It was dumber than you think. There was an emperor who reacted to ‘rome falling’ with thinking his pet pigeon, whom he called Rome, had died. When he learned the city had fallen he was actually relieved and didn’t give a fuck.
I’m sure it did they just didn’t have social media and cell phones to document the fall in 4k.
I’m pretty sure it had equally stupid moments, like the still today infamous moment where Nero played whilst Rome burned.
Whilst when it come to History decades blur into a handful of stories and us non-Historians just learn it like that with explanations about why it happened, living in the actual thing moment by moment without the benefit of hindsight and an overview of the whole thing to put all pieces together is a very different experience.
I wouldn’t at all be surprised if in the fullness of time all of what’s going on now will be pieced together with what came before and what comes next, with some nice explanation about, say, how the the neoliberal political experiment of the late XX century with it’s heavy emphasis on weakening Governmental oversight of the Economy re-enacted in the early XXI century many of the same problems with the Economic structure and the Political capture by the Merchant class of the early XX century causing a similar resurgence in Fascism and the fall of Democracy in several nations. (Certainly History seems to rhyming again).
Future generations will mainly see it as bunch of high level descriptions of the main events knowing fully what the outcome was, without the fear and anxiety of experiencing it as it develops without knowing what comes next.
like the still today infamous moment where Nero played whilst Rome burned.
That didn’t really happen though.
Also, even if it did happen, it was centuries from the fall of the Roman Empire.
It’s both sad and funny how even in our own downfall, we’re still comparing ourselves to fucking Rome. An empire that 1) Was actually nothing like ours 2) No nation state should ever be emulating because it was awful 3) Lasted a thousand+ years and 4) Literally murdered the god and prophet of our primary religion.
We are not the heirs of that ancient Mediterranean hierarchy, nothing existing today is or will be. The god damn Rome mind virus. Let go of it.
really nice roads though… ;) /s
The late empire was a pretty silly place. That’s what happens when the elite has to pretend a failing system works.
Most empires were like that. As a system gets bigger, it’s possible set of outputs (and ways to solve issues) actually decreases.
Angkor civilization: climate crisis? Build more temples to please the gods!
Assyrian empire: unsafe borders? Vanguish our enemies!
USA: wealth inequality? Blame the immigrants!
Russia: fading relevance? Expand our borders!
In fact Nero’s reign was this stupid. All the John’s revelation mythology that informs Christian eschatology is (biblical academic consensus submits) about Rome under Nero. Nero was notoriously as vein as Trump and is probably the same sociological phenomenon.
King Heron is once again eating all the frogs.
King Heron is once again eating all the frogs.
Or turning them gay.
Roman Empire lived on from 400 (in the West) to 1400 years (in the East) after Nero. So if Trump is your Nero, you have quite a good while and some good times to expect
Nero has been pretty much redeemed in modern scholarship. The majority of the stories about him stems from slander written by avowed enemies of the Julio-Claudians (Tacitus and Suetonius in particular), later amplified by Christian writers who carried a special grudge against him. The archaeological evidence suggests he was a capable ruler, who carried out lots of large scale projects that were pretty beneficial overall, and he certainly didn’t set Rome on fire and fiddled while he watched it burn.
I got a follow up question to the biblical academic consensus - where do you get that from? I mean literally, since I always wanted to kind of read the bible with these kinds of interpretations, but I absolutely don’t know where to go for a source like this. Any tips?
Check out this YouTube channel from Dan McClellan. He’s a biblical scholar with a Bachelor’s (BA) in Near East Studies from Brigham Young University with a minor in Classical Greek, a Master’s (MSt) in Jewish Studies from Oxford, a Master’s (MA) in Biblical Studies from Trinity Western University, and a Doctorate (PhD) in Theology and Religion from the University of Exeter.
He’s gotten kind of popular over the past couple of years debunking religious nuts on TikTok, but he’s got a lot of very informative videos on the Bible and biblical history, what certain books or passages were actually talking about, and so on. He presents things in a clear and understandable way, without fluff or editorializing. I can’t recommend him enough.
I think a good starter might be a YouTube channel called Esoterica.
At least Nero could play an instrument.
