6 ms·

You know, a lot of people like to correlate things with the fall of the roman empire but when it comes to causality theu theorize. Ok, maybe this was true about

by _8j50 5y ago

You know, a lot of people like to correlate things with the fall of the roman empire but when it comes to causality theu theorize. Ok, maybe this was true about the romans, so what? It's the symptom, not the disease, and as symptoms go they can indicate any number of diseases. I can agree that income inequality, racism and xenophobia are symptoms of an underlying disease but even if America has the same disease as the Rome, this is a different host with different strength, weaknesses and immune system. Rome wasn't found upon rebellion, it didn't have a civil war at the scale of america andnit didn't have WMDs, fighter jets, interlinked supply chains and the internet. It could be worse or better or a seasonal bug. You should also understand that the eastern Roman empire lasted up until only a few hundred years ago. And it was no joke. It took over a millenium for Rome to fall. Constantinope fell on 1453, columbus discovered america on 1492. If Rome is strictly western Rome then the equivalent would be America losing global influence and military power but still remaining relatively prosperous and strong with perhaps few states splintering. Different variable, different input, similar symptomps but likely different output imo. You know what parallel scares me? Rwanda.

frisco 5y ago
> Rome wasn't found upon rebellion, it didn't have a civil war at the scale of america The founding of Rome involved one brother killing the other over a hill… and if you don’t think they had large scale civil war, you simply haven’t read Roman history
- pfraze 5y ago
  IIRC Rome was conquered (EDIT: sacked, see replies) at least once during its history as a republic and forced to rebuild. An event like that could just as easily have indicated "the end" for them, but it didn't for whatever reason.
  - throwoutway 5y ago
    Rome itself became less important over time, and the later emperors never even went there as they were too busy fighting the many civil wars, traitors, etc. or just being assassinated
    - pfraze 5y ago
      This is entirely true of imperial Rome, but less true of the republican Rome. In the context of this particular thread, the conversation was centered on republican Rome and whether a recent civil war was an indicator of the transition to empire. I and my parent were observing that republican Rome had endured multiple existential crises which might suggest a civil war wasn't uniquely noteworthy for the progress to empire, but see my other comments for better answers on why I believe that. (I'm not sure history can be charted with that obvious a causality.) An interesting aside, the civil war being referenced was actually over a question of Roman citizenship, which used to only apply to people in the city. For quite some time, the (now-)Italian peninsula was under Roman control, but its inhabitants were given a sub-citizen status with much lesser rights. The civil war established that citizenship could be offered to a much wider area.
      - eropple 5y ago
        Right era, but I disagree with the reference to which war. The Social War was absolutely not republican Rome's finest hour, but the "uh oh" seeds were planted 15-20 years earlier with the Marian reforms to the army. The Marian reforms created a standing army rather than a conscript-civilian army, which did then fight in the Social War, but the fuse set by those reforms didn't really blow up until after the Social War when Marius and Sulla started fighting over just who got to have all of the consulships and just who was the bigger, manlier man who got to have all their enemies murdered by the public for gold. ...Ahem. (It is not a pleasant period of history to read about.)
  - eropple 5y ago
    Republican Rome was never conquered. Rome was sacked--which, it is often theorized, created a long-standing cultural fear of the Gauls/Celts that remained largely until Julius Caesar's Gallic conquests/genocides--but the attackers did not stay and did not attempt to replace the governing apparatus. Roman history, particularly pre-imperial, does show a lot of "why exactly will they not just die?", but some level of resilience in large Mediterranean powers of antiquity was pretty common. (Carthage took two wars and decades to lose the Punic Wars.)
    - pfraze 5y ago
      Cheers, that fits better with my memory of what I read. That does somewhat diminish my point.
- edgyquant 5y ago
  This is probably a myth, but we do know at some point the Roman’s revolted against their king.
- osigurdson 5y ago
  Yes, Rome was very civilized apart from genocide, slavery and the breaking wheels.
  - visarga 5y ago
    As opposed to over 400,000 people living in 'modern slavery' in US even today.
pfraze 5y ago
I've definitely decided that fishing for parallels is counter-productive. It's worthwhile to educate yourself on history (and Duncan's book is a great read) but I personally do my best to quell that anxiety-response "Is this us?" question while I read. History is path-dependent and all stories are retro-actively told. There are a lot of cases where it depends on the people in the room, or the sentiment of the people in the room that day, or even something so random as taking a wrong turn and coming across a group of anarchists ready to throw some bombs (WW1). When looking at Rome, it's better to draw broad parallels with little weight.
