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A ‘plague’ comes before the fall: lessons from Roman history

• Jahkk 2y ago
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  • WJW 2y ago
    People said the wildest shit about covid.
    • questiontime02 2y ago
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  • questiontime02 2y ago
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  • yyyyybb 2y ago
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  • pixl97 2y ago
    Turns out modern technology/medicine, cleanliness standards, and avoidance of the illness of the highest at risk had a big effect in making sure it didn't take us out. One 100 years before we had a very similar pandemic that didn't end the world, but caused a large number of deaths.
    • Jensson 2y ago
      The pandemic 100 years ago killed children, the pandemic today didn't, that makes them night and day. The pandemic we had now wouldn't be very noticeable 100 years ago since it mostly killed old people and there weren't that many old people around. Imagine if Covid was as lethal to everyone as it was to 70 year olds, then you had the plague 100 years ago.
    • swayvil 2y ago
      It's so easy to tell a story. Any story. Here in internetland. It's getting so I don't trust a single thing any of you people say. It's like tower of babel part 2.
      • pixl97 2y ago
        And it wasn't always easy to tell a story IRL? The term snakeoil salesman and yellow journalism is from far pre-internet days. If you thought the internet was going to be some magical where everyone told the truth you were already completely disconnected from reality. All the internet does is guide us to our little reality tunnels of the untruth that we enjoy best.
        • swayvil 2y ago
          With the magic of social media everybody can be a snakeoil salesman now. And will. Apparently everybody is just a snakeoil salesman waiting for the opportunity to push their dreams and politics. So now we have a million-strong chorus of snakeoil salesmen 24-7. I'd call that a big difference.
  • rybosworld 2y ago
    A man wearing body armor survives a gun shot. Man exclaims: "see! guns aren't dangerous!"
    • yyyyybb 2y ago
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• thom 2y ago
  Yup, that and the 209 other reasons is why the western Roman Empire fell.
  • throwup238 2y ago
    Everyone knows it was caused by a massive decrease in the quality of Roman garum. After their supplies of the good stuff ran out, they just didn’t have enough umami to keep the empire united. Once Constantinople developed their own garos, they had no reason to stay together with the west.
    • QuercusMax 2y ago
      I thought it was the extinction of the sylphium plant that really sealed their fate.
    • gumby 2y ago
      It's always the simple explanations like these that survive Occam's razor.
    • psunavy03 2y ago
      The heck with bread and circuses. Fish sauce for all my friends!
  • mjhay 2y ago
    I remember a quote saying something to the effect of "the Roman Empire wasn't murdered, it killed itself on accident."
  • sien 2y ago
    The Roman Empire being there was probably weirder than it falling. There hasn't been as extensive empire in that area since. It was sort of defying gravity to be there at all. Then sooner or later things would go wrong and it would fall to pieces. As in The Talking Heads song 'things fall apart, it's scientific'.
    • beezlebroxxxxxx 2y ago
• neverokay 2y ago
  They say you have to be lucky to get cancer statistically because you actually have to live a long time to even get it. I guess if you are several hundred year old empire you will have run into just about everything. The plague was just the last thing they saw, not the ultimate thing that ended them. We’d be lucky if all this crap lasts long enough to watch a plague run through it.
  • deleted 2y ago
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  • datahack 2y ago
    You sound just like a Roman.
    • neverokay 2y ago
      American, close enough. Our empire hopes at least.
      • all2 2y ago
        I almost wish we had actual imperial ambition instead of all the cloak and daggers garbage the CIA gets up to. At least there would be economic stability and decent education and infra in annexed countries.
        • runlaszlorun 2y ago
          There prob would be a lot of popular support. And there is an election coming up. Personally, I was thinking we could privatize the entire military in one fell swoop. And then let them sell their services to various foreign nations. Turn that one big cost center into a revenue opp. No way that could possibly go wrong… But if America does get dragged into any more conflicts, can we make it a home game this time? You know… ‘fight em over here so we dont have to fight em over there’. Sucks always being the away team.
          • 2y ago
• cardanome 2y ago
  The Roman empire was based on slavery and had to die so that humanity could progress. Slave labor is vastly less efficient than having serfs that can keep (part of) what they produce and have incentives to +-work harder. That allowed producing more food with less workforce so many people were free to do other things and bigger cities could develop which in turn would set the foundation for making the industrial revolution possible. Everything else is just some weird romanticism of the antique when in reality many things got better in the medieval period. There wasn't a sudden fall of the Roman Empire. It was a gradual process and the structures coming after it saw themselves not as a replacement but as a continuation of Roman traditions. Edit: As people misunderstand. The important difference between serfdom and slavery is not freedom. The important part is incentives to work harder. Slaves only have the incentives to avoid the whip. They do not own what they produce. They need to be closely supervised and micromanaged. In contrast many forms of serfdom allowed to the serfs to keep some of the stuff they produced so they had incentives to work more efficiently.
  • SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
    I'm not sure why you're focusing on that one aspect when there so many others for the Roman decline. And it's not like slavery disappeared with the Roman empire.
    • cardanome 2y ago
      Because economics are the deciding factor. It is what enables sustaining a higher population, investing in technological progress and of course military might. The form of society that is more efficient will always win out in the end. Same as companies that can produce goods more efficiently under free market capitalism will always dominate.
      • SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
        You're making a lot of unsupported claims about free market capitalism which really isn't a factor when we're discussing 2000 year old empires. I don't think you can make the argument that the dark ages ushered in a free market, so I don't know how you're connecting these things. It's a strange take that hyper-focuses on slavery and the economy when slavery was being used by western nations well into the 1800s.
• dredmorbius 2y ago
  A fascinating insight for me came via Kyle Harper's book The Fate of Rome: plagues co-evolve to match civilisations. <https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691166834/the-fate-of-rome https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691166834/th...> That is, the Antonine, and other plauges of Rome relied on the dense urbanisation, highly-developed transportation, and long-range trading patterns, all of which served to provide the conditions in which pathogens which were either benign or simply too virulent to establish themselves in smaller, less-interconnected communities --- in such cases the epidemics would simply burn themselves out, perhaps decimating a village or small trading group of same, but not spreading further. The fact that Yersinia pestis seems to have evolved first in rodent populations (themselves often microcosms of human civilisations with large and interconnected population clusters) seems relevant. IIRC Harper cites hamsters or gerbils as the prior host species to humans. James Burke, of Connections fame, stated in a later interview "ReConnections* of how he'd extend the episodes of the original series that a key consequence of jet air travel would be an increased spread of global pandemics. This occurs toward the end of this video: <https://archive.org/details/JamesBurkeReConnections_0 https://archive.org/details/JamesBurkeReConnections_0> More broadly, it seems to me that any network will co-evolve parasite or pathogenic entities, whether we're talking human cities (look at the long list of urban vices, online abuse, network issues, and the like). One factor contributing to the "golden age" effect is that such ages exist before the parasites / pathogens evolve. As such, the sense that "something went wrong" seems to me misled, and a better formulation would be that such golden ages were living on borrowed time in the first place. Podcast episode of Harper addressing a similar theme from Plagues Upon the Earth: <https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN2511895438.mp3 https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN2511895438.mp3>.
  • llm_trw 2y ago
    Or we can listen to Socrates and the fact that civilization eats up the soil it depends to grow its food on: https://web2.qatar.cmu.edu/~breilly2/world/Lucretuis.htm https://web2.qatar.cmu.edu/~breilly2/world/Lucretuis.htm Civilization can easily survive a mortality rate that we'd consider impossible, viz. the colonies in the new world, it can't survive hunger.
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• bedobi 2y ago
  it's kinda tiring when people assert that yxz ended the roman empire allow me to be the akshully guy and point out, for one, it didn't, the eastern half of the SAME roman empire was still kicking around long after the western half "fell" the western roman empire also didn't end because of migration (even if it had, what's the lesson? the world exists and people move around inside it, there's nothing anyone can do to stop that, certainly the romans couldn't, nor did they when they themselves INVITED the germanic tribes in, as they had for hundreds of years, because they had to, there was no alternative... if you can't successfully roll with immigration, your polity is doomed anyway, the world and the societies in it aren't some hermetically sealed snow globes that are possible to keep segregated and separated from each other) nor corruption or incompetent leadership (Rome and every other political entity in history has also and did also have that, since forever) or any other pet theory (plagues likewise came and went)
  • selestify 2y ago
    So what ended the western part, and why didn’t the same thing end the eastern part?
    • Qwertious 2y ago
      There's no single one "what", but: Western rome kept feuding with itself and hiring germanic tribes as mercenaries. After a while, the germanic mercenaries were thoroughly trained in fighting western romans, and eventually western rome pissed off germanic mercenaries and lost the resulting war. Eastern rome didn't have as many germanic tribes as neighbors, and they had less infighting to begin with. One of the major reasons earlier-rome had so much military success was that they conquered their neighbors before said neighbors successfully copied all their (really quite amazing) military doctrines. (I am not a historian, don't quote me on this)
  • graeme 2y ago
    The Byzantines didn’t last all that long as anything recognizably Roman. By 641 they had lost 75% of their prior tax base. They pushed out now and again but were largely Greece and Anatolia for much of their history after that.
