I haven't read this part II yet, although I very much enjoyed part I - it's an after-work read for sure - I wanted to mention for anyone interested in Roman history, spotify has "The History of Rome" podcast that has been going for something like 15 years now, and is super excellent. It's become my favorite thing to listen to while I cook or clean.
It looks like this covers Diocletian's monetary reforms, which is one of my absolute favorite parts of roman history - looking forward to it!
> "The History of Rome" podcast that has been going for something like 15 years now, and is super excellent
If you're talking about Mike Duncan's podcast, note that it ended in 2012 with the deposing of the final Western Emperor.
There is a spiritual successor by Robin Pierson called "The History of Byzantium" that picks up shortly after the end and is still ongoing after over 230 episodes.
Duncan's current podcast is "Revolutions", which covers a variety of historical revolutions. I've been listening for a bit now and am only on the third (French) of ten revolutions. Definitely recommend the show for people seeking a history podcast.
The History of Rome was the very first podcast I can remember listening to on a weekly basis. It was the era when the Nokia N95 was very much the flagship almost smartphone, and I got so interested in the idea of being able to automatically subscribe to these on-demand and niche "radio shows" that I suffered the torture of writing an app for the Symbian OS.
Did you catch this article from the other day? I don't know much about Diocletian's monetary reforms (I'm still busy reading up on the history of the Republic), but his Edict of Maximum Prices was mentioned in it. https://www.bookandsword.com/2021/05/08/how-much-did-a-tunic...
I found it tiring that she consistently dismisses the ancient sources as wrong without giving an reason why. Academics have been saying "well this <commonly believed thing from antiquity> can't possibly be true", and it not infrequently turns out to be at least not wrong. Sure, sources in antiquity are unreliable, but they are at least two millennia closer to the actual events than we are.
The book also seemed like a survey that had chunks missing out of the map. The parts that were there were well done (excepting not giving any good reason for distrusting the ancient sources) and I definitely learned things. But I don't feel like I got a good feeling of the course of Roman history, more like little vignettes along the way.
I can't say I dislike the book, but I think it could be better. (Although, I'm a complete novice in Roman history, so that might influence my opinion. And maybe the book wasn't written for me, too.)
I read it a few years ago after listening to the Duncan podcast and reading a bunch of archeology papers. I'm definitely no classicist, and don't read Latin but have a passing interest in the history. I think some of here dismissals are well founded and other experts agree. I think the weakness of the book is that it leans heavily on pronouncement of unknowability. But I really like that she treats the reader like a smart person and presents conflicting and complicated information as is, and lets you mull it over.
It isn't a perfect book, but it's very readable, informative, and seems to be well regarded. I was on a Rome kick at the time and didn't find anything that seemed to be completely out of left field.
Perhaps it's a reaction to the normal bias? I'm constantly surprised by how people will take extremely partial accounts from somebody on one side of an issue and no real expressed or implicit commitment to accuracy at face value.
[0]: e.g. Thucydides' History of the Pelopenesian war might be accurate, but honestly, why would it be? It's even worse when you have stuff like Caesar's writings.
I’ve skimmed some of it. I was under the impression that Gibbon’s decline narrative isn’t very well regarded among scholars today, but I don’t know enough to make any judgment there.
> While I am going at points to gesture to Gibbon’s thinking, we’re not going to debate him; he is the ‘old man’ of our title. Gibbon himself largely exists only in historiographical footnotes and intellectual histories; he is not at this point seriously defended nor seriously attacked but discussed as the venerable, but now out of date, origin point for all of this bickering.
Holding it in ill-regard would be punching down. It's an 18th work! If it were at all up to date, that would indicate serious stagnation in the academy. Of course, there has been a great amassing of new evidence since then, especially non-textual.
I'm starting book 3 right now. Due to being written over 200 years ago his work might be out of date, but is there anything he got wrong? I could see scholars having issues with some of his opinions, but as far as I am aware, his factual history stands.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominate == USSR, basically. It's too editorialized to stand as a modern historical text, but it's great fun to read nonetheless!
One of the books I'm currently reading is Edward J. Watts' "Mortal Republic - How Rome Fell into Tyranny" which details how Rome the republic transformed into a dictatorship. It is intriguing, parts are like the TV-series House of Cards with an abundance of dirty tricks pulled by opponents against each other.
