Sun had long ago set, the moon had peeked out from behind a dispersion of high clouds. From a point atop one of the hills could see glances of how this great city must once have looked. The buildings seem to shuck their long years and are once again as they were; massive, it is as if a doorway in time had opened and I am paid for a look into what was Rome. What could have caused this once master of all cities to collapse? This article will endeavor to clarify some of the explanations generally accepted, or argued, and perhaps shed some light on what could have caused the collapse of what was the most powerful empire in history.
There is a need, to begin with, the explanations given by Edward Gibbon. While some agree with his logic, his Decline and Fall on the Roman Empire is unavoidable in an article like this. According to David Jordan, the reasons for Rome's fall marches across the pages of the Decline and Fall, seemingly without a pattern, and seemingly unrelated to each other. This is taken from the seventh chapter of Jordan's Gibbon and his Roman Empire sum up my feelings relate to ing the work; nonetheless, I will try to show some of Gibbon's Causes for this decline.
Two of Gibbon's factors are the political errors of its emperors and their quest for personal glory. These are obvious in his chapters on Constantine. Gibbon blames the emperor for destroying Rome for his own personal glory, in them. The next cause would have to be the anti-Roman nature of Christianity. Gibbons insists that the penetration of Christianity was deadly to the empire by weakening the intellectual of great people. On a pessimistic note, Gibbon also lists as a cause' the unavoidable collapse of all human institutions, some assertions on the corrupting nature of luxury, and some reflections on the pretense of human wishes. While the arguments submitted are lengthily backed, they seem to fail in explaining the true nature of the fall.
Many others disagree with Gibbon's explanations and proffer their own for approval. One such author is David Womersley who in his work, The Transformation of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire openly attacks
Gibbon's work calling it a blunt instrument with which to dissect these centuries.' The quote, taken from chapter Sixteen, is one of many which show the disagreement between the two ideas. A few pages later Woomersley refers to Gibbons works as a stumbling block to historians and again later refers to Gibbon himself as a poet historian caught up in the moment and unaware of the true history of the situation. The problem is that in the midst of these attacks,
Womersley fails to bring to light any new and exciting information concerning the fall of Rome and is seen as simply relying on the old standby that the reason was the corrupting nature of luxury and power. Womersley argues that the Romans became so comfortable in their superiority that they forgot how to fight and forgot what made them great.
Another who opposes the beliefs of Gibbon is author and historian David Jordan. In his work, Gibbon and his Roman Empire, Jordan states that Gibbon imposed himself on his materials and in doing so deformed the history he was striving to record. In Jordan's opinion, the main cause of the decline was internal decay, Rome had taken the known' world and clasped it for a very long time. He correlates society to a living organism in so much that if it does not grow, it dies. While it was the Germanic tribes who finally leveled Rome, it was Rome's own audacity that destroyed it long before any enemies infiltrated the city.
This reasoning actually seems sensible and fits with the political situation of the times. At the time of the collapse, the state was overawed by the
soldiers who were mercenaries. Leaders were murdered by their own troops for the fortune they had accumulated. The Stubborn commons' had been eradicated by the Augustan settlement and it seems that every regime of the later emperors finished with the same cycle of betrayal and massacre. The ladder history of Rome. seems to play like a poorly scratched record, frozen into a trench.
One fact which stands out in mind is that Rome was greatest before the monarchy. Once power became centralized, Rome was condemned. In reverse order, England did not become a world existence until a decentralization of the power occurred, that is the Parliament. The dilemma appears to be who takes control when a monarch dies. It is the internal conflict that uses up so many reserves and splits up a nation. It is the losers of such a struggle which normally causes the breakup since while people who defy a particular ruler may be forced to live with it, they will never prefer it. I believe it is this innate flaw in the monarchy that governs the continuous cycle of deception and murder which marks the ladder history of Rome.
As I hope this article has shown, the issue of what resulted in the fall of The Roman empire is a complicated one and will most probably remain a mystery for the foreseeable future. People build on the establishments of others; patterns form themselves. Maybe someday we will know the valid reasons for the fall and be able to use that wisdom to prevent the same fate.
are you a historian author?