Quote:
Originally Posted by xerxes
Very good topic, though personnally for me Rome never fell.
Though, I presume the topic is meant to be materially speaking rather culturally: meaning the fall of the Republic in the West (476 AD) on the spears of Germans and in the East by the guns of the Turks. I have read Edward Gibbson's book, cover to cover, all six volumes, thogh I skipped all chapters talking about religion. But still the topic is too grand for my tiny mind. The influence of Rome was great and august that even when the Germans roamed freely in their realm, their took Roman titles such as Master of the East etc. though in 476 the sharade was stopped and Romulus Augustus was dethroned. But i really dont think there is anything mysterious about the material fall of Rome. The impression that I got about Gibbson's work was that the decline and the decay (not the fall) was due to Roman people taking for granted their life style. The fall itself can be attributed to the geopolitical shift by that time.
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I admire your readership of Edward Gibbon, especially because I have not yet read his entire history. However, I must caution you that Gibbon's ideas about the fall of the empire need to be treated with caution. I believe that scholarship of J.B. Bury may be more apt. Gibbon will never be excelled as a narrative historian and his work is the greatest history bar none.
Nonetheless, his idea that Christianity sapped the strength of Rome is flawed. There is no evidence that Christian Roman soldiers or denizens did not fight has hard for the Empire as their pagan forbears
on the basis of religion. That is, the supposed lack of fighting ethos, which Gibbon attributed to Christian apathy or preoccupation with the afterlife, was probably due more to the parasitism of the landed aristocracy in the later Empire and the perennial budgetary problems of the empire.
Gibbon's analysis of the Byzantine Empire is also gravely mistaken. He reconstructed the Eastern Empire's history as one long slide from defeat to defeat, presided over by effete and degenerate emperors. Due to better scholarship, we know realize that Byzantium was a vivacious culture and powerful empire. It deserves appreciation as its own case, not merely as a long appendix to the Roman Empire.