Leaders of the late Roman Empire faced at least as many threats from within as without. Over-extension, declining trust in its institutions, falling middle class and a series of ineffective leaders that failed to address these looming threats all contributed to the decline of antiquity’s greatest force.
That’s the theme from “Home Rome Fell,” published in 2010 by British historian Adrian Goldsworthy. I picked it up for my own sense of every amateur historian’s favorite period.
Over nearly 500 pages, the book adds considerable depth to the simple tables we learn in high school. Speaking of which, I recreated one of those over-simplified tables below, heh.
| 753 BCE: Rome is established | 509 BCE: Roman Republic established | 27 BCE: Octavian made first Roman emperor | 476 CE: Germans depose last Roman emperor | 1453: Ottoman Empire overthrows Constantinople |
| Rome’s Period of Kings (244 years) | Roman Republic (482 years) | Roman Empire (503 years) | Byzantine Empire (977 years) | |
Below are my notes for future reference.
My Notes:
- More Roman soldiers were killed by other Romans than by foreigners
- History The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776) by Edward Gibbon is “one of the great works of English literature”
- 476 CE, which is used as the end of the Roman empire, is a somewhat arbitrary line of when one particular puppet empire was dethroned
- “The great paradox of the Roman Empire’s fall is that it did not end because people inside it – and, indeed, outside it – stopped believing in it or wanting it to exist.”
- Late antiquity and early medieval period now preferred terms which downplays the “fall” of Rome
- Gibbon called the period CE 96-180 as the most peaceful of them all
- Marcus Aurelius: respected for Meditarions and well liked but plague and Germanic tribes sparked the beginning of the end
- His son Commodus (180) marks end of Pax Romana
- Dura Europos (present-day Syria) archeology
- Nero and Christians
- Slave trade with barbarian chieftains
- Income inequality extended by Roman conquest
- “The arrival of Rome may well have increased the frequency, and perhaps the scale of warfare beyond the frontiers”
- “Enrich the soldiers and despise everyone else” is a famous phrase attributed to Roman Emperor Septimius Severus
- “It is possible that in the third century some stretches of the empire’s frontiers faced an increased threat from the peoples who lived outside.
- The very existence of the empire, as well as its diplomacy, encouraged the rise of powerful leaders within the tribes. There may have been other factors, too. The archaeological record suggests that the population may have been rising amongst the tribes beyond the Rhine and Danube at this time. It is possible that there were also problems caused by climate change and the exhaustion of soils through farming, although as yet there is not enough evidence to understand this in detail. Sea levels on parts of the North Sea coast do appear to have been rising, so that some parts of the coastline were flooded and in other places the soil became too salty to cultivate.” 119
- Civil wars also played a role