[HN Gopher] A 'plague' comes before the fall: lessons from Roman...
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A 'plague' comes before the fall: lessons from Roman history
Author : diodorus
Score : 59 points
Date : 2024-05-15 20:11 UTC (2 hours ago)
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| thom wrote:
| Yup, that and the 209 other reasons is why the western Roman
| Empire fell.
| throwup238 wrote:
| Everyone knows it was caused by a massive decrease in the
| quality of Roman garum. After their supplies of the good stuff
| ran out, they just didn't have enough umami to keep the empire
| united.
|
| Once Constantinople developed their own garos, they had no
| reason to stay together with the west.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| I thought it was the extinction of the sylphium plant that
| really sealed their fate.
| gumby wrote:
| It's always the simple explanations like these that survive
| Occam's razor.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| The heck with bread and circuses. Fish sauce for all my
| friends!
| mjhay wrote:
| I remember a quote saying something to the effect of "the Roman
| Empire wasn't murdered, it killed itself on accident."
| neverokay wrote:
| They say you have to be lucky to get cancer statistically because
| you actually have to live a long time to even get it.
|
| I guess if you are several hundred year old empire you will have
| run into just about everything. The plague was just the last
| thing they saw, not the ultimate thing that ended them.
|
| We'd be lucky if all this crap lasts long enough to watch a
| plague run through it.
| cardanome wrote:
| The Roman empire was based on slavery and had to die so that
| humanity could progress. Slave labor is vastly less efficient
| than having serfs that can keep (part of) what they produce and
| have incentives to +-work harder. That allowed producing more
| food with less workforce so many people were free to do other
| things and bigger cities could develop which in turn would set
| the foundation for making the industrial revolution possible.
|
| Everything else is just some weird romanticism of the antique
| when in reality many things got better in the medieval period.
| There wasn't a sudden fall of the Roman Empire. It was a gradual
| process and the structures coming after it saw themselves not as
| a replacement but as a continuation of Roman traditions.
|
| Edit: As people misunderstand. The important difference between
| serfdom and slavery is not freedom. The important part is
| incentives to work harder. Slaves only have the incentives to
| avoid the whip. They do not own what they produce. They need to
| be closely supervised and micromanaged. In contrast many forms of
| serfdom allowed to the serfs to keep some of the stuff they
| produced so they had incentives to work more efficiently.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| I'm not sure why you're focusing on that one aspect when there
| so many others for the Roman decline. And it's not like slavery
| disappeared with the Roman empire.
| cardanome wrote:
| Because economics are the deciding factor. It is what enables
| sustaining a higher population, investing in technological
| progress and of course military might.
|
| The form of society that is more efficient will always win
| out in the end. Same as companies that can produce goods more
| efficiently under free market capitalism will always
| dominate.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| You're making a lot of unsupported claims about free market
| capitalism which really isn't a factor when we're
| discussing 2000 year old empires. I don't think you can
| make the argument that the dark ages ushered in a free
| market, so I don't know how you're connecting these things.
|
| It's a strange take that hyper-focuses on slavery and the
| economy when slavery was being used by western nations well
| into the 1800s.
| cardanome wrote:
| I am not saying there was any free market capitalism in
| feudalism. I am trying to explain to you the basic
| economic principle that those that can produce something
| more efficiently will tend to dominate. I used the
| example of corporations under capitalism as an example
| that I hope you would be more familiar with.
|
| If I need to use 90% of my population just to produce
| enough food to sustain them, I can only use 10% for other
| things. The society that only needs 50% of the workforce
| to be in agriculture can easily entertain for example a
| vastly bigger military even with the same population.
|
| Economics is what wins war. Economics is what allows
| technological progress.
|
| Yes, slavery existed but the question is what the
| dominant form of ding agriculture.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| I don't understand what time periods you're comparing
| here. Your explanations don't follow with any sort of
| historical precedent. You're making assumptions that
| there were such a thing as a standing army during the
| middle ages - ironically enough it was Rome with its
| slaves that had one of those - and that somehow there
| were less serfs than slaves. The majority of people in
| Medieval Europe were still peasant farmers.
|
| I feel like you're talking about economic abstractions
| without understanding the actual historical context.
| cardanome wrote:
| Are you not even able to understand abstractions and
| examples?
|
| I am not making any assumption about there being big
| standing armies. I am just trying to explain to you the
| basic principle that the economy is the deciding factor
| that governs everything else. I really just try to
| explain basic economic stuff.
