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When Rome Fell, the Chief Culprits Were Climate and Disease. Sound Familiar?

• gaius 9y ago
  This is obviously wrong. No sane person would argue that climate change in Roman times was man-made, therefore there was no possible action Rome could have taken to mitigate it.
  • thomasfoster96 9y ago
    Isn’t the bigger point that the modern world is in a situation to mitigate climate change, but isn’t really trying enough, thus risking the same fate as the Roman Empire?
  • jstanley 9y ago
    That doesn't follow. Just because the cause wasn't man-made doesn't mean a man-made mitigation can't work. For example, rain is not caused by human activity, and yet man-made roofs still work.
    • NotSammyHagar 9y ago
      Plus capturing more water, diverting water, those are things that can address lack of rain. Grow crops that use less rain per produced food. There are endless things man can to do counter natural events. For us, besides all those things, don't build in flood plains, don't build in the forest that has frequent fires (probably most of them). or build houses that won't be destroyed by fires. http://abcnews.go.com/US/mans-concrete-home-survives-raging-wildfire-washington/story?id=33286398 http://abcnews.go.com/US/mans-concrete-home-survives-raging-...
• alvar0 9y ago
  Sounds ridiculous actually. We are Rome indeed but the similarities are not exactly climate and disease...
  • titanix2 9y ago
    Yes the article is written like if environmental changes were the only factor. It may very well have undermined the inner streng of the empire (as a child I learn about the lead pipes that would have been a major issue because of saturnism) but it still needed external interventions to collapse. The article even mention the Byzantine Empire which have a very clear date and cause of falling that is definitely not climate related.
• yters 9y ago
  Rome fell because they killed all their kids due to their party lifestyle, and had to use slave labor to support themselves.
• mci 9y ago
  The chief culprit was permitting tens of thousands of barbarians to enter the empire. They never integrated or left. Within a hundred years, the western part of the empire collapsed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_War_(376–382) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_War_(376–382)
  • TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago
    Rome didn't allow them to integrate.
    • Amezarak 9y ago
      In fact, one of the Roman demands permitting their emigration was that they surrender the children of the wealthy and powerful to be raised as Romans; this hostage-taking as typical of the times and an effective means of assimilation and integration, as the children generally returned home with Roman ideas in their head. The immediate cause of the first Gothic revolt was that the Romans simply could not logistically supply the massive number of Goths, the Goths bribed their way out of surrendering their arms as they were required to do, and when the (hungry) Goths encountered a town market they were not allowed to go to (so as to not drive up food prices for local citizens to exorbitant prices), they decided to take what they wanted by force, killing anyone in the way. Then when the Romans attempted to punish them, they decided all agreements were off.
  • boomboomsubban 9y ago
    They had let tens of thousands of outsiders in before without issue. The difference here was the Goths beat the Romans on the field, forcing Rome to accept a bad deal. This was a result of a long period of famine and pestilence creating budget problems, leaving provinces to go into revolt, and the army stretched too thin to deal with everything.
    • Amezarak 9y ago
      The Gothic emigration much more resembled the emigration of the Cimbri or the Teutons than it did the resettlement of a few ten thousand peoples around the empire. The Goths were relatively barbarian, fundamentally hostile to the empire except in the dire emergency precipitated by the Huns, and further, the original Gothic revolt predated the problems you're talking about and the defeat of the Romans in the field. It was also almost certainly much more than a few ten thousands, despite the usual tactic of modern historians who downplay numbers in general with handwavy arguments about how that's just not possible, etc. and discount the accounts of contemporary sources without any hard evidence contradicting them. > It was thought expedient that an accurate account should be taken of their numbers; but the persons who were employed soon desisted, with amazement and dismay, from the prosecution of the endless and impracticable task;(67) and the principal historian of the age most seriously affirms that the prodigious armies of Darius and Xerxes, which had so long been considered as the fables of vain and credulous antiquity, were now justified, in the eyes of mankind, by the evidence of fact and experience. A probable testimony has fixed the number of the Gothic warriors at two hundred thousand men; and if we can venture to add the just proportion of women, of children, and of slaves, the whole mass of people which composed this formidable emigration must have amounted to near a million of persons, of both sexes and of all ages. http://www.ccel.org/g/gibbon/decline/volume1/chap26.htm#goth http://www.ccel.org/g/gibbon/decline/volume1/chap26.htm#goth If they had numbered only a few ten thousand, the Roman logistics system would not have struggled so much to keep them fed, nor would it have been a major problem to account for them all.
