It absolutely was. Just greedy oligarchs squabbling over power and stealing as much as they could. No parallels to current events, of course.
"On hearing the news that Rome had "perished", Honorius was initially shocked, thinking the news was in reference to a favourite chicken he had named "Roma".
It was absolutely every bit as stupid as today. People really haven't changed much in 2000 years.
In his History of the Wars, Procopius mentions a likely apocryphal story:
At that time they say that the Emperor Honorius in Ravenna received the message from one of the eunuchs, evidently a keeper of the poultry, that Rome had perished. And he cried out and said, 'And yet it has just eaten from my hands!' For he had a very large cock, Rome by name; and the eunuch comprehending his words said that it was the city of Rome which had perished at the hands of Alaric, and the emperor with a sigh of relief answered quickly: 'But I thought that my fowl Rome had perished.' So great, they say, was the folly with which this emperor was possessed.
Sounds like the French Revolution.
The fall of the Roman Republic certainly was. One of the biggest forces driving it was malignant social inequality. The wealthy patrician class, buoyed by hoards of slave labor seized from the conquered provinces, was dispossessing the Roman citizens who had fought and died to conquer those lands.
Reformers had a variety of ideas on how to solve this. One of the most popular ones was to simply buy land up and give it to Roman citizens that found themselves destitute. An expensive program, but you know what the real stupid thing was?
The money was there. The Roman state had overflowing coffers, vast amounts of gold and other riches taken from those conquered provinces. The reformers didn't even want to raise taxes on the rich to pay for their social redistribution programs. They just wanted to take some of this vast pile of gold the state had won and use some of it to benefit the people who actually did the fighting and dying to win that gold.
But, the elites refused to share. They wanted it all for themselves. And eventually they lost all their power to the Caesars as a consequence.
Humanity is really fucking good at making the exact same mistake over and over and never even coming close to learning anything from it.
We learn more and more each time, actually, but all the very rich people support these movements which include a huge infusion of anti-intellectualism, since the insanely wealthy really, really want to keep their (ill-gotten) gains.
This is how all the big super-popular podcasts hosts are hyper-masculine misogynist far-right dude-bros like Matt Walsh, Ben Shapiro and Joe Rogan. Like PragerU, they've all been supported with infusions of money until they became functional franchises of their own.
NSDAP in Germany also drew large donations from the ownership class eager to stay the ownership class in the face of the rise of communism. Essentially they (including some Jewish donors failing to predict their own arrest and evacuation) sought any opposition party, who was the fascist autocrat party.
So, pretty much like any other era, really.
One of those humorous questions I'd love a serious answer to.
For one, Rome didn't just keel over, it was a long and drawn out process over centuries, and even after the accepted date 476, there were still splinters calling itself "Roman Empire"...
And I truly hope that history will look back on the USA in the same way, and see how the decline didn't start (but certainly accelarated) in 2016.
Something calling itself The Holy Roman Empire was around until the 1800s. My grandmother knew people who were contemporaries, and I’m in my thirties.
To be clear, I don’t think it’s really the same as Rome, but they seemed to.
The Holy Roman Empire emerged centuries after the fall of the Western Roman Empire and had little direct institutional or cultural continuity with classical Rome. The "Roman" aspect was more of an ideological concept and an attempt to invoke the prestige of the Roman legacy and the idea of a unified Christian empire in the West. So despite the name it was fundamentally a different entity from the ancient Roman Empire.
It wouldn't at all be surprising if part of the US actually survives and prospers as an independent nation whilst other parts fall down to an Economic level that matches the wealth producing capability of their economic frameworks and their workers (I reckon a post-Oil independent Texas would be at basically the same level as Argentina).
Better even: an outcome such as Britain after the Empire - a long drawn fizzle from primacy into mediocrity with delusions of grandeur - is realistic and possibly the best possible one.
Even post Imperial Britain had periods were most had a pretty decent life, such as the one that followed WWII and the rebuilding of the country, though the societal structures that underpinned that have been progressively destroyed since Thatcher and the results are pretty visible by now.
American merely stopping being top dog ain't too bad, but some of the other possible outcomes can be pretty nasty and that's just the ones were one or more Democratic nations are what's left of it. Descent into Authoritarianism would be the really ugly shit, not just for America but also the rest of the World on account of all the nukes.
I was promised that the end of civilization was hedonism and there would be orgies.
I think we're just gonna get cleanup detail now. This isn't what i signed up for.
/s
I think the hedonism and orgies were only for the rich in Rome. So probably the same is happening now. But we aren’t rich…
It's time we redistributed the orgies!
Hey, the poor had orgies too! Crappy orgies, but orgies nonetheless!
You mean you didn’t get to ride Epstein’s personal jet out to his private island ?
The orgies occur, as we learnt. We just ain't invited.
"I approve this message."
Sorry, we get the Harlan Ellison and of civilization, not the Iain M Banks version.
What with all the leaded water and wine, it was likely even more stupid.
