>"Be careful when you think you've got a lesson from history. It probably says more about you than the Romans."

This is one of those times I read something that I know I'll find myself quoting for a long time to come. Thanks for that.

Historian Vera Keller said, in Episode 1 of the CBC series "Making Modern Publics", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2984068

"You know that 19th century commonplace, "If you don't know history, you're doomed to repeat it?" That's what most people think is the reason why you do history: you're doomed to repeat it.

Historians don't think you're doomed to repeat it. Historians don't think in cycles of history, the way they did in say, the fourteenth century. We think in terms of arrows of time.

You're not doomed to repeat anything. What you're doomed to do is to continue it. Early modern Europe has established so much of the modern world, and so many of the ideas that we have in our brain, were thought up once upon a time, for some reason that made sense—perhaps, perhaps not—at that time.

We continue to have those ideas inside our heads and we don't even realize that they are products of history. Unless you understand the history, you have no choice to examine those ideas and decide whether or not they make sense, or that they are moral, or they have anything to do with you, or your culture.

And so it's only by understanding your whole world as a historical product, and specifically as a product of early modern Europe, that you can do anything to change your world."

There are literally hundreds of theories as to why Rome fell. Here's a list http://www.utexas.edu/courses/rome/210reasons.html

My favorite from that list:

22. "Bread and circuses"

I'd love to see the theory on that one.

Edit: It's way more boring than I hoped. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses

Not necessarily boring. Someone even managed to turn it into a best-selling series of books and major motion pictures: The Hunger Games. The name of the country in The Hunger Games is Panem, meaning, of course, bread! The games themselves are the circus used to pacify the populace, either through entertainment for the upper classes, or fear for the lower classes.

The most fun part of Wikipedia is always following the related links at the bottom of the article.

I don't know - the claim could be made the modern "bread and circuses" (TV, Internet, etc.) are causing the downfall of America.

In my opinion, bread and circuses was more of a symptom than a cause.

In the 2nd and 1st centuries BC, as the Romans were expanding out from Italy into North Africa, Spain, Greece, and what is now Turkey, the people of influence (generals and politicians) were accumulating vast amounts of wealth, in the form of loot, land, and slaves. They used their newly-obtained wealth to buy up lots more land and establish huge agricultural operations, both in Italy and abroad.

At the same time, the small farmers that had formed the backbone of the economy and military, were in big trouble. They couldn't compete with the large farming establishments, which had the advantage of mass production, and were run off of the cheap labor of all the newly-arrived slaves. These small farmers had to sell their land to the wealthy people. They simply couldn't continue to make a living as farmers. These dispossessed people moved into the cities, where they formed a large group of poor and desperate people.

So we had a huge wealth gap forming, where the top 5% had something like 80% of the wealth. This is far worse than the wealth gap we see today, and there were lots of problems.

This new class of urban poor was typically too poor to even afford enough food to survive and employment was often difficult to find. As a result, they tended to get pretty cranky and riot a lot. So in order to keep this under control, the poor Roman populace got bread and circuses.

A populace that was getting free food and entertainment was a lot less likely to cause problems and revolt, so the wealthy people in society spent large amounts of money on free grain and free entertainment.

It was part of the culture of Rome for the wealthy to give stuff away to show how awesome they were. As they got wealthier, it wasn't a problem to give away lots of stuff. This was known as the patron-client system. In return for free stuff and favors, the recipients were expected to support the person giving them stuff by voting for them (or their allies) and attacking opponents.

The politicians shamelessly used their vast wealth to buy loyalty and used angry mobs under their control as political tools. It went downhill quickly from there as the Roman Republic slid into power grabs, civil war, and the eventual establishment of the Imperial system.

The emperors solved the political instability, but the wealth gap became even worse. At some points, the emperor personally controlled something like 80% of the wealth of the empire, with most of the remaining 20% being controlled by wealthy families.

The majority of the populace was poor, completely apathetic when it came to politics, and they had very little hope of improving their lot in life. This is considered to be one of the many reasons for the weakening of the Roman Empire. The weakening and eventual downfall as a complex thing that stemmed from a variety of factors working together, and this is just one of them.

If anyone is interested, I very much recommend the (now completed) podcast: The History of Rome. Mike Duncan makes Roman history both interesting and entertaining.

That's a great list, thank you (esp. as I am making a board game about the fall of the Republic!)

There is good detail in (SF writer) R.A. Lafferty's The Fall of Rome,

http://sentent.blogspot.com/2010/05/r-lafferty-and-semitic-g...

http://www.amazon.com/The-fall-Rome-R-Lafferty/dp/B0006CALC4

http://theevitable.blogspot.com/2009/01/ra-laffertys-fall-of...

That's awesome. Please keep me updated as you get close to finishing - my email is in my profile.

I think you could leave "Roman" out of that first sentence.

Pretty much. I bet there isn't a political position today that you couldn't find a examples from history both for and against.

In Neal Stephenson's Anathem, there was an entire faction of monks who researched intellectual history specifically to warn modern-day philosophers when they were treading dusty ground. In fact, one of the only open questions (in their mind) was whether literally every possible thought had already been conceived.

> That's a long way of saying, be careful when you think you've got a lesson from history. It probably says more about you than the Romans.

Isn't that the whole point of the exercise - finding similarities with Roman history conveys authority to something you want to say about the present.

These are not excluding explanations, hardly even competing. Although a conservative lesson would be more along the lines of losing virtue and allowing foreigners to overrun the empire.

All of the above are true to some extent.

Wasn't it simply that Rome gained significant technological arbitrage (with weapons, tactics, infrastructure, etc), which allowed it to gain a huge "market share", but as the competition copied their innovations the vertically integrated but inefficient Empire was effectively disrupted?