|
| History doesn't go perfectly linearly. There is always
| exceptions for every rule. You need to understand the
| broad stroke and main driving forces before going into
| the small.
|
| The bigger picture is: Slave holding society -> feudalism
| -> capitalism
|
| Not everywhere in the world and sometimes steps get
| skipped but that is the general tendency observed.
| Astraco wrote:
| Everybody knows slavery ended with the Roman Empire.
| cardanome wrote:
| It ended slavery as the dominant form of doing agriculture.
| Astraco wrote:
| Then the end of slavery in the Empire and and the start of
| serfdom, more efficient than slavery, after de Diocletian
| reforms killed the Empire. That's contradictory. And
| slavery was still a thing after those reforms, as other
| comments say.
|
| Diocletian reforms, the corruption, civil wars and the
| inability of defend itself eroded and destroyed all the
| structures that made the Republic great all those are the
| reasons that made the Empire fall.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| The Republic was gone for a few hundred years before the
| Empire fell in Western Europe (and the Eastern part of
| the Roman Empire continued for a thousand years more).
| Astraco wrote:
| I'm talking about the political, economical and social
| structures, not the Republic.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| In Southern Europe, if you consider serfs different from
| slaves (they were, but only to a small extent).
|
| Slavery is extremely economically efficient in reality,
| especially if you have the power to force the slaves into
| utter servitude, like they did in the US South. The south,
| and the USA as a whole, would never have been as rich if
| they didn't have slavery at the right time. It was
| important enough that h he confederacy was willing to fight
| a war over it: they knew, and they were proven right, that
| losing slavery would plunge them into poverty, as it did.
|
| Of course, this is not a defense of slavery: in all its
| forms, it is a disgusting, disturbing, inhuman institution
| that must always be fought against and dismantled. But this
| can only ever be done by the will of the people, against
| the economic interests of the slave masters. An unregulated
| free market will always seek to reintroduce slavery (just
| like it will converge to monopolies or at least oligopolies
| and many other undesirable traits).
| cardanome wrote:
| Slavery in the US made sense for a limited time but at
| some point it would have hold the US back economically.
| It would have lacked enough free workforce for the
| industrialization and so would have fallen vastly behind
| compared to other countries.
|
| Slavery is very profitable for the slave holder but not
| for the society as a whole.
|
| Like if you take Nazi Germany. Many companies got rich by
| being provided essentially free slave labor that they
| could free work to death. But does it really make sense
| to have educated people work themselves to an early grave
| doing menial inefficient labor that needed to be closely
| supervised? Could they not have provided much more to the
| economy if they had been free? The practice is as
| sustainable as eating your own flesh.
|
| Nazi Germany could keep going as long as the war machine
| kept going and there were countries to occupy but it
| wouldn't have been a very sustainable society in the long
| run.
|
| Yes capitalist have an individual interest in slave labor
| and in forming monopolies. But in doing so they also also
| create conditions for the undoing of the very society
| that made them rich. That is exactly the point. Slavery
| is amazing for the slave owner but not for everyone else.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| This is a bizarro statement than any historian would laugh
| at.
|
| Slavery, in lots of different forms, _flourished_ for
| nearly a millennium and a half throughout the world after
| the fall of the Western Roman Empire (including, quite
| conspicuously, in the Eastern Roman Empire for nearly
| another thousand years...) It 's very strange to me that
| you consider _slavery_ responsible for the downfall of Rome
| given how it was so prevalent everywhere for so long after.
| throwup238 wrote:
| Serfs were by and large slaves. The only major difference was
| that they were tied to a specific piece of land and couldn't be
| sold off separately. Other than that, feudal lords could do
| with them as they wished.
|
| Besides slavery was practiced in Europe for long after Rome,
| especially by the Vikings who would raid the serfs and take
| them as slaves. The Byzantine empire that survived the fall of
| Rome practiced slavery until its fall a thousand years later so
| your thesis doesn't make much sense.
| cardanome wrote:
| There is a huge difference between serfs and slaves. Both are
| unfree by modern standards but that doesn't mean one wasn't a
| big progress over the other.
|
| As I said the big difference is that serfs could also keep
| part of what they produce. They have incentives to work
| harder while slaves do not have any.
|
| Feudal lords couldn't just do with them as they wanted. Yes,
| they were tied to specific piece of land but in return also
| got the protection of the lord in times of war.
