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“Peak Civilization”: The Fall of the Roman Empire (2009)
- ptrincr 9y agoLast time Rome popped up as a topic on hackernews, someone mentioned "The history of Rome" podcast. It's absolutely fantastic. I mention it so that perhaps someone else can enjoy this masterpiece as much as I have.
- ukulele 9y agoThanks for the recommendation. Was it the one by Mike Duncan?
- vondur 9y agoYes, that's it.
- vondur 9y agoI should also mention the Tides of History and The Fall of Rome Podcast. Both are excellent, and narrated by a newly minted phd in the field.
- smartbit 9y agoRome popped up in the GDPR discussion some 30min after your wrote your text :-) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16606629#16609355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16606629#16609355
- ptrincr 9y agoYes, and it also mentions the gini coefficient. This popped up in the History of Rome podcast I was listening to last night. Never heard it before, need to read up on it :-)
- durgiston 9y agoAlso the followup podcast "The History of Byzantium" if you couldn't get enough of late antiquity and the middle ages!
- icebraining 9y agoAlso the book The Storm Before The Storm, written by the author of that podcast (Mike Duncan), which about the end of the Roman republic (not the empire). http://thestormbeforethestorm.com/ http://thestormbeforethestorm.com/
- colanderman 9y agoThanks for the recommendation. Also "Historia Civilis" [1] is a great YouTube channel on ancient Rome, with a particular focus on its military campaigns. [1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCv_vLHiWVBh_FR9vbeuiY-A https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCv_vLHiWVBh_FR9vbeuiY-A
- _audakel 9y agoI can definitely second that. History of Rome on Spotify is one of my favorite things to listen to
- Nomentatus 9y agoSize and complexity shouldn't be confused. Often large size necessitates simpler policies and procedures. I happen to be rereading Gibbon right now. He doesn't focus in on complexity, he contradicts it - pinpointing Constantine's crude-but-effective solution to constant rebellions and civil wars as the cause of the slow collapse: namely stationing perhaps two-thirds of Rome's military permanently in the cities with independent commands (the "palantines".) This prevented the regular barbarian-fighting armies (the "Borderers") and their commanders from rebelling successfully because they were now a relatively small military minority that would have to fight city after city - even in their own area - just to usurp power locally. But, with one hand tied behind its back, Rome's fall was inevitable from that point on. This "prepared the ruin of the Empire" in Gibbon's words. (But it was, arguably necessary, rebellion and civil war were incredibly frequent before that decision was taken.) Size (and inequality) had undermined solidarity across the empire, not complexity. Diversity isn't exactly complexity. Keeping large groups together is hard, and the traditional pagan religion had lost most of its force well before Christianity came along; soldiers were no longer too afraid of the Gods to break a solemn oath in order to join a local rebellion under their particular commander. Most people's religion, particularly in the upper classes, had become much simpler - they really didn't have any. It's possible to see this inexorable tendency toward rebellion as a result of Augustus' previous simplification long before; when drafting soldiers became too complex and unpopular, he ended conscription. This set up the situation in which soldiers became more loyal to their commanders, and themselves, than to the official emperor in Rome. Looking at other societies, from other books, local chiefs and individuals slowly learned how to undercut central authority, in particular, slowly starving the center of revenues. Deviousness and a growing culture of tax-cheating and avoidance. It ain't that hard to keep things together if you have the money.
- smallnamespace 9y agoThe complexity that is being referred to is social and administrative complexity, the huge military upkeep being a side effect of that. A simple policy can still reflect a highly complex, expensive form of social organization. It's rather hard to argue that stationing massive garrisons throughout an empire is not a massive exercise in social complexity and organization. > Diversity isn't exactly complexity. Keeping large groups together is hard, It's difficult to argue that late Imperial Rome, with its multiple levels of bureaucracies, military and civilian, a nascent Church, along with large standing garrisons wasn't far more socially and economically complex than the societies of the invading barbarians. And all that complexity went exactly towards 'keeping large groups together' without the benefit of a unified ethnicity or other identity. But note that in earlier times, Rome's technological and social complexity was able to pay for itself and then some: it was able to field and man large military organizations, and the complexity brought in a profit by conquest and war booty. In other words, size was a logical end result to earlier complexity: in order to keep the system running, Rome had to continue to grow. Unfortunately, Rome ran out of rich easily-conquered lands and its inefficient (and complex) economy could not make the economic transition (unlike the Eastern Empire, which had richer and more densely populated lands). Your example of stationing two-thirds of a massive standing army just to keep order is an example of just how inefficient the late Western Imperial economy must have been, and why it fell against barbarian groups that had much simpler, flatter social hierarchies based on ethnic kinship and trust.
