Over the past 13,000 years the predominant trend in human society has been the replacement of smaller, less complex units by larger, more complex ones.
-Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel
Even since Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (an probably even before that) the death throes and final end of the Roman state have been an obsession of thinkers of all persuasions and perspectives. Ever since Gibbon's magnum opus hit the market, new theories explaining the Roman Empire's collapse and theories explaining why the contemporary world resembles that trajectory of events have been widespread. Today is no different.
What is the cause, though, of this Roman fixation? Why have scholars and commentators always found the need to find either explanations or inspiration from these events? This is clearly something to ponder about since there are certainly many other historical episodes of interest.
To pick other examples from ancient well removed from any modern loyalties, the history of the Diadochi in the Near East following Alexander the Great's amazing feat of conquest certainly has both drama and political lessons as does the collapse of the Roman empire. Not only do the Diadochi inherit the aftermath of one of the largest swings in power seen in history, but they also rule during one of the most culturally creative stretches of human history, when Alexander's empire served as a κρατήρ for all of the political channels it opened for the spread of culture across the remnants of Alexander's empire. So for that matter does the history of the Delian League, which one could easily imagine a commentator using in order to shed light on NATO and the expression of American power across the world. Yet neither of those have gathered either the academic or public interest as the fall of Rome has had; indeed, nowhere near as much.
Why Rome, then? There is certainly the point that all of European history has been shaped by Rome's end, but hasn't it also been affected by the Diadochi and the Delian League? Certainly, but neither or those two have left such a mark on European law, language, and architecture as Rome had. With Rome and her culture having such an impact upon the evolution of our own, it is thus of no surprise that our imagination focuses on Rome so much.
Another factor is that is the Fall of Rome is a clear and distinct counterexample against what has seemed to be the trend of human history towards ever more complexity. Unlike the quarreling Diadochi and the relatively short-lived Delian League, the Roman Empire was a stable order for well over two centuries. This history of stability lends to its ultimate collapse a much more shocking and apocalyptic elements to it that arouses the imagination like almost no event before or since. The image of Alaric's sack of Rome in 410 B.C., or Genseric's sack in 455, almost immediately leads to the question of how could the Visigoths manage to overwhelm such a powerful state. The Roman Empire actually maintained order, and continued to increase the complexity of that order, within its borders. It projected power from Scotland to the Zagros Mountains, and managed to have smooth transitions between generations of decision-makers that maintained that order for so long. And yet, that order was torn asunder by the end, not to be followed by more complex social networks, but less as much of Westerm Europe was divided into fiefdoms by the victorious Germanic tribes.
There are two general patterns within the world that make the case of Rome so interesting, and these are patterns we are often only half conscious of pulling our interest. First is something that was mentioned above: the general trend in human history, whether it is in the form of Manifest Destiny or the development of linguistic states out of Romantic nationalism, in societies becoming both larger in terms of population, and more complex in their organization. Second is the Lindy effect, which is that anything that can replicate itself within the world becomes more likely to replicate itself over time as it exists each unit of time further.
The first shocks us because out of the dust of the Western Roman Empire came a handful of Germanic kingdoms, none of which, not even Charlemagne’s, could claim to have the complexity of the Roman Empire. Complexity was there, and then it vanished for centuries. A clear explicandum for explanation and food for thought. The second shocks us because the Roman Empire survived for so long as a stable political order only not to seemingly into something else, something distinctly Roman, but it collapsed into a political order, at least in the West, that was clearly not Roman.
One could almost be forgiven to think that human history is a history of the emergence of ever-more complex institutions and modes of social cooperation. Human events have seem to have an autocatalytic property to themselves by which the association of human beings, especially within competitive relationships, is sufficient to bring about an avalanche of creativity generating ever larger institutions with ever more interactions within them. Bands have yielded to tribes, tribes to chiefdoms, chiefdoms to simple states, and simple states to more complex ones. It seems the natural order of things that human societies increase in complexity as time passes.
Against this, the history of Rome provides us with a spectator's perspective, sometimes impartial sometimes nakedly biased, on the unraveling of a society far more complex than any of its succeeding orders for centuries. That lack of complexity across the Middle Ages is really one of the reasons it is called the Dark Ages, and why the Middle Ages seem to lack the glory that Rome had. The often petty squabbling between and within dynasties over tracks of land that were small potatoes compared to the territorial stakes of the Roman Empire just doesn't seem like a proper act to follow the Roman hegemony. This is all on top of the destructive fantasies that the Fall of Rome satisfies within us.
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