August 1, 2023
Dear Friends and Family,
The longest standing empire (superpower) in history and the one that has been studied the most is the Roman Empire which lasted five centuries. This segment provides a very summarized overview of its rise, its conditions at the top, and its decline following the Big Cycle format of segments 2 & 3.
Importantly, the segment provides the categories of analysis to assess the rise, top, and decline from three different sources. Such categories are remarkably similar. These categories will be utilized to analyze America’s current situation to provide insight and hopefully wisdom on a couple of items. First, to further determine whether or not we are in decline. If so, then second, to provide a problem definition in each category which is needed before we can effectively determine courses of action to take to reverse the decline. These analyses will consume segments 5 through 13.
The categories I have synthesized from the three sources in this segment are:
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
The longest standing empire (superpower) in history and the one that has been studied the most is the Roman Empire which lasted five centuries. This segment provides a very summarized overview of its rise, its conditions at the top, and its decline following the Big Cycle format of segments 2 & 3.
Importantly, the segment provides the categories of analysis to assess the rise, top, and decline from three different sources. Such categories are remarkably similar. These categories will be utilized to analyze America’s current situation to provide insight and hopefully wisdom on a couple of items. First, to further determine whether or not we are in decline. If so, then second, to provide a problem definition in each category which is needed before we can effectively determine courses of action to take to reverse the decline. These analyses will consume segments 5 through 13.
The categories I have synthesized from the three sources in this segment are:
- Division from Within
- Weakening of Values
- Political Instability
- Overspending
- Economic Troubles
- National Security
- Weakening of Legions (primarily military)
- Invasion by Foreigners
Happy Learning,
Harley
SEEKING WISDOM FOR AMERICA – SEGMENT 4
WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM ROME – OVERVIEW: EXCERPTS
THE RISE OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE: Why was it Rome – and not another city-state – that created a polity around all sides of the sea, uniting most of Europe and the entire north African coast with the lands of ancient empires in the Middle East?
The starting point was conquest, as with most empires. But sustaining and expanding control depended not just on violence but on the ongoing linkage of human and economic resources to central power. Creative political organization enabled Rome to provide for a huge and spread-out army to give people incentives for cooperation with the imperial center, and to propagate a persuasive culture based on military prowess, rule-based order, divinely sanctioned authority, and the virtues of civic life. Romans’ political and cultural innovations – their citizenship, their law, for a time their republic, drew old and new elites into government and army.
Around 500 BCE, the Romans replaced their king with a republic – a political innovation of enormous consequence. Most of the enormous territory that we know as the Roman Empire was acquired from the second century BCE, to the first century CE. During most of this time, Rome was ruled by elected representatives of its people. But it was only in 27 BCE when Augustus took the title of emperor that elected leadership gave way to one man’s lifetime rule.
Government Innovation: The source of law was the Roman people. Although magistrates, including the consuls, were lawmakers by virtue of their ability to issue binding commands and to make decisions in judicial matters, the approval of assemblies of citizens was essential to making a magistrate’s proposal into a law. Only certain categories of people could vote, and not all citizens could be chosen as magistrates and consuls.
Rome’s republic managed to combine respect for hierarchy, openness to talent, and the principle of popular sovereignty. The republic’s multiple institutions allowed ambitious newcomers – often military heroes – as well as men of established wealth, pedigree, or service to shape policy in their interests. The general principle that law was made by the people and their elected representatives proved both inspiring and manipulable, and perhaps therefore enduring.
To govern outside their capital, Romans developed strategies that would enter the repertoires of later empire-builders. One of these was the enlargement of the sphere of Roman rights. The closest towns in Italy were simply annexed; free males became Roman citizens, and elites could become Roman nobles. The extension of citizenship beyond Rome was an innovation of enormous consequence As the Romans conquered more distant, non-Latin areas of Italy, they made treaties with leaders of defeated cities, giving them some internal autonomy in return for subordination to Rome in fiscal and military matters.