|
| Slavery was replaced as the dominant form for doing
| agriculture. Slavery still exists to this day but I don't see
| how this is relevant. We are talking broad stroke tendencies
| over a very long, long time. The more efficient forms of
| productions will always win out in the end. It shouldn't
| really be controversial that slave labor is not very
| efficient.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > There is a huge difference between serfs and slaves.
|
| Bullshit. Also, when you say "Yes, they were tied to
| specific piece of land but in return also got the
| protection of the lord in times of war", that was generally
| true of chattel slaves as well - owners like to protect
| what they see as their property, after all.
|
| From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom_in_Russia#Slaves
| _and_s... (and there are other linked sources on that page
| if you want to follow up):
|
| > Formal conversion to serf status and the later ban on the
| sale of serfs without land did not stop the trade in
| household slaves; this trade merely changed its name. The
| private owners of the serfs regarded the law as a mere
| formality. Instead of "sale of a peasant" the papers would
| advertise "servant for hire" or similar.
|
| > By the eighteenth century, the practice of selling serfs
| without land had become commonplace. Owners had absolute
| control over their serfs' lives, and could buy, sell and
| trade them at will, giving them as much power over serfs as
| Americans had over chattel slaves, though owners did not
| always choose to exercise their powers over serfs to the
| fullest extent.
| cardanome wrote:
| The Russian Empire was one of the most underdeveloped and
| economically impoverished forces in Europe. So yeah, my
| point.
|
| People here focus on the aspect of freedom which isn't
| really that important. That is a more modern idea that we
| see when capitalism develops and there is an actual free
| workforce.
|
| The point again is economic incentives. Slaves have the
| incentives to avoid the whip and otherwise work as slowly
| as possible. Most forms of serfdom allowed working part
| of the land for yourselves and getting to keep some of
| which you produce. So you have an interest in being
| efficient in your work.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > The Russian Empire was one of the most underdeveloped
| and economically impoverished forces in Europe.
|
| The Russian Empire was considered a "Great Power" for
| nearly 400 years. Sure, the lives of the average citizen
| sucked just like that of slaves, but the lords in Russia
| were able to harness their labor for nearly unfathomable
| levels of wealth and domination.
|
| The idea that serfs somehow worked harder because "they
| got to keep some of what they produced" is just pure
| fantasy. Serfs had to work hard because a lot of the time
| they were on the verge of starvation.
| throwup238 wrote:
| The serfs you're thinking of came much later thanks to
| populist land reforms, largely after the black plague
| decimated the labor pool and gave them huge leverage for
| the first time - a thousand years later. Until then, serfs
| were slaves with no other protections. They didn't get to
| keep anything. They and everything they had belonged to
| their feudal lords. Slaves on the other hand got the
| protection of Rome and even had opportunities to rise to
| freemen, unlike serfs most of whom were tied to the land
| for life.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Serfs often had fewer rights than Roman slaves. Sure, they
| often couldn't be sold and moved around, but they also had
| no way of winning their freedom, their children were
| automatically slaves as well, there were no legal
| repercussions of any kind for lords that treated their
| serfs badly, there were no legal obligations to leave any
| kind of food for serfs etc. Roman slaves were protected by
| national laws to a much, much higher extent.
|
| Additionally, feuds between neighboring lords, which were
| extremely commonplace in much of Medieval Europe, often
| involved deliberate attacks on serfs, with the sole purpose
| of killing them off. This was also mostly unheard of in
| Rome, and would have led to legal punishments against the
| slave killers if it could be proven.
|
| Of course, this started gradually changing, and the exact
| conditions for serfs varied greatly between regions. But
| by-and-large, Medieval Europe was much worse off then many
| areas of the Roman Empire.
|
| And in regards to efficiency, this all makes no sense. The
| Roman Empire was _vastly_ more economically efficient than
| medieval Europe, particularly when it came to food
| production. The kinds of armies the Roman Empire could
| field (which is mostly limited by feeding them) were not
| seen again in Europe until near the modern era. The Roman
| Army ranged from ~300,000 soldiers in the time of Tiberius,
| to more than 600,000 in the time of Constantine. By
| comparison, with the exception of Charlemagne (who still
| raised at most 100,000 troops once, and could hardly
| sustain this), medieval Europe had tiny armies - William
| the Conqieror conquered England with 14,000 troops, for one
| example of the scale.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| European farms during the middle ages were far more
| efficient than European farms during Roman times.
| Egyptian farms during Roman times were more efficient
| than both.