- _8j50 5y ago
  I can get behind that reasoning.
- edgyquant 5y ago
  I find people who constantly look for parallels insufferable. Yes you can look two a few factors and say they look like some other society but the buck stops there. America isn’t Rome and won’t go the same path regardless. There’s a certain type of person I see on my social media who equates every single bad thing in history with the current day. Nazi Germany and now Ukraine “giving you their guns” is the goto. Rome has an allure to it, I get it I feel it myself, but history doesn’t repeat itself and groups of humans (especially civilizations) have so much more nuance to them it’s a disservice to both Rome and American history.
  - nobody9999 5y ago
    >I get it I feel it myself, but history doesn’t repeat itself and groups of humans (especially civilizations) have so much more nuance to them it’s a disservice to both Rome and American history. I agree, it's imprudent to try and draw direct parallels between the US and any other historical empire, including Rome. That said, we can learn much from history. And in the US and Europe, we can learn even more from the history of the "West." As Eugen Weber[0] put it[1]: ...But where should we start? Perhaps the first thing to ask is what the scope of a series on the history of Western Civilization should be? And the best way to think of it is that we are going back to the old country. We're going back to where many of our ancestors came from. To see where their stories came from, and their memories and their habits and the way they are, which has made us the way we are. This is what history is about. Where we come from. What lies behind the way we live and act and think. How our institutions, our religions, our laws were made. As the old saw goes, "history doesn't repeat, but it often rhymes." Understanding the thoughts, fears, triumphs and failures of our forbears is an important window on our human nature and the things that have driven us since time immemorial, and continues to drive us to this day. Whether it's the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and the many civilizations of the Levant/Fertile Crescent as well as Rome, the Abrahamic[2] religions and the thinkers/ideas of the ensuing millenia, they all have something important to teach us about the world we live in now. They did, after all, birth many of our core beliefs, ideas and institutions. While it's generally not productive to point at specific issues and exclaim "This is just like Rome!" or something similar, understanding the culture and practices of our ancestors can give us insight into our current world. But that's not enough. While human nature is human nature which hasn't really changed in a couple hundred thousand years, times do change. And when they do, we need to, as Lincoln pointed out[3]: The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise -- with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country. tl;dr: While it's dumb to see history as a blueprint for the future, it is a wonderful trove of knowledge and information about the human condition and its response to a vast array of stresses. As we are keenly reminded by Paul M.M. Cooper and his Fall of Civilizations[4] podcast. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugen_Weber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugen_Weber [1] https://archive.org/details/western-tradition-01-the-dawn-of-history/Western+Tradition+01+The+Dawn+of+History.mp4 https://archive.org/details/western-tradition-01-the-dawn-of... (timecode: 06:35) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abrahamic_religions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abrahamic_religions [3] http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/congress.htm http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/congres... [4] https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com/ https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com/ Edit: Fixed formatting/transcription issues.
jweir 5y ago
The article is about the fall of the Republic not the Empire. Very different things.
simplicialset 5y ago
It's unlikely that the US will fall into chaos and political disarray so those are not really the problems people are talking about when they mention increasing income inequality and more polarized politics. And you're right that empires don't really fall in short time frames, it's a more drawn out process but when decaying institutions are combined with shocks to the system like global warming, famines, wars, pandemics, etc. then it becomes much harder to be optimistic about the status quo and the people in charge of managing these shocks. Things are a lot more fragile and unstable than people realize so it's important to zoom out and look at all these issues in aggregate in order to formulate effective plans for revitalizing decaying democratic institutions so that we can properly deal with the inevitable shocks that cause the decline and collapse of nations.
ceeplusplus 5y ago