- rock57 9y agoGreat quote made back in 2009 "I can see the politicians of the time running on a platform that said, "Keep the barbarians out! More walls to defend the empire"." Also "As things stands, we seem to be blithely following the same path that the Roman Empire followed. Our leaders are unable to understand complex systems and continue to implement solutions that worsen the problem. As the wise druid was trying to tell to Marcus Aurelius, building walls to keep the barbarians out was a loss of resources that was worse than useless. "
- meri_dian 9y agoWell, the reality is that letting the barbarians in actually did in significant part lead to Rome's downfall. They rampaged through the countryside and sacked Rome multiple times. Rome was in a state of near perpetual warfare with the Germans for centuries. Eventually Rome became too weak to defend its northeastern borders and the Germans hollowed out what had become a rotten western empire.
- solidsnack9000 9y agoThe degree to which the Romans relied on barbarians in later years for their own defense was quite significant -- and they rarely afforded barbarians full citizenship.
- mjfl 9y agoI don't know why you're being downvoted - the analogy to modern politics they are trying to push is hilariously bad. Are we really blaming the Romans for not supplicating the Goths and then getting massacred by them, leading to a 1000 year technological stagnation? Are we really trying to project Donald Trump onto Marcus Aurelius? You've got to be kidding me.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- icebraining 9y agoAre we really trying to project Donald Trump onto Marcus Aurelius? This is a post from 2009. Any analogies to Trump are being done by you.
- CurtMonash 9y agoSince the article starts by citing the battle of the Teutoberger Forest (in the photo caption), I'll say this: If you can read or understand German, and you don't know the 19th Century satirical song "Als die Roemer Frech Geworden", you're in for a treat. Every recorded version seems to have a different choice of stanzas, but a comment to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-z2Nmu4okI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-z2Nmu4okI seems pretty comprehensive.
- maxerickson 9y agoI wonder if in the long view we still live in the Roman empire.
- wizardforhire 9y agoMore like a fan-fiction reboot.
- barrkel 9y agoThe Roman empire lasted over a thousand years - but only in the east, in Constantinople. The command structure of the empire lives on today in the Catholic church, but of course it's not a continuation.
- peterburkimsher 9y agoWhen the Ottomans sacked Constantinople, didn't the intellectuals just move back to Rome and start the Renaissance? Intellectually I'd say that history is pretty continuous. The greatest loss was not the "fall" of Rome, but the destruction of Mayan history during the Spanish conquest (they had developed writing separately - along with the Chinese, Phoenicians, and Arabs).
- jcranmer 9y agoLess the Ottomans sacking it than the Fourth Crusade doing that job. Constantinople was a pretty sad city in the 1440s; the Ottomans actually revived the city back into a major metropolis.
- mkempe 9y agoThe USA is an Enlightenment creation, designed to learn from and avoid the failures of previous government systems; as such they owe more to the spirit of Ancient Athens than to that of Ancient Rome.
- baddox 9y agoFrom what I have read, the thinkers of the American and French revolutions seemed to be influenced by Rome rather than Athens.
- walterbell 9y agoR.A. Lafferty brought this event to life in his fiction. https://www.fantasticfiction.com/l/r-a-lafferty/fall-of-rome.htm https://www.fantasticfiction.com/l/r-a-lafferty/fall-of-rome... ”Rome's demise was not a simple case of fierce barbarians sacking and subduing a decadent, crumbling city. The author has skillfully balanced the turmoil and illusions of a mighty, dying Empire against the vitality of the aggressive Huns, Vandals, and above all, the Goths. The result is one of the most perceptive and stimulating historical accounts ever written. This is history told and read for sheer pleasure: exciting, splendid and complex. The Fall of Rome is a story of the men and women who made things happen, who were as awesome, poignant, and in some cases, as savage as the era itself.”
- mynameishere 9y agoThe fall of Rome is complicated because people like to match it up with their pet theory as to why our current empire will collapse real soon now. But the Romans just ran out of things to steal. Taking foreign lands meant not just immediate booty but ongoing tribute and advantageous trade and promises of farmland for soldiers. That strategy could only go so far. Then when they lost their great early prize, Carthage, which supplied grain to Rome itself, the empire was finished. Local gangsters took over from the distant gangsters and so they had feudalism.
- icebraining 9y agoThe eastern Roman empire kept going for centuries despite losing Egypt and generally getting their ass kicked by the caliphates, though.