One thing I've never quite understood from history books though: there was so much wealth, people with big palaces, large tracts of land, artwork (like statues), gold, from wealthy families, and so on. Where did all that wealth go in the end?
What wealth would be able to go somewhere, or stay? Stashed gold is quickly dealt with by spending more than you earn. Palaces get abandoned, fall into disrepair and get divided up by squatters, in any order and concurrency. Anything marble needs a good excuse to avoid downcycling in a lime kiln.
Without something like a stock exchange, wealth means having actual productivity under your control and that has zero inherent stability. It's well possible to build and expand over generations while the productivity goes on and the system facilitating that control (e.g. a rule of law) remains undisrupted, but when either of that stops being the case nothing remains. When there's no authority that enforces whatever letters of ownership or contracts you might have, they are as immaterial as ETF shares in a paperless bank account that has just disappeared some day.
Rome's territory was sacked by "barbarians", nevermind the pilfering and stealing other "Romans" did. Consider that when emperors died, the usual course was to murder their whole family and sack their belongings, all for good measure. It was not a stable thing to be at the top in Roman society, you gained a target on your back due to your wealth and power in an inherently violent society. Combine all this with looting over the centuries, and what's left to us is a lot less than originally existed.
This is an outstanding question and would take more than one book to even rudimentarily answer. That is why I would like to provide just a few bits and pieces here: There are, of course, some ancient monuments that are still in use today (the Pantheon, the Mausoleum of Hadrian = Castel Sant'Angelo, several amphitheatres). Many architectural elements were reused in later buildings, especially ancient columns in church buildings. But most of reusable material was indeed recycled: Marble was burnt into chalk. Gold, silver and bronze was recast (very few ancient bronze sculptures survived). In contrast, quite a lot of engraved gems of imperial provenance have come down to us; although their whereabouts during the Dark Ages are unknown, it can be assumed that they moved from one royal or ecclesiastical treasury to the next. It is also worth noting that in the long run, much of the precious metal probably ended up in the Far East (China, Southeast Asia and India) as a medium of exchange for the luxury goods that reached Europe via the Silk Road.
A lot of it was moved to Byzantium / Constantinople / İstanbul by Constantine, who tried to pay all the Roman elite he could, especially senators to move to his 'New Rome'. The ERE would continue to be wealthier until the sack of Constantinople by crusaders due to its domination of the European silk trade (after stealing the secrets via a Christian mission to China). That is a little ironic considering the first crusade was initiated by the Emperor in the east to recapture Jerusalem and the middle east.
After the sack of Constantinople, much of that wealth, including the secret of silk-making was taken back to Italy, and the ERE would never recover from this.
Of course, a huge amount of wealth remained in the west, even after Odoacer's conquest (see this mosaic of the palace of Theodoric: https://www.worldhistory.org/image/3090/palace-of-theodoric-... which is in undeniably Roman form). That said, the ERE would continue to be the center of wealth in Europe up until at least the sack.
I think it's important to note that Odoacer, in destroying the WRE was not considered by his contemporaries to have destroyed the Roman Empire. He immediately sent the imperial regalia to the Emperor in the east and declared himself a Viceroy of the eastern Roman emperor. In this way, I think the ERE thought it kind of convenient, as they now, at least on paper had full control of the whole Roman empire. The identity of 'Roman' in the West was not broken, so I've read until the ERE decided to 'reconquer' Rome and mainland Italy for being barbarian, which, as you can imagine would throw your personal identity for a bit of a loop.
Despite still being greatly dilapidated when Constantinople was finally invaded by the Ottomans 200 years after the sack, it was still famous for silk. Mehmed The Conqueror is attested to have said, upon wandering its ruins:
The spider is curtain-bearer in the palace of Chosroes,
The owl sounds the relief in the castle of Afrasiyab.
>That is a little ironic considering the first crusade was initiated by the Emperor in the east to recapture Jerusalem and the middle east.
I don't think this is quite right. The sequence of events is roughly as follows:
1054: Great Schism, Patriarchate of Constantinople diverges from Papacy in Rome.