The Eastern empire lost its ability to project power across the Mediterranean by the mid 600s and completely lost its ability to project anything more than local power by about 1000 AD. By 1453 the Byzantines couldn't even be considered any sort of empire. Western Rome also lost huge ability to project power when it fell and decomposed into its constituent states. Whereas as recently as the reign of Diocletian Rome was projecting power well into Germania proper by the end of the 4th century Rome couldn't even defend its own borders. The equivalent for the US would be China/Russia wantonly attacking American client states (Germany, France, Israel, Taiwan) without fear of retaliation.
- ozgune 5y ago
  I think it’s a stretch to say the Eastern Roman Empire lost its ability to project power in the Mediterranean by mid-600s. During the Macedonian Dynasty (867-1056), they were arguably still the dominant power. Arab-Byzantine Wars lasted for 500 years and involved the entire Mediterranean. The Byzantine Italy existed until 1071. Even after, the Komnenian Restoration (12th century) revived the Empire to some extent in financial, cultural, and territorial form. Sure, they weren’t as powerful as the Roman Empire at its peak, but still could project plenty of power after mid-600s.
emmelaich 5y ago
What is interesting about Rwanda is the artificiality and strength of the division between Hutus and Tutsis. I wonder how many people know that the history; that the 1994 massacre was of the formerly "upper-class" Tutsi. The highlighting of divisions - imaginary or real rarely helps and almost always makes things worse. There's a reason retaliation in soccer is an automatic red card. It's not that the retaliation isn't warranted; it's because it typically is.
- _8j50 5y ago
  They brainwashed an entire social group into thinking the best way to get what they want is to kill the otherside. China sold them machetes, but in America, we have half the world's guns.
  - emmelaich 5y ago
    Who is "they" -- the colonising power? Sure, but it's much more complex than that. Regarding machetes, just shows you don't need firearms for a massacre.
- rayiner 5y ago
  While the role of Europeans in exacerbating existing tensions shouldn’t be overlooked, it’s incorrect to call the division between Hutus and Tutsis “artificial.” Tutsi were originally a herding class, and Hutus were farmers. Divisions and conflicts between such groups run deep throughout history in many locations. Eventually Tutsis became feudal overlords, and imposed practices such as a system of indentured labor that had to be provided by Hutus. The distinction was sufficiently developed that Hutu women were prohibited from marrying Tutsi men (presumably to control inheritance): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuhake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuhake. It’s like when people say that the British created the tensions between Muslims and Hindus on the subcontinent. That overlooks the millennia of Muslim invasions and rule by sultanates (the process by which I came to have an Arabic surname despite being born 8,000 miles from the Middle East).
avastmick 5y ago
The article is not about the fall of the Roman Empire, but about the fall of the Roman Republic and its replacement with a dictatorship under Julius Caesar. The Empire expanded after that point. Rome was bloodily founded, with the forced subjugation of other nations and peoples across what is now Italy. The correlation seems less about the fall to ruin, but that that somewhere like the US would fall into a dictatorship and has many ingredients as Julius Caesar served to claim emperor. I would also add a hefty amount of backwards looking rhetoric also to the mix - things were better, more moral in the past; or we must address sins of the past. Putin has been using similar rhetoric to Caesar swapping the Ukraine for the Celts. I recommend Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History on the Celtic Holocaust that poses that the whole expansion and annihilation of the Celts was a money making scheme by Julius Caesar to grasp power.
- eropple 5y ago
  My memory of Carlin's episode on that one is that it's broadly accurate as per the historical consensus, but as a note one should beware of taking Carlin too seriously more generally. Good for the basic shape of things, maybe good for tone, but probably not good for the why things actually happened most of the time. Too deep in the dad-history bucket. (But that's not to diminish that Julius Caesar was a bad dude.)
- sofixa 5y ago
  > The correlation seems less about the fall to ruin, but that that somewhere like the US would fall into a dictatorship and has many ingredients as Julius Caesar served to claim emperor And it's not like it's something completely out of the question - there was literally a coup attempt to circumvent election results (which are already gerrymandered to hell) a year ago.
eropple 5y ago
> it didn't have a civil war at the scale of america Only barely so, and not for lack of trying, and Rome still had massive and frequent civil wars both in the late Republic as well as throughout the imperial period. Republican Rome stretched from Spain to the Nile River in the south and Syria in the East. Over 350,000 (and quite possibly a lot more) Roman soldiers, out of a population estimated to be around 60,000,000 (most of whom were not citizens), fought at just the Battle of Actium at the end of the Republican era. In a pre-industrial era with a pre-industrial economy. The American Civil War had more soldiers, yes, and proportionally more with regards to population--but also had an economy that could support it. And it happened once. Not "every few years for centuries on end". Roman civil wars were titanic and they went on for decades. (The third century CE is referred to as an ongoing crisis for a reason.) As for the rest--the differences between the Western Roman Empire and the East are so significant that even if you happen to be right (and you might be, I don't find it credible myself) it strikes me as it'll be by accident.