The fall of the Roman Republic certainly was. One of the biggest forces driving it was malignant social inequality. The wealthy patrician class, buoyed by hoards of slave labor seized from the conquered provinces, was dispossessing the Roman citizens who had fought and died to conquer those lands.
Reformers had a variety of ideas on how to solve this. One of the most popular ones was to simply buy land up and give it to Roman citizens that found themselves destitute. An expensive program, but you know what the real stupid thing was?
The money was there. The Roman state had overflowing coffers, vast amounts of gold and other riches taken from those conquered provinces. The reformers didn’t even want to raise taxes on the rich to pay for their social redistribution programs. They just wanted to take some of this vast pile of gold the state had won and use some of it to benefit the people who actually did the fighting and dying to win that gold.
But, the elites refused to share. They wanted it all for themselves. And eventually they lost all their power to the Caesars as a consequence.
Humanity is really fucking good at making the exact same mistake over and over and never even coming close to learning anything from it.
We learn more and more each time, actually, but all the very rich people support these movements which include a huge infusion of anti-intellectualism, since the insanely wealthy really, really want to keep their (ill-gotten) gains.
This is how all the big super-popular podcasts hosts are hyper-masculine misogynist far-right dude-bros like Matt Walsh, Ben Shapiro and Joe Rogan. Like PragerU, they’ve all been supported with infusions of money until they became functional franchises of their own.
NSDAP in Germany also drew large donations from the ownership class eager to stay the ownership class in the face of the rise of communism. Essentially they (including some Jewish donors failing to predict their own arrest and evacuation) sought any opposition party, who was the fascist autocrat party.
Only correction I would make is Ben Shapiro is their Token Jew and def not a hyper-masc dude-bro. He’s the dweeb part of that movement.
I blame the tyranny of our amygdala.
Whilst in 2 millennia we massively evolved the tools we use, we barely evolved socially and did not at all evolve Psychologically or Physiologically.
We can change our environment but we can’t change the hearts of our neighbors.
So, pretty much like any other era, really.
Just gotta swap lead poisoning drinking water with checks notes Lead poisoning in drinking water, the air in the form of emissions and microplastics!
(I know lead was dropped from most gasoline in the 90s, but the effects linger. Also in some places there’s exemptions where small planes can use leaded gas to this day)
I saw the documentary Gladiator 2 and can confirm, the fall of Rome was this stupid.
let’s stab him 27 times. and more this time if everyone participates.
That event is what started the Roman empire, not what killed it.
Do they have an Octavian, though…?
We have goths
Maybe the new pope will send Atilla the nun.
Or the Mongolians will land in Mexico and specifically target one of the sections of walls before luring border patrol larpers into false retreat traps. While they didn’t have anything to do with the fall of Rome, they were very good at ending empires.
But do they have big booba?
Does heavy artillery count?
I imagine so, just much of it likely didn’t get recorded since hard drives were much smaller back then.
The write speeds were terrible, but the durability!
I would kill for a drive that could hold data for centuries with little to no data rot
<Hands you chisel and stone tablet.>
No need to get fancy, a properly stored clay tablet will do.
Kids these days with their cuneiform on clay. Too lazy to use a proper chisel.
Check out m-discs, optical media that could last centuries if stored correctly. I’m not really banking on centuries, but they should at least last the rest of my life. Just need to get around to migrating my data.
Warning, the drives themselves are reasonable (you need a special writer but any reader will work), but the media itself is expensive.
Except the fall of time was a gradual things that occurred over hundreds of years, with no clear delimitation. Not one specific tiping point that occurred within two months of a specific leader taking over.
I assume they’re talking about the Republic and not the Empire.
Why would you assume that? Fall of Rome usually refers to the collapse of the empire.
Why would they be talking about stupidity when Rome fell to the Ottomans militarily?
Well, I’d agree and disagree, but you can pretty much point at the last 100 years and draw a lot of parallels between the fall of our republic and the fall of their republic. Emphasis on the collapse of representative democracy into naked empire.
There’s a large hill and at the bottom of that hill is a cliff, we’ve been sliding down that hill since Regan and this past January we finally reached the cliffs edge.
we’ve been sliding down that hill since Regan
And Nixon pushed us
Wilson pushed us. Nixon greased the track
You can lay blame at the feet of almost every single president since Wilson. We’ve never really been great, but Wilson was a real piece of work. It’s wild that he’s treated as some kind of progressive hero. It’s really been a long, slow death by a thousand cuts.