A lot of the people running the show still had a pretty decent amount of exposure to lead thanks to automotive fuels. Leaded gasoline didn’t start to get phased out of US fuel system until 1975 (phasing it out of regular octane) and wasn’t full phased out until 1996.
It was actually such a major source of lead exposure for children that it has led (ha) to a hypothesis that a sharp decline in crime rates beginning in the 1990s is directly attributable to the phaseout of leaded gasoline. Of course other things may have influenced this or even caused it like increased access to abortion services, social welfare programs, etc. it is also linked to higher cognitive functioning since then; new kids are more smarter
Elon musk left South Africa in 1989 and they didn’t phase it out until 2006. He had much more recent exposure though someone like Trump, born 1946, had much longer exposure (at least 29 years before the levels started to drop significantly)
fun fact: despite the above leaded gas still remains in the us. It is allowed for racing nonsense though nascar stopped using it in 2007 and F1 in 1992 said no more than 5mg/l of lead, and at this point they claim to use unleaded fuels.
BUT the big one is airline fuel. Every day constantly passing over all of us are thousands of airplanes spewing neurotoxic lead. And the crazy thing is lead in gasoline isn’t some magic thing; it’s an octane booster, an anti knocking agent. There are many other ways to achieve this, though ethanol is not suitable for planes. The reason planes still use lead is because of cost and the complexity of getting FAA approval of a potential alternative fuel. The incentive to do so is not that high because airplane fuel is ultimately a very small portion of total fuel sales.
A gigantic toxic nightmare above us and we tolerate it because it’s easy to just not think about it and it would potentially cost a little bit to not have fucking lead in our air
The latter half of this about aviation fuel went off the rails. Much of it is exaggerated or straight up inaccurate.
First off, lead is used in fuel to protect non-hardened valves used in old engines. It is not just an octane booster, and it’s not some giant conspiracy that’s keeping it in use. Modern engines don’t need it, but people aren’t running it just to be dicks. It’s part of the engine design in really old stuff, which is a ton of old aircraft that haven’t been rebuilt and updated to use unleaded fuel. Converting and certifying these old engines for UL is prohibitively expensive for many hobbyist pilots, but on the whole, leaded avgas has been being phased out for years, and it’s becoming less common every day.
Furthermore, airlines do not use leaded fuel because jet fuel does not contain lead. 100LL (100 octane low lead) avgas is used in small, older piston-engine aircraft, but that accounts for an incredibly tiny fraction of aviation fuel consumption, and there are unleaded avgas formulations available for modern piston engines that can use it. While leaded avgas does contribute to lead pollution, its effect is heavily concentrated around small airports with older private aircraft. Avgas is not a significant contributor to lead exposure for the average person.
So the crazies and their chemtrail conspiracy were kind of correct?
It's funny that Rome is considered a good historical comparison, when the British Empire existed less than a century ago.
Rome had an agrarian slave economy. Britain, a very modern financial system and industrial economy. If there's a wealth of insight to be drawn from comparisons, it's probably gonna be from the latter and not the former.
Except the fall of time was a gradual things that occurred over hundreds of years, with no clear delimitation. Not one specific tiping point that occurred within two months of a specific leader taking over.
Well, I'd agree and disagree, but you can pretty much point at the last 100 years and draw a lot of parallels between the fall of our republic and the fall of their republic. Emphasis on the collapse of representative democracy into naked empire.
In fact Nero's reign was this stupid. All the John's revelation mythology that informs Christian eschatology is (biblical academic consensus submits) about Rome under Nero. Nero was notoriously as vein as Trump and is probably the same sociological phenomenon.
King Heron is once again eating all the frogs.
At least Nero could play an instrument.
King Heron is once again eating all the frogs.
Or turning them gay.
I got a follow up question to the biblical academic consensus - where do you get that from? I mean literally, since I always wanted to kind of read the bible with these kinds of interpretations, but I absolutely don't know where to go for a source like this. Any tips?
I think a good starter might be a YouTube channel called Esoterica.
Check out this YouTube channel from Dan McClellan. He's a biblical scholar with a Bachelor's (BA) in Near East Studies from Brigham Young University with a minor in Classical Greek, a Master's (MSt) in Jewish Studies from Oxford, a Master's (MA) in Biblical Studies from Trinity Western University, and a Doctorate (PhD) in Theology and Religion from the University of Exeter.
He's gotten kind of popular over the past couple of years debunking religious nuts on TikTok, but he's got a lot of very informative videos on the Bible and biblical history, what certain books or passages were actually talking about, and so on. He presents things in a clear and understandable way, without fluff or editorializing. I can't recommend him enough.
Nero has been pretty much redeemed in modern scholarship. The majority of the stories about him stems from slander written by avowed enemies of the Julio-Claudians (Tacitus and Suetonius in particular), later amplified by Christian writers who carried a special grudge against him. The archaeological evidence suggests he was a capable ruler, who carried out lots of large scale projects that were pretty beneficial overall, and he certainly didn't set Rome on fire and fiddled while he watched it burn.