rayiner 5y ago
> income inequality, racism and xenophobia are symptoms of an underlying disease And what is that? India (and Pakistan and Bangladesh), China, Russia, and all the Gulf States, are also xenophobic and racist and have high levels of income inequality. Most countries are xenophobic and racist by American standards—if they lack income inequality it’s because everyone is equally poor. So what’s the common thread?
- WaxProlix 5y ago
  That's a fantastic question, and as someone who feels some kinship with the OP but without any further understanding of their viewpoint, let me stipulate that, to me, it's emergent xenophobia, racism, and inequality. If these things are rampant, but on the decline, it's not the same thing. If they were more or less in check, but are now running wild through the decaying empire, that's the signal. Again, my opinions are totally my own (and maybe somewhat overstated here) and don't reflect OP at all. Just a thought.
  - throwawaylinux 5y ago
    Is xenophobia and racism getting worse? There's clearly a massive vested interest in perpetuating the idea and fearmongering that it is. But if you go back even a decade or two, democrat presidents would be considered ultra-right-wing nazi-adjacent on their rhetoric about illegal aliens and border control. Tolerance and permissiveness seem to be rising since then as far as I can see. Although you may be referring to the troubling rise in policies of institutional racism like race discrimination in university admissions, which I agree is one obvious thing that seems to be going backwards in recent times.
    - tptacek 5y ago
      I don't think you've heard any Democratic President in the last 50 years argue that we should eliminate birthright citizenship.
      - throwawaylinux 5y ago
peder 5y ago
My initial take is that this article is trash. To build up their empire, the Romans literally conquered people that weren't like them; you could probably argue they should have had more conquering zeal and xenophobia. Also, why does the tech community have an obsession with Rome?
- DevKoala 5y ago
  > Also, why does the tech community have an obsession with Rome? American centric negativity combined with self aggrandizing projection. The comparisons to Rome are the new JavaScript frameworks of HN.
- ogogmad 5y ago
  > Also, why does the tech community have an obsession with Rome? This question comes across as a bit sneering (more so one of its answers), but I'll say general intellectualism. This is what the orange site is about after all. See a defence of the classics here: https://acoup.blog/2021/09/10/meet-a-historian-michael-taylor-on-why-we-need-classics/ https://acoup.blog/2021/09/10/meet-a-historian-michael-taylo... - The blog ACOUP is probably better than the submission, so I'll agree with your first point. You could make a case for Chinese history being equally rich, if not more. But note that the language and cultural barrier would be greater for most people on this site. Its relevance for the shaping of the "Western" world would be less relevant. The amount of study material and analysis in the English language would be less. But if there were decent enough articles on it, it would result in a flood of submissions to this site.
- xeromal 5y ago
  As someone in the tech community who fell into an obsession with Rome, I think my fall into it was mostly just familiarity. Out of all the great empires of the ancients (China, Rome, Persia, Khans, Greeks, etc), who is the most responsible for what I am today? I write in Roman letters and speak roman words thousands of years later. My ancestors from England lived in cities built by Rome and lots of American political culture is Rome-inspired. Heck, Cincinnati is named Cincinnatus who was responsible for saving Rome on more than one occasion. The question isn't why are we obsessed with Rome. It's why not.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
whakim 5y ago
> Rome wasn't found upon rebellion Myths aside, we don't really know anything about the founding of Rome. But it's clear that (like the United States), Rome was originally a "frontier" place, situated at the intersection of several older groups of Italic peoples. > it didn't have a civil war at the scale of america The Social War would certainly beg to differ - a war fought over who got to be full-fledged members of the Roman community. > it didn't have WMDs, fighter jets, interlinked supply chains and the internet. One of the most stunning features of the late Roman Republic (and subsequent Empire) is the degree to which trans-Mediterranean trade takes off in the second century B.C.E. after the Roman defeat of Carthage. By the standards of the ancient world, the late Roman Republic was incredibly interconnected. I'm not trying to argue that the parallel totally fits or that the outcome will be the same. But I think there are more similarities here than you give credit for.

