Was the fall of Rome this stupid?
from ArchmageAzor@lemmy.world to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world on 13 Oct 15:14
https://lemmy.world/post/37295893
from ArchmageAzor@lemmy.world to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world on 13 Oct 15:14
https://lemmy.world/post/37295893
#nostupidquestions
threaded - newest
I mean they were killing each other every opportunity they got so, maybe…
Yes
Yes.
Edit: Oh, also… It just kept getting more stupid.
From what I’ve heard from friends who have Rome as their special interest: yes.
Well...
<img alt="" src="https://files.catbox.moe/v6wf23.gif">
Strange women in ponds handing out swords sounds like a preferable system.
Our economy is based on magic already anyway so it’s not like it’s a particularly hard pivot.
We really did shape western society after Rome, didn’t we?
I mean, America is specifically patterned on the Roman Republic.
Which is part of the reason there’s a fasces in the House of Representatives.
Full on clown shoes.
What’s that on the crazy-town-banana-pants scale?
Yes
Well they didn’t have banana pants, but the town was in fact crazy
The decline and fall of the Roman empire was something that took place over the course of centuries, involved events largely out of the control of individuals and affected very large areas and very diverse and different cultures.
I simply may not know enough about it, but I wouldn’t call it “stupid”. It’s just not a word that I can see applying here. It wasn’t a historical event, more like some kind of plate tectonics process.
history happens slowly then suddenly.
the political class of the western empire had been pulling itself apart for centuries.
That’s how it always goes when the decadence sinks in.
With how fast we are able to communicate, I’d say it’s likely to happen faster this time around. When the emperor does something that fucks over the populace, they can hear about it within minutes. During Roman times it could have taken months.
i agree, but its peaks and valleys i suppose. the fall of US empire is still in the ‘slow’ stage i suspect.
I agree with your conceptualization of the process, but if there was a single underlying theme of the entire process besides ‘decadence’, it would likely be ‘stupidity’. At least on a collective scale.
Yes. Marked by opulence and a distracted upper class, depending on foreign born nationals and the impoverished to defend them from the mob. A military class they eventually spit on and denied access to anything “Roman” which wasn’t a great incentive for you know, defending them from their own disgruntled citizens or enemies at their door. They cared more about their money and orgies and pedophelia than they did at maintaining the cogs of Empire of which their lifestyle depended. Bread and circuses and a whole lot of arrogant prejudice.
Well, the US was greatly inspired by Rome so why not follow the fall?
Money, orgies, and pedoohelia? Why does that sound familiar?
….
I’m not sure how linked to the Fall of Rome these things are when they existed throughout basically the entire history of the Roman Empire (and even the Republic before it). The “secession of the plebs” was effectively a general strike of the commoners that happened multiple times between the 5th venture BCE and the 3rd century BCE — many centuries before the Fall of Rome.
I would also assume that over time, a lot of the idiotic day-to-day shit probably gets forgotten about and as successive historians retell the events they naturally focus on the bigger, more important sounding stuff because it makes for a better read, so things probably get puffed up to sound loftier than they actually were.
Kind of.
Mostly yes. As others have written, it involved some money issues. There were also problems with logistics and agriculture, Rome had an absurdly high population for that time. That stuff just has to be managed and managed well.
And also you had some external factors.
And also the religious shift from the old greek gods to christianity, were suddenly a whole bunch of stuff was “against god” the way you would think it is now. It is unclear how much knowledge was lost and exactly why, but the facts remain that you have relatively skilled military doctors in one century and then that disappearing into thin air in the next.
The thing you can observe at the moment, the question of loyalty from universities, into giving positions to loyal or just compliant people over skilled people is roughly the same process. Not the same, because obviously they didn’t have our modern universities, but replace it for any other system of education and actual skill and merit based system and you get the gist of what happened.