- creep 9y agoCan someone help me translate the quoted Latin? I'm a beginner. >“In primis sciendum est quod imperium romanum circumlatrantium ubique nationum perstringat insania et omne latus limitum tecta naturalibus locis appetat dolosa barbaries." I think generally if you look at the above sentence and know some Latin vocabulary you can see what is going on, but I'm having a hard time sorting out the structure given the subjunctives, passives, and participles.
- mkempe 9y ago"The Barbarians are at the gate." Source: I took Latin for 8 years; had to read-and-translate live for three years from Virgil every other week at 8am in front of the class. Latin is usually more concise than English, except when it's medieval or kitchen Latin.
- creep 9y agoThere are only two verbs in this sentence that I can see: "appetat" which means "he/she/it attacks/grasps/strives for/approaches, and "perstringat" which is a subjunctive and means "he/she/it may graze/seize/reprove". I think perstringat refers to sciendum, but I am not what appetat refers to. There is no verb that implies a plural third person, nor is there a word for "gate" here. What I'm having trouble with is the second part. So the first part is something like, "in the beginning, the knowing may draw together what is the roman authority of the barking around, wherein the nation..." But still I'm not sure. Then in the second part we have what could be multiple nominatives and only one verb.
- mkempe 9y agoFirst it must be known that the empire is surrounded etc. etc. and each edge (of the empire) covered with natural features appeals to cunning barbarism. I.e. they're at the gate.
- mkempe 9y agoThere are more verbs in various forms. E.g. "sciendum est ..." means it should be known that ... "tecta" is from "tegere".
- mltony 9y agoThis article focuses too much on economics. Surely these economic effects have happened and greatly contributed to Rome's demise. But were they a root cause or just a consequence of something else? I think that politics played some role in Rome's demise and that should've at least been mentioned to give a complete picture. Some political systems are quite effective, some are not as much. Monarchys are typically less effective since the power transition is not merid-based. Roman empire wasn't quite a monarchy in the medieval sense, but judging by the amount of crises per century, it was pretty close. Wasn't that a factor to be taken into account? Wasn't that the bad emperors who screwed up Roman economy to the extent that even Marcus Aurelius couldn't fix it? Early Roman republic was on the other hand an outlier in terms of its efficiency. Obviously that was military efficiency, but wasn't it tightly connected with political efficiency? It seems to me that early Roman republic managed to build a system that promoted people based on their merit and that somehow made the entire system an order of magnitude more efficient then their neighbours. It seems to me that just the fact that we are looking at ancient Roman history is an example of availability bias. Hundreds or thousands of other city-states of that era weren't as militarily or politically effective and therefore lost to Rome and ceased to exist. This is another indicator of high efficiency of early Roman politics, and it kind of implies that as time went by the efficiency slowly or rapidly decreased. Of course it's hard to argue about how effective is one political system compared to another. It's hard to even define precisely what is efficiency in this case. But I think we shouldn't only focus on economics just because it's easier to talk about. I am waiting for someone smarter than me to write a book about political reasons of why do societies collapse. Or is there such a book already out there?
- avn2109 9y agoFate of empires by John baggot glubb is the canonical treatment of this topic. It’s also really short and pithy and you can read it in an hour.
- lambdasquirrel 9y agoOnly tangentially related, but I can’t possibly be the only one who read this and thought about a particular codebase... > The answer to these crisis and challenges is to build up structures - say, bureaucratic or military - in response. Each time a crisis is faced and solved, society finds itself with an extra layer of complexity. Now, Tainter says, as complexity increases, the benefit of this extra complexity starts going down - he calls it "the marginal benefit of complexity". That is because complexity has a cost - it costs energy to maintain complex systems.
- eloff 9y agoWow, that's an uncanny parallel to complexity in software development.
- autokad 9y agoI get that way about my models in machine learning. after a while I am like ok, let me tear everything down and make a fresh start with some really simple models
- Piskvorrr 9y agoIndeed - because by then you have a different mental model from what you've baked into the models at the beginning.
- OrganicMSG 9y agoOne way to reduce this is to try and enforce that structure is to be dependent on whatever is currently being done, so that any bureaucracies that are created are explicitly shut down at the end of a given task, with a meta-bureaucracy that just has the job of spinning off structures and winding them up, like job management in an OS.
- wallace_f 9y agoPerhaps this is a good reason for a stronger social safety net. In other words, while on the one hand it is important to eliminate jobs that produce zero or negative value, or even ones that offer value lower than their total economic costs (which includes opportunity costs--ie children who learn more effectively by another teacher, or on their own), on the other hand it is very difficult to tell people they should be losing their job. One way to fix that is perhaps to entitle everyone to basic needs.
