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What does the “Fall of Rome” actually mean? It’s not like everyone died or disappeared. They just stopped being ruled by a particular government.

• hansworst 4y ago
  I’m guessing it means that things went from one single government with lots of power ruling over a large population to many governments ruling smaller groups of people.
• drewcoo 4y ago
  It means "you should check Wikipedia." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_the_Western_Roman_Empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_the_Western_Roman_Empi...
  • dang 4y ago
    That's pretty good snark, but please don't be snarky on HN - it's a kind of collective poisoning in its own right. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • dqpb 4y ago
    Ok > the fall of Rome was the loss of central political control in the Western Roman Empire, a process in which the Empire failed to enforce its rule, and its vast territory was divided into several successor polities. So it’s exactly what I said it was.
• MagnumOpus 4y ago
  A lot of people died - starved or got killed by disease, pillagers or such like. The population of Italy and Greece post the Empire was probably only half of what it was during the Roman times. But even beyond that, the “fall” of Rome (the city) meant that its one million former inhabitants now largely became rural subsistence farmers rather than artisans/craftsmen/smiths/teachers in a city with theatres, race tracks, running fresh water, spas and food trucks. If the US underwent the same sort of change, you might call it “fallen” too…
  • ztrww 4y ago
    Most of this occurred close 100 hundreds years later after the fall of Rome when the Eastern Roman Empire tried to reconquer Italy the inhabitants of which had really noticed that the empire had fallen in 476. And anyway the population of Rome hadn’t been close to a million for hundreds of years, it had been declining for centuries.
• colechristensen 4y ago
  Lots of people died and disappeared, whole cities were abandoned, those that weren’t often had a tenth of their previous populations, people receded to subsistence agriculture, and literacy went to almost zero. If you took an interest in a subject and read a few books, you could be the worlds foremost expert on it. This was most prevalent in the west. Rome was just a few sparks away from triggering an industrial revolution a thousand years early.
  • dqpb 4y ago
    > Rome was just a few sparks away from triggering an industrial revolution a thousand years early That’s a pretty amazing idea.
    • notahacker 4y ago
      I remember reading a very entertaining story as a kid by John Christopher (typically an author of juvenile sf) in which basically the opposite happened (the protagonists are transported to an alternative 1981 in which the Roman Empire survived in stable form basically unchanged, and they're able to transform its fortunes with longbows and pendulums... although helping the underground Pope legitimise Christianity as a religion doesn't go quite as well as expected. Special props to the author for having the imagination to conceive that the pendulum could be used as a torture instrument!
      • mkr-hn 4y ago
        It's a bit older than that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pit_and_the_Pendulum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pit_and_the_Pendulum
    • selimthegrim 4y ago
      https://physicsworld.com/a/praising-alexandrians-to-excess/ https://physicsworld.com/a/praising-alexandrians-to-excess/ Lucio Russo thinks rather it would have been the Greeks, but makes clear that neither of them approached things with the modern scientific method.
  • 4y ago
• bombcar 4y ago
  We can speak of the "Fall of Detroit" even though Detroit continues to exist and hasn't disappeared, but it is certainly no longer in its heyday.
• InitialLastName 4y ago
  Bret Devereaux recently went into a lot of detail on this in his blog [0]. Short answer: some things stayed the same (lots of sub-communities didn't see much difference), other things distinctly got worse (lots of people died). The process was also different in different areas. In general, in Western Europe, a lot of regions went from an urban-oriented centralized economy to a more decentralized one, causing big problems for the cities that no longer had the administrative prowess to support themselves. [0] https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-fall-part-i-words/ https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-f...
• thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > It’s not like everyone died or disappeared. Except it's exactly like that. Huge numbers of people died; population cratered.
  • panick21_ 4y ago
    That actually happened 100s of years after the political fall of the empire and it also happened to a large extent in the East where the empire persisted. So the political fall of the West as the primary factor in de-urbanization is not really a good argument.
    • thaumasiotes 4y ago
      > it also happened to a large extent in the East where the empire persisted. This would be a stronger argument if the Eastern and Western Empires had been economically segregated from each other.