Posted on 07/16/2007 5:34:07 PM PDT by blam
GGG Ping.
Oh, crap.
Are we gonna’ rewrite ANCIENT history too?
and all this in a period where the speed of bureaucratic functioning and of military response rattled along at 45 kilometres a day,
Not true. Rome could pass messages from one end of the empire to another in a matter of days.
Rome fell for one reason only—Fred Thompson had not been born yet.
Military history ping. Previous threads on the ping list include one on Attila the Hun at the Battle of Chalons.
How?
This answer is easy. Rome fell because the society got rich, liberal and complacent and no longer felt a strong military or decisive action was worth the effort.
Reliance on mercenaries to do their fighting, evasion of taxes needed to keep up the Republic and a general malaise that they were invincible led to their destruction.
In other words they became fat, dumb and lazy. Just like America today.
Signal towers.
Are we gonna’ rewrite ANCIENT history too?
Well, to be fair, you have to acknowledge that the Ancient History we are familiar with has probably been rewritten a couple of dozen times. ;-)
later read
Rome fell because it didn’t kill the anti-Romans faster than the anti-Romans killed the Romans.
But yes, Germanic "immigration" both internal and external (meaning military invasions) were a major league element to Rome's downfall.
It gets more complicated, but for example at the end when the city itself fell, Gibbons claims the gates were opened in the night by some inhabitants whose sympathies lay more with the forces outside than with the Roman authority inside the city.
In many ways Rome had tried to absorb the germans, or had been forced to do so. Rome was surviving in the end with a German mercenary army and with the help of German allies. Rome became weaker and the German "guests" stronger.
Modern authors don't like to mention that Gibbons also attributed the fall to the Romans becoming an unwarlike people who relied on others to do their fighting. Or that religion softened the fall because the Germans by that time had become Christians.
You’re right...what WAS I thinking?
(Apparently, I wasn’t.)
:-)
Thanks for shaking me out of my silliness!
I heard it was the lead poisoning from the plumbing they installed.
The Romans were master engineers when it came to moving water. Aqueducts, constant flow sewerage, etc.
They even invented lead pipe. Lead, which is poisonous, leached out into the drinking water.
Some say this contributed to a collective insanity among the ruling class, who enjoyed the very best in running water technology.
Then the comet hit and everything changed. Lot of effort was wasted when the Northern half of the Western Empire simply shut down (economically and socially) in or about 541 AD for the next thousand years.
“Rome fell because the society got rich, liberal and complacent and no longer felt a strong military or decisive action was worth the effort.”
You left out ‘gay’.
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