1071: Battle of Manzikert, Seljuk (Turkish) Empire conquers most of Anatolia
[also 1071: Norman invasion of southern Italy and Sicily, final de facto eviction of Byzantines from Italy]
1095: First Crusade, Frankish armies storm the Levant and capture Nicaea and Jerusalem -- also the only Crusade that had any real success, others at most reversed previous losses.
It seems more than a little suspicious that all of this happens so quickly. It can't just be about Jerusalem, which had fallen to the Muslim conquests four centuries prior. Rather, after the Schism, there is a "switch" from formal (but usually ignored) ERE suzerainty over European kingdoms, with European military assistance under the banner of ERE armies, to European armies fighting as "equal partners" of the ERE. This second arrangement worked well at first, but it was less stable and less successful in the long run, ultimately leading to the disastrous Fourth Crusade and the Fall of Acre.
In fact, the ERE/Byzantines had already been making gains against the Arabs in the Levant up until the Schism:
Interesting, i thought that the church was a power center that was complementary if not secondary to the secular powers of western Europe. However you seem to be saying, that the formal legitimacy granted by the Eastern Roman Empire was more important to maintain some very fragile equilibrium between the church vs the state, and that this equilibrium was then lost with the church schism.
I find it somewhat hard understand, how the church managed to mobilise europe into a crusade, it is possible that the various competing establishments weren't very enthusiastic about the project, to begin with.
> In fact, the ERE/Byzantines had already been making gains against the Arabs in the Levant up until the Schism
The Patriarch in Rome had been operating effectively independently for centuries before the schism.
The Romans made gains after the collapse of the Caliphate, retaking Anatolia, Crete, Bulgaria and Antioch and even Armenia and Georgia, but then they experienced a series of setbacks when the Turks appeared.
I'm not an expert on the motivations of medieval generals, but if you've spent your whole life fighting for "God" and suddenly the people who are supposed to be close to God don't seem to have a clue what they're doing, don't you think that might impact your willingness to fight?
The Roman Empire had always centered on Italy, Greece and Anatolia. Until 1050 the ERE had always had a toehold in Italy and most of Anatolia. By 1100 they had lost all of Italy and most of Anatolia:
It's true that theological disputes accumulated gradually before the Schism and were interleaved with political disputes, but this doesn't really dispute the importance of the theological split and instead smears it over the previous two centuries (arguably beginning with the coronation of Charlemagne).
I mean, it is factually true that the Emperor in the east sent an envoy in 1095 to ask Pope Urban II for aid. I am not sure if the crusades would have happened without that.
The wealth didn't need to go anywhere! That's kind of the point.
What's confusing is that pre-decline Rome, on the face of it, seems pre-modern in many ways, but this is just a simulacrum, because there was none of the productivity increases that underpin the modern world.
Example:
19th century London: big in part because there are lots of factories there!
100 AD Rome: big because of years of taxation routing grain there!
Yes, there was trade. Yes, cities did do a lot of self rule. Yes, the early government was pretty minimal. See Rostovtzeff for some fun with this. But there wasn't really much self-sustaining about the cities.
So back to the original question, there is no "stock" of wealth. The buildings are the results of wealth, not (perhaps baring things like aqueducts) the source of wealth. Without the political control over the many agricultural laborers and their output, the wealth just dissipates.
There is a lot more 0-sum stuff going on than the modern world, where conversely the positive-sum nature of things is not well appreciated.
The land, as well as much of the art, palaces, etc are still there. But everything requires upkeep, so without the engine of the empire and economy, stuff decays, often past the point of repair (think Detroit ruin porn). A palace can't survive without the staff to maintain it.
Indeed you are right, the land is there, and palaces might be nothing more than a pile of rocks now, however: having wealth meant both getting enemies, but also having resources to get protection and arrange things; with enough money/wealth, one could, for example, get out of the hotbed of assassinations and political intrigue (=Rome) to a more secluded place, build a stronghold of some sorts, become a mini-monarch / local player, and over time grow the wealth and build a dynasty.
I'm thinking about long-lived dynasties, like the House of Yamato (1000+ years; Imperial House of Japan), or Bagrationi in Georgia, and so on.
Yet, from ancient Rome, not one of the powerful ancient families seems to have survived, and the same disappearing act happened with the rather massive wealth that was sloshing around back then. I mean that was a bit surprising to me.