Well we’re not gonna have that problem America just hit peak 18-year-old in colleges and it’s only going to be smaller class sizes in a couple years or maybe even now from here on out
The “Fall of Rome” conflates a lot of different events, covering over a thousand years:
The one most usually thought of is the fall of the western empire… and while it was preceded by some stupid policy decisions, they weren’t notably more stupid than many other decisions the empire made over the previous five centuries. From an institutional perspective, it was actually a relatively boring period.
(Many of the other comments here are pointing to things that were pretty much constants for most of the empire’s existence, so if you want to blame them for the fall, you need to explain why the empire didn’t fall 500 years earlier.)
This, people love to think Rome fell because of moral degeneracy and corruption, but that was probably at its height under Commodus or Nero when the empire was very stable and secure. The later emperors were relatively modest and to an increasing degree impotent, so it mattered less if they were incompetent, though many of them were, and that didn’t help.
The reality is empires all eventually fall, they lose the military edge that won them the empire, either by degrading or the “barbarians” learning and catching up, and the forces that were kept in check by the military tear the empire apart.
Something that I find interesting with Rome is that arguably one of the ways it managed to keep going for so long is that it was continuing to push its borders outwards through conquest. Assimilating a land and its people into the Republic/Empire is one way of dealing with the problem of invading “barbarians” (even if that is just transmuting the problem such that your external threat is a new group of “barbarians”, and the old potential invaders potentially pose a threat from within).
Continuing to push outwards is a way to continue developing the military though, and to distract the military from the potential option of seizing power for themselves. There’s only so far you can push before the borders you need to secure are too large to do effectively, and the sheer area to be administrated is too large, even for Rome.
As you highlight, it’s a common misconception that people don’t realise that the Fall of Rome was far more protracted and complex of a process than a single event. I think that’s a shame, because I find it so much more interesting that historians can’t even agree on when the Fall of Rome even was.
No, definitely more stupid than this. This is only slightly stupid.
I’d say this is par for the course. Technology has made it much more public and more rapid fire
Also the complexity of modern society resists change. We have layers of procedure, checks and balances, even logistical realities that slow or disperse the kind of blunt demands being made at the top
So there’s a lot of stupid but effective things they could do back then, where today the same things are stupid and pointless
-Marx
Compared to what in your country?
Absolutely. The circus is the biggest tell of an empire crumbling.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFC_White_House
What the fuck, what even is real anymore lol
The circus is where all the outcasts of society go to form family. It’s often satirical, aggressively leftist, and deeply connected to the arts.
Signed, a circus performer
Not sure what you mean by ‘this stupid’, but in general: no. It was a complex process that unfolded over centuries and in different places in different ways and at different speeds. The reasons were economic, political, climatic, cultural and military.
For a really well done deep-dive, I can recommend the Fall of Rome podcast: www.podbean.com/…/The-Fall-of-Rome-Podcast
Commenting to echo my agreement. Rome was bloody huge, and it was hard to administrate. Things like high quality roads and advanced administrative systems help to manage it all, but when you’re that big, even just distributing food across the empire is a challenge. Rome only became as large as it was because it was supported by many economic, military and political systems, but the complexity of this means that we can’t even point to one of them and say “it was the failure of [thing] that caused Rome to fall.”
An analogy that I’ve heard that I like is that it’s like a house falling into disrepair over many years. A neglected house will likely become unliveable long before it collapses entirely, and it’ll start showing the symptoms of its degradation even sooner than that. The more things break, the more that the inhabitants may be forced to do kludge repairs that just make maintaining the whole thing harder.
Thanks for the podcast recommendation, I’ll check it out. I learned about a lot of this stuff via my late best friend, who was a historian, so continuing to learn about it makes me feel closer to him
First of all, it’s beautiful you want to remember your late historian friend by learning more history. Kudos!
The fall of Rome is a deeply fascinating topic and it doesn’t disappoint in scale, complexity and nuance. Even the house-in-disrepair analogy doesn’t necessarily work, because in many places no one ever even realised something had fallen - though in other places they surely did. In 476 CE, typically the date we use for the fall of the western empire, no one at the time thought anything was more substantially wrong than anything that had happened over the preceding 200 or so years.
