Posted on 01/09/2016 1:57:28 PM PST by fella
The five marks of the Roman decaying culture:
Concern with displaying affluence instead of building wealth;
Obsession with sex and perversions of sex;
Art becomes freakish and sensationalistic instead of creative and original;
Widening disparity between very rich and very poor;
Increased demand to live off the state.
(Excerpt) Read more at goodreads.com ...
The parallels between the Roman Empire and America are striking and scary.
Gibbon....what did he ever write other than that boring Rome stuff? //sarc.
I doubt if the Roman legislature ever enacted
laws without knowing what was in them. We’ve
passed them in decadence
The biggest difference I see is that technological progress is so rapid nowadays, it offsets a lot of the social decay.
The Roman Empire’s technology was stagnant.
What I like is that they kept calling themselves the Roman Republic for centuries after they became an empire.
Kind of like us pretending the Constitution is still in effect.
Just about every one of these points existed at the very beginning of the Roman empire. Tiberius (emperor #2), Caligula (#3) and Nero (#5) were all pervs of the highest order. Roman art was a rip-off of Greek art. There was always a vast gulf between the rich and poor in Rome. Finally, didn’t Gibbon also blame the rise of Christianity as one of the reasons the Roman empire collapsed?
Good point!
The good emperors before Marcus Aurelius were childless, and selected able successors.
Marcus Aurelius had a son Commodus whom he selected. It didn’t turn out well.
It is hard to see an accident coming, but you can always look back to see the consequences. When we talk about opposing tyranny, at what point do we define as the crossing line when the government goes from “of the people” to “against the people”.
Some of the parallels are quite shocking. Obama,of course, is perfectly cast...
“The incapacity of a weak and distracted government may often assume the appearance, and produce the effects, of a treasonable correspondence with the public enemy.”
“The Italians, who had long since renounced the exercise of arms, were surprised, after forty years’ peace, by the approach of a formidable Barbarian, whom they abhorred, as the enemy of their religion, as well as of their republic.”
http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/gibbon/03/daf03033.htm
I always like to point out that according to Gibbon, when Rome finally fell to the barbarians, the gates were opened from within:
“While the emperor and his court enjoyed, with sullen pride, the security of the marches and fortifications of Ravenna, they abandoned Rome, almost without defence...
“The king of the Goths, who no longer dissembled his appetite for plunder and revenge, appeared in arms under the walls of the capital; and the trembling senate, without any hopes of relief, prepared, by a desperate resistance, to defray the ruin of their country. But they were unable to guard against the secret conspiracy of their slaves and domestics; who, either from birth or interest, were attached to the cause of the enemy. At the hour of midnight, the Salarian gate was silently opened, and the inhabitants were awakened by the tremendous sound of the Gothic trumpet. Eleven hundred and sixty-three years after the foundation of Rome, the Imperial city, which had subdued and civilized so considerable a part of mankind, was delivered to the licentious fury of the tribes of Germany and Scythia.”
http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/gibbon/03/daf03019.htm
YET, Jesus chose to be born under Roman rule. That was planned very well, as the Romans adopted Christianity and the successor to Peter still sits not too far from Rome in the Vatican. It's called the Vatican because it was built on Vatical Hill, a MUCH older name to that hill. Rome had many hills.
The Vatican, as the "seat" of the pope, was begun one street level below the current level. If one descends downstairs there is one glass covered metal box and it says, quite simply: HERE LIES PETER.
The Romans were possibly developed by God JUST so that Christianity WOULD be spread so far...since Rome ruled MUCH of the known world at that time.
God did NOT have His only begotten Son born in Oriental Asia, India, Africa or the new world (North, Central and South Americas).
Good post, but obsolete. The Roman Empire was like decades ago, or whatever. They’re just a bunch of dead white men.
Those ideas will work differently this time. Today we can have amoral leftists with their conspicuous displays of affluence, their obsession with sex and perversions of sex, their tax-supported freakish art, their policies that widen the disparity between very rich and very poor, and their push to have ever growing numbers live off the state. Nothing will go wrong.
Human nature has changed, so this time it won’t lead to collapse, universal misery, and a thousand years of darkness. Trust your neighborhood liberal. Would Obama lie to you? If you like your civilization, you can keep your civilization. Period.
“Where error is irreparable, repentance is useless.â€
Another Gibbon quote
After Iulie they were generals elected by the Army. Hoisted on the Shield the term was. The Army had no loyalty to the center just the winner of a bunch of stupid civil wars.
We’re here at a certain point in time.
The past is over and therefore determined.
According to the theory of classical dynamics, the future is also determined, from the “initial conditions” (the present).
Unfortunately, even if it were, we don’t know the intial conditions precisely enough, and even if we did, we couldn’t solve the equations!
And anyway, the future is more like a quantum probability than a deterministic outcome.
That said, in answer to your question of when we cross the line to gov’t becoming tyranny, for the U.S. it’s been more like the frog in the pot with the temperature slowly rising.
It’s pretty hot now.
[...]
The Praetorian Guard, the emperor's personal bodyguards, assassinated and installed new sovereigns at will, and once even auctioned the spot off to the highest bidder. The political rot also 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.
Collapse reason #6
The arrival of the Huns and the migration of the Barbarian tribes
[...]
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. According to the historian Ammianus Marcellinus, Roman officials even forced the starving Goths to trade their children into slavery in exchange for dog meat. In brutalizing the Goths, the Romans created a dangerous enemy within their own borders. When the oppression became too much to bear, the Goths rose up in revolt and eventually routed a Roman army and killed the Eastern Emperor Valens during the Battle of Adrianople in A.D. 378. The shocked Romans negotiated a flimsy peace with the barbarians, but the truce unraveled in 410, when the Goth King Alaric moved west and sacked Rome. With the Western Empire weakened, Germanic tribes like the Vandals and the Saxons were able to surge across its borders and occupy Britain, Spain and North Africa.
Collapse reason #7
Christianity and the loss of traditional values
[...]
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 eladers took an increased role in political affairs, further complicating governance. The 18th-century historian Edward Gibbon was the most famous proponent of this theory, but his take has since been widely criticized. While the spread of Christianity may have played a small role in curbing Roman civic virtue, most scholars now argue that its influence paled in comparison to military, economic and administrative factors.
See anything familiar in reasons 5 or 6?
As they taught me in the military, you don’t have to respond to an illegal order, but if you self-determine it to be an illegal order, you had better be ready to fall on your sword over the repercussions. I agree that we have too many self-serving assholes in government, but I’m not ready to say that the pot is boiling.
Gibbon got into trouble because he attributed a lot blame for the fall of the Roman Empire to Christianity.
He frequently unfavorably contrasts the otherworldly focus of the later Roman citizens, with the energetic practical outlook of their ancestors, and with the warlike nature of the barbarians.
He also has a lot in there on the various doctrinal disputes and heresies, and subtly makes fun of them and the disputants.
You got it right IMO that God’s plan did work out as Christianity provided the foundation for the tremendous moral and scientific progress which the western world has had.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.