Reading histories of Rome's collapse mainly taught me to be skeptical of historians. At every period Rome's collapse was attributed to the cause du jour ignoring all the contrary evidence.
Modern historians, like many scientists, involves trying to formulate hypotheses that extrapolate from known data, and these hypotheses frequently changed as new data is acquired (or existing data is reinterpreted). And if you read academic history, you'll frequently see the continuing discussion as this happens.
However, there is a very strong demand for popular history that is not commonly found in science. Your average lay person is much more interested in, say, the fall of Rome rather than asking what dark matter is, and so you'll see a lot more books purporting to explain the fall of Rome. Furthermore--and this is especially true for people who write to a popular audience--most authors aren't exactly interested in discovering the unvarnished truth of the world, but rather have a particular narrative that they want to push. Again especially true for writing about history: if you're crusading against lead, Christianity, multiculturalism, etc., then being able to explain the fall of Rome as being mostly or entirely caused by lead, Christianity, multiculturalism, etc. bolsters your argument tremendously. And the people who instead write "it's actually a complex, multifaceted process that involves things that take me 50 pages to even list out" (the kind of answer an academic historian is wont to give) tend to lose in popularity to those who have simple explanations.
e.g. Gibbon attributing it to Christianity nevermind the 'barbarians' had also converted by that time, or the histories arguing for an ecological collapse (apparently contradicted by digs).
I see the recent fad is arguing that they weren't multicultural enough (nevermind that each stage of assimilation - when the Roman Empire 'worked' - was preceded by Romans beating up their enemies and that didn't quiet happen the last few times).
Case in point, the aftermath of Trajan's Dacian Wars [1]:
> One hundred thousand male slaves were sent back to Rome
Prior to that (think 1st century AD) they had most probably ethnically cleansed the entire area 50-to-100 kms North of the Danube, because for that period and area there are very few material/archeological remains.
> e.g. Gibbon attributing it to Christianity nevermind the 'barbarians' had also converted by that time, or the histories arguing for an ecological collapse (apparently contradicted by digs).
I don't really understand the obsession with Gibbon. Most fields have some "foundational" scholarship that is now considered outmoded thanks to more recent evidence. Speaking specifically to the history of late antiquity, a lot of archaeological evidence has come to light in the past century which has greatly augmented the textual evidence that we have. And, speaking of textual evidence, what we do have for the period is pretty poor: not only are the sources not very good/don't survive/were written hundreds of years later, but the "reliable" ones were written at a time when the Roman empire's decline was restricting the flow of information. (Sidonius Apollinarus is a great example of this.) Add to all this that we're talking about a pretty complicated subject, and it's no wonder that there are lots of historians positing different factors involved in what was a centuries-long process.
> I see the recent fad is arguing that they weren't multicultural enough (nevermind that each stage of assimilation - when the Roman Empire 'worked' - was preceded by Romans beating up their enemies and that didn't quiet happen the last few times).
The thing is, the people who were doing the "beating up" by and large weren't "Romans" per se. During the empire, and especially after the crisis of the third century, Roman armies were actually pretty synonymous with barbarian foreigners - those groups who lived in border regions would often join the army and fight, perhaps remaining inside the empire after their terms of service, and perhaps going back home. Especially when discussing late antiquity, I think it's pretty misleading to draw a hard line between "Romans" and "barbarians" - it was simply much more fungible than that.
That being said, if you look at things from a political perspective, the inability of the Romans to assimilate barbarian armies in the way they had been so competent at for so long (mostly because emperors and armies became so occupied with an endless string of assassinations and usurpations) led to some pretty crippling Roman losses at Adrianople and the Frigidus which the empire never really recovered from. So in that sense, multiculturalism does play a role.
>I don't really understand the obsession with Gibbon.
Gibbon is a pretty famous example which most readers would be familiar with. His Catholic counterparts were less famous but not better...
>Most fields have some "foundational" scholarship that is now considered outmoded thanks to more recent evidence.
The issue isn't so much evidence but ignoring the obvious counterpoints possibly due to the prevailing trends of the time, and in case of Rome's history this keeps happening over the centuries.
>the inability of the Romans to assimilate barbarian armies in the way they had been so competent at for so long (mostly because emperors and armies became so occupied with an endless string of assassinations and usurpations)... So in that sense, multiculturalism does play a role.
When people talk about 'failures of multiculturalism' they usually either blame the 'locales' for being too discriminatory or the 'foreigners' for 'not really wanting to assimilate'. 'It didn't work out because rulers kept being assassinated and overthrown' usually points to an entirely different kind of failure.