This podcast, also by an historian with a PhD on the topic of the fall, delves into all of it. The literature, the archeology, from the large political structures to the lives of individuals. Highly recommended, again.
I mean… I’m not going to argue the fall of the US isn’t stupider than the fall of Rome…
But I will argue the fall of the US started back when Reconstruction was stopped. Just took a while for the confederates to win.
Absolutely. There are soooooooo many similarities, just with a futuristic twist. Rome refused to change with the times and other city states that modernized and welcomed new people did swimmingly. You can’t force everyone to conform to your ideology unless your ways are obviously better and easier to incorporate other influences into your own society. Look at the fall of Chinese dynasties. They tried so hard to stay isolated but (right or wrong how it happened) if they opened up and simply took the parts they needed (guns, boats capable of traveling oceans, and trains.) they would have done much better. Kinda like Japan. Japan messed up by picking a fight with the country they were learning from.
No, trump has got till the midterms or he’s gonna lose a significant amount of power, so he’s trying to speedrun the fascist dictatorship takeover. rome took hundreds of years to crumble and fall.
Nobody’s got that kind of time any more.
This collapse didn’t start in January.
…are you really comparing the fall of the great Roman Empire to what that joke of a ‘country’ called the separated states of Muricah?
This is sacrilege
Why do you hate your own country?
Why wouldn’t you at this point?
I am not even American’t
Which one?
Yeah probably. Successive emperors selfishly fighting among themselves for power, weakening their Nation, destroying the Foundation of their state, making alliances with people that cannot be trusted, all that’s a Hallmark of the fall of Rome. Both Falls actually.
Just as an aside I don’t know why my voice to text is capitalizing certain words in that paragraph but I’m too lazy to fix it.
Thanks for the explanatory postscript, I was gonna ask…
Incitatus was more competent than most of Trump’s cabinet.
Some pop philosophy for you:
youtu.be/XHqHhoi6ErU youtu.be/A4YK3oioThc youtu.be/WXpw0SURjaQ
Nowadays with mass media and the internet, we get aware of much more of the stupid shit happening all over than a common person would in the Western Roman Empire because stupid shit anywhere can be brought to people’s attention everywhere quickly, and since stupid stands out it does get brought to people’s attention.
Also real power is more centralized nowadays, also because of the speed with which information and people can travel enabling more centralised Command & Control systems.
So I would say that a fall due to internal social and political degenrence will happen faster and look a lot more stupid to bystanders, than back in Roman Empire days. Also the density of stupid timewise is probably higher now since everything is happening faster and in a lot more places at the same time.
That said, what’s happening in the US has been developing since at least Clinton’s time, maybe even Reagan’s, maybe longer than that - it’s just that the earlier stages which made the structural changes and created the conditions for what’s happening now, weren’t obvious to anybody but a handful of experts in some domains who of course weren’t given airtime on mass media or were deemed kooks by the rest of people when they did get airtime: any system’s eventual doom is guaranteed as soon as criticism of the structurs system itself is repressed or even de facto suppressed, though it generally takes time for it go through the stagnancy and then the internal-pillaging stages that lead to it cracking and collapsing due to becoming unable to serve most people in it.
I don’t think its fall was stupid. There is one book I’ve heard of from Edward Gibbon that explains why ancient Rome fell. It’s still there today, only in a different and more esoteric form.
It actually explains the prophecies in a particular religious text being fulfilled perfectly using the language of this text’s prophets as well.
The fall of which Rome?
I still contend that this isn’t equivalent to the fall of the Empire. It’s equivalent to the fall of the republic and the rise of the empire.
The US isn’t dealing with Astragoths and Huns pillaging their cites. They’re dealing with an exceptionally stupid version of Caesar trying to usurp power and proclaim an empire.
Buckle up, America. If you don’t take care of this now, your in for about 437 more years of this shit.
Say what you will about the modern day, but at least we don’t have a slave revolt so vicious and organized that it threatens the entire country