What does the “Fall of Rome” actually mean? It’s not like everyone died or disappeared. They just stopped being ruled by a particular government.
[0] https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-f...
But even beyond that, the “fall” of Rome (the city) meant that its one million former inhabitants now largely became rural subsistence farmers rather than artisans/craftsmen/smiths/teachers in a city with theatres, race tracks, running fresh water, spas and food trucks. If the US underwent the same sort of change, you might call it “fallen” too…
Rome was just a few sparks away from triggering an industrial revolution a thousand years early.
That’s a pretty amazing idea.
Lucio Russo thinks rather it would have been the Greeks, but makes clear that neither of them approached things with the modern scientific method.
Most of that happened far later and guess what, to a significant extent it also happened in the East where the empire continued to exist.
The Justinian plague had for more to do with the things you mentioned then anything about if you lived in the empire or outside.
> Rome was just a few sparks away from triggering an industrial revolution a thousand years early.
That's a waste extenuation.
Except it's exactly like that. Huge numbers of people died; population cratered.
So the political fall of the West as the primary factor in de-urbanization is not really a good argument.
This would be a stronger argument if the Eastern and Western Empires had been economically segregated from each other.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_the_Western_Roman_Empi...
> the fall of Rome was the loss of central political control in the Western Roman Empire, a process in which the Empire failed to enforce its rule, and its vast territory was divided into several successor polities.
So it’s exactly what I said it was.