I would have expected some wealthy modern "noble family" to be able to trace its roots to Rome and the wealth obtained when, say, some of their ancestors were Roman Senators, who decided to sail to a secluded location, assume control of lucrative trade routes, and so on.
> I would have expected some wealthy modern "noble family" to be able to trace its roots to Rome
Rome was never a monarchy, and even the imperial period was never as autocratic as it is sometimes painted. The Romans didn’t delineate between the republic and empire the way we do. It was still nominally the Res Publica, and still effectively in some ways a Republic. Hence, the emperor ruled with the tacit consent of, and relied on support of various factions - the army, the senate, and the plebs. Bad emperors would get overthrown and people would think nothing of it. Because the situation at the top was so fragile there weren’t really imperial dynasties that lasted more than a few generations.
Secondly, there was the ‘apocalypse’. Plague and warfare severely reduced the population of the Italian peninsula and the city of Rome (by about 95%). The countryside was overrun by various Germanic tribes who probably confiscated much of the wealth. People with money probably went elsewhere - Milan, Venice, and Constantinople for instance.
> the emperor ruled with the tacit consent of, and relied on support of various factions - the army, the senate, and the plebs. Bad emperors would get overthrown and people would think nothing of it.
That doesn't sound too different from how monarchs would rule.
According to Keynes most of the wealth was never created because the shiny brain parasite called gold was considered wealth and its liquidity preference exceeded that of physical capital.
When you think about it, gold never changes over time, so calling it wealth is obviously absurd. The moment you have dug it out, you apparently have wealth. People like living in a parallel world I guess.
Someone had to pay for all the civil wars. That isn’t cheap. One of main things Augustus was able to do was to stand down a huge amount of soldiers. This included back pay and settling veterans in various new colonies. Egypt was a very rich area in ancient times.
Great article. One bit piqued my interest in particular:
> ... when actually performing a regular census proved difficult, Constantine responded by mandating that coloni – the tenant farmers and sharecroppers of the empire – must stay on the land they had been farming so that their landlords would be able to pay the taxes, casually abrogating a traditional freedom of Roman citizens for millions of farmers out of administrative convenience.
Are the roots of serfdom traceable back to this mandate? It's tempting to imagine so, as serfs were not slaves per se, but tied to the land they worked.
Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/1780747411/ ) presents serfdom as one outcome of a battle between the head of state and local nobility that was common across societies, with serfdom being what the nobility wants and freeholding being what the head of state wants. The analysis is that each side wants peasants to have the status that makes tax collection easier for their side.
Interestingly, those positions have reversed in the modern day, with the analogue of serfdom -- W2 employment -- heavily favored by the state, and the analogue of freeholding -- employment as a contractor -- preferable to employers (who mostly lack the power to implement it over the state's objection).
Corporations prefer contractors because they can use the power asymmetry to extract more value for lower pay.
Formal employment is favoured by a democratically elected state, as it works to restore the power balance to the voters through appropriate regulation (assuming of course you live in a modern well functioning democratic society - which I understand is not the case in many places).
I strongly disagree. Having been both an employee and a contractor, both in the gig economy sense and the consultant sense of the word, I very much prefer and felt much freer as a contractor. I think the reason states prefer people to be employees is probably the same reason the Roman state mandated farmers and sharecroppers stay on the land, it makes us much easier to tax and control.
There is probably also the added benefit that it's more difficult for employees to move into a position were they can compete with the corporations that pay for the politicians campaigns in democratically elected states.
There are real benefits to the usual employment arrangement that have nothing to do with power asymmetry or making it easier for the government to turn people into serfs. The employee might benefit from that arrangement because it lets her insure against inevitable random fluctuations in productivity, and stabilize her income. (Newsflash, "profit sharing" is a bad thing for most employees. It's not what they generally want.) OTOH, the employer can lower workers' turnover or 'churn', and incent them into contributing to long-term enhancement of firm-specific capital. Building this sort of capital is in fact one of the main ways in which workers can contribute to any organizational endeavor; even though it generally happens tacitly, it can be far more relevant in practice than any overtly assigned 'tasks'.
