Are you talking about the Fall of Rome the city or Rome the Empire?
After the murder of Pertinax on 28 March 193, the Praetorian guard announced that the throne was to be sold to the man who would pay the highest price. Titus Flavius Claudius Sulpicianus, prefect of Rome and Pertinax’s father-in-law, who was in the Praetorian camp ostensibly to calm the troops, began making offers for the throne. Meanwhile, Julianus also arrived at the camp, and since his entrance was barred, shouted out offers to the guard. After hours of bidding, Sulpicianus promised 20,000 sesterces to every soldier; Julianus, fearing that Sulpicianus would gain the throne, then offered 25,000. The guards closed with the offer of Julianus, threw open the gates, and proclaimed him emperor. Threatened by the military, the Senate also declared him emperor. His wife and his daughter both received the title Augusta.
We really did shape western society after Rome, didn’t we?
Not sure what you mean by ‘this stupid’, but in general: no. It was a complex process that unfolded over centuries and in different places in different ways and at different speeds. The reasons were economic, political, climatic, cultural and military.
For a really well done deep-dive, I can recommend the Fall of Rome podcast: https://www.podbean.com/podcast-detail/gkvb5-433d2/The-Fall-of-Rome-Podcast
Yes
No, trump has got till the midterms or he’s gonna lose a significant amount of power, so he’s trying to speedrun the fascist dictatorship takeover. rome took hundreds of years to crumble and fall.
This collapse didn’t start in January.
Nobody’s got that kind of time any more.
The “Fall of Rome” conflates a lot of different events, covering over a thousand years:
- The end of the Republic
- The Crisis of the Third Century
- The fall of the western empire
- The fall of Constantinople to the Fourth Crusade
- The capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman Empire
The one most usually thought of is the fall of the western empire… and while it was preceded by some stupid policy decisions, they weren’t notably more stupid than many other decisions the empire made over the previous five centuries. From an institutional perspective, it was actually a relatively boring period.
(Many of the other comments here are pointing to things that were pretty much constants for most of the empire’s existence, so if you want to blame them for the fall, you need to explain why the empire didn’t fall 500 years earlier.)
This, people love to think Rome fell because of moral degeneracy and corruption, but that was probably at its height under Commodus or Nero when the empire was very stable and secure. The later emperors were relatively modest and to an increasing degree impotent, so it mattered less if they were incompetent, though many of them were, and that didn’t help.
The reality is empires all eventually fall, they lose the military edge that won them the empire, either by degrading or the “barbarians” learning and catching up, and the forces that were kept in check by the military tear the empire apart.
Yeah probably. Successive emperors selfishly fighting among themselves for power, weakening their Nation, destroying the Foundation of their state, making alliances with people that cannot be trusted, all that’s a Hallmark of the fall of Rome. Both Falls actually.
Just as an aside I don’t know why my voice to text is capitalizing certain words in that paragraph but I’m too lazy to fix it.
Thanks for the explanatory postscript, I was gonna ask…
From what I’ve heard from friends who have Rome as their special interest: yes.
Absolutely. The circus is the biggest tell of an empire crumbling.
What the fuck, what even is real anymore lol
The circus is where all the outcasts of society go to form family. It’s often satirical, aggressively leftist, and deeply connected to the arts.
Signed, a circus performer
The decline and fall of the Roman empire was something that took place over the course of centuries, involved events largely out of the control of individuals and affected very large areas and very diverse and different cultures.
I simply may not know enough about it, but I wouldn’t call it “stupid”. It’s just not a word that I can see applying here. It wasn’t a historical event, more like some kind of plate tectonics process.
history happens slowly then suddenly.
the political class of the western empire had been pulling itself apart for centuries.
history happens slowly then suddenly
With how fast we are able to communicate, I’d say it’s likely to happen faster this time around. When the emperor does something that fucks over the populace, they can hear about it within minutes. During Roman times it could have taken months.
i agree, but its peaks and valleys i suppose. the fall of US empire is still in the ‘slow’ stage i suspect.
The fall of which Rome?
I still contend that this isn’t equivalent to the fall of the Empire. It’s equivalent to the fall of the republic and the rise of the empire.
The US isn’t dealing with Astragoths and Huns pillaging their cites. They’re dealing with an exceptionally stupid version of Caesar trying to usurp power and proclaim an empire.
Buckle up, America. If you don’t take care of this now, your in for about 437 more years of this shit.
Kind of.
Mostly yes. As others have written, it involved some money issues. There were also problems with logistics and agriculture, Rome had an absurdly high population for that time. That stuff just has to be managed and managed well.
And also you had some external factors.
And also the religious shift from the old greek gods to christianity, were suddenly a whole bunch of stuff was “against god” the way you would think it is now. It is unclear how much knowledge was lost and exactly why, but the facts remain that you have relatively skilled military doctors in one century and then that disappearing into thin air in the next.
The thing you can observe at the moment, the question of loyalty from universities, into giving positions to loyal or just compliant people over skilled people is roughly the same process. Not the same, because obviously they didn’t have our modern universities, but replace it for any other system of education and actual skill and merit based system and you get the gist of what happened.
Well we’re not gonna have that problem America just hit peak 18-year-old in colleges and it’s only going to be smaller class sizes in a couple years or maybe even now from here on out
Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
-Marx
Nowadays with mass media and the internet, we get aware of much more of the stupid shit happening all over than a common person would in the Western Roman Empire because stupid shit anywhere can be brought to people’s attention everywhere quickly, and since stupid stands out it does get brought to people’s attention.
Also real power is more centralized nowadays, also because of the speed with which information and people can travel enabling more centralised Command & Control systems.
So I would say that a fall due to internal social and political degenrence will happen faster and look a lot more stupid to bystanders, than back in Roman Empire days. Also the density of stupid timewise is probably higher now since everything is happening faster and in a lot more places at the same time.
That said, what’s happening in the US has been developing since at least Clinton’s time, maybe even Reagan’s, maybe longer than that - it’s just that the earlier stages which made the structural changes and created the conditions for what’s happening now, weren’t obvious to anybody but a handful of experts in some domains who of course weren’t given airtime on mass media or were deemed kooks by the rest of people when they did get airtime: any system’s eventual doom is guaranteed as soon as criticism of the structurs system itself is repressed or even de facto suppressed, though it generally takes time for it go through the stagnancy and then the internal-pillaging stages that lead to it cracking and collapsing due to becoming unable to serve most people in it.
Say what you will about the modern day, but at least we don’t have a slave revolt so vicious and organized that it threatens the entire country