| throwup238 wrote:
| Do you have a source for that? The sources I can find
| like Varo, Cato, and Columella's table of farm labor
| inputs versus pre-industrial British and European records
| show that they are comparable and Roman yield was often
| significantly higher thanks to well organized labor and
| very productive regions like Etruria.
| jltsiren wrote:
| I don't think slavery was ever the dominant form for doing
| agriculture, except in some weird outliers such as Sparta.
| Because the vast majority of people were involved in
| agriculture in pre-modern societies. If almost everyone is
| a slave, keeping the slaves in check must be the primary
| job for most free people. Otherwise the slaves will revolt
| and overthrow the system. And if your society is little
| more than an oppressive machine designed to keep the slaves
| in check, you can't expect much long-term success.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Even that difference wasn't always respected; in Russia there
| was essentially no difference between a serf and a slave.
| From the "Serfdom in Russia" Wikipedia page:
|
| > By the eighteenth century, the practice of selling serfs
| without land had become commonplace.
| ceuk wrote:
| Can you expand on the idea that slave labour is "vastly less
| efficient"? Is it just a motivation thing?
|
| And is there any good evidence/sources for this? Surely both
| groups generally performed pretty extreme levels of
| backbreaking labour. I can't exactly imagine a slave slacking
| off while literally being whipped.
|
| Also, even if feudalism made us more efficient at food
| production as you say* - did it not also make societies less
| effective at producing great works of infrastructure (roads
| being a good example) than imperial Rome? One just needs to
| compare the dark ages/low middle ages to the Roman era to see
| the stark contrast.
|
| Isn't the entire narrative basically: Roman prosperity -> bad
| times -> rediscovery of classic values (renaissance) -> parity
| with the Romans 1000 years later?
|
| Genuine questions, not trying to be combative. My history just
| might not be very good
|
| * Also I'd be interested to find out if there were more famines
| during pax romana or in the period after the fall of the
| western empire..
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Roads are a poor example. Goods and people travelled far more
| efficiently by water, roads were primarily for military use.
|
| Historians today don't use the term "dark ages" because in
| reality they weren't that dark.
| cardanome wrote:
| Yes, I made an edit but I will put it also here:
|
| > The important part is incentives to work harder. Slaves
| only have the incentives to avoid the whip. They do not own
| what they produce. They need to be closely supervised and
| micromanaged. In contrast many forms of serfdom allowed to
| the serfs to keep some of the stuff they produced so they had
| incentives to work more efficiently.
|
| Serfs often were provided a bit of land of their own that
| they could cultivate for themselves.
|
| Note that many people point out rightfully that where were
| many forms of serfdom and some where closer so slavery while
| others were more free. Also the development of big cities
| only really happened towards the end of the medieval period
| so it was a longer process and not like immediate benefit.
|
| > Isn't the entire narrative basically: Roman prosperity ->
| bad times -> rediscovery of classic values (renaissance) ->
| parity with the Romans 1000 years later?
|
| Yes that is the narrative created by renaissance people to
| explain whey they are better than the people in the medieval
| period. It is basically propaganda that has survived till
| this day.
|
| The truth is things got much worse before they got better.
| The whole inquisition, witch hunts, religious fundamentalism,
| yeah that happened AFTER the medieval period. That is
| modernity. It was this transition period that saw lots of war
| and plagues and much uncertainty. So it is natural that
| people longed for a romanticized golden age that they project
| their ideas on.
|
| The dark ages were originally called dark in the sense that
| there are less written sources from this time period. They
| are "dark" in the sense that historians know less about them
| time, like blind spots. They are not dark because times where
| horrible. That is a modern interpretation.
| mjhay wrote:
| There were vastly more slaves in the late Republic and early
| Empire than the mid or late empire, due to conquest. Slaves
| undercutting free workers was a factor in the fall of the
| Republic, but it had little to do with the fall of the Empire.
| Proto-serfdom had already begun by the Empire's fall, so by
| your argument it should have gotten stronger, not weaker.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| A silly comment. Slavery persisted well into early modern
| times. Spanish colonies in the New World depended on it. It
| persists still in some parts of the world.
|
| > The Roman empire was based on slavery
|
| Something only a recent college grad who's ignorant of history
| would ever say.
| Calavar wrote:
| 1. I don't think it's accurate to call Rome a slave based
| economy. Most people in Rome were freemen. Slaves served
| certain functions that would have been hard to replace with
| freemen, but I wouldn't say that makes Rome a slave based
| economy. For example, migrant laborers can't be easily replaced
| in the modern US economy, but I wouldn't say that the US
| economy based on migrant labor.