By the time the Romans completed their conquest of Italy, they had produced three different ways of attaching land and people to their empire: (1) annexation, limited citizenship, and eventual assimilation for nearby Latins, (2) limited self-government for some non-Latin cities and tribes, and (3) colonies of Latins displaced to frontier regions. Later empires would use these strategies to expand and govern, but of particular import for Rome’s future was that its citizenship came to be desired by non-Romans. Extending citizenship became both a reward for service and a means to enlarge the realm of loyalty. Later soldiers from outside Rome could earn citizenship by serving in the army for 25 years; victorious general granted citizenship to far away individuals.
Infrastructure Innovation: Roman improvements included water and sewage systems, public baths, sports facilities, and huge amphitheaters for civic spectacle, adapting Greek models to accommodate larger publics. Law was part of this Roman civilization, both a means of governance and a support for social order. For most of the empire’s history, law was not recorded in a uniform way. In was only in the sixth century – and in Constantinople, the easter Roman capital – that the emperor Justinian sponsored the collection of laws in a single code.
Scholars, artists, and scientists from all over the empire found places inside Roman culture and left their mark upon it. Universal values, expressed in learning and in relationships to others, in limits on how power was to be used, in the goal of enabling even conquered people to realize what was conceived of as their human potential came into being. Barbarians could become Romans, if they played by Rome’s rules and lived up to Rome’s idea of civilization. Other vital elements were a capacity for self-criticism, concerns about degeneration, and an openness to political debate. Both the inclusion of civilized critics and the exclusion of those who did not see the virtues of the Roman way created a widely shared elite culture.
THE TOP OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE: The tasks of imperial government began to overwhelm the republic’s minimalist institutions. Rome’s judicial bodies could not provide sufficient recourse, particularly with regard to the charges of corruption that the much-enlarged empire produced. Romans stretched the rules of their republic as generals were granted special powers, more resources, and longer terms in their commands, sometimes to keep them out of the capital.
When Julius Caesar emerged victorious from imperial conquests and battles with his rivals, he was accused of wanting to make himself a king. Caesar regarded the empire as his to rule and to pass on. Senators assassinated Caesar in 44 BCE, shortly after he had taken up the ominous new office of “dictator for life.”
It was Octavian, Caesar’s adopted son, who managed to make himself Rome’s first emperor, the possessor of overarching, superior, lifelong, and legal authority. In 27 BCE, the senate granted Octavian an array of new powers along with yet another title, “Augustus.” During this time of relative peace and prosperity, the institutions of governance, war, finance, and culture were adjusted to both the emperor’s superior powers and the demands of ruling the enormous polity. After the violent conflicts and wars that had plagued the republic, Romans were drawn to the prospect of order; they appear to have accepted the transformation of older institutions into a more concentrated form of power.
In a further erosion of the republican sovereignty, Augustus’s successor took the electoral powers of the popular assemblies and gave them to the senate. The emperor could make wars or peace; he was the head of the senate and the administration of Rome; and he enjoyed a personal exemption from the constraint of all other laws. Augustus accumulated an enormous fortune from plunder, gifts, taxes, and revenues from his personal estates and from provinces under imperial control.
The locus of the emperor’s power was the military, although this was always a double-edged sword. Augustus kept the link between citizenship and military service – but moved troops, with their generals, out of Italy and to the border zones. A new elite corps – the Praetorian guard – protected the emperor. Augustus also created a standing navy. To enhance his personal control, Augustus appointed men of equestrian rank who had not been elected as magistrates to high command in the military and the provinces, bypassing both senators’ prerogatives and popular voting. These changes had long-term, unintended consequences. Sending Roman legions to the borders spread Roman ways far over the empire, in addition to diminishing, for a time, violence in the capital. In theory, the senate appointed emperors; in practice the senate or senators murdered some of them. The Praetorian guard also assassinated and declared emperors. In the third century CE – a time of economic difficulties and internal strife for Romans – military success decided power struggles over who would be emperor. There were 26 Roman emperors between the years 235 and 285 CE, and only one of these died naturally in office.