There wasn’t one thing we can trace serfdom to. The system we usually envision is a product of Charles Martel but before him there were serfs all the way back into the Roman Empire. It was more a natural evolution/long term trend of the Roman economy away from “slave based” labor.
An argument I'd like to see a little more is one that argues that the Roman Empire actually 'fell' in the Crisis of the Third Century. This seems to account for many of the continuity arguments and catastrophe arguments at the same time (although my understanding is that the economic cataclysm actually happens relatively late--I'm sure this will be addressed in Part III, though): the post-Roman states are largely continuous with the post-Crisis Roman norms, although on a much smaller scale due to the loss of state capacity.
Isn't this addressed pretty early on in this essay?
"But here too, we have to be careful in defining what that governance meant, because the Roman Empire of August, 378 AD was not the Roman Empire of August, 14 AD."
"are we comparing [the decline of the fifth and sixth centuries] to the empire of Hadrian (r. 117-138) or the empire of Valentinian (r. 364-375)? Because most students are generally more familiar with the former (because it is was tends to be get focused on in teaching), there is a tendency to compare 476 directly with Rome under the Nervan-Antonines (96-192) without taking into account the events of the third and early fourth century."
It definitely didn't "fall" at that time in any real sense, but it seems to have started a terminal decline that continued all the way through the Early Middle Ages (with no clearly identifiable "fall" event, albeit the convention of picking 476 CE, being roughly at the midpoint, is arguably as good as any!). By the same standard, one could argue that recovery and renewed growth following this "decline" state began roughly in the Late Middle Ages and continued throughout the Renaissance and the Early Modern Period, essentially setting the stage for the Age of Exploration and Industrial Revolution as truly "disruptive" events from a long-run POV.
While there is no one event, the population collapsed, the security situation deteriorated, material conditions became dramatically worse and literacy rates plunged through the 5th and 6th centuries. Mass death and poverty combined with a collapse governmental capacity is more than just a "terminal decline" in my book.
The fall of Constantinople to Ottoman cannons in 1453 drew a line under the Roman polity, Politeia tōn Rhōmaiōn for good.
You can debate how Roman the empire was at that point, but it was still officially Basileía Rhōmaíōn, known informally as Rhōmania, and the people still called themselves Romaioi.
Ehh-sure, but also no? If we want to have fun with it, one can make a reasonable argument that the Catholic Church and today's nation-state of the Vatican City is the further continuation of the Western Roman Empire to this day. They still even speak Latin!
Historical labels are fun. The arguments mostly so when you're drinking.
Sure, but the Eastern Roman Empire isn't the Roman Empire, then, change my mind. (Said mostly unseriously, of course. Labels are just that.)
I did once take this dumb argument to the end that the Roman Empire never actually ended, it just ended up on an island with a different flag and then unceremoniously transferred itself to North America later. Then I learned Asimov had already done it.
> the Eastern Roman Empire isn't the Roman Empire, then, change my mind.
The Eastern Roman Empire is a historical fiction by western authors who have grown up in nations who had historically chosen to label the remaining territories of the Roman Empire as not the ‘real’ Rome for political purposes, and religious ones. It lent church and state an aura of legitimacy. Necessarily they had to deny that the inconveniently tenacious Rome in the east was really Rome.
Constantine moved his capital in AD 324. The Empire in the west had been declining, so the move east was hardly surprising. At that point, the Empire stretched from Britain to Egypt.
When the emperor Valens lost the battle of Adrianople in 378, along with his army and his life the empire effectively lost control of he situation in the west. But the Empire itself was not lost. At that point Rome still controlled the most populous and richest parts of the empire, including the capital the levant, and Egypt. They would continue to hold off, and hold on, for another thousand years.
Meanwhile Frankish and Gothic kings wanted the title of emperor for themselves to legitimise their rule and increase their standing. So too, the patriarch in Rome wanted to be the preeminence. Inconveniently, a Roman emperor still controlled the Roman capital and most of a wealthy and still powerful Empire. The pretenders needed to keep pretending, not only to the throne, but that the Empire didn’t exist.
Thus began the policy of calling the Roman Empire the ‘Empire of Constantinople’ or the ‘Empire of the East’, or the ‘Empire of the Greeks’. That way, Franks and Goths could claim to be the ‘real’ emperor, even when they only controlled the depopulated and impoverished remains of the west.