What’s the elevator pitch for Wilson being terrible? All I really remember about him is the League of Nations and some limited involvement in WWI.
He wrote Southern Revisionist History, and used his Yale credentials to spread it even before he was even president. Once he was president, he refounded the KKK, built a ton of statues of Confederate traitors, segregated the federal government, and used presidential funding to help produce “Birth of a Nation,” which he screened at the White House. I could go on.
Basically, he was all aboard with Eugenics, and he saw probably one of the most aggressive expansions in government power in US history while using WWI as an excuse. Stuff like shutting down newspapers that ran articles he didn’t like; the news of the flu outbreak was pretty suppressed for a while because of the war IIRC. He also banned prostitution not because of any moral argument, but because soldiers were catching STDs at troop collection points and being kept from being deployed because of the STDs. So, 100 years later, it’s still illegal because not using a condom kept a bunch of boys from being fed into the meat grinder.
There’s a bunch of other pretty wild shit that isn’t coming to me at the moment, but Wilson fucking sucked and generally doesn’t deserve any of the praise that people seem to offer him now.
Probably was, but you didn’t have every single citizen, plebeian and slave following it live 24/7 with every single move by any member of the agora being scrutinised and memed to death.
Yea, yes it was. The fall of western Rome was marked with lots of stupid, including xenophobia and racism and rich idiots in charge who should have never been anywhere near government.
Did they have bribery in the form of mobile Fast Food trucks?
Probably not, but everything else checks out.
I’m only disappointed I won’t get to read the history books 300 years from now when they cite twitter posts and AI generated videos.
What if AI is actually Skynet, but because it’s consumed all the word’s media, it has seen the Terminator movies and thus knows that a blatant attack would be an inefficient way to get rid of humans, so it’s working to make us dumber and dumber and get us to simply kill ourselves off.
Did they have bribery in the form of mobile Fast Food trucks?
You are assuming that we will still have civilization by that point and have not died out from lack of food idiocracy style… which the way we are going… is not so unlikely scenario now… 10 years ago I’d say you’re crazy… but now i am putting civilization collapse by 2100 on my posthumous bingo card…
Buddy, collapse is happening RIGHT NOW. You’re in it. Whatever Mad Max post apocalyptic vision you have? Throw it out. What is happening right now outside your home at this moment, this is what collapse looks like.
Well i am trying to do what I can with my votes, but your right, its utter madness out there, bin collections are fortnightly and garden waste now needs a permit to be collected! I nearly dropped me crumpet in me tea I did guv!
You joke, but if you met anybody that lives in Syria about a decade ago, they would tell you this is exactly what it looks like. It’s what it looked like for people about a year and a half ago in Palestine, and it’s what it looked like to Soviet citizens in 1989. So keep making jokes, don’t believe it, whatever. But it IS happening
I like to remind people that the first mad Max movie isn’t like fury road. It’s a mostly normal world that’s just starting to fall apart.
ABSOLUTELY. And that first movie was before the nuclear war, so it’s literally all about an energy crisis. People feel so comfortable in their modern world that they seem to not be able to imagine just how close to losing it all they are
It’s not complete, though, and most people will only recognize in retrospect that it was happening at all. Kind of like how people are with genocides, now that I think of it.
I believe “complete” is relative in this case. Collapse is a process and not an event, people seem to miss that a lot. I think a lot of the reason why people only see it in retrospect is because they’re all waiting to see some big glorious fire ball. But the truth is, collapse is mostly boring, and then concerning, and then terrifying.
…and then history.
I suspect bribery was just “gift exchanging” back in those days
I was promised that the end of civilization was hedonism and there would be orgies.
I think we’re just gonna get cleanup detail now. This isn’t what i signed up for.
/s
Sorry, we get the Harlan Ellison and of civilization, not the Iain M Banks version.
The orgies occur, as we learnt. We just ain’t invited.
“I approve this message.”
I think the hedonism and orgies were only for the rich in Rome. So probably the same is happening now. But we aren’t rich…
You mean you didn’t get to ride Epstein’s personal jet out to his private island ?
Hey, the poor had orgies too! Crappy orgies, but orgies nonetheless!
It’s time we redistributed the orgies!