Economic Troubles: The economy of Rome was not a thought-out system but a hodgepodge of practices. The wealth of the system depended on agriculture, precious metals and other natural resources, and the ability to treat, transport, and exchange these goods. As new territories were added, new resources could be taxed, distributed, or both. For some of the conquered, defeat by Romans meant enslavement, but for some of the victors, more slaves meant greater capacity to work and manage estates. The allocation of lands in distant provinces to senators gave them a stake in maintaining commercial linkages. Taxation was key to the whole operation. The Romans taxed land, persons, inheritances, slave owning, imports, and exports.
Feeding the army and the city of Rome were large-scale operations. In the second century CE, the number of men in arms grew to about 400,000. Perhaps a quarter of the inhabitants of Rome were citizens; the rest were dependents, slaves, and foreigners.
THE DECLINE OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE: Economic Troubles: In the third century CE, rapid and murderous turnovers in emperors, external assaults by a variety of foes – Goths and other “barbarian” tribes, pirates, the Persian empire – and stress on soldiers’ remuneration as inflation reduced their salaries undermined Rome’s security. Rome’s periphery shrank under the assaults of tribes who had become savvy in Roman ways.
The empire had ceased to extend its territory, which meant the ability to distribute resources (money) was drying up. Emperors went back to being military commanders out of necessity and tried to govern from frontier cities far from Rome. Over the long term, the empire built on a tight linkage between military force and legitimate power would slowly be torn apart on this same principle.
Weakening of Values: Common gods and citizenship were not enough to hold the empire together, and they were unacceptable to some. During Rome’s hard times, many people, distressed by ongoing wars, barbarian inroads, and supply failures, turned to Christianity with its promises of solace and salvation. Emperors responded at first by scapegoating Christians as the source of the empire’s problems, outlawing them as rebels against Rome and its gods. Persecution created martyrs, and the sect continued to grow and to attract even more Romans. Over the next century Christianity was established as the state religion. Other religions were declared superstitions; other priests were demoted and taxed; other temples were torn down; other gods were disfigured and dethroned. By the end of the fourth century in much of the empire to be Roman meant to be Christian, and belonging to another religion was a civil offense, punishable by Roman law.
National Security - Protecting Borders: Romans had tried to protect their borders at low cost by making alliances with largely Germanic-speaking tribes in frontier areas. Tribal people’s service to Roman authority and participation in imperial culture shows that “barbarians” were not the uncivilized outsiders that the term implied; they wanted “in” on Rome’s empire.
Weakening of Legions: The gradual waning of the western empire left multiple but much weaker powers on its territories, all of them shaped in fundamental ways by their Roman past. The Roman peace was gone, along with the taxation regime and the vast integrated economy that had distributed money, skills, people, and products throughout the empire. Sanitation systems, tiled roofs, and hard-fired pottery disappeared for centuries in northern and central Europe; literacy declined; poorly fed cattle shank in size. The air in Italy turned cleaner as mines ceased to operate.
The very success of the enterprise had made it ripe for attack by outsiders who stopped expansion and reduced imperial resources; the connection between military command and political leadership was a formula for civil wars. Rome’s collapse left in place a powerful imperial imaginary linked to Christianity, the inspiration for new conquests and new civilized missions. Source: Empires in World History by Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper (2010).
Two-Tiered Justice: Emperor Hadrian’s prosperous, peaceful empire was, above all, one of extremes of inequality. For example, slaves significantly outnumbered citizens, and this simple fact made the latter nervous. If slaves could organize, they could become a powerful collective force. The rights of citizens too set apart the haves from the have-nots; those without Roman citizenship could earn it, but for most that meant a lifetime of military service in the Roman army.
Under Hadrian a disturbing two-tier justice system came into being, which distinguished between two kinds of people. The legal punishments of, for example, flogging, torture, beheading, crucifixion, and deportation were reserved only for the propertyless “humble” citizens; more “respectable” army veterans, town councilors, knights, and senators were, by contrast, protected from the sharp edge of Roman law. This divide would become only more acute with time.