...Yes, I know these things. You get that I'm goofing around a little, right? (I don't know how much clearer than an Asimov reference one needs to get there!)
> but it seems to have started a terminal decline that continued all the way through the Early Middle Ages (with no clearly identifiable "fall" event, albeit the convention of picking 476 CE, being roughly at the midpoint, is arguably as good as any!)
This isn't really true. The Roman Empire recovered substantially during the 4th century; economic output and population (at least as well as we can measure them) stabilized at levels below those of the first two centuries C.E., but significantly higher than during the crises of the third century. It wasn't until the late 4th century that things really started going downhill.
I'm not sure it makes sense to argue that a state "falls" when it reorganizes its administrative structure, makes big changes to its currency and fiscal policies, and goes through a period of violent upheaval. By those standards, the United States "fell" in the late 19th and early 20th century with the civil war and the vast expansion of the role of the state.
I suspect this would be considered a valid thesis by future historians if the United States had existed in relatively stable prosperity for hundreds of years beforehand and the result of such changes was that the US reduced in power and wealth to the extent that it sat on the verge of succumbing to foreign invasion by the mid twenty-first century.
(At the other end of the scale there are people willing to argue that the Eastern Roman Empire was just an administrative reorganisation and consolidation so the Empire didn't really fall until 1453. Some people measure terminal declines from the peak, some people won't acknowledge falls until something finally ceases to exist)
> I suspect this would be considered a valid thesis by future historians if the United States had existed in relatively stable prosperity for hundreds of years beforehand and the result of such changes was that the US reduced in power and wealth to the extent that it sat on the verge of succumbing to foreign invasion by the mid twenty-first century.
But this isn't at all what happened with regards to the late Roman Empire. The Western Empire recovered substantially from the crisis of the second century. The administrative changes that were made weren't the root causes of what happened in the late 4th and 5th centuries; they were actually what allowed (most of) the 4th century to be such a success. It's also emphatically not true that the Roman Empire of, say, the 370s, "sat on the verge of succumbing to foreign invasion" (even if you accept the notion of "foreign," which doesn't really apply to Rome's military relationship with many of its "barbarian" neighbors).
While the subject matter of the series is very interesting, I feel that it is a trend of nuancing things out of proportion.
Yes, the Roman emperorship claim was continually picked up, but there were differences (in the West especially) in the organization and reach of these regimes. The Church became more of a parallel branch of power and not a subordinate. Yes, literacy was not lost altogether and people of these periods preserved some books. But there was lots of stuff that would've been preserved by a more diverse culture, where intellectualism wasn't confined to Christian monasteries. There's a whole long story of how the West lost and then gradually recovered Plato and Aristotle, because for the long time they couldn't read Greek, the Ostrogothic king killed the early potential translator to Latin (Boethius) and then there were ages before these foundational texts were regained from Arabic and then Byzantine sources. Lots of philosophical and historical books (such as many parts of Livy's history of Rome itself) were preserved only as summaries, because apparently no one wanted/needed to even read them.
Myself, I would distinguish the (okay, gradual) fall of the empire as the political regime and the decline of the civilization. The former, I think, was actually a good thing, since I cannot imagine another road to the modern experience of personal and political freedom (however flawed and maybe fleeting) from the centralized and despotic culture of the late Empire. (I don't have strong convictions about the causes of the latter).
> But there was lots of stuff that would've been preserved by a more diverse culture, where intellectualism wasn't confined to Christian monasteries
The previous post in the series argues convincingly that this simply wouldn't have happened - that "preserving stuff for posterity" just wasn't a norm in the Classical world, and that even the Musaeum and Library of Alexandria (a rather unique institution in the Classical world that would have been roughly comparable to a modern research university) did a pretty poor job of it by later standards. The monasteries really were unique.
I'm not saying this would be preserved for the preservation's sake, but because it would be interesting to people, especially those who didn't feel the need to conform to a very strict worldview and reject pagan lies and frivolities. (This isn't necessarily a dig at Christianity itself, things were always a little different with lay intellectuals: but these kind of disappeared for a while, in the Latin West of course.) As I hinted at, the stuff that was lost was not some random antiquarian junk but books of well established, even then, usefulness for science/scholarship.
