even resulted in multiple "emperors."

I've always heard that was one of the contributing factors, but if it was, it was a problem they had for over 400 years before the collapse.

[colorado tanker]

It's always been interesting to me that most Europeans choose to focus on the "decline and fall" in the Western Roman Empire rather than the fact the Eastern Empire lived on another 1000 years, at times with a quite brilliant civilization.

Although Rome contributed much to Western civilization, the fact is our civilization wouldn't have come into existence had Rome not fallen to our "barbarian" ancestors.

[SunkenCiv]

/bingo

[Beowulf2]

Are you at the place where the really old Hessen general (name slips my mind) and Cornwallis are talking and the Hessen tells Cornwallis to read this Roman book? If you have read that part, can you tell me the name of the book?

[Billthedrill]

Gibbon's case was a little stronger than that, IIRC. It wasn't so much a matter of religion - he also claimed that the charitable practices of the early Christian movement siphoned off potential tax money and more important, that the structuring of the early Church drew off administrative talent that might have done better - well, actually, Gibbon showed that it DID do better - in maintaining administrative efficiency through times of stress than the time-servers who were in the formal Roman government.

It was never a particularly strong case to begin with and I half suspect Gibbon of including it out of a bit of late 18th-century sensationalism. Nor did he claim it was the only cause of the fall of the Western empire. But I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand. The Church did abide, after all, and the (Western) Roman government did not.