Just gotta swap lead poisoning drinking water with checks notes Lead poisoning in drinking water, the air in the form of emissions and microplastics!
(I know lead was dropped from most gasoline in the 90s, but the effects linger. Also in some places there’s exemptions where small planes can use leaded gas to this day)
It's both sad and funny how even in our own downfall, we're still comparing ourselves to fucking Rome. An empire that 1) Was actually nothing like ours 2) No nation state should ever be emulating because it was awful 3) Lasted a thousand+ years and 4) Literally murdered the god and prophet of our primary religion.
We are not the heirs of that ancient Mediterranean hierarchy, nothing existing today is or will be. The god damn Rome mind virus. Let go of it.
really nice roads though.... ;) /s
It was dumber than you think. There was an emperor who reacted to 'rome falling' with thinking his pet pigeon, whom he called Rome, had died. When he learned the city had fallen he was actually relieved and didn't give a fuck.
I’m sure it did they just didn’t have social media and cell phones to document the fall in 4k.
I saw the documentary Gladiator 2 and can confirm, the fall of Rome was this stupid.
Is it falling? Feels like it’s just gonna prop itself into a fascist perpetuity like Russia or North Korea.
Yeah that's the fall buddy
Right, I guess in hindsight it feels more like the inevitable endgame/result of capitalism.
It really feels more like the fall of Rome to me. Or the 3rd Reich.
We should start making bets based on our feelings ;-)
I'm pretty sure it had equally stupid moments, like the still today infamous moment where Nero played whilst Rome burned.
Whilst when it come to History decades blur into a handful of stories and us non-Historians just learn it like that with explanations about why it happened, living in the actual thing moment by moment without the benefit of hindsight and an overview of the whole thing to put all pieces together is a very different experience.
I wouldn't at all be surprised if in the fullness of time all of what's going on now will be pieced together with what came before and what comes next, with some nice explanation about, say, how the the neoliberal political experiment of the late XX century with it's heavy emphasis on weakening Governmental oversight of the Economy re-enacted in the early XXI century many of the same problems with the Economic structure and the Political capture by the Merchant class of the early XX century causing a similar resurgence in Fascism and the fall of Democracy in several nations. (Certainly History seems to rhyming again).
Future generations will mainly see it as bunch of high level descriptions of the main events knowing fully what the outcome was, without the fear and anxiety of experiencing it as it develops without knowing what comes next.
like the still today infamous moment where Nero played whilst Rome burned.
That didn't really happen though.
Also, even if it did happen, it was centuries from the fall of the Roman Empire.
The late empire was a pretty silly place. That's what happens when the elite has to pretend a failing system works.
Most empires were like that. As a system gets bigger, it's possible set of outputs (and ways to solve issues) actually decreases.
Angkor civilization: climate crisis? Build more temples to please the gods!
Assyrian empire: unsafe borders? Vanguish our enemies!
USA: wealth inequality? Blame the immigrants!
Russia: fading relevance? Expand our borders!
Without a shared righteous moral code, what else can we expect but men being wolves to their fellow men and a community's inevitable implosion?
It’s the perennial Problem of Evil (or, in modern terms, the problem of Cluster B Personality Disorders).
And nobody has ever been able to solve it. Not religion, not moral philosophy, not civic or moral education, not political philosophy, none of it. The sociopaths and narcissists will always infiltrate, corrupt, and eventually corrode, any institution, public or private, wherein they find they can gather power, prestige, and wealth.
Discover a cure for Sociopathy and Narcissism, and you solve 95% of humanity’s problems overnight.
Honestly, I think pure monotheism (believing we will all have to explain our choices to the Creator, the Merciful, the Almighty, who gave us this life and universe for free and asks us only not to corrupt nor senselessly destroy the rest of his creation, more importantly, and acting like it) works pretty well, but I guess you could see my bias from my username, lol.
IME, it's not the few sociopaths and psychologically extreme that ruin it though, it's those who aren't but through a lack of effort put into thought and emotional growth end up following these wolves in sheep clothing. No, "I was just following orders/the rules/what they said" is not and has never been a good defense, and God won't like it either because if he didn't want you to think you would've been a pig or a mouse, idk, lol. So, for this vast majority of regular, good spirited and passably reasonable people, I do think believing in God works. But we don't have that in the West, we have the more satanic "nothing is true (the final conclusion of moral relativists) and nothing is forbidden", whether you're an atheist, a pagan or an American styled Catholic...
Are you the kind of monotheist that thinks that Project2025's vision of state enforced Christianity is the right idea, or are you the kind that thinks it's exactly the wrong idea?
Lol. I haven't read much about it but a quick search showed me that the people at the top of that project are basically Biblical villains. 😅
Probably was, but you didn't have every single citizen, plebeian and slave following it live 24/7 with every single move by any member of the agora being scrutinised and memed to death.
