The stability of the roman empire was a marvel. After incessant war within the borders during the republic, violence moved to the borders of the empire. To be Roman, and citizenry became quite broadly spread, during those few centuries, was to be free and safe.
Fiction can often capture this truth better than any scholarship. In "Augustus", a portrait of the first roman Emperor, the author John Williams conjures a scene where Augustus, near the end of his life, contemplates his successes and failures on the deck of his cruise-ship. An Egyptian freighter pulls alongside, and the crew sings him a song, thanking him for the stability he brought, the captain recalling the pirates that used to terrorize the Mediterranean. Now, they could voyage safely.
That change, in just a generation, exemplified the stability of the roman empire. While adding color to this history is great, it often tends to cheapen this enormous achievement.
> To be Roman, and citizenry became quite broadly spread, during those few centuries, was to be free and safe.
It's pretty plain here that the parent is arguing that Romans, not their slaves, were free and safe. Anyway, the idea that Rome is worse than its contemporaries because of slavery or some other failure to adhere to 20th (or 21st) century mores is silly (though fashionable) without making a case that said contemporaries performed better by those same standards.
However, I do think that by modern standards, all governments were terrible back then. Most of history is like that. It's mostly about cruelty and suffering.
I was only clarifying since you were responding to a comment comparing Rome to her contemporaries. No one argues that Rome was more enlightened or less brutal than modern first-world nations, but many do argue that Rome was relatively more backwards than her contemporaries on the basis that Romans practiced slavery and colonization (ignoring that her contemporaries did the same or would have done if they had the ability).
“ In modern English and other vernaculars, the term also commonly includes the inhabitants of Norse home communities during this period.”
Not sure why that is particularly strange. In the age of overt empire, Gibbon wrote an explicitly cautionary tale, like the momento mori that accompanied a triumph. But we aren't in that same age.
From a broader perspective, the nature of "structural" Rome, especially once Octavian (Augustus) took control, lead to sclerosis as the control and wealth and power overwhelmed other activities of state and society. For example the literature of the republic and early empire is greater than that of later periods not because people became dumber but because society, even if richer over all, could not afford it.
Arguably the empire continued, not just in the east but through what remains of Charlemagne's realm (more diffuse yet of greater scope): hundreds of millions of people speak a form of Latin (we call it Spanish or French or other names); many legal systems contain roman influences (though sometimes vestigial, with a legislative chamber called a "Senate"), and many cultural norms trace back to or through Roman times.
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You can see this today, writ small (I'll ignore the politics of the larger scope). The older megacorps (think US Chamber of Commerce members) are focused more on extraction (of rents or of re-mining the same seams) rather than customer benefit. The "newer" (only a few decades old) tech upstarts themselves have largely entered late middle age and are heading to the same fate. Google, once an admirable innovator, is regularly pilloried on this site for having lost its way; some companies required a near death experience (Apple) or spell of privation (Microsoft, IBM) which may help (MS) or may not (IBM). Even in the old guard, GE is haeding downward, and though they've been around for a while and have in the past been a force for good, will anyone mourn?
I've long believed there's a Hayflick limit for both companies and social systems. And as it is for humans, it's a good thing.
I think I agree with you about the Hayflick limit idea, but I also think it's useful to point out, as the parent does, that a sclerotic, moribund empire is probably a better place to live for the majority of people in it than not an empire, assuming there is trade and general stability.
Is it? It took a plague to launch a revolution in agriculture in Europe, leading to an increase in calories production, an expansion of human life span, and opening up an expansion in trade (which reflects an increased amount of consumption of goods beyond simple survival). The preceding periods of semi-stasis were ones of no expansion in human quality of life and punctured by the opposite when you happened to be in the wrong place during a struggle between elites.
In our concrete world: had Apple not been able to blow up the oligopoly where the phone carriers controlled what phones were available and what they could do, would we have the current explosion of software, tools, etc? In the US in particular the sclerotic phone oligopolies kept the mobile phone market at least a decade behind Europe and Japan.
This is exactly the issue I'm talking about. It's very plausible that the world got much better after the plague, and that the plague was an important catalyst. But it also seems obviously true that absolutely no one alive at the time would choose the plague in order to cause that improvement.
Elites got to define history (especially before the printing press). Of course they blamed "the Barbarians", but what's really true is that Roman society started eating itself.
The claim that the fall of Rome was a "good" thing, on the other hand, is simplistic beyond belief.
[1]https://smile.amazon.com/Decline-Empire-Volumes-Everymans-Li...
Do you have any citations? I was always told that the average level of nutrition often increased once the Romans were no longer in charge - since less tax was being levied.
I think the idea that the Roman Empire was bad for its citizens varies in persuasiveness depending on the era. The Roman Empire was very unstable and extremely prone to brutal civil wars, and when it wasn't in a state of active conflict, the maxim of Severus "Be harmonious, enrich the soldiers, scorn all others" was pretty much the norm. Which isn't exactly great for everybody who isn't a soldier.
That all said, there were definitely times in which the Roman empire was stable and prosperous - but I think the system itself didn't encourage it.
And there were surprising details, such as that after the Arabic conquest of many areas, the conquerors pretty much kept relying on Roman era tax rolls and local organization.
The article does make an interesting point though that the decay was from the top. And I think this is largely true. Societies don't usually collapse because they get overrun, they get overrun because they're already weak.