What's the stuff that "would have been preserved" by the Classical world but was not preserved by the monasteries, and the existing tradition in general? Religious texts? We actually got their most esoteric and intellectually interesting stuff, in the form of Classical philosophy.
We may have lost much of the mass culture that was closely linked to pagan religion, but we can get the gist of it from what Christianity and other later religions managed to pick up - and even that was soon after transformed and improved in refinement beyond all recognition. The stuff simply wasn't as interesting as we sometimes suppose.
Some of this would obviously be lost in a civilizational decline regardless of existence of extra-monastic science. But I mentioned books of Livy histories which would be preserved if people were actually interested in lay history of Rome, their supposed quintessential state. Today we cannot figure out many facets of Roman Republican system in like 1st century BCE and before. If Classical-style philology survived on a serious scale, we would get the second part of Aristotle's Poetics and more of the classic Greek tragedies and poetry. We have only scraps of Hellenistic philosophy (Stoic and even moreso Epicurean, Sceptic), and mostly only the Latin imitators, because again they stopped reading Greek and had to avoid these "suspicious" worldviews. The books on these topics, if you actually read them, have to largely rely on connecting scraps and conjecture. We cannot really say we "actually got their most esoteric and intellectually interesting stuff" with any certainty.
I think the point of monasteries monoculture stands, but it's really secondary. My main point is that cultural decline cannot be explained and nuanced away. Say, we wouldn't get the Arabic and Byzantine retransmission, and got only the things preserved in the West in 700 CE, would you also be so content?
> which would be preserved if people were actually interested
And this is the non-obvious point that the first part of OP disagreed with. Preserving and copying texts on any sort of scale without anything like a printing press was hard, specialized work. And there were few or no institutions explicitly devoted to that task - to the best of our knowledge, anyway - prior to the Christian monasteries. The Musaion and Library of Alexandria is described as exceptional simply because it did engage in some primitive version of that work, and even that was not considered important enough to be kept functional for more than a few centuries.
> copying texts on any sort of scale without anything like a printing press was hard, specialized work
Not disputing that it was an expensive luxury thing, but let's not take it to the extreme that the ancients were helpless in that regard. Clearly they were able to preserve a number of titles throughout centuries, there were many books commonly read and cited. (Until they disappeared toward the late first millennium.)
If some piece was really core and central to them, they generally managed not to lose it, just because of the need (again, not some abstract desire for preservation). If they stopped, it means that either they collectively lost interest in some swaths of intellectual activity, or lacked the means because of an economic and civilizational slump. In fact both those factors were likely at play here. The transition from scrolls to codices, that you are probably alluding to, was a force multiplier for this process.
The remark about the fact that walls emerging around cities are an indicator of deteriorating security hits close to home.
Last year, I bought a small house in a development project in my city of birth, Ostrava, Czech Republic. It is not finished yet. But the development of 34 houses will be walled, presumably to isolate it from the nearby neighbourhood of block of flats, which isn't the best part of Ostrava, though not the worst either.
When I grew up there, there weren't any walled developments in the city. They have proliferated in last 10 years or so.
I wonder to what degree this is a real deterioration of security and to what degree it is perception. I do not feel unsafe in Ostrava, but some visitors do, and being a fairly fit strong man in his 40s, I am not a typical street crime victim; most people whom I know and who were victims of street crime, were smaller/older/frailer/female. So it might be my perception that is skewed, not theirs.
Considering that the fall of the Roman Empire took centuries of slow changes. was I wonder if people there even noticed. Seems a lot of these things can only be noticed after the fact and over times much longer than a human lifespan
I expect they at least heard stories from the good ol' days from their grandparents. Every so often you'd probably hear a reminiscence about some aspect of life that was easier, or some piece of technology that is no longer available.
I think those looking for deep causes for the decline of the Roman Empire are looking for the wrong thing. Like entropy, the presence of dynamism, coordinated energy and cohesion in societies is the exception, and the natural state is a sort of mediocre Malthusian sameness that the Empire declined into.
Civilization is sustained by bursts of energy and confidence which generally comes from new ideas and a vision of themselves and the world which galvanizes people and has them build empires, institutions and cultural creations and structures.