- ornel 9y agoJames C. Scott (in "Against the Grain: a deep history of the earliest states [2017]) has a bit of perspective on "collapse": "Why deplore “collapse,” when the situation it depicts is most often the disaggregation of a complex, fragile, and typically oppressive state into smaller, decentralized fragments? One simple and not entirely superficial reason why collapse is deplored is that it deprives all those scholars and professionals whose mission it has been to document ancient civilizations of the raw materials they require. There are fewer important digs for archaeologists, fewer records and texts for historians, and fewer trinkets—large and small—to fill museum exhibits... Yet there is a strong case to be made that such “vacant” periods represented a bolt for freedom by many state subjects and an improvement in human welfare. What I wish to challenge here is a rarely examined prejudice that sees population aggregation at the apex of state centers as triumphs of civilization on the one hand, and decentralization into smaller political units on the other, as a breakdown or failure of political order. We should, I believe, aim to “normalize” collapse and see it rather as often inaugurating a periodic and possibly even salutary reformulation of political order."
- astebbin 9y ago>an improvement in human welfare Was this generally the outcome of the Roman Empire's collapse? Intuitively, I would expect breakdowns in law and order and the collapse of complex supply chain systems (particularly food delivery) to result in mass human suffering, at least in the short term.
- adrianN 9y agoNot to mention infrastructure like public baths and sewers.
- nostrademons 9y agoFor whom, and according to what value system? The histories I've read of the early middle ages corroborate much of your intuition. Trade collapsed; many luxury goods became impossible to obtain at any price; illiteracy rose; population declined and many citizens died from famine and plague. But there's often a trade-off between freedom and convenience, then and now. The Roman empire was built upon large-scale slavery and wealth inequality. If you were a member of the elite, then yes, the collapse was terrible; you lost access to all the privileges of the empire. If you were a slave, you probably ended up somewhat better off, becoming either a peasant or a bandit. Not being able to obtain pottery or steel doesn't matter much if you couldn't afford it to begin with, and dying at 40 from starvation is an improvement on dying at 25 in the arena.
- jcranmer 9y agoThe Classical Roman Empire had a surprisingly ineffective and inefficient administrative system, even at its height. It was strongly centralized, and the Empire, even by the second century, was simply too large to manage by one person. After the Crisis of the Third Century, Diocletian essentially solved the issue by installing multiple co-emperors to divvy up the work, although this did have massive issues (turns out that having two theoretically co-equal rulers in an absolute monarchy doesn't bode well for stability). What essentially happened from the third century through the seventh century is that the internal instability caused more and more power to be (intentionally or not) devolved to more local elites. After Christianity became the state religion, the administrative backbone of Roman Europe became the Church and not the Empire itself, which also helped to hasten the devolution. At some point, the local rulers and population would realize that they're not getting anything from Rome and they owe nothing to Rome, so why call themselves Roman? The Western Roman Empire effectively dissolved itself into nothingness, and its passing went more or less unnoticed by contemporaneous observers. Portraying this gradual process as a concrete "fall" is somewhat problematic. There is a striking continuity on many levels. Even the polities end up being fairly stable: the Frankish kingdom eventually ended up inheriting the Western Roman Empire de facto and arguably de jure following the crowning of Charlemagne as Holy Roman Empire, while the Eastern Roman Empire became the Byzantine Empire. In both cases, the administrative systems had been transformed dramatically from the traditional Roman model. That's not to say that there wasn't a severe shock, but the biggest shock would have been the loss of North Africa (the key granary supplying Rome) that created a vicious cycle of economic decline. The actual date commonly given for the fall (476) was more or less contemporaneously ignored by everybody as yet another change in the local ruler.
- Naritai 9y agoWhile my only source is the Fall of Rome podcast that others on this thread are raving about, one key point he makes is that whether or not it was a 'Fall' depends a lot on where you lived. Yes, there was lots of continuity in Aquitane and Gaul, but if you lived in much of Northern Africa, (what is now) northern France, or Britain, you saw a significant decline in your standard of living. Britain even stopped using currency altogether.
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- qwerty456127 9y agoI am not even sure it has actually fallen. It seems a lot we are still living in what it has morphed into.
- drpgq 9y agoI miss the oil drum. It had good content and good commenters. Too bad they couldn't survive the rise of oil from shale.
- soufron 9y agoHas it fallen ? Il thought its capital had moved to Washington...