• anvandare 9y ago
  Another collapse by changing environment is (likely) that of the Maya civilization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_Maya_collapse#Drought_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_Maya_collapse#Drought_... A civilizational collapse is rarely caused by a single event, but instead by multiple events - each which would be survivable on their own - causing a complete breakdown in the system. A society can survive a drought, a war, a plague, a famine, but all four at once might just be too much. It's not for want of a nail that a kingdom is lost, but because of all accumulated failures and breakdowns which led to the point where loss of a single nail was just that one failure too much. Death by drowning in a million raindrops.
• nkkollaw 9y ago
  This is ridiculous.
• scythe 9y ago
  "From the eighteenth century onward, we have been obsessed with the fall: it has been valued as an archetype for every perceived decline, and, hence, as a symbol for our own fears." ~ Glen Bowersock The most important reason for the fall of Rome is frankly obvious, so obvious it's never mentioned: the severe political divisions within the Empire which caused it to fracture. The bulk of the intellectual and economic power in Rome shifted to the Eastern Empire, which lasted in its original form until the eighth century, and in some form until the fifteenth. The seeds of the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century were sown when Theodosius divided the Empire among his sons in 395, and there is hardly any comparable event today. There were various other reasons, of course; disease certainly didn't help, neither did the appearance of the Sassanids, the increasing irrelevance of the Senate, or famines in Gaul. But everyone on the right and the left wants Rome to have fallen because of its mishandling of their favorite political issue, be it inflation, military conscription, climate change, taxation, or as one amusingly inaccurate meme charges, religious intolerance. These accusations are all silly. The Roman Empire saw multiple civil wars between the reign of Constantine and the conquest by Odoacer. No developed country today faces such an issue. As soon as it was no longer able to draw support from the East, the Western Roman Empire began eighty years of monotonic decline. If there is any moral to the story, it's that monarchy is unsustainable -- but we all knew that, anyway.
  • boomboomsubban 9y ago
    >The Roman Empire saw multiple civil wars between the reign of Constantine and the conquest by Odoacer. We may not see that today, but that was fairly common for Rome. Marius and Sulla's civil wars, Caesar's civil wars, and Octavian's civil wars all took place in a century. And chalking it all up to "monarchy is unstable" ignores the collapse of the Republic and the 4-15 centuries that the monarchy did pretty well.
    • scythe 9y ago
      I didn't mean that the civil wars were the primary cause of decline (although they helped) but that they serve to distinguish the Roman Empire from modern countries and weaken the possibility of comparison. My point is really that the Western Roman Empire never had a chance -- Rome started in southern Italy and expanded because its early enemies didn't recognize it as a threat, but they couldn't get away with that again, of course. As to whether the monarchic system was the reason Rome couldn't keep the whole Empire under one roof -- well, the Byzantines lasted, but they did so while controlling much less territory (Justinian's conquests were quickly lost), so while my argument is weak, I admit, your counterexample is also. The monarchy was successful from Octavian until Commodus; after that, it is hard to name two good rulers who succeeded each other, and impossible to name three. I think it is not by accident that during this early period the Senate was still politically relevant and vaguely democratic. But I am also just strongly tempted to blame regional divisions on poor governance, although there were probably other factors, and I am hardly a scholar.
