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Fully agree, @peeters - as I've mentioned elsewhere in these comments, there's a long-standing trend of trying to identify the one true cause of the fall of the Roman Empire. Each explanation falls short - it's just a complicated thing (and heck, the empire didn't really fall, it just shifted east.)

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Or as some wag once put it, the empire then continued to decline and fall for another 1000 years.

Inclined to agree with this. It didn't fall, just sort of withered into other cultural ideologies and empires.

Some of it was also fucking bananas which didn't survive enlightenment.

Something a lot of people don't realise is that the last of the "Roman" states (that called themselves Roman) didn't cease until about 50 years before Columbus crossed the Atlantic (xref the fall of Constantinople).

You can also count the Holy Roman Empire that was dissolved in 1806.

No you can't, dispite the name the "Holy Roman Empire" was nether Holy or Roman.

It considered it's self the successor in the same way that russia considers itself to be the 3rd Rome.

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