The Fate of Rome
press.princeton.edu
press.princeton.edu
He brought up that people that lived in railroad towns in the US in the 19th century were shorter than they were elsewhere, resulting from more stressors related to living in a population-dense area with higher rates of disease transmission. And the same applied to urban parts of the Roman Republic/Empire.
But, here [2], another group make the case for pollution being the cause of stunted growth in the UK, which reminds me of this article in The Atlantic pointing out that pollution in parts of the Roman Empire of ~150 AD was only surpassed >1500 years later in the industrial revolution [3].
So maybe the higher density-shorter (and generally less healthy) population relationship is a combination of factors.
[1] https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/217-plague-and-the-dec...
[2] https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/bitstream/1885/24...
[3] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/05/scientis...
But I've read that educated Romans associated milk drinking with barbarians, so there'd be a social component to avoiding milk, too, even when it was available. Though I suppose those educated (and probably wealthy) Romans would have plenty of other sources of protein.
And the worst part of all is that even if we had complete and absolutely perfect information on the decades leading to the end, you probably still couldn't find "the cause." Empires fail long before they collapse - inertia. One can easily argue that the Soviet Union failed decades before 1989. But for anything so monumental, inertia was enough to keep the corpse of a system moving forward for decades to come. And in the time of Rome, when the speed of dictate was that of carriage, sail, (and on rare occasion - pigeon) - this effect would have been magnitudes greater, which is difficult to even begin to appreciate the implications of.
Perhaps the most interesting, and telling, thing of all is how empires towards their end tend to share not just one of the "symptoms", but many.
Probably better to invest in land in places with a (relatively) stable climate, good fresh water supply, and far enough north and high enough in elevation to be protected from the most obvious effects of climate change.
I'm in a very blue state, but the rural population (30% maybe) is a different world of wealth, education, politics, population density. We subsidize their economy by building infrastructure there they can't afford (like roads and bridges). This causes endless arguing at the state level. I think a lot of the states are like this with varying % in the two groups.
Yeah, everything that could go wrong did go wrong. We can't run a natural experiment where everything but that one thing goes wrong, and see if Rome survives. Kind of like a very old organism whose health just goes off the cliff.
Inertia isn't the problem, failure to take responsibility is. Although it does seem like inertia, a cornucopia of policies that can't be coped with, such as wastage that everyone turns a blind eye to, gradually increasing deficits of supply versus demand (for the Soviets it was grain (somehow Russia is now a grain exporter), for the Americans it is potholes).
Numbers are worthless, most Romans were illiterate, and they didn't have Arabic numbers. Bafflingly illiterate workers and automated machines are economically equivalent, otherwise there wouldn't be such a difference between high school dropouts and graduates in work productivity.
"The cause"? A failure to tolerate ambition, even when society converts into a fishbowl where everyone is neighbors. Unless ego is abolished and the most horrifying of social engineering programs could be enacted, the problems of late empire are simple: men like Robert Moses, condemned by equally corrupt later generations, are no longer permitted to ensure things run smoothly.
This sounds like a dramatic underestimate in the case of heavy infantry (a legion).
Elite infantry units similar to Scipio Africanus' legions went from Tarraco to Carthago at 26 miles per day forced march which is a pretty high rate of speed [1]
Using the excellent Orbis site from Stanford [2], it is possible to calculate this at accurate detail @ ~179 days marching 30KM a day, from Tarraco to Alexandria, which is across the empire.
Comparing that against an armored division, it would depend on which armored division since some are more road capable and limited mainly by fuel supplies. An M1A2 can go on roads at 45MPH and has a range of 265 miles.
[1] https://www.academia.edu/4825296/Observations_on_marching_Ro...
Reading https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monograph_reports..., page number 29 (page 53 of the PDF), it seems many would break down if driven only 375 km. That’s less than the range you claim they have.
That’s one reasons why tanks, when not in action, get transported on trailers.
The text even says “significant numbers of failures were recorded during months with zero usage”, indicating that keeping a M1 parked isn’t easy, either.
> That’s one reasons why tanks, when not in action, get transported on trailers.
While that may be a minor reason, the actual big reasons are the most current M1A2 SEP tanks at ~147,200 pounds destroy roads, convoy operations are a giant pain, tanks are an immense hazard to trucks and cars, and the fuel consumption is off the charts, making this not economical.
