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 ci

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.