Division from Within: In the third century AD the Roman world was in crisis. In the space of fifty years (235-286) there were no fewer than twenty emperors, each falling in quick succession to political assassination or death on the battlefield. For the best part of 15 years the Roman provinces of Britain, Gaul and Spain seceded from the empire, and in 272 the Romans permanently abandoned the province of Dacia (modern-day Romania).
Political Instability: The grand idea for which Emperor Diocletian would go down in history was his decision on March 1, 293, to create a college of four emperors to rule the Roman world. Diocletian was thus the first emperor to accept that the task of running the Roman empire was too big for one man. Diocletian’s ambition with the system was a complete failure. All it created was more intense jockeying for power, a new welter of rivalry and competition. It soon became apparent that the only thing that glued the four emperors together was the consent of the others. As soon as that was lost, the government of four would collapse like a sheaf of wheat.
Source: Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire by Simon Baker (2006)
EIGHT REASONS WHY ROME FELL from History.com
REASONS FOR THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE Life, Liberty & Levin by Mark Levin (4/10/2023)
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM ROME – OVERVIEW: EXCERPTS
THE RISE OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE: Why was it Rome – and not another city-state – that created a polity around all sides of the sea, uniting most of Europe and the entire north African coast with the lands of ancient empires in the Middle East?
The starting point was conquest, as with most empires. But sustaining and expanding control depended not just on violence but on the ongoing linkage of human and economic resources to central power. Creative political organization enabled Rome to provide for a huge and spread-out army to give people incentives for cooperation with the imperial center, and to propagate a persuasive culture based on military prowess, rule-based order, divinely sanctioned authority, and the virtues of civic life. Romans’ political and cultural innovations – their citizenship, their law, for a time their republic, drew old and new elites into government and army.
Around 500 BCE, the Romans replaced their king with a republic – a political innovation of enormous consequence. Most of the enormous territory that we know as the Roman Empire was acquired from the second century BCE, to the first century CE. During most of this time, Rome was ruled by elected representatives of its people. But it was only in 27 BCE when Augustus took the title of emperor that elected leadership gave way to one man’s lifetime rule.
Government Innovation: The source of law was the Roman people. Although magistrates, including the consuls, were lawmakers by virtue of their ability to issue binding commands and to make decisions in judicial matters, the approval of assemblies of citizens was essential to making a magistrate’s proposal into a law. Only certain categories of people could vote, and not all citizens could be chosen as magistrates and consuls.
Rome’s republic managed to combine respect for hierarchy, openness to talent, and the principle of popular sovereignty. The republic’s multiple institutions allowed ambitious newcomers – often military heroes – as well as men of established wealth, pedigree, or service to shape policy in their interests. The general principle that law was made by the people and their elected representatives proved both inspiring and manipulable, and perhaps therefore enduring.
To govern outside their capital, Romans developed strategies that would enter the repertoires of later empire-builders. One of these was the enlargement of the sphere of Roman rights. The closest towns in Italy were simply annexed; free males became Roman citizens, and elites could become Roman nobles. The extension of citizenship beyond Rome was an innovation of enormous consequence As the Romans conquered more distant, non-Latin areas of Italy, they made treaties with leaders of defeated cities, giving them some internal autonomy in return for subordination to Rome in fiscal and military matters.
By the time the Romans completed their conquest of Italy, they had produced three different ways of attaching land and people to their empire: (1) annexation, limited citizenship, and eventual assimilation for nearby Latins, (2) limited self-government for some non-Latin cities and tribes, and (3) colonies of Latins displaced to frontier regions. Later empires would use these strategies to expand and govern, but of particular import for Rome’s future was that its citizenship came to be desired by non-Romans. Extending citizenship became both a reward for service and a means to enlarge the realm of loyalty. Later soldiers from outside Rome could earn citizenship by serving in the army for 25 years; victorious general granted citizenship to far away individuals.