by _8j50 5y ago

frisco 5y ago

> Rome wasn't found upon rebellion, it didn't have a civil war at the scale of america The founding of Rome involved one brother killing the other over a hill… and if you don’t think they had large scale civil war, you simply haven’t read Roman history

pfraze 5y ago
IIRC Rome was conquered (EDIT: sacked, see replies) at least once during its history as a republic and forced to rebuild. An event like that could just as easily have indicated "the end" for them, but it didn't for whatever reason.
- throwoutway 5y ago
  Rome itself became less important over time, and the later emperors never even went there as they were too busy fighting the many civil wars, traitors, etc. or just being assassinated
  - pfraze 5y ago
    This is entirely true of imperial Rome, but less true of the republican Rome. In the context of this particular thread, the conversation was centered on republican Rome and whether a recent civil war was an indicator of the transition to empire. I and my parent were observing that republican Rome had endured multiple existential crises which might suggest a civil war wasn't uniquely noteworthy for the progress to empire, but see my other comments for better answers on why I believe that. (I'm not sure history can be charted with that obvious a causality.) An interesting aside, the civil war being referenced was actually over a question of Roman citizenship, which used to only apply to people in the city. For quite some time, the (now-)Italian peninsula was under Roman control, but its inhabitants were given a sub-citizen status with much lesser rights. The civil war established that citizenship could be offered to a much wider area.
    - eropple 5y ago
      Right era, but I disagree with the reference to which war. The Social War was absolutely not republican Rome's finest hour, but the "uh oh" seeds were planted 15-20 years earlier with the Marian reforms to the army. The Marian reforms created a standing army rather than a conscript-civilian army, which did then fight in the Social War, but the fuse set by those reforms didn't really blow up until after the Social War when Marius and Sulla started fighting over just who got to have all of the consulships and just who was the bigger, manlier man who got to have all their enemies murdered by the public for gold. ...Ahem. (It is not a pleasant period of history to read about.)
- eropple 5y ago
  Republican Rome was never conquered. Rome was sacked--which, it is often theorized, created a long-standing cultural fear of the Gauls/Celts that remained largely until Julius Caesar's Gallic conquests/genocides--but the attackers did not stay and did not attempt to replace the governing apparatus. Roman history, particularly pre-imperial, does show a lot of "why exactly will they not just die?", but some level of resilience in large Mediterranean powers of antiquity was pretty common. (Carthage took two wars and decades to lose the Punic Wars.)
  - pfraze 5y ago
    Cheers, that fits better with my memory of what I read. That does somewhat diminish my point.
edgyquant 5y ago
This is probably a myth, but we do know at some point the Roman’s revolted against their king.
osigurdson 5y ago
Yes, Rome was very civilized apart from genocide, slavery and the breaking wheels.
- visarga 5y ago
  As opposed to over 400,000 people living in 'modern slavery' in US even today.

pfraze 5y ago

I've definitely decided that fishing for parallels is counter-productive. It's worthwhile to educate yourself on history (and Duncan's book is a great read) but I personally do my best to quell that anxiety-response "Is this us?" question while I read. History is path-dependent and all stories are retro-actively told. There are a lot of cases where it depends on the people in the room, or the sentiment of the people in the room that day, or even something so random as taking a wrong turn and coming across a group of anarchists ready to throw some bombs (WW1). When looking at Rome, it's better to draw broad parallels with little weight.