|
| 2. Relating incentives to productivity is an anachronistic
| grafting of industrial and post-industrial economic thought
| onto a subsistence farming economy where it doesn't apply. If a
| serf works harder and produces more crop, what are they going
| to do with it? Sell it to their neighbor, who is also a farmer
| and grows all the same things? To the best of my knowledge,
| there was not a significant cash crop economy in medieval
| Europe.
|
| 3. As others have pointed out, slavery continued long after the
| Roman Empire. It was much more prevalent in the encomienda
| system and the antebellum South than it ever was in Rome. The
| proportion of enslaved people in mid 1700s South Carolina about
| 3 to 5x that of ancient Rome. And even that's nothing compared
| to the Caribbean.
| felipellrocha wrote:
| This is a huge mischaracterization. Most people in the roman
| empire were free. Yes, they had slaves, but their economy was
| not based in slavery. In fact, part of the reforms of
| Diocletian was to transform everyone into serfs, aka, proto-
| Feudalism. They walked backwards, not forward.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| A fascinating insight for me came via Kyle Harper's book _The
| Fate of Rome_ : _plagues co-evolve to match civilisations_.
|
| <https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691166834/th...>
|
| That is, the Antonine, and other plauges of Rome relied on the
| dense urbanisation, highly-developed transportation, and long-
| range trading patterns, all of which served to provide the
| conditions in which pathogens which were either benign or simply
| too virulent to establish themselves in smaller, less-
| interconnected communities --- in such cases the epidemics would
| simply burn themselves out, perhaps decimating a village or small
| trading group of same, but not spreading further.
|
| The fact that _Yersinia pestis_ seems to have evolved first in
| rodent populations (themselves often microcosms of human
| civilisations with large and interconnected population clusters)
| seems relevant. IIRC Harper cites hamsters or gerbils as the
| prior host species to humans.
|
| James Burke, of _Connections_ fame, stated in a later interview
| "ReConnections* of how he'd extend the episodes of the original
| series that a key consequence of jet air travel would be an
| increased spread of global pandemics. This occurs toward the end
| of this video:
|
| <https://archive.org/details/JamesBurkeReConnections_0>
|
| More broadly, it seems to me that _any_ network will co-evolve
| parasite or pathogenic entities, whether we 're talking human
| cities (look at the long list of urban vices, online abuse,
| network issues, and the like). One factor contributing to the
| "golden age" effect is that such ages exist _before_ the
| parasites / pathogens evolve. As such, the sense that "something
| went wrong" seems to me misled, and a better formulation would be
| that such golden ages were living on borrowed time in the first
| place.
|
| Podcast episode of Harper addressing a similar theme from
| _Plagues Upon the Earth_ :
| <https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN2511895438.mp3>.
| bedobi wrote:
| it's kinda tiring when people assert that yxz ended the roman
| empire
|
| allow me to be the akshully guy and point out, for one, it
| didn't, the eastern half of the SAME roman empire was still
| kicking around long after the western half "fell"
|
| the western roman empire also didn't end because of migration
| (even if it had, what's the lesson? the world exists and people
| move around inside it, there's nothing anyone can do to stop
| that, certainly the romans couldn't, nor did they when they
| themselves INVITED the germanic tribes in, as they had for
| hundreds of years, because they had to, there was no
| alternative... if you can't successfully roll with immigration,
| your polity is doomed anyway, the world and the societies in it
| aren't some hermetically sealed snow globes that are possible to
| keep segregated and separated from each other)
|
| nor corruption or incompetent leadership (Rome and every other
| political entity in history has also and did also have that,
| since forever)
|
| or any other pet theory (plagues likewise came and went)
| surfingdino wrote:
| The plague was a factor in the demise of Rome, but it was not the
| factor. Mary Beard's SPQR discusses some that are not always
| mentioned today, perhaps because they are too close for comfort
| for Europe and the USA or too political. I recommend reading
| Beard's book.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| surely nobody was doing dangerous government funded bio-rituals
| back then! (they probably were)
| renewiltord wrote:
| To be honest, people over-learn things from what's written down.
| That's just a different form of looking under the lamp for your
| lost keys. Plagues do damage civilizations but there's no lessons
| there. The US and China are two diametrically opposite kingdoms
| and they have both weathered the latest one just fine through
| diametrically opposite approaches.
|
| Rome's big advantage in historical popularity is that its works
| survived being written down. Treat it as an existence proof of
| things, not its events as necessary conditions.
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