The Roman Empire didn't fall in the fifth century, the Western Roman Empire fell.
The Eastern Empire kept plugging along for just about a thousand more years.
Any claims about the "cause" of the Fall need to explain why the Eastern Empire didn't fall when the Western part did. Were families stronger in the East than the West?
“When the Roman Empire fell in the fifth century, the strong trustee families of the barbarian tribes replaced the weak, atomistic Roman families as the foundation of society.
The Roman Empire didn’t fall in the fifth century, the Western Roman Empire fell.
The Eastern Empire kept plugging along for just about a thousand more years.”
The eastern Roman empire was for all basic purposes destroyed by Mohammed in the 7th. Century. What pitiful remnant — Byzantium — that was left was finally finished off by Mehmet the Second in 1492 when he utterly destroyed Constantinopal.
This bunk also. Greece did not stop having babies; the problem with Greece is that she exported all of her population thru war to other places and exhausted herself with civil wars.
Rome is another matter. The Western Empire did not fall apart as Gibbon stated due to Christianity and high taxes. It fell apart because there was one to many coup attempts that led to civil war, which the Germans ended up taking advantage of. Bryan Ward-Perkins wrote an excellent book that details that the empire was humming along just fine until the battle of the Frigidus (which was the last battle in a series between East and West which decimated the western armies). The Germans were able to cross over repeatedly with little restitance and ended up staying.
Here is another issue I have with the Roman empire not having babies. It was becoming Christian in the west very quickly. Christians were known to save pagan babies from exposure and raising them in the faith. Christians generally have lots of kids. It was the pagans that were having smaller families and exposing their children. If the empire was becoming Christian at the expence of paganism, it should have led to an increase of family size, yet the author tries to make the opposite case. Rome and Greece have very little in common in what we are seeing right now. We are now seeing the paganization of the West with the emphasis on smaller families. Rome saw the opposite, they just weakened themselves through civil war and were not able to resist the barbarians after the fact.