> Gibbon is a pretty famous example which most readers would be familiar with. His Catholic counterparts were less famous but not better...
But when people criticize bad psychology research, they don't mention Freud or Jung (even though they're famous) because obviously their methods have little to do with how psychology is conducted today. The same goes for the history of late antiquity; I think it's better to point out more recent (and better regarded) research before making the bold claim that a long line of scholars impute today's hot-button issues as the cause of the fall of Rome.
> The issue isn't so much evidence but ignoring the obvious counterpoints possibly due to the prevailing trends of the time, and in case of Rome's history this keeps happening over the centuries.
I just don't think Gibbon (and late 18th century history scholarship in general) is remotely comparable to modern history scholarship.
> When people talk about 'failures of multiculturalism' they usually either blame the 'locales' for being too discriminatory or the 'foreigners' for 'not really wanting to assimilate'. 'It didn't work out because rulers kept being assassinated and overthrown' usually points to an entirely different kind of failure.
I would love to read some of this research. Most of the scholarship that I've encountered speaks of these so-called "failures of multiculturalism" as an effect of the empire's decline, not a cause. For example, take the Visigothic kingdom (generally considered the earliest of the successor states): the reason why the Visigoths were to some degree able to maintain their own identity was the weak negotiating position of the Western empire, which allowed them to operate with more independence than previous settlements of barbarians.
>But when people criticize bad psychology research, they don't mention Freud or Jung.
But they might start with Freud and end up at the replication crisis, while pointing out there's too much focus on W.E.I.R.D people[0]. They could even point out some of the 60s research was obviously more meant to prove a point than be proper research (e.g. Zimbardo). It won't be a strike against psychology as a whole at all, just a warning to use caution and proper research methods.
> I think it's better to point out more recent (and better regarded) research before making the bold claim that a long line of scholars impute today's hot-button issues as the cause of the fall of Rome.
Just read the linked article, which is actually quite good but a bit too busy stretching out arguments in order to argue against some imagined alt-right antagonist. It's trivial to show that Rome wasn't homogeneous ethnically, but he stretches some things more than they're worth (Rome treating its Italian subjects arguably better isn't 'diversity'. We don't really know how Carthago treated its subjects - Numidia jumped when Carthago was obvious losing, Greek polis citizenship isn't a good model for how the Hellenic Empires ran, etc.).
>I would love to read some of this research. Most of the scholarship that I've encountered speaks of these so-called "failures of multiculturalism" as an effect of the empire's decline, not a cause.
I was referring to the word's definition as used by ordinary people rather than research. My point was that the research you're describing doesn't really refer to so-called "failures of multiculturalism" as a cause, and you're confirming it.
> But they might start with Freud and end up at the replication crisis, while pointing out there's too much focus on W.E.I.R.D people[0]. They could even point out some of the 60s research was obviously more meant to prove a point than be proper research (e.g. Zimbardo). It won't be a strike against psychology as a whole at all, just a warning to use caution and proper research methods.
I take your point fairly. I don't know nearly as much about psych as I do about history.
> Just read the linked article, which is actually quite good but a bit too busy stretching out arguments in order to argue against some imagined alt-right antagonist. It's trivial to show that Rome wasn't homogeneous ethnically, but he stretches some things more than they're worth (Rome treating its Italian subjects arguably better isn't 'diversity'. We don't really know how Carthago treated its subjects - Numidia jumped when Carthago was obvious losing, Greek polis citizenship isn't a good model for how the Hellenic Empires ran, etc.).
I read the linked post's point as more of a pushback against depictions of Rome in modern culture. And Rome's conceptualization of citizenship was radically expansionist compared to that of the Greek states which were flourishing at the same time. As for, say, the Hellenistic kingdoms, I think it's clear that the ability of the Romans to actually absorb those kingdoms and have them come to see themselves as "Romans" (a trick the Seleucids/Antigonids/etc. never pulled off) speaks to a real and meaningful difference here.
>Rome's conceptualization of citizenship was radically expansionist compared to that of the Greek states which were flourishing at the same time.
Agreed.
> As for, say, the Hellenistic kingdoms, I think it's clear that the ability of the Romans to actually absorb those kingdoms and have them come to see themselves as "Romans" (a trick the Seleucids/Antigonids/etc. never pulled off) speaks to a real and meaningful difference here.
