The Road from Rome | Hacker News Reader

The Road from Rome

aeon.co

31 pointsdiodorus7 comments

I'm skeptical of the author's premise because there were plenty of barbarian tribes outside Rome's borders, who made almost no progress in their civilization for the thousand years that Rome stood. If Europe had fallen entirely to them, why should anything have changed? Even the simple (re)invention of writing may have not come for another thousand years (by which point all of Europe would have been conquered by Arabs anyway). The point is: the iron age is slow.

Rather it all seems to depend on the crucial fact that the barbarians immediately adopted the culture, religion, and especially the (highly written) language of the Romans. Which is highly peculiar: not often in history do the conquerors adopt the customs of conquered. But without this transformation, I don't believe Europe in the West would have become anything but tribes of illiterate savages, like it was in the North.

So if the fall of Rome was for Europe's benefit in the long run--and it may have been--then it's because we got very very lucky. In the meantime, don't be too hasty to throw away today's great civilizations. I do not think it is usually so easy to revive them.

P.S. The author's insistence on pausing every few sentences to needlessly scourge "colonialism" and "slavery" and "white supremacy" and other assorted buzzwords is very irritating.

this p.s. is simply not true

article is bery pleasant to read, I as a history buff even learn few new things

Also the plague of Justinian and cooling climate probably had more to do with people getting taller. Just like the Black Death of the 14th century, those who survived had access to larger plots of land which allowed for more food and more varieties of food than pre plague. I’m going to surmise that the Roman Empire may have been close to the population maximum and the poor had to survive on mostly a bread based diet, hence the shorter population.

> the barbarians immediately adopted the culture, religion, and especially the (highly written) language of the Romans.

This is not really true. It was Clovis and the Franks who made Europe Catholic. Many of the other Germanic tribes were Arian, including the Lombards who essentially destroyed (East) Roman hopes of retaking Italy.

Christianity spread by missionaries to many places, particularly Ireland (cf. "Saint Patrick"), and became successful because it helped build alliances among competing tribes. The Ostrogoths ruled over a Roman populace which continued its cultural institutions -- they didn't force everyone to become Goths -- but they retained their Arianism until Justinian retook Italy.

The article's graph undermines its own thesis: it's clearly visible that South Asia was just as divided as Europe, but in fact stalls after the first millenium, because that low territory fraction represents nearly 800 years of constant war in the region. Europe, unlike India, has a lot of natural borders, which allowed places like England, Venice, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Portugal to avoid conflict and focus on their internal development, and indeed, all of those places punch well above their weight in the historical record (although the Mediterranean islands generally do not). The only natural border in India protects Kerala, who (poetically) were the first to develop the theory of infinite series in the 16th century. The other outstanding examples of this phenomenon are Oman and, of course, Japan.

Rome wasn't conquered by an outside force, the 'barbarians' were already either working as roman soldiers or completely romanized. The fall is romanticized, but it really marks a threshold in the decay of the centralization of power.

This was discussed yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26819319

Local agricultural optimums in Northern Europe played a role too. How good was agriculture in the Parisian basin during the late Roman empire? Was it possible for farmers to get the iron implements and draft animals needed to make heavy soils productive?

Separating the Middle East/North Africa and Europe on the "dominant state" chart is an interesting choice, since the Roman Empire controlled most of both for centuries. Controlling a large portion of Europe is difficult unless you're a maritime-ish power with access to the Mediterranean.

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