Infrastructure Innovation: Roman improvements included water and sewage systems, public baths, sports facilities, and huge amphitheaters for civic spectacle, adapting Greek models to accommodate larger publics. Law was part of this Roman civilization, both a means of governance and a support for social order. For most of the empire’s history, law was not recorded in a uniform way. In was only in the sixth century – and in Constantinople, the easter Roman capital – that the emperor Justinian sponsored the collection of laws in a single code.
Scholars, artists, and scientists from all over the empire found places inside Roman culture and left their mark upon it. Universal values, expressed in learning and in relationships to others, in limits on how power was to be used, in the goal of enabling even conquered people to realize what was conceived of as their human potential came into being. Barbarians could become Romans, if they played by Rome’s rules and lived up to Rome’s idea of civilization. Other vital elements were a capacity for self-criticism, concerns about degeneration, and an openness to political debate. Both the inclusion of civilized critics and the exclusion of those who did not see the virtues of the Roman way created a widely shared elite culture.
THE TOP OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE: The tasks of imperial government began to overwhelm the republic’s minimalist institutions. Rome’s judicial bodies could not provide sufficient recourse, particularly with regard to the charges of corruption that the much-enlarged empire produced. Romans stretched the rules of their republic as generals were granted special powers, more resources, and longer terms in their commands, sometimes to keep them out of the capital.
When Julius Caesar emerged victorious from imperial conquests and battles with his rivals, he was accused of wanting to make himself a king. Caesar regarded the empire as his to rule and to pass on. Senators assassinated Caesar in 44 BCE, shortly after he had taken up the ominous new office of “dictator for life.”
It was Octavian, Caesar’s adopted son, who managed to make himself Rome’s first emperor, the possessor of overarching, superior, lifelong, and legal authority. In 27 BCE, the senate granted Octavian an array of new powers along with yet another title, “Augustus.” During this time of relative peace and prosperity, the institutions of governance, war, finance, and culture were adjusted to both the emperor’s superior powers and the demands of ruling the enormous polity. After the violent conflicts and wars that had plagued the republic, Romans were drawn to the prospect of order; they appear to have accepted the transformation of older institutions into a more concentrated form of power.
In a further erosion of the republican sovereignty, Augustus’s successor took the electoral powers of the popular assemblies and gave them to the senate. The emperor could make wars or peace; he was the head of the senate and the administration of Rome; and he enjoyed a personal exemption from the constraint of all other laws. Augustus accumulated an enormous fortune from plunder, gifts, taxes, and revenues from his personal estates and from provinces under imperial control.
The locus of the emperor’s power was the military, although this was always a double-edged sword. Augustus kept the link between citizenship and military service – but moved troops, with their generals, out of Italy and to the border zones. A new elite corps – the Praetorian guard – protected the emperor. Augustus also created a standing navy. To enhance his personal control, Augustus appointed men of equestrian rank who had not been elected as magistrates to high command in the military and the provinces, bypassing both senators’ prerogatives and popular voting. These changes had long-term, unintended consequences. Sending Roman legions to the borders spread Roman ways far over the empire, in addition to diminishing, for a time, violence in the capital. In theory, the senate appointed emperors; in practice the senate or senators murdered some of them. The Praetorian guard also assassinated and declared emperors. In the third century CE – a time of economic difficulties and internal strife for Romans – military success decided power struggles over who would be emperor. There were 26 Roman emperors between the years 235 and 285 CE, and only one of these died naturally in office.
Economic Troubles: The economy of Rome was not a thought-out system but a hodgepodge of practices. The wealth of the system depended on agriculture, precious metals and other natural resources, and the ability to treat, transport, and exchange these goods. As new territories were added, new resources could be taxed, distributed, or both. For some of the conquered, defeat by Romans meant enslavement, but for some of the victors, more slaves meant greater capacity to work and manage estates. The allocation of lands in distant provinces to senators gave them a stake in maintaining commercial linkages. Taxation was key to the whole operation. The Romans taxed land, persons, inheritances, slave owning, imports, and exports.