There's something here, but it's not appropriate to generalize from the polis to the Hellenic Empires and I'm not sure it's so clear cut. Greek culture spread widely. For example, the Maccabeean Revolt shows they were Hellenized Jews willing to go pretty far to partake of Greek culture, especially if you take the modern view that assigns the Hellenized most of the responsibility for the policies sparking the revolt.
* There's an unfortunate paucity of sources, that is just about none, on the Hellenistic side of the revolt, so we can't rule out the traditional account. Either way these Jews clearly existed.
I once read a metaphor from Daniel Dennet about effectiveness of science despite all this crap, paraphrasing:
When you look at the edge of an axe at a microscope, you'll see a very ragged, uneven, broken and weak boundary. What gives the axe its cutting capacity is all the iron bulk behind it.
After listening to Mike Duncan's excellent "History of Rome" podcast, one of the repeated themes I noticed is that during periods when the Romans were more racist/classist/etc they had trouble. Their periods of greatest success were when they let people with the necessary skills and talent rise to the top regardless of their origin.
That said, they definitely had problems with failing to culturally assimilate immigrants during the late empire -- when "citizens" of the empire didn't think of themselves as Roman but instead primarily part of some other group.
>during periods when the Romans were more racist/classist/etc they had trouble
I'm afraid you might be attributing some false causality. It seems more obvious to me that during periods of peace, any social rifts are unproblematic, but when people start to go hungry and their wealth is threatened, any societal wedges are utilized by the domineering group to protect their interests.
It does become an issue when the only competent administrators of Rome were Germanic in origin and discriminated against, or when the army's best men are also Germanic. A massacre of the families of german soldiers both alienated the king of the Vandals and strengthened his position, leading eventually to the Sack of Rome. Duncan asks near the end of the show why there was not a series of German emperors, as there were Dalmatian emperors.
Technically there were a bunch of German "emperors" although they called themselves kings. They're the people that Justinian fought against, more or less, when he reconquered Italy and in the process killed large parts of the population.
I'll have to double-check Duncan's podcast to see if he ends it in the 470s or in the 530s or so. Personally I think the Gothic War/Lombard Invasion makes a much better ending point for civilization in the West than 472.
> there were a bunch of German "emperors" although they called themselves kings.
What does that mean? "King" was the word for the concept in every language except Latin, where it was still the word for the concept, but was avoided due to a cultural taboo.
A Roman emperor held many titles. English "emperor" derives from imperator, "commander", an honorific title given to generals. He was addressed as Caesar, originally a personal name, which survives in the German Kaiser and the Russian Tsar. To the Greeks, he was basileus, "king", because there was no Greek taboo on the word "king".
There was no title analogous to Near Eastern "king of kings" or Chinese 皇帝, explicitly set above the level of a "king".
For some reason introductory history doesn’t much cover the Visigothic Roman Kingdom, but it’s quite interesting. L. Sprague de Camp set his marvelous Lest Darkness Fall in that time period.
I sometimes feel like I’m the only one to not be a huge fan of The History Of Rome. It wasn’t bad, but I got frustrated with the fact that it was too much of “A biography of Roman leaders”: not enough analysis of the more fundamental shifts happening behind the scenes, not enough time spent discussing what was life was actually like for the various populations at different times. There were a few “step back” episodes, but they were few and far between
There, I’ve got it off my chest. You can start throwing stones now ;)
Unfortunately the historical record lacks the information to provide a meaningful analysis of many of those people behind the scenes. Only the nobles were writing books, and the emperors only kept the ones flattering them.
Most popular accounts of more behind the scenes actions extrapolate heavily from minimal information. We actually have very little idea how Roman soldiers of various eras fought for example, descriptions of battles rarely describe the individual soldiers actions during combat.
I'm sure Duncan would have liked to do more about the people, Revolutions often tries to describe the lives of the multiple different sides.
Consider the Life of Caesar podcast. They're covering the period starting from Julius Caesar and after 6 years and hundreds of hours they're only up to Nero.
Perhaps, but for me, the lazy takeaway was that the (west) Romans continuously struggled with the wealth/power feedback loop and eventually tore themselves apart because their state could not reign over its wealthiest members.
Roman civilization worked well assimilating other people who were actually willing to assimilate. But that is a fairly non-consequential observation, at least when observed in 2021, and the mechanism cannot be easily carried over to modern world.
For starters, there is a lot more of us humans nowadays. Instant communication means that even if you move thousands of miles away from your country, you are still fed a steady information diet about all the outrage back home, so you cannot really let go of the place you moved away from.