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• jhanschoo 9y ago
  Unfortunately, science journalism tends to fail to capture the role that books like this play in academic history. I doubt that the author says that climate was a leading factor in Rome's fall, but I'm sure he makes a strong argument that we should not neglect its role. It's important in the sense that it investigates a typically neglected dimension, but I think historians will be hesitant to rank factors that led to the fall. Sufficiently self-aware historians are aware that the etiology of past events is a tricky business, and the best one can do is discuss a sequence of events with great detail that may or may not be linked by causation.
  • barkynoggins 9y ago
    If you know historians, you'll know they actually squabble like children over stuff like this. Of course, No True Historian would ignore the role of climate in causing radiating invasion waves. Even if it was a cold day making Attila mad, it's still an equal factor. God our universities have rotted.
• quantumleap22 9y ago
  Rome devolved into a multicultural empire where the elites imported foreign tribes to provide cheap labor, usury was rampant and the native stock stopped having children. Sound familiar?
  • alvar0 9y ago
    And currency debasement: https://www.goldbroker.com/media/image/cms/media/images/silver-commodity-money/roman-currency-debasement-silver-content%E2%80%93denarius.png https://www.goldbroker.com/media/image/cms/media/images/silv... Too familiar
• JoeAltmaier 9y ago
  The chief reason for many civilizations to fall. Mayan (repeatedly), Aztec, those in the Arabian desert, Ur, Babylon and on and on.
• whb07 9y ago
  Couple things I hold to be true: 1. Everyone thinks they know why Rome fell 2. It never involves the state of the monetary policy in place Quick bit of evidence, the Roman government pursued fast and loose debasement of their currency to prop up their heavy spending and terrible policies. Meaning, they were “printing too many coins” by diluting the amount of precious metal in each coin. Emperors got loose printing money to support a heavy military spending to gain power and support from them. As seen in modern countries once hyper inflation hits, its game over.
  • yequalsx 9y ago
    Is it possible that 2 is a consequence of other factors? Like climate change or some other combinations of forces? Was the economy unable to support the number of forces due to climate change and as a result debasement of currency was seen as the best way forward? Hyperinflation wasn’t game over for Germany. It had a brief empire shortly after it’s hyperinflation period.
    • whb07 9y ago
      Yes, but they are tied! I can't remember which emperor said something along the lines of "as long as i have the army behind me", but the scales had been tipping beyond the balance between gov / private citizens. I think its hard to find out which came first, but the moment the government started minting 99% gold coin (and they got away with it) -> 95% gold -> 90% gold till its a worthless "gold" coin too many bad things got put in motion. I do agree its a confluence of factors. Maybe they expanded too much -> need more money -> print money -> cant exactly fire all the expeditionary forces -> print more money -> squeeze taxes out of populace -> people are getting fed up so output and tax revenues go down -> empire is too big -> attacks on Germany and Europe from the barbarians -> print more money to pay military -> squeeze people - > ad nauseum. There's an established economic principle that "bad money drives out good". So while I do not think that just printing money is the only cause, once it occurs its down hill. You have to somehow figure out how you will try and reign it all in (thats what they tell themselves at least). As to the Germany example, the hyper inflation can be fixed though who can really tell how traumatizing and painful it can be to those going through it. For sure it caused some discord and animosity and some people attribute it to the rise of Hitler and so forth. My point generally is that historians should look at the entirety of factors and weigh them together. It is all too easy to point a quick finger at the military expansion, or climate or whatever and not combine them all. Very few places look at monetary theory probably because its relatively new (really with Friedman's work in middle 20th century), but also because it muddles the simplistic reason. edit: clarity
• m0llusk 9y ago
  Rome was built on conquest and ran out of adjacent countries to plunder. Serious problems handling environmental and political challenges didn't come up until after economic stagnation had set in.
• woodandsteel 9y ago
  I like to think of the fall of empires on two levels. On the level of specifics, I would suppose there are in each case generally a number of different causes, interacting in various ways. On a more general level, empires as such are an unnaturally large and complex form of social organization, and for that reason they inevitably collapse at some point or another.