[HN Gopher] Rome: Decline and Fall? Part II: Institutions
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Rome: Decline and Fall? Part II: Institutions
Author : picture
Score : 113 points
Date : 2022-01-28 18:12 UTC (4 hours ago)
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| stereolambda wrote:
| 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).
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > 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.
| stereolambda wrote:
| 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.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| 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.
| stereolambda wrote:
| There is an interesting, but very incomplete list here: h
| ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_literary_work#Classical
| _w...
|
| 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?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > 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.
| jcranmer wrote:
| 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.
| wffurr wrote:
| 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."
| zozbot234 wrote:
| 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.
| wins32767 wrote:
| 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.
| glogla wrote:
| Ah, what a wonderful find. That whole site is a perfect weekend
| rabbit hole to fall to.
| jnurmine wrote:
| 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?
| zemnmez wrote:
| A lot of it was moved to Byzantium / Constantinople / Istanbul
| 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.
|
| For reference, the amount looted from Constantinople during its
| sack is meant to be around 900,000 silver marks -- enough to
| raise the entire Venetian navy almost 6 times over. (https://en
| .wikipedia.org/wiki/Sack_of_Constantinople#sack_of...)
|
| 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.
| scythe wrote:
| >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:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Antioch_(968%E2%80%93.
| ..
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab%E2%80%93Byzantine_wars#By.
| ..
| Dumblydorr wrote:
| 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.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| Sounds a little like the Communist Party of China, with its
| regular purges of high level rivals.
| pchristensen wrote:
| 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.
| jnurmine wrote:
| 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.
| Leary wrote:
| Would love to see more analysis of the external reasons for
| Rome's decline. Namely, who were the people who could vigorously
| challenge Rome?
| erulabs wrote:
| 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!
| ch4s3 wrote:
| I'd also recommend Mary Beard's book SPQR [1].
|
| [1]https://www.amazon.com/SPQR-History-Ancient-Mary-
| Beard/dp/16...
| jmckib wrote:
| 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...
| mongol wrote:
| I like Emperors of Rome podcast Very interesting and pleasant
| ricree wrote:
| > "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.
| nescioquid wrote:
| 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.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| _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).
| somewhereoutth wrote:
| Your modern day analogy fails.
|
| 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).
| biorach wrote:
| Excellent article.
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