> The text even says “significant numbers of failures were recorded during months with zero usage”, indicating that keeping a M1 parked isn’t easy, either.
Zero usage doen't mean that preventitive maintenance checks & services cease. Given that even idling a 1500hp turbine for maintenance is a major undertaking that is a good amount of start/stop and usage of the entire system, even if getting no road time.
The existence of a warlord tendency isn't totally abolished with capitalism, it is only mitigated by pressures to conform which is problematic for modern society versus Victorian or 50s society because various brands or artists wish precisely to stand out.
There is no way for anything to ultimately be a benefit to society without any understanding that one is part of a greater whole, which will be an interesting argument to present to anyone involved in designing curriculums.
Nations and empires can go through crisis after crisis, and Ancient Rome did so for practically 300 years, since the end of the rule of Marcus Aurelius, and the corresponding end of the Pax Romana. Crisis after crisis and civil war after civil war wore away at the empire. Each time, regional governors accrued more power, the central command structure got weaker and weaker, and finally provinces started to break away from the empire.
This is why the fall of Rome is at different times for different people: there wasn't really a clear end of the empire and a move toward fiefdoms and regional governance. The title "emperor of Rome" continued long past the end of the Roman Empire, well into the 2nd millennium AD.
EDIT: I believe that what we are looking at in the USA now is closer to Rome in 180 AD than it is to 470 AD. The Pax Americana and the era of globalization that it enabled (globalization is not a modern phenomenon - Ancient Rome under the Pax Romana had a form of globalization, as did the English empire with the Pax Britannica) is clearly coming to an end. There is still a long way to fall before everything unravels - and a lot more pain, tyranny, and bloodshed.
It is unclear to me that the big boogeymen of US foreign policy - China and Russia - are poised to take over from the US. Russia clearly does not have the economy to support this. The CCP is likely hoping that the US tears itself apart without a foreign war, since China would likely suffer heavy losses in one.
Michael Parenti does a good job of painting the crises of the first century BC (with some mentions of the Gracchi) as a class struggle in his People’s History of Ancient Rome.
This is an excellent example of wishful thinking. American influence is clearly shrinking. Just one example: when Biden went on a tour to oil-producing countries to ask them to increase oil production, every single country either ignored him or agreed to make homeopatic scale increase (which was presented as a huge win by US media).
Are you?
Americans like to repeat that and certainly believe it but is it still as true as it was?
It’s probably still true military but in term of influence the USA is less relevant by the day. You weren’t very successful at convincing developing countries to sanction Russia for exemple.
The US is one of the largest producers of oil, a large exporter of food, and a large exporter of tech.
None of those sticks were used against developing countries to get them to sanction Russia because currently there's no need
Arguably US was even weaker in that regard during the cold war. E.g. the response to the invasion of Czechoslovakia was much weaker in every regard. Granted there weren't many soviet billionaires to sanction but sending weapons there would have been inconceivable (especially on this scale)
The Ottoman sultan was calling himself Kayser-i Rum in the 20th century!
It's entirely possible our technology progress has surpassed the government Great Filter and it is now almost impossible for empires to crumble from within e.g. CCP has experienced many "empire-ending" problems but still somehow survived to this day.
Winning a war isn't about force: it's about morale and mindset. If you can't stop people from fighting against you, you can't win a war. A drone has never walked into a community and gotten people to put down their guns.
Drones are weapons. They're one of the many tools of war. But war has always been about culture, food, politics, religion, demographics, and many other factors.
People win and lose wars. Weapons help.
Drones on the other hand are cheap and require fairly few people to operate. A few deaths squads in the control might be enough to suppress an entire country.
It's a little like surrounding an army on an open field: If you give the losing side in a pitched battle an escape route, many of them will run, but if you surround them, they will fight to the death because there's nothing else they can do.
While it’s not exactly that straightforward but democratic reforms is what basically killed it. Gorbachev allowed independent power centers to form which weren’t controlled by the party apparatus and these new centers had no reason to preserve the union/empire even though relatively few people (outside of the Baltic region and the Caucasus) actually wanted to abolish it. Internationalist empires like the USSR, Austria-Hungary, Ottomans, Tsarist Russia (outside of the core regions), Yugoslavia and even Rome to some degree tend to be very fragile. Any rapid attempt to reform the system tends to destabilize it to such a degree that it can no longer survive without extreme violence.