_8j50 5y ago
I can get behind that reasoning.
edgyquant 5y ago
I find people who constantly look for parallels insufferable. Yes you can look two a few factors and say they look like some other society but the buck stops there. America isn’t Rome and won’t go the same path regardless. There’s a certain type of person I see on my social media who equates every single bad thing in history with the current day. Nazi Germany and now Ukraine “giving you their guns” is the goto. Rome has an allure to it, I get it I feel it myself, but history doesn’t repeat itself and groups of humans (especially civilizations) have so much more nuance to them it’s a disservice to both Rome and American history.
- nobody9999 5y ago
  >I get it I feel it myself, but history doesn’t repeat itself and groups of humans (especially civilizations) have so much more nuance to them it’s a disservice to both Rome and American history. I agree, it's imprudent to try and draw direct parallels between the US and any other historical empire, including Rome. That said, we can learn much from history. And in the US and Europe, we can learn even more from the history of the "West." As Eugen Weber[0] put it[1]: ...But where should we start? Perhaps the first thing to ask is what the scope of a series on the history of Western Civilization should be? And the best way to think of it is that we are going back to the old country. We're going back to where many of our ancestors came from. To see where their stories came from, and their memories and their habits and the way they are, which has made us the way we are. This is what history is about. Where we come from. What lies behind the way we live and act and think. How our institutions, our religions, our laws were made. As the old saw goes, "history doesn't repeat, but it often rhymes." Understanding the thoughts, fears, triumphs and failures of our forbears is an important window on our human nature and the things that have driven us since time immemorial, and continues to drive us to this day. Whether it's the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and the many civilizations of the Levant/Fertile Crescent as well as Rome, the Abrahamic[2] religions and the thinkers/ideas of the ensuing millenia, they all have something important to teach us about the world we live in now. They did, after all, birth many of our core beliefs, ideas and institutions. While it's generally not productive to point at specific issues and exclaim "This is just like Rome!" or something similar, understanding the culture and practices of our ancestors can give us insight into our current world. But that's not enough. While human nature is human nature which hasn't really changed in a couple hundred thousand years, times do change. And when they do, we need to, as Lincoln pointed out[3]: The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise -- with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country. tl;dr: While it's dumb to see history as a blueprint for the future, it is a wonderful trove of knowledge and information about the human condition and its response to a vast array of stresses. As we are keenly reminded by Paul M.M. Cooper and his Fall of Civilizations[4] podcast. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugen_Weber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugen_Weber [1] https://archive.org/details/western-tradition-01-the-dawn-of-history/Western+Tradition+01+The+Dawn+of+History.mp4 https://archive.org/details/western-tradition-01-the-dawn-of... (timecode: 06:35) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abrahamic_religions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abrahamic_religions [3] http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/congress.htm http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/congres... [4] https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com/ https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com/ Edit: Fixed formatting/transcription issues.

jweir 5y ago

The article is about the fall of the Republic not the Empire. Very different things.

simplicialset 5y ago

It's unlikely that the US will fall into chaos and political disarray so those are not really the problems people are talking about when they mention increasing income inequality and more polarized politics. And you're right that empires don't really fall in short time frames, it's a more drawn out process but when decaying institutions are combined with shocks to the system like global warming, famines, wars, pandemics, etc. then it becomes much harder to be optimistic about the status quo and the people in charge of managing these shocks. Things are a lot more fragile and unstable than people realize so it's important to zoom out and look at all these issues in aggregate in order to formulate effective plans for revitalizing decaying democratic institutions so that we can properly deal with the inevitable shocks that cause the decline and collapse of nations.

ceeplusplus 5y ago

The Eastern empire lost its ability to project power across the Mediterranean by the mid 600s and completely lost its ability to project anything more than local power by about 1000 AD. By 1453 the Byzantines couldn't even be considered any sort of empire. Western Rome also lost huge ability to project power when it fell and decomposed into its constituent states. Whereas as recently as the reign of Diocletian Rome was projecting power well into Germania proper by the end of the 4th century Rome couldn't even defend its own borders. The equivalent for the US would be China/Russia wantonly attacking American client states (Germany, France, Israel, Taiwan) without fear of retaliation.