And some culture clashes are very real. The later remnant of the Roman empire (Byzantium) fought against the Islamic world for centuries and finally fell to the Turks. They did not find a way to assimilate the newcomers. The religious barrier was too high. To be fair, they had a similar problem with Catholic Europeans, the Sack of Constantinople wasn't perpetrated by anyone else than fellow Christians.
In modern Western Europe, some immigrant groups assimilate fairly quickly (Russians, Indians, Vietnamese, Iranians), some other form parallel societies in a manner that Rome would not have tolerated well.
> Roman civilization worked well assimilating other people who were actually willing to assimilate
I don't think it's historically accurate to describe the Germanic peoples who conquered the Western Roman Empire as not willing to assimilate, given that they all learned Latin (and indeed their descendants in Italy, France and Spain speak languages descended from Latin to this day) and converted to Christianity. They clearly were prepared to take up Roman ways/culture.
> In modern Western Europe, some immigrant groups assimilate fairly quickly (Russians, Indians, Vietnamese, Iranians), some other form parallel societies in a manner that Rome would not have tolerated well.
Like most sweeping generalisations, this is wrong. Whether groups live in parallel is determined community by community, not by nationality. I can think of examples of less integrated Vietnamese communities in the UK and more integrated Pakistani communities, and vice versa. What can't be ignored is the level of racism groups are subjected to: it seems obvious to say that people will integrate better if they have people willing to integrate with them. I suspect this is far more often the problem.
> I can think of examples of less integrated Vietnamese communities in the UK and more integrated Pakistani communities, and vice versa. What can't be ignored is the level of racism groups are subjected to: it seems obvious to say that people will integrate better if they have people willing to integrate with them.
It's not all obvious to me that:
(1) some Vietnamese and Pakistani communities in the UK faced more racism than other Vietnamese and Pakistani communities in other parts of the UK,
and (2) that was the cause of the different amounts of integration between those communities.
My 1990s experience says that a lot of people are casually racist, sometimes viciously so, but, at the same time, they are perfectly willing to engage in mutual commerce and other activites with the outgroup, as long as they gain something from it. If this hypocritical kind of racism dominates, the outgroup has a chance to establish itself through education and trade.
The "Kauft nicht bei den Juden" or KKK-like kind of racism that really strives to isolate and possibly exterminate the outgroup even at a financial or practical cost to the dominant group is rarer and if it prevails, it leads to really bad consequences.
>My 1990s experience says that a lot of people are casually racist, sometimes viciously so, but, at the same time, they are perfectly willing to engage in mutual commerce and other activites with the outgroup, as long as they gain something from it. If this hypocritical kind of racism dominates, the outgroup has a chance to establish itself through education and trade.
I don't think this is hypocritical; just normal human behavior.
Newcomers are always the "other", and treated as such. Over time, as the "in group" discovers that if the "out group" displays behavior that makes for good customers and employees, and that there are financial benefits (increased sales, being able to hire new staff at a lower rate than otherwise) the "out group" becomes integrated with the "in group".
>The "Kauft nicht bei den Juden" or KKK-like kind of racism that really strives to isolate and possibly exterminate the outgroup even at a financial or practical cost to the dominant group is rarer and if it prevails, it leads to really bad consequences.
Yes, but thankfully such behavior is (very) rare. Anti-Semitism has existed in Europe for centuries but conditions had gradually improved everywhere. When fascism/authoritarianism became a thing in Europe in the first half of the 20th century, most regimes at worst maintained the existing casual anti-Semitism. Hitlerian genocidal anti-Semitism was very much an aberration, not seen in Hungary, pre-Anschluss Austria, Poland, or Italy. Mussolini's Italy had many Jewish supporters and leaders; it reluctantly implemented anti-Jewish racial laws just before the war began, after it became clear that Germany was now the more powerful Axis power.
More to the point, the integration can only occur when the "out group" behaves in ways that the "in group" accepts. In the US and Western Europe such integration happened or is happening with Jews, Italians, Irish, Eastern Europeans, Asians, South non-Muslim Asians, and Latinos. This has not happened with blacks and Muslims.
>What's your proof that Muslims in the US are resisting integration?
The San Bernardino, Orlando, and Boston Marathon attacks immediately comes to mind, among others. (I'm not sure what's worse about the San Bernardino attack, that a woman was involved or that her husband was American-born.)