China and the US (still) are nation states and not real empires, therefore they are almost immune to some of the issues which brought down most historical empires (nation states are much better in enacting reforms and generally much more flexible). Of course that’s not permanent and might change in a generation or two, for instance if different US states continue drifting apart economically, culturally and socially.
Tell the Tibetans and the Uighurs that the PRC is a “nation state” not a “real empire”
Well, there were some who wanted to continue it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Roman_Empire - of course, after a 300+ year gap, it's more a revival (or reusing a powerful trademark to boost your importance) than a continuation...
Maybe, but following the argument in the parent comment about the speed of transfer of information and physical goods, the timeline now may progress significantly quicker.
I suspect that the root cause now will be a technological failure, or more accurately, the inability of even a large group of citizens to maintain or re-build the globe-spanning technological structures on which our lives depend. It's an effect I've called the "Anti-Singularity" - at some point, some key component of this technological structure will fail for whatever reason, and cause a cascading and quite rapid failure of the rest of the system. At this point, progress and knowledge growth will very rapidly halt.
It's getting ever-easier to observe this!
These internet fiefdoms will be owned most likely by giant monopolistic corporations, much like the old AOL network before it connected to the broader world wide web. Content ownership laws will go even further towards squashing the creativity and organic growth of our culture as these corps gain even greater control than they currently have.
The actual world-wide internet will become a niche relegated to the people willing to hack their way out of the walled gardens and a necessity for tech workers who live outside of the areas serviced by the limited networks.
Dang, now I really want to write a cyberpunk story.
My impression is that it was less common to outright deny reality and more common to blame at least the disasters and pandemics on those one found troublesome supposedly offending the gods.
The root-cause then must have been lack of democracy. Rome once had a democracy sort of right? But when the authoritarian emperors took over, you could say sayonara to "civil society".
Bad leadership is caused by people's inability to hold leaders accountable. In other words by lack of democracy.
Rome had Emperors for either 400 or 1500 years, depending on what you call Rome, while the Roman Republic lasted about 400 years at most, with a tiny percentage of the population having voting rights for most of it.
So blaming a lack of democracy is a huge stretch.
Not really.
The Roman Republic had legislative assemblies and elected magistrates, but the deck was firmly stacked in favor of the aristocracy. Votes in the Centuriate assembly, which elected all senior magistrates, were heavily weighted by wealth. Originally the highest two classes, comprising those with at least 10,000 denarii in assets, controlled an outright majority of the votes. (1 denarius is on the order of 1 day's income for an unskilled laborer).
The weighting was somewhat reduced in the mid 3rd century, but Sulla's reforms around 80 BC reverted the change, and additionally stripped the more democratic plebeian and tribal assemblies of most of their powers.
The senate (ostensibly an advisory body, but by the middle republic actually a legislature) was never elected. During the early republic, senators were appointed by the consuls. Later, they were appointed either by the censors, or automatically upon election to a senior magistracy. In either case, appointment to the senate was for life.
I don’t think you can point at one proximate cause over any others without asking why Rome was vulnerable to that thing particularly.
I will suggest that intentionally strengthening local communities and limiting travel and such is a potential antidote to presumably repeating this scenario.
Edit: I'm not sure I mean "denying people the right to travel." Maybe I mean something more like "Bring back blimps and other slow travel so germs don't race around the globe in 24 hours."
It's just as feasible to message an airplane, so again I don't see how limiting the speed of travel is what needs to be done.
What needs to be done is to use the speed of information to enable people to take appropriate action. Unfortunately, our society's institutions massively screwed this up. They were telling us in February 2020 that COVID wasn't a big deal, no need to worry, go about your business as usual--at exactly the time when, as we now know in hindsight, we should have been doing things like shutting down international travel and quarantining people who were entering countries until the incubation period had passed. Fortunately for my wife and me, we didn't buy the story we were being told and started taking our own personal precautions months before any so-called experts were recommending it.
With fully closed borders, Australia and NZ managed to have no increase in overall mortality. South Korea didn't even close borders, just imposed entry quarantines with strong test and trace, and was able to obtain a much lower net mortality than North America and Europe also.