4 ms·

Rome Fell and Nobody Noticed

150 points by fkozlowski 3mo ago

brador 3mo ago
The fall of empire merely affects a nations ability to handle chaotic unexpected events.
mentalgear 3mo ago
One of the engines of collapse of Rome was the corrupt financial elite extending to the government that designed rules to extract maximum wealth for the elites, ignoring the long-term health of the economy. By the end, the government was essentially squeezing a dry sponge. Seems like civilisation has learned nothing.
- bamboozled 3mo ago
  The elites have, and that’s what they’re doing in the USA. As for the plebs. It’s expensive bread and UFC on the Whitehouse lawn.
- skybrian 3mo ago
  In ancient times, wealth was based on controlling farmland and extracting food from peasants. Modern economies don’t work like that, so what you can learn from historical analogies is limited.
  - chadgpt3 3mo ago
    They're still based on controlling shares and extracting profits from workers. Very similar.
    - skybrian 3mo ago
      Oddly, for some companies, the money comes from advertisers. When this started becoming a thing, I figured it would be a bubble and eventually businesses would wise up, but they've kept on paying for decades now.
- diordiderot 3mo ago
  You'd think that an army full of oppressed Roman citizens would've overthrown them right.
  - mentalgear 3mo ago
    Yes, you'd think that. There are historical precedents of high-civilisation collapse (in South America) and Europe (French Revolution). Sometimes people rise up and something better arises from it. Sometimes they don't, but the tainted civilisation will still collapse one way or another under it's own corruption.
derbOac 3mo ago
This makes an important point, and is important to think about, but I'm also interested in how societies go to that brink and come back. I suspect there's a bit of bias in this, as you don't hear as much about the nations that come to the point of collapse and then somehow immediately recover, you hear more about those that disintegrate into decades of chaos and disorganization. The essay also points to something else on my mind a lot lately, which is, when does that continuation of the status quo stop, and why? At what point did these societies start to see themselves as something else, and why? Is it always due to some fundamental breaking down of some governmental or military covenant?
- unsnap_biceps 3mo ago
  Can you give any examples of societies that went to the brink and reversed course? I can't think of any, but I'd be fascinated to learn more about examples who have.
  - vkou 3mo ago
    In contemporary societies, you can view any peaceful transition from a strong-monarch to a parliamentary democracy as such an example. None of that happened out of the largess of the monarch, it happened because pressure and unrest has been building up, and he sees the writing on the wall, and would rather cede power peacefully rather than go the way of the Bourbons[1]. There are many situations in history when people on one side back down right before shit hits the fan. Another good example of that was British subjugation of India. Doesn't matter how much hot gas Churchill would emit about keeping India forever British, when push came to shove, Clement was sympathetic to India's desire for freedom, and did not choose to plunge the empire into colonial war. -- [1] Which was up the steps to a guillotine, by order of the National Convention.
    - mejutoco 3mo ago
      Funny enough, in Spain the bourbons went in the other direction in recent history (1975): republic -> civil war and dictatorship and then the bourbon monarch that was the dictator successor had a role in transitioning to parliamentary monarchy.
comrade1234 3mo ago
I've always liked stories about the post-Roman empire when you still had evidence of a richer and more civilized time that your ancestors lived in but you were stuck in your time. I know it's probably fiction, but I always got that fix from King Arthur stories. It took a couple of hundred years after that before Charlemagne and law and civilization again.
- Planktonne 3mo ago
  If you haven't yet read The Eagle of the Ninth and its sequels, you might really like them. They're set in Britain that is slowly going post-Roman, and the change in culture is a significant theme.
  - dotancohen 3mo ago
    Was that the book that opens with a child running barefoot, and later playing an instrument to entertain guests against his desires? I began reading that book four decades ago and have been unable to find it since.
- recursivecaveat 3mo ago
  I think it was a pretty common pre-modern (not by any means extinct today) academic view that the arc of history was generally towards the decline of civilizations. Like our ancestors were great and amazing and we're just kindof pale imitations of them. It probably doesn't hurt that when the two most important sources of authority in your society are noble title/blood and religion, your ancestors are much closer connected to the source of those. Modern fantasy picks up this trope, where the most powerful magic and the greatest structures etc are always in the past, only being rediscovered by people in the now.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