ozgune 5y ago
I think it’s a stretch to say the Eastern Roman Empire lost its ability to project power in the Mediterranean by mid-600s. During the Macedonian Dynasty (867-1056), they were arguably still the dominant power. Arab-Byzantine Wars lasted for 500 years and involved the entire Mediterranean. The Byzantine Italy existed until 1071. Even after, the Komnenian Restoration (12th century) revived the Empire to some extent in financial, cultural, and territorial form. Sure, they weren’t as powerful as the Roman Empire at its peak, but still could project plenty of power after mid-600s.

emmelaich 5y ago

What is interesting about Rwanda is the artificiality and strength of the division between Hutus and Tutsis. I wonder how many people know that the history; that the 1994 massacre was of the formerly "upper-class" Tutsi. The highlighting of divisions - imaginary or real rarely helps and almost always makes things worse. There's a reason retaliation in soccer is an automatic red card. It's not that the retaliation isn't warranted; it's because it typically is.

_8j50 5y ago
They brainwashed an entire social group into thinking the best way to get what they want is to kill the otherside. China sold them machetes, but in America, we have half the world's guns.
- emmelaich 5y ago
  Who is "they" -- the colonising power? Sure, but it's much more complex than that. Regarding machetes, just shows you don't need firearms for a massacre.
rayiner 5y ago
While the role of Europeans in exacerbating existing tensions shouldn’t be overlooked, it’s incorrect to call the division between Hutus and Tutsis “artificial.” Tutsi were originally a herding class, and Hutus were farmers. Divisions and conflicts between such groups run deep throughout history in many locations. Eventually Tutsis became feudal overlords, and imposed practices such as a system of indentured labor that had to be provided by Hutus. The distinction was sufficiently developed that Hutu women were prohibited from marrying Tutsi men (presumably to control inheritance): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuhake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuhake. It’s like when people say that the British created the tensions between Muslims and Hindus on the subcontinent. That overlooks the millennia of Muslim invasions and rule by sultanates (the process by which I came to have an Arabic surname despite being born 8,000 miles from the Middle East).

avastmick 5y ago

The article is not about the fall of the Roman Empire, but about the fall of the Roman Republic and its replacement with a dictatorship under Julius Caesar. The Empire expanded after that point. Rome was bloodily founded, with the forced subjugation of other nations and peoples across what is now Italy. The correlation seems less about the fall to ruin, but that that somewhere like the US would fall into a dictatorship and has many ingredients as Julius Caesar served to claim emperor. I would also add a hefty amount of backwards looking rhetoric also to the mix - things were better, more moral in the past; or we must address sins of the past. Putin has been using similar rhetoric to Caesar swapping the Ukraine for the Celts. I recommend Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History on the Celtic Holocaust that poses that the whole expansion and annihilation of the Celts was a money making scheme by Julius Caesar to grasp power.

eropple 5y ago
My memory of Carlin's episode on that one is that it's broadly accurate as per the historical consensus, but as a note one should beware of taking Carlin too seriously more generally. Good for the basic shape of things, maybe good for tone, but probably not good for the why things actually happened most of the time. Too deep in the dad-history bucket. (But that's not to diminish that Julius Caesar was a bad dude.)
sofixa 5y ago
> The correlation seems less about the fall to ruin, but that that somewhere like the US would fall into a dictatorship and has many ingredients as Julius Caesar served to claim emperor And it's not like it's something completely out of the question - there was literally a coup attempt to circumvent election results (which are already gerrymandered to hell) a year ago.

eropple 5y ago

> it didn't have a civil war at the scale of america Only barely so, and not for lack of trying, and Rome still had massive and frequent civil wars both in the late Republic as well as throughout the imperial period. Republican Rome stretched from Spain to the Nile River in the south and Syria in the East. Over 350,000 (and quite possibly a lot more) Roman soldiers, out of a population estimated to be around 60,000,000 (most of whom were not citizens), fought at just the Battle of Actium at the end of the Republican era. In a pre-industrial era with a pre-industrial economy. The American Civil War had more soldiers, yes, and proportionally more with regards to population--but also had an economy that could support it. And it happened once. Not "every few years for centuries on end". Roman civil wars were titanic and they went on for decades. (The third century CE is referred to as an ongoing crisis for a reason.) As for the rest--the differences between the Western Roman Empire and the East are so significant that even if you happen to be right (and you might be, I don't find it credible myself) it strikes me as it'll be by accident.

rayiner 5y ago

> income inequality, racism and xenophobia are symptoms of an underlying disease And what is that? India (and Pakistan and Bangladesh), China, Russia, and all the Gulf States, are also xenophobic and racist and have high levels of income inequality. Most countries are xenophobic and racist by American standards—if they lack income inequality it’s because everyone is equally poor. So what’s the common thread?

