Yes, but most of those were made by slave labor. The drop off in state capacity also made it impossible for the state to afford large armies for war, which furt

Yes, but most of those were made by slave labor. The drop off in state capacity also made it impossible for the state to afford large armies for war, which further improved the quality of life for the average citizen. The focus on the decline of public works and art is fundamentally an elite view, since they were never coerced to labor for them or die in the fields protecting the empire. For the common man the empire was much worse, but the common man doesn’t write the history books.