theoeirjfb 3mo ago
I do not get the obsession with fall of Rome being a bad thing. Look at taxation, look at big part of population being in slavery. Their military machine, roads and civilisation was basically just to crash rebelions! Today we have taxation around 30 to 70 percent. Imagine if taxes would be at 10% and we would not have to sponsor all sort of "adventures".
- CoastalCoder 3mo ago
  That's an interesting point and worth discussing. I'm not sure why you got down voted. Maybe people are perceiving some subtext that I'm not.
  - TalkingCodeMonk 3mo ago
    > I'm not sure why you got down voted. Maybe people are perceiving some subtext that I'm not. Probably because the vast majority of politicians who attack taxation do so specifically to destroy social programs and quality of life multipliers, instead of the war machine or any other area of bearucratic waste, inefficiency, or corruption. For example "No new wars" becomes "No, new wars!" and all the people who screamed about government spending clap as the military spend doubles, or feign disgust but fall in line eventually because "the other guy would've done the same" as admitting they were wrong or conned is inconceivable. Also, literally nobody is paying a 70% effective tax rate anywhere. I'd be surprised if you could find anyone paying more than 50% without misinformation. Even when taxes were 90% for a short period of time, for an extreme minority, there were loopholes that meant none of them ever paid anything close to 90%.
  - cucumber3732842 3mo ago
    >I'm not sure why you got down voted Because he questioned taxes and the weekend crowd thinks that's heretical and won't even entertain the discussion of why things are that way let alone whether they're good or bad.
    - satvikpendem 3mo ago
      I had just the sort of discussion you're talking about on that big thread about PG's "how to make a billion dollars article," where for some reason people couldn't even fathom that there was even a way to tell whether certain taxes are good or bad, and couldn't understand the logic of doing so. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48526360#48527840 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48526360#48527840
joshcsimmons 3mo ago
Yes! Partially this was due to various people complaining about the decline of Rome for centuries (sky is falling). The parallels are unmistakeable. Sam Altman’s $27 Million House Burns: This Is How An Empire Dies https://youtu.be/OONViaKRs1k https://youtu.be/OONViaKRs1k
Gimpei 3mo ago
To be pedantic, the Roman Empire did not fall in 472. It lived on in the eastern Mediterranean for another one thousand years. The Eastern Romans even took back a fair amount of western Roman holdings for a bit. The people who actually killed the Roman Empire were the Franks, permanently weakening it during the Latin occupation.
- thomassmith65 3mo ago
  The Catholic church is an institution of the Roman Empire, and it's still around. That puts things in perspective, I find, and makes me wonder if 100 thousand years from now, historians will just lump the Romans and us into the same bucket.
  - hyperman1 3mo ago
    I've always thought of the USA as the east Roman Empire of the British Empire. The seat of the throne moved to the white house, but the USA is still culturally close to the UK. Except for the religion, which seems to come from The Netherlands and Germany.
    - mathgeek 3mo ago
      > Except for the religion, which seems to come from The Netherlands and Germany. Which religion brings those thoughts to mind? As an American I often find myself combining a handful of the American denominations into one, but I’m interested to hear what an outsider sees projected.
      - hyperman1 3mo ago
        Basically, the whole protestant faction. A sibling comment mentions Lutheran (German) and Mennonites (Dutch). There is of course catholicism from the Irish, but the Anglicans are suspiciously small.
        mike_hearn 3mo ago
mjhay 3mo ago
Ironically enough, the thing that really did Roman Italy it was Justinian’s reconquest. The Gothic War was absolutely devastating. Yersinia pestis didn’t help either, of course.
- 627467 3mo ago
  And similarly, the cruzader conquest of the East
vintermann 3mo ago
This question depends as much on you as it does on history, because it's about identity: what made Rome Rome? To say "Rome fell and nobody noticed", you have to have a different definition of Rome - or maybe we should say, assert a different essence of Rome - than the people who lived at the time.
- fkozlowski 3mo ago
  Yeah, that's a good point. Even though Latin had diverged to the point that reading Cicero required explicit schooling — the post-476 Romans did consider themselves Roman and fully the descendants of the late Republican / early Imperial period. I'm mostly arguing that people overindex on the political changes and don't see the ground level continuity. Map color changed != they're not Roman any more. Regardless, I do enjoy asking "what made Rome Rome?" — I like the idea of the Byzantines being Roman in 1453 even though at that point it was tenuous.

