Posted on 12/23/2008 11:41:49 AM PST by briarbey b
The Roman Empire actually fell in AD 235. That was the end of the Severan Principate and the beginning of a nearly 50 year period of civil war, invasions, plagues and murders. During this time, nearly the entire empire was lost. Out of this mess emerged a massive proto-typical feudal state that was Roman in name only. It possessed most of the territory as the old empire, but that is where the similarities end. The capital was at Ravenna, until it was moved to Constantinople. Diocletian and his successors cast aside any pretense of the Republic, donned crowns and ruled without the machinery of the Republic. The army was taken over by Germans. The only unifying force was Christianity. This arrangement lasted from 285 to 1453.
Yeah, I’m not sure about that. Constantine, Justinian, Charlemagne—all Christians who fought to restore the Roman Empire (really a quite different Empire in the case of the latter) to its former glory.
Churchmen might have been more pacifist than they were during the Crusades, but I think the immorality of the late Empire had much more to do with it.
No country in the history of the world has ever planned its own demise - except the United States. Lack of morals and political corruption are coupled with obscene spending to delude the poor and planned extermination of an entire generation.
We started with so much and we allowed our leaders to squander it all away. The tipping point is near. What will it take to say, “Enough!”?
What a bunch of crock....Gee watch HBO’s Rome much?
Everyone knows it was Bush’s fault that Rome fell.
And Yes, he had some help....from the Amish.
PING
It’s rather useless to analogize with a non-event. The capital of the Roman Empire was moved from Rome to New Rome (a.k.a. Constantinople) in 324.
The retirement of the last Western Augustus to a villa near Naples in 476 happened at the behest of the Eastern Augustus Zeno, who decided (rightly, I think) that the system of parallel Augusti led to bad governance, and (wrongly, I think) that Imperial interests in Italy could be adequately handled by the King of the Ostrogoths in his role as Patrician of the Romans. No Empire ‘fell’ in 476.
Justinian reasserted direct Imperial control over Italy, Spain and North Africa in the sixth century, though this was not long-lived, except in the area around Ravenna.
The ‘Fall of Rome’ like ‘the Byzantine Empire’ represents not an historical reality, but an invention of Gibbon, who wanted to claim the ‘glories of (pagan) Rome’ for the “Enlightenement” by denying the continuity of the Empire at some convenient point.
The Roman Empire, throughly Christian, continued until, having dwindled to a city-state through neglect of the fleet, betrayals by allies, and a failure to embrace firearms, it fell to the Turks in 1453.
We have destroyed a generation with our abortion policies, and replaced them with immigrants. HOW stupid is that??
The seed of the fall of the Roman Republic began to grow with the great victories in the Punic Wars and the following wars. Soldiers prior to that period, a couple of centuries BC, were citizens, not professional soldiers, with farms and homesteads of their own. War was seasonal so the soldier went home to tend his farm.
After the expansion during the Punic Wars there was a vast importation of slaves captured during the conquests and purchased by the wealthy. Soldiers would return from the wars wherein these slaves were captured to find their homesteads seized and being farmed by them for the benefit of the wealthy classes with their families thrown off the land. The Gracchi tried to stop this but were assassinated by the Patrician class for their efforts. Thus died the Republican character of the Roman army and transformed it into a tool for empire despite great resistance to the expansion required as a permanent feature to support such a system. The latifundia region of southern Italy has suffered for the last two millenium because of this system which depopulated the area and turned much of it into a wasteland.
As the city filled up with this dispossessed lumpenproletariat it became the the means that the wealthy patrons used to obtain and keep power. The client-patron relationship wherein the client was bribed with money and aid to vote as the patron wished has been problematic ever since and is still used by the big city political machines through the patronage system.
In Rome it eventually led to the state itself being the prey of the competing political factions erupting in the huge bloodletting civil wars in the century before Christ. The final struggle between Octavian and Antony was throughout the whole Mediterranean.
Private citizens such are Marcus Crassus could fund armies and fight wars using Roman authority. Of course, such matters were the means to achieving fabulous wealth through which the state itself was manipulated by bribery and corruption of secular and sacred offices.
It was the existence of such factions which the Founders warned against (see the Federalist) and tried to prevent from dominating political life in our Republic. That lasted until Jefferson and Madison formed the forerunner of the Democrat party to oppose Hamilton. We still suffer the consequences of that creation.
Do you have any book or listins of books that might flesh out these ideas? This is quite fascinating for me. Thanks in advance.
Where did you get that?
I would like to read more.
Oh, goodness, that quote has been in my archives for years. If you google Roosevelt, you may find more of it. If I recall, it was a speech given after he was out of office.
Immorality, which would have been condemned even in the old pagan Republic, was the source of several of the factors mentioned. The bottom line was the message sent out that state, or the emperor, owes you free food, lodging, and circuses, as long as you remain a mob friendly towards him.
I feel that the brutality of the circuses directly undermined people's interest in serving in the military. They could enjoy real death and dismemberment (as opposed to our reliance on special effects) from a safe distance. Unless you were a condemned prisoner, you were on the arena floor of your own free will to provide a good show for some sort of personal gain.
Join the military, and you spend 25 years of taking orders, and sometimes risking your life. There were benefits of the best medical care available, the best equipment, and a reasonable concern for your food and shelter. At the end of the enlistment, aliens could look forward to full Roman citizenship for themselves and their families.
But in a society that organized itself around mobocracy and free sustenance and entertainment, no sane person would want to sign up to defend the empire.
Many believers have their eyes turned toward a Europe that will be what we see as a revived Roman Empire of the last days. I disagree.
The similarities between the US and Rome are unprecedented. Right down to our Coliseums. A senate..architecture..conquering the world and making them democracies (and we are suppose to be a republic..that is a laugh). If anyone can think of more...chime in!!
Unfortunately we have much in common with Imperial Rome. We may be living in the last days of the Republic.
Naaaah! Welcome to New Kenya (Africa U.S.A.)
“Where the law of the jungle has replaced the Law of the Land.”
—
de Texas Fossil
People generally take the growth of power and centralization as a reason for Rome's fall. There's a lot in that. But there's another side to the coin.
If you were a wealthy Roman you could live well on your estate and not care about the city and the empire. The fact that life would go on, empire or no empire, led people to care less about what happened to Rome.
If anyone can think of more...chime in!!
Thanks for the invite.
The empire had to begin hiring soldiers recruited from the unemployed city mobs or worse from foreign counties. Such an army was not only unreliable, but very expensive. The emperors were forced to raise taxes frequently which in turn led again to increased inflation.
How obvious is it that Alaric, who sacked Rome in 410, was a certified Roman General.
In other words, the Roman citizens became so apathetic, or feckless, that the job of defending the empire was reassigned to foreign agents. It is not that they were not good soldiers, but that they were not inculcated or born with the empathy that was the Roman empire. They were diverse. Too diverse.
Just like illegal Mexican immigrants.
And all so Democrats can keep "power" (and sad "republican politicians" can keep their jobs).
How obvious is it?
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