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The Fall of the Roman Empire

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Scribulus

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In Christian circles, it is commonly heard that the reason for the fall of the Roman Empire was that they came to accept practices that were fundamentally immoral by Christian standards, such as sexual promiscuity and cultivated gluttony. What is an Objectivist explanation for the fall of the Roman Empire?

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In Christian circles, it is commonly heard that the reason for the fall of the Roman Empire was that they came to accept practices that were fundamentally immoral by Christian standards, such as sexual promiscuity and cultivated gluttony. What is an Objectivist explanation for the fall of the Roman Empire?

They came to accept Christianity, which is immoral. ;)

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It's been accepted by many that Constantine making Christianity the state religion softened and distracted an originally somewhat aggressive and materialistic culture during a time of mass invasion from barbarians in the West. I'd also say Diocletian's separating of the empire into provinces was significant to decentralizing and ultimately undermining imperial authority. Finally, let us not forget the expanding welfare state and excessive minting of money as a reason the Roman economy started going in the toilet, along with higher taxation. All the terrible "ifs" coming together, is what I think.

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The primary reason for the fall was the empire's turn to mysticism, i.e. Christianity, the "life after death" syndrome and the move towards altruism that this religion brings with it. It made the distinctly Roman character overall weaker. Taxes and inflation (the coinage was being debased) had its part as well.

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You should read The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Gibbon. There are many reasons for the fall of the empire, but Gibbon placed a large amount of the blame on Christianity.

The primary reason for the fall was the empire's turn to mysticism, i.e. Christianity...

To be fair, the Romans were deeply into mysticism from the very beginning. Religion was closely linked to government policy by consulting oracles, offering sacrifices after victorious battles, etc. I would argue that Christianity was at least a lesser degree of mysticism than the traditional Roman religion. At least Christianity didn't believe in the silly Roman practice of haruspicy (studying animal entrails to predict the future).

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Thanks for your replies. I was just wondering what the secular consensus is. I was just sure the presence or absence of orgies did not have the significance of inflation and political alliances and so forth. Gibbon will have to go on my reading list; OPAR is already occupying my full attention. :wub:

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  • 1 month later...

A better start for this would be "What made Rome great, and what did they lose that ended up making them weak?" They went from a Republic to a dictatorship, and a pool of self-reliant farmers that wore their swords out to the fields they tilled, to a parasitic Roman Mob of over a million people who lived off the dole, with fleets of ships carting back food from the Nile in order to feed them. They'd get placated by Roman leadership or they'd riot until they got what they wanted, and what they wanted was a free ride.

Taxes went up to such a degree throughout the empire that a law had to be passed against selling yourself into slavery, since slaves didn't pay taxes.

Christianity didn't kill Rome, and orgies didn't kill Rome either. Socialism did.

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While it maybe fashionable to blame Socialism and Christianity for the fall of the Roman Empire on an O'ist board, from my studies of the subject, it was a complete political failure, not so much one of culture. Also the complete exporting of the responsibility of defense to the barbarians that the defense was necessary against also greatly contributed.

A Patron Client System was the status quo of the empire, crossing all boundaries and classes. Octavian made himself "Imperator" by more or less making the Legions his direct clients. This military power, with the legions sworn directly to the family of Julius Caesar, was what made the emperorship possible. It also made it necessary to keep putting Julio-Claudians on the Throne, to keep the Legions in line. Of course, the end of the line was Caligula, an absolutely disastrous emperor. Once this line was extinct, whomever controlled the legions, controlled the empire.

More or Less, the Major political unit of the Empire was the 3 Major Legions, one on the Rhine, one on the Danube, and one on the Euphrates. If a succession crisis came up, each of the generals controlling these legions could take them off the frontier and use it to came the emperorship. This both A. put some leaders of questionable ability on the throne B. Decimated the Legions. The Roman Style of Combat, Close Quarters with Stabbing Sword and Shield, was gruesome and effective, the whole point was to kill the foe, not simply make him flee in the field as in earlier styles, such as the phalanx.