150 points by fkozlowski 3mo ago

The fall of empire merely affects a nations ability to handle chaotic unexpected events.

One of the engines of collapse of Rome was the corrupt financial elite extending to the government that designed rules to extract maximum wealth for the elites, ignoring the long-term health of the economy. By the end, the government was essentially squeezing a dry sponge. Seems like civilisation has learned nothing.

bamboozled 3mo ago
The elites have, and that’s what they’re doing in the USA. As for the plebs. It’s expensive bread and UFC on the Whitehouse lawn.
skybrian 3mo ago
In ancient times, wealth was based on controlling farmland and extracting food from peasants. Modern economies don’t work like that, so what you can learn from historical analogies is limited.
- chadgpt3 3mo ago
  They're still based on controlling shares and extracting profits from workers. Very similar.
  - skybrian 3mo ago
    Oddly, for some companies, the money comes from advertisers. When this started becoming a thing, I figured it would be a bubble and eventually businesses would wise up, but they've kept on paying for decades now.
diordiderot 3mo ago
You'd think that an army full of oppressed Roman citizens would've overthrown them right.
- mentalgear 3mo ago
  Yes, you'd think that. There are historical precedents of high-civilisation collapse (in South America) and Europe (French Revolution). Sometimes people rise up and something better arises from it. Sometimes they don't, but the tainted civilisation will still collapse one way or another under it's own corruption.

derbOac 3mo ago

This makes an important point, and is important to think about, but I'm also interested in how societies go to that brink and come back. I suspect there's a bit of bias in this, as you don't hear as much about the nations that come to the point of collapse and then somehow immediately recover, you hear more about those that disintegrate into decades of chaos and disorganization. The essay also points to something else on my mind a lot lately, which is, when does that continuation of the status quo stop, and why? At what point did these societies start to see themselves as something else, and why? Is it always due to some fundamental breaking down of some governmental or military covenant?

unsnap_biceps 3mo ago
Can you give any examples of societies that went to the brink and reversed course? I can't think of any, but I'd be fascinated to learn more about examples who have.
- vkou 3mo ago
  In contemporary societies, you can view any peaceful transition from a strong-monarch to a parliamentary democracy as such an example. None of that happened out of the largess of the monarch, it happened because pressure and unrest has been building up, and he sees the writing on the wall, and would rather cede power peacefully rather than go the way of the Bourbons[1]. There are many situations in history when people on one side back down right before shit hits the fan. Another good example of that was British subjugation of India. Doesn't matter how much hot gas Churchill would emit about keeping India forever British, when push came to shove, Clement was sympathetic to India's desire for freedom, and did not choose to plunge the empire into colonial war. -- [1] Which was up the steps to a guillotine, by order of the National Convention.
  - mejutoco 3mo ago
    Funny enough, in Spain the bourbons went in the other direction in recent history (1975): republic -> civil war and dictatorship and then the bourbon monarch that was the dictator successor had a role in transitioning to parliamentary monarchy.

comrade1234 3mo ago

I've always liked stories about the post-Roman empire when you still had evidence of a richer and more civilized time that your ancestors lived in but you were stuck in your time. I know it's probably fiction, but I always got that fix from King Arthur stories. It took a couple of hundred years after that before Charlemagne and law and civilization again.

Planktonne 3mo ago
If you haven't yet read The Eagle of the Ninth and its sequels, you might really like them. They're set in Britain that is slowly going post-Roman, and the change in culture is a significant theme.
- dotancohen 3mo ago
  Was that the book that opens with a child running barefoot, and later playing an instrument to entertain guests against his desires? I began reading that book four decades ago and have been unable to find it since.
recursivecaveat 3mo ago
I think it was a pretty common pre-modern (not by any means extinct today) academic view that the arc of history was generally towards the decline of civilizations. Like our ancestors were great and amazing and we're just kindof pale imitations of them. It probably doesn't hurt that when the two most important sources of authority in your society are noble title/blood and religion, your ancestors are much closer connected to the source of those. Modern fantasy picks up this trope, where the most powerful magic and the greatest structures etc are always in the past, only being rediscovered by people in the now.