Feeding the army and the city of Rome were large-scale operations. In the second century CE, the number of men in arms grew to about 400,000. Perhaps a quarter of the inhabitants of Rome were citizens; the rest were dependents, slaves, and foreigners.
THE DECLINE OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE: Economic Troubles: In the third century CE, rapid and murderous turnovers in emperors, external assaults by a variety of foes – Goths and other “barbarian” tribes, pirates, the Persian empire – and stress on soldiers’ remuneration as inflation reduced their salaries undermined Rome’s security. Rome’s periphery shrank under the assaults of tribes who had become savvy in Roman ways.
The empire had ceased to extend its territory, which meant the ability to distribute resources (money) was drying up. Emperors went back to being military commanders out of necessity and tried to govern from frontier cities far from Rome. Over the long term, the empire built on a tight linkage between military force and legitimate power would slowly be torn apart on this same principle.
Weakening of Values: Common gods and citizenship were not enough to hold the empire together, and they were unacceptable to some. During Rome’s hard times, many people, distressed by ongoing wars, barbarian inroads, and supply failures, turned to Christianity with its promises of solace and salvation. Emperors responded at first by scapegoating Christians as the source of the empire’s problems, outlawing them as rebels against Rome and its gods. Persecution created martyrs, and the sect continued to grow and to attract even more Romans. Over the next century Christianity was established as the state religion. Other religions were declared superstitions; other priests were demoted and taxed; other temples were torn down; other gods were disfigured and dethroned. By the end of the fourth century in much of the empire to be Roman meant to be Christian, and belonging to another religion was a civil offense, punishable by Roman law.
National Security - Protecting Borders: Romans had tried to protect their borders at low cost by making alliances with largely Germanic-speaking tribes in frontier areas. Tribal people’s service to Roman authority and participation in imperial culture shows that “barbarians” were not the uncivilized outsiders that the term implied; they wanted “in” on Rome’s empire.
Weakening of Legions: The gradual waning of the western empire left multiple but much weaker powers on its territories, all of them shaped in fundamental ways by their Roman past. The Roman peace was gone, along with the taxation regime and the vast integrated economy that had distributed money, skills, people, and products throughout the empire. Sanitation systems, tiled roofs, and hard-fired pottery disappeared for centuries in northern and central Europe; literacy declined; poorly fed cattle shank in size. The air in Italy turned cleaner as mines ceased to operate.
The very success of the enterprise had made it ripe for attack by outsiders who stopped expansion and reduced imperial resources; the connection between military command and political leadership was a formula for civil wars. Rome’s collapse left in place a powerful imperial imaginary linked to Christianity, the inspiration for new conquests and new civilized missions. Source: Empires in World History by Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper (2010).
Two-Tiered Justice: Emperor Hadrian’s prosperous, peaceful empire was, above all, one of extremes of inequality. For example, slaves significantly outnumbered citizens, and this simple fact made the latter nervous. If slaves could organize, they could become a powerful collective force. The rights of citizens too set apart the haves from the have-nots; those without Roman citizenship could earn it, but for most that meant a lifetime of military service in the Roman army.
Under Hadrian a disturbing two-tier justice system came into being, which distinguished between two kinds of people. The legal punishments of, for example, flogging, torture, beheading, crucifixion, and deportation were reserved only for the propertyless “humble” citizens; more “respectable” army veterans, town councilors, knights, and senators were, by contrast, protected from the sharp edge of Roman law. This divide would become only more acute with time.
Division from Within: In the third century AD the Roman world was in crisis. In the space of fifty years (235-286) there were no fewer than twenty emperors, each falling in quick succession to political assassination or death on the battlefield. For the best part of 15 years the Roman provinces of Britain, Gaul and Spain seceded from the empire, and in 272 the Romans permanently abandoned the province of Dacia (modern-day Romania).
Political Instability: The grand idea for which Emperor Diocletian would go down in history was his decision on March 1, 293, to create a college of four emperors to rule the Roman world. Diocletian was thus the first emperor to accept that the task of running the Roman empire was too big for one man. Diocletian’s ambition with the system was a complete failure. All it created was more intense jockeying for power, a new welter of rivalry and competition. It soon became apparent that the only thing that glued the four emperors together was the consent of the others. As soon as that was lost, the government of four would collapse like a sheaf of wheat.