So the real question to ask is: what ideas and vision gave Rome that coordinated energy in the first place, and one that lasted so many centuries before it got tired and lost its ability to energize people?
A related question: how much longer can the ideas of the Enlightenment drive the current global civilization (created in the West), and are we seeing signs of the West losing confidence in itself?
"So the real question to ask is: what ideas and vision gave Rome that coordinated energy in the first place,"
Taxes.
I would conjecture pre-Roman when groups would sack a town they would kill all males and enslave the rest. Taxes changed the game. This created a concept of managing states. Instead of killing everyone in a village - you wanted them to work hard and pay taxes. This also had an unforeseen side affect: if you were a good tax payer you were protected. People wanted to be a Roman citizen. The Romans would destroy anyone taking their tax money. You could safely produce a crop or raise cattle. Other cultures pre-Roman had taxes but were always caught up in ethnic cleansing - thus destroying their tax base. Romans could care less: Spaniard, Syrian, Egyptian, didn't matter: just pay taxes.
If you inflate currencies to the point taxes mean nothing: doom.
I may be wrong, but don't taxes at large scale predate Rome by millennia? We have thousands of examples of Babylon's detailed record keeping for taxes, for instance.
> are we seeing signs of the West losing confidence in itself?
Plenty of those around. I won't get into them because it gets treated as "doing politics" and usually attracts angry replies, even though the signs of degeneration can be seen uniformly on either side of the mainstream political debate.
It's great to see such a brilliant public academic, if Devereaux would mind being labeled as such, produce such wonderful articles. He blows the cobwebs off of dusty history, and I find the way he deals with iron mongering, textiles as well as castle building to be really insightful.
Very much agreed - I have never been interested in history, but his essays I find enthralling. To everyone who enjoys his work, please consider supporting him on Patreon (only $5!).
In one word, the Goths. Everyone has their own opinion, mine is that it mostly comes down to population.
The population of the Roman Empire decline due to plague, while the Gothic population and culture had grown with better agricultural technology. When the Huns pushed vast numbers of Goths into the weakened Roman empire in the west they further weakened it. Italy starved, and they lost the ability to raise effective armies. Rome itself eventually fell to siege and starvation.
On the exterior, peer powers like the Parthian and Sassanid Empire in the East. On the interior, successful military leaders who tried to become emperor, weakening the Empire from within, which then allowed foreign powers to invade (though some of them were invited as foederati)
The author also talked about that in another post [1], though it's not the focus of it (mostly in the 'Kicking, Gouging and Screaming' part).
Starting from middle republic, the patrician class (1% if you will) started concentrating large tracts of land in their hands in gigantic latifundias. These started spamming the farm produce economy with cheap, slave-labor produced grain. That bankrupted small farmers and they sold out to patricians and went to cities (Rome etc) or became slaves or indentured servants in latifundias. That made decline of Rome accelerate geometrically. Much of the middle to late republic conflicts stem from that discontent with patricians and their rising power. Populares faction tried to set things right starting with Gracchi brothers, who tried to limit max wealth and redistribute excess land, however they got murdered by patricians. From then on there was no way to save Rome. Patricians won. Caesar represents the last but weak attempt by the populares to change some things. Which Caesar did even if he wasnt able to dare impose wealth caps or redistribute land. Even for that, he was killed by patricians too. Patricians won the ultimate victory while ensuring the fall of Rome. It wasnt 100 years before the privatized Roman army started getting undone by rising barbarians despite Rome's technological superiority. (which was waning too)
The reason for that military decline is simple - Rome's power always resided in its large population who believed in Roman society enough to fight and die for it. After patricians made Rome into an entirely slave based society after destroying the free Rome and what power free, working class Romans had in Roman society, and even going to the extent of privatizing the army to not pay for it in taxes, the manpower and logistical advantage of Rome was lost. Private armies paid by rich strongmen are incompatible with democracy (civil wars era, rich patricians vying for power with their privately-raised legions leading to triumvirate and ending with octavian), and the privately funded army of a hierarchical empire is prone to not preferring to die for the sake of their society and instead fighting for their pay and loot. So the rapid decline.
Rome went down crashing when it forfeited its people. It deserved its fall.
It looks like this covers Diocletian's monetary reforms, which is one of my absolute favorite parts of roman history - looking forward to it!