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

theoeirjfb 3mo ago

I do not get the obsession with fall of Rome being a bad thing. Look at taxation, look at big part of population being in slavery. Their military machine, roads and civilisation was basically just to crash rebelions! Today we have taxation around 30 to 70 percent. Imagine if taxes would be at 10% and we would not have to sponsor all sort of "adventures".

CoastalCoder 3mo ago
That's an interesting point and worth discussing. I'm not sure why you got down voted. Maybe people are perceiving some subtext that I'm not.
- TalkingCodeMonk 3mo ago
  > I'm not sure why you got down voted. Maybe people are perceiving some subtext that I'm not. Probably because the vast majority of politicians who attack taxation do so specifically to destroy social programs and quality of life multipliers, instead of the war machine or any other area of bearucratic waste, inefficiency, or corruption. For example "No new wars" becomes "No, new wars!" and all the people who screamed about government spending clap as the military spend doubles, or feign disgust but fall in line eventually because "the other guy would've done the same" as admitting they were wrong or conned is inconceivable. Also, literally nobody is paying a 70% effective tax rate anywhere. I'd be surprised if you could find anyone paying more than 50% without misinformation. Even when taxes were 90% for a short period of time, for an extreme minority, there were loopholes that meant none of them ever paid anything close to 90%.
- cucumber3732842 3mo ago
  >I'm not sure why you got down voted Because he questioned taxes and the weekend crowd thinks that's heretical and won't even entertain the discussion of why things are that way let alone whether they're good or bad.
  - satvikpendem 3mo ago
    I had just the sort of discussion you're talking about on that big thread about PG's "how to make a billion dollars article," where for some reason people couldn't even fathom that there was even a way to tell whether certain taxes are good or bad, and couldn't understand the logic of doing so. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48526360#48527840 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48526360#48527840

joshcsimmons 3mo ago

Yes! Partially this was due to various people complaining about the decline of Rome for centuries (sky is falling). The parallels are unmistakeable. Sam Altman’s $27 Million House Burns: This Is How An Empire Dies https://youtu.be/OONViaKRs1k https://youtu.be/OONViaKRs1k

Gimpei 3mo ago

To be pedantic, the Roman Empire did not fall in 472. It lived on in the eastern Mediterranean for another one thousand years. The Eastern Romans even took back a fair amount of western Roman holdings for a bit. The people who actually killed the Roman Empire were the Franks, permanently weakening it during the Latin occupation.

thomassmith65 3mo ago
The Catholic church is an institution of the Roman Empire, and it's still around. That puts things in perspective, I find, and makes me wonder if 100 thousand years from now, historians will just lump the Romans and us into the same bucket.
- hyperman1 3mo ago
  I've always thought of the USA as the east Roman Empire of the British Empire. The seat of the throne moved to the white house, but the USA is still culturally close to the UK. Except for the religion, which seems to come from The Netherlands and Germany.
  - mathgeek 3mo ago
    > Except for the religion, which seems to come from The Netherlands and Germany. Which religion brings those thoughts to mind? As an American I often find myself combining a handful of the American denominations into one, but I’m interested to hear what an outsider sees projected.
    - hyperman1 3mo ago
      Basically, the whole protestant faction. A sibling comment mentions Lutheran (German) and Mennonites (Dutch). There is of course catholicism from the Irish, but the Anglicans are suspiciously small.
      - mike_hearn 3mo ago

mjhay 3mo ago

Ironically enough, the thing that really did Roman Italy it was Justinian’s reconquest. The Gothic War was absolutely devastating. Yersinia pestis didn’t help either, of course.

627467 3mo ago
And similarly, the cruzader conquest of the East

vintermann 3mo ago

This question depends as much on you as it does on history, because it's about identity: what made Rome Rome? To say "Rome fell and nobody noticed", you have to have a different definition of Rome - or maybe we should say, assert a different essence of Rome - than the people who lived at the time.

fkozlowski 3mo ago
Yeah, that's a good point. Even though Latin had diverged to the point that reading Cicero required explicit schooling — the post-476 Romans did consider themselves Roman and fully the descendants of the late Republican / early Imperial period. I'm mostly arguing that people overindex on the political changes and don't see the ground level continuity. Map color changed != they're not Roman any more. Regardless, I do enjoy asking "what made Rome Rome?" — I like the idea of the Byzantines being Roman in 1453 even though at that point it was tenuous.