Source: Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire by Simon Baker (2006)
EIGHT REASONS WHY ROME FELL from History.com
- INVASIONS BY BARBARIAN TRIBES: The most straightforward theory for Western Rome’s collapse pins the fall on a string of military losses sustained against outside forces.
- ECONOMIC TROUBLES AND OVERRELIANCE ON SLAVE LABOR: Rome was also crumbling from within thanks to a severe financial crisis. Constant wars and overspending had significantly lightened imperial coffers, and oppressive taxation and inflation had widened the gap between the rich and poor. Rome’s economy depended on slaves to till its fields and work as craftsmen, and its military might had traditionally provided a fresh influx of conquered peoples to put to work. But when expansion ground to a halt in the second century, Rome’s supply of slaves and other war treasures began to dry up. With its economy faltering and its commercial and agricultural production in decline, the Empire began to lose its grip on Europe.
- DIVISIONS FROM WITHIN: The fate of Western Rome was partially sealed in the late third century, when Emperor Diocletian divided the Empire into two halves – the Western Empire seated in the city of Milan, and the Eastern Empire in Byzantium. East and West failed to adequately work together to combat outside threats, and the two often squabbled over resources and military aid. As the gulf widened, the largely Greek-speaking Eastern Empire grew in wealth while the Latin-speaking West descended into an economic crisis.
- OVEREXPANSION AND MILITARY OVERSPENDING: At its height, the Roman Empire stretched from the Atlantic Ocean all the way to the Euphrates River in the Middle East, but its grandeur may have also been its downfall. With such a vast territory to govern, the empire faced an administrative and logistical nightmare. Even with their excellent road systems, the Romans were unable to communicate quickly or effectively enough to manage their holdings.
- POLITICAL INSTABILITY: If Rome’s sheer size made it difficult to govern, ineffective and inconsistent leadership only served to magnify the problem. Political rot extended to the Roman Senate, which failed to temper the excesses of the emperors due to its own widespread corruption and incompetence. As the situation worsened, civic pride waned, and many Roman citizens lost trust in their leadership.
- NOT PROTECTING THEIR BORDERS: The Romans grudgingly allowed members of the Visigoth tribe to cross south of the Danube and into the safety of Roman territory, but they treated them with extreme cruelty. Roman officials even forced the starving Goths to trade their children into slavery in exchange for dog meat. In brutalizing the Goths rose up in revolt and eventually routed a Roman army.
- LOSS OF TRADITIONAL VALUES: The decline of Rome dovetailed with the spread of Christianity, and some have argued that the rise of a new faith helped contribute to the empire’s fall. The Edict of Milan legalized Christianity in 313, and later it became the state religion in 380. These decrees ended centuries of persecution, but they may have also eroded the traditional Roman values system. Christianity displaced the polytheistic Roman religion, which viewed the emperor as having a divine status, and also shifted focus away from the glory of the state and onto a sole deity. Meanwhile, popes and other church leaders took an increased role in political affairs, further complicating governance.
- WEAKENING OF THE ROMAN LEGIONS: For most of its history, Rome’s military was the envy of the ancient world. Unable to recruit enough soldiers from the Roman citizenry, emperors like Diocletian and Constantine began hiring foreign mercenaries to prop up their armies. The ranks of the legions eventually swelled with Germanic Goths and other barbarians, so much so that Romans began using the Latin word “barbarous” in place of “soldier.” Source: History.com
REASONS FOR THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE Life, Liberty & Levin by Mark Levin (4/10/2023)
- Severe Economic Troubles.
- Invasion of Foreigners.
- Divisions from Within.
- Empire Stretched too Thin.
- Political Corruption.
- Weakening of Values.
- Political Instability.
- Weakening of Legions (military).
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
| america_4l_roman_empire-_overview_--_segment_4.pdf |