• surfingdino 2y ago
  The plague was a factor in the demise of Rome, but it was not the factor. Mary Beard's SPQR discusses some that are not always mentioned today, perhaps because they are too close for comfort for Europe and the USA or too political. I recommend reading Beard's book.
  • Dracophoenix 2y ago
    Any worth mentioning in particular?
    • donavanm 2y ago
      Im not making the connections the top comment is. Her SPQR books are nice alternative history from a real historian. At a guess the parent comment is referring to some cultural aspects based on earlier roman and not our current judeo-christian values in the west. An emphasis on biological advancements, moralality that serves status hierarchy and empire, “polycule” style relationships in military and socioeconomic units, a different view on “sanctity of life.” Off the top of my head.
    • surfingdino 2y ago
      Roman elites' unwillingness to go on long military campaigns themselves and increasing reliance on foreign personnel who quickly figured out that it is easier and safer to simply turn against their paymasters than risk lives in far away lands.
  • localfirst 2y ago
    I interpreted it as an omen of sorts. many dynasties believed plagues, natural disasters, famine were markers of decline. ex) Dutch empire. There was a plague + ponzi finance bubble in the same decade. The gilder never recovered after this point began to steadily lose value and roughly 150 years later, Dutch empire was no more. One can't help but wonder if America is on the same trajectory.
    • surfingdino 2y ago
      It is, along with the rest of the broadly defined West. It's not like the West is going to disappear, but it will become less of a driving force.
• hasselhoftd 2y ago
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• luxuryballs 2y ago
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• renewiltord 2y ago
  To be honest, people over-learn things from what's written down. That's just a different form of looking under the lamp for your lost keys. Plagues do damage civilizations but there's no lessons there. The US and China are two diametrically opposite kingdoms and they have both weathered the latest one just fine through diametrically opposite approaches. Rome's big advantage in historical popularity is that its works survived being written down. Treat it as an existence proof of things, not its events as necessary conditions.
• cjohnson318 2y ago
  This was the high water mark of the Western Roman Empire, but at the time, a number of people were very concerned about the vast amount of wealth that was flowing out of the empire towards the east for luxury goods like silk and spices. This was a time that the rich got richer, spent more and more overseas, and strained the whole economy. (My source on this is Peter Frankopan's Silk Roads. If y'all have competing theories, or more detail, I'm all ears.)
  • rz2k 2y ago
    Just throwing out ideas, but I don't think wealth flowing out is as much of a big deal as it was in the 70s. However, the opposite is the case with respect to concentration of wealth. Also I think that the US and Europe are very different when it comes to concentration of wealth, and preserving that concentration. It is difficult to pin down why. For one, Europe is legally inferior in terms of the legal structures permitting early stage and disruptive companies. European countries are also biased toward favoring large employers in terms of preventing competition from former employees. Ideally, you want a system where people who have generational wealth can lose it easily, as much as you want people who work really hard, and especially people who are extremely innovative to be able to catapult themselves to positions of consequence where they can determine good decision making. Anyway, back to wealth flowing out. Europe in that respect might be the winner. LVMH and Hermes being among the largest companies in Europe by market cap, suggests the wealth is flowing in, even if Europe would likely prefer to be making money out of other less cyclical goods and services.
    • bruce511 2y ago
      >> Ideally, you want a system where people who have generational wealth can lose it easily, as much as you want people who work really hard, and especially people who are extremely innovative to be able to catapult themselves to positions of consequence where they can determine good decision making. Do you though? I'm not sure. Social mobility certainly has benefits, it motivates etc. Equally, it would seem advantageous for the weak-aristocrat to fall, making way for new blood. Certainly we've seen the end of formal feudal aristocracy. The French Revolution started a wave of royalty-ending power. Today, while monarchies and aristocracy dukes, barons etc) still exist, they are not major factors. (With the exception of the UK where they lack political power but are still wealthy.) The second generation of wealth, the industrialists, also wax and wine. Competition comes from within and without. Large brands have faltered, new industries have risen, and fallen, but social structures have remained solid since ww2. There is clearly economic mobility, but wealth concentration seems less obvious in Europe (although a trip to Monaco might weaken my argument.) What Europe has is a bit more discretion. Mysql, Nokia, Skype, etc and plenty more are, or were, European. But you don't see those founders in the press, and outside very narrow communities you don't know who they are. Which I suppose brings me back to your point. I think you are correct, but I'd add that the stability of society as a whole acts as a good framework for that mobility. I'm not sure the American system of massive disparity is ultimately good.