To sum up two Legions fighting would be two Meat Grinders eating each other. Neither machine would be the same again. The Romans relied on their veterans to train the new generation of soldiers, and with so many lost, they simply couldn't regeneration themselves and died on the vine. 200 years of intermitant civil war destroyed Rome's ability to natively defend itself, and thus this was "outsourced" to Tribes on the frontier. As an illustration, the Gothic leader that sacked Rome, Alaric, was once a "Roman" commander himself, and more or less invaded the Empire in an attempt to get a job. The plunder though became so good that this was abandoned quickly when it became clear a full sack was possible. Also even 400 years later, the legions where fighting with weapons Julius Caesar would have recognized, showing some of the technological stagnation of the empire as a whole. By the time Rome fell, its technological advantage in combat had long since past, with the barbarians themselves taking the lead with such useful things as the horse archer.

In my opinion, had the Roman Empire adopted something similar to the US Constitution, where leaders where chosen not by the legions but by the people or even a small political elite, the disastrous crisis of defense in the 5th and 6th Centuries would not have happened, for the legions would not have been degraded as they where from the civil wars, and the military adventures emperors seeking legitimacy. The resulting outsourcing of defense was disastrous and utterly ruinous for the empire. One can see us learning from history with the articles in the Constitution demanding a citizen militia and civilian control of the armed forces. The Timocracy of Rome was a failure, even the degenerate Democracy of the Welfare State is preferable.

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The Romans relied on their veterans to train the new generation of soldiers, and with so many lost, they simply couldn't regeneration themselves and died on the vine.

This makes more sense to me than anything else I've heard. I'm sure many things played a role, including entitlement and mysticism, but the atrophy of the leadership because of faulty policies at a time of need sounds like the critical factor. (And probably orgies didn't have a whole lot to do with it.)

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it was a complete political failure, not so much one of culture. ... In my opinion, had the Roman Empire adopted something similar to the US Constitution, where leaders where chosen not by the legions but by the people or even a small political elite, the disastrous crisis of defense in the 5th and 6th Centuries would not have happened

It was a political failure BECAUSE it was a cultural failure, though you're right to note that it isn't correct to pin it so neatly on Christianity and Socialism.

John Lewis identifies the root in the cultural mind-set of the Roman citizen. The problem, he notes, was a warrior culture and the mind-set of selecting political leaders because of their military acumen. The downfall of the Roman Republic and conversion into an Empire was an inevitability so long as that culture was unchallenged. The much-vaunted civility of Roman civilisation is actually largely Greek in origin, which was co-opted by conquering Romans who thought it fashionable - prior to Roman expansion the southern half of the Italian peninsula was a collection of Greek colonies. To the extent the Romans used Greek ideas they tended to be civil, while to the extent they acted on what was specifically their own Roman ideas they tended to be brutes.

This was the thesis of his lecture at OCON08. He ties it back in particular to the Punic Wars (and by implication, all the way back through the Republican era and back even further into the kingdom era prior to the deposing of Tarquinius). Those principles in action then leads him to explain Marius, Sulla, and on to Julius Caesar and the formation of the Empire under Augustus. The details you cite are just an example of the concretes being principles in action, and can be clearly seen as a continuation of the same chain of causes and effects that Dr Lewis identifies.

They never could have adopted anything like the US Constitution because of the culture they had. In stark contrast to the ideas of worldly reason and the liberty of men as held by the 18th century American intellectuals, Dr Lewis notes that two key ideas in Roman culture - philosophical idealism and the ethics of duty - made that impossible. Thus it is not that Christianity and Socialism lead of themselves to the downfall of Rome, but that what made the Romans vulnerable to Christianity and Socialism shares a common root with the concrete particulars you cite as traceable back to their warrior culture - the lack of understanding of reason and worldly applications of it to the principles of proper human action.

JJM

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