WaxProlix 5y ago
That's a fantastic question, and as someone who feels some kinship with the OP but without any further understanding of their viewpoint, let me stipulate that, to me, it's emergent xenophobia, racism, and inequality. If these things are rampant, but on the decline, it's not the same thing. If they were more or less in check, but are now running wild through the decaying empire, that's the signal. Again, my opinions are totally my own (and maybe somewhat overstated here) and don't reflect OP at all. Just a thought.
- throwawaylinux 5y ago
  Is xenophobia and racism getting worse? There's clearly a massive vested interest in perpetuating the idea and fearmongering that it is. But if you go back even a decade or two, democrat presidents would be considered ultra-right-wing nazi-adjacent on their rhetoric about illegal aliens and border control. Tolerance and permissiveness seem to be rising since then as far as I can see. Although you may be referring to the troubling rise in policies of institutional racism like race discrimination in university admissions, which I agree is one obvious thing that seems to be going backwards in recent times.
  - tptacek 5y ago
    I don't think you've heard any Democratic President in the last 50 years argue that we should eliminate birthright citizenship.
    - throwawaylinux 5y ago

peder 5y ago

My initial take is that this article is trash. To build up their empire, the Romans literally conquered people that weren't like them; you could probably argue they should have had more conquering zeal and xenophobia. Also, why does the tech community have an obsession with Rome?

DevKoala 5y ago
> Also, why does the tech community have an obsession with Rome? American centric negativity combined with self aggrandizing projection. The comparisons to Rome are the new JavaScript frameworks of HN.
ogogmad 5y ago
> Also, why does the tech community have an obsession with Rome? This question comes across as a bit sneering (more so one of its answers), but I'll say general intellectualism. This is what the orange site is about after all. See a defence of the classics here: https://acoup.blog/2021/09/10/meet-a-historian-michael-taylor-on-why-we-need-classics/ https://acoup.blog/2021/09/10/meet-a-historian-michael-taylo... - The blog ACOUP is probably better than the submission, so I'll agree with your first point. You could make a case for Chinese history being equally rich, if not more. But note that the language and cultural barrier would be greater for most people on this site. Its relevance for the shaping of the "Western" world would be less relevant. The amount of study material and analysis in the English language would be less. But if there were decent enough articles on it, it would result in a flood of submissions to this site.
xeromal 5y ago
As someone in the tech community who fell into an obsession with Rome, I think my fall into it was mostly just familiarity. Out of all the great empires of the ancients (China, Rome, Persia, Khans, Greeks, etc), who is the most responsible for what I am today? I write in Roman letters and speak roman words thousands of years later. My ancestors from England lived in cities built by Rome and lots of American political culture is Rome-inspired. Heck, Cincinnati is named Cincinnatus who was responsible for saving Rome on more than one occasion. The question isn't why are we obsessed with Rome. It's why not.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

whakim 5y ago

> Rome wasn't found upon rebellion Myths aside, we don't really know anything about the founding of Rome. But it's clear that (like the United States), Rome was originally a "frontier" place, situated at the intersection of several older groups of Italic peoples. > it didn't have a civil war at the scale of america The Social War would certainly beg to differ - a war fought over who got to be full-fledged members of the Roman community. > it didn't have WMDs, fighter jets, interlinked supply chains and the internet. One of the most stunning features of the late Roman Republic (and subsequent Empire) is the degree to which trans-Mediterranean trade takes off in the second century B.C.E. after the Roman defeat of Carthage. By the standards of the ancient world, the late Roman Republic was incredibly interconnected. I'm not trying to argue that the parallel totally fits or that the outcome will be the same. But I think there are more similarities here than you give credit for.