But the US is still better off than Western Europe. In Britain, you have three groups from the Indian subcontinent:
* Indian Hindus
* Indian Sikhs
* Indian and Pakistani Muslims
Sikhs and Hindus have been very successful; they are more likely than the average to be part of the British middle class (<http://www.theguardian.com/money/2010/dec/14/middle-britain-...>). Muslims are, by contrast, worse than average in every single social measure despite being, racially speaking, indistinguishable from the other two groups to any outsider (since none knows, or cares, about the myriad of caste differences); they are all "Asians" in Britain.
The list of Islamic terrorist attacks (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Islamist_terrorist_att...>) is so long that one's eyes and mind become numb after a while. One thrilling 12-day period in July 2016 had four Islamist attacks in Western Europe (Nice truck attack, Germany train attack, Germany suicide bombing, France priest attack)! 2017 saw the *third* London incident involving civilians attacked on a bridge!
And before you say "they're not real Muslims", as The Atlantic explained in detail (<http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2015/02/what-isi...>), ISIS was and is ISIS because its members and leaders are sincere in their fundamentalist Islamic beliefs. They are telling the truth when they call themselves devout Muslims.
While these are solid points, I'm not talking about Western Europe (and I'll note, that black Africans and African descent people do _better_ than Pakistanis on UK achievement tests). Why are you skipping over the fact that Muslims are middle class in the US? Why ignore Sikhs in Canada in the 80s (Air India bombing, etc) which Trudeau got in hot water over when visiting India.
>Why are you skipping over the fact that Muslims are middle class in the US?
That makes the the likes of the San Bernardino, Orlando, and Boston Marathon attacks all the worse, because you can't cite the usual go-to excuse in Europe of "the [French|British|Belgians so badly mistreat Muslims that they cannot escape the banlieus, and thus resort to violence". The San Bernardino attack, in particular, was carried out by a middle-class US-born civil servant and his wife.
>Why ignore Sikhs in Canada in the 80s (Air India bombing, etc) which Trudeau got in hot water over when visiting India.
* The bombing was because of Sikh separatism in India. That in this case deadly consequences outside India is terrible, but it does limit the scope of the relevance to other atrocities.
* The events (outside India, at least) were several decades ago.
* Most important, the Sikhs who committed these crimes did not believe or claim that their religious belief is the only legitimate one in the world, and did not try to extend their ideology's reach across a large portion of the world, with the ultimate goal of the entire world under their control.
>What can't be ignored is the level of racism groups are subjected to: it seems obvious to say that people will integrate better if they have people willing to integrate with them. I suspect this is far more often the problem.
I disagree. In Britain you have three groups from the Indian subcontinent:
* Indian Hindus
* Indian Sikhs
* Indian and Pakistani Muslims
Sikhs and Hindus have been very successful; they are more likely than the average to be part of the British middle class (<http://www.theguardian.com/money/2010/dec/14/middle-britain-...>). Muslims are, by contrast, worse than average in every single social measure despite being, racially speaking, indistinguishable from the other two groups to any outsider (since none knows, or cares, about the myriad of caste differences); they are all "Asians" in Britain.
Indian Sikhs and Hindus are willing to assimilate. Indian and Pakistani Muslims, far less so.
"What can't be ignored is the level of racism groups are subjected to: it seems obvious to say that people will integrate better if they have people willing to integrate with them. I suspect this is far more often the problem."
It does not seem as obvious to me. This theory seems to have too many outliers.
At least here in Central Europe, racism/anti-semitism against visible minorities tended to be very strong. Historically, Jews were treated horribly, and in the more recent history, Vietnamese also. Growing up in the 1990s, there was a lot of shockingly casual racism against them.
Looking across the pond, Japanese-Americans were herded into concentration camps during WWII. The only worse level of racism is probably genocide.
In all these cases, the communities are now very well integrated, though the memories of really bad treatment aren't that distant.
Yes, yesterday, actually. I love the blog, though I do not always agree with everything. For example, this particular text could have remarked that Christianity turned out to be notably less assimilable and co-optable than many other identities and actually managed to subvert the empire instead of being absorbed to the mega-mix.
No, it could not have made that point, because Christianity did not happen during the Roman Republic. It was not about the empire at all, so why would it make any points about the empire?
The presentation of this article is really nice. I’ve only seen it on mobile. It feels like a reading experience. There was one weird thing with a paragraph’s font that was suddenly bolded. It had a link in white without text decorations, but also bolded. The green text and white link started giving me the effect of flashing.
Anyways, I think this site shows that even text-heavy content can be presented online in a visually pleasing way.
Rome fell because their economy depended on expansion of the empire and managing a huge empire is hard when you don't have Internet. God bless the Internet.