• btbuildem 2y ago
  > The Antonine plague would continue to rage in the cities and military camps of the Roman Empire for at least another decade. A second wave of an undiagnosed epidemic disease hit Rome in 190 AD; if this too was part of the Antonine plague, then the pandemic lasted at least a quarter-century. What ended it? Decade or quarter century - how did it subside, and why? Can't help but draw parallels with the covid-19 pandemic -- most people you'll talk to will refer to it in the past tense, even though folks continue to get sick with it. We've stopped most monitoring and data collection, and it most definitely disappeared from the media. The one remaining reliable source of information is the wastewater analysis, which tends to indicate the virus is more or less as present in the population now as it's been in the past few years. My conclusion to all this was kind of a sad lightbulb moment -- all the past pandemics, they didn't magically end. People just got tired, it became too expensive or politically inconvenient, we collectively turned away and pretended "it went away". The quarter-century timeframe on the Antonine plague looks starkly realistic in this light.
  • SoftTalker 2y ago
    Pandemics burn out eventually. The weak are killed off, those who survive either have natural immunity or are strong enough to recover. The pathogen itself also evolves; it's not really good for a virus to kill its host, as that limits its ability to spread.
    • jajko 2y ago
      This is often mentioned but its true only from statistical or 'strategy' point of view, something viruses on their own simply don't possess. They just multiply via various mechanisms, what happens with their environment is well beyong their capability to care or plan around. Their mutations are random, but its proverbial throwing gazillion bunch of stuff on the wall and seeing what sticks. Their numbers and short life span give them maybe 100 million? evolution speed advantage compared to humans. Maybe much more. Think how humans would change in say 100,000 generations.
      • pferde 2y ago
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• codedokode 2y ago
  Here is something that I don't understand. Roman Empire had advanced science, it had lot of people, lot of money and resources, and could have more weapon and soldiers than anyone else. Where did tribes from Asia, who had no advanced technologies, poor economy, no literacy, get the resources and soldiers needed to successfully invade and win against the Empire? Where did they get the weapon? Why they were so numerous if all they did was riding the steppes on their horses? Is riding the steppes on a horse more profitable than building cities, roads, bridges and aqueducts? Also why don't we see similar things in modern times, why don't wee see poor undeveloped nations successfully invading large developed countries?
  • tsimionescu 2y ago
    Today's countries are incomparably more centralized than in the times of Rome. When Georgia fired some missile on Russia (after weeks of harassment by Russian troops at the border), Putin knew about it within seconds. The same thing would have taken days if not weeks in Roman times. And then, marching an army from a neighboring province again would have taken weeks, or even months if you needed to bring them from farther away. Today, your air force can arrive at any point on your (main) territory in a matter of hours, even for a country the size of Russia, and boots on the ground might take a day or two. Also, everything about how war is fought and the impact of weapons has changed dramatically. The difference between the destructive power of the greatest (even non-nuclear) weapons that we have versus more common rifles or rockets is colossal. In Roman times, the difference between the best weapon and an improvised club was tiny by comparison.
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  • conductr 2y ago
    > Also why don't we see similar things in modern times, why don't wee see poor undeveloped nations successfully invading large developed countries? We will, in time. But there’s a huge technology gap in weapons and warfare compared to the past. I believe they could conquer and grow by recruiting the people and resources of the conquered. Making larger targets more achievable. So it was a process. It’s not that a conqueror had the resources and people needed to begin with or got them through peaceful growth. That said, in modern times, the west is so outnumbered and richer than the east that it’s likely only a matter of time before this happens.
• ericmcer 2y ago
  This is interesting because many believe the Black Plague is what caused the Renaissance. Maybe Roman leadership drained themselves ensuring that power structures stayed in place, whereas in post Black Plague Europe survivors were left with tons of land and hierarchies fell to pieces now that workers had so much leverage.
• thenerdhead 2y ago
  What also comes after a plague is a period of recovery and then renaissance. Given many world leaders faltered on their response to SCV2, society will still continue to rebuild and reimagine if it doesn't collapse! Hopefully we can solve the chronic infection/long-term sequelae part soon.
  • Log_out_ 2y ago
    This. Ineffective feudal systems like slavery do not survive plagues. All those noble robber knights starved in there towers while the peasants went to town.
    • DyslexicAtheist 2y ago
      > All those noble robber knights starved in there towers nitpick but ... noble robber knights spelled it "their towers". even the peasants (those rare few who could read and write) would never have spelled it "there towers" :)