Things That Did Not Cause the Fall of the Roman Empire

People have a lot of theories about what caused the downfall of the Roman Empire. In particular, many American conservatives seem to really love talking about the parallels that supposedly exist between the current situation in the United States and the fall of the Roman Empire. Usually, they try to argue that we need to reject liberal ideas and return to good old-fashioned traditional values and that, if we do this, we will be able to save our empire from its impending doom.

Unfortunately, the people who make these comparisons generally know nothing at all about what really caused the fall of the Roman Empire. They basically just impute things they don’t like about our current situation and claim that these things are what led to the Roman Empire’s downfall. (They also invariably seem to forget that only the western portion of the Roman Empire fell in the fifth century AD; the eastern portion managed to survive for a thousand years after that until the conquest of the city of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453.)

Today, I’m going to talk about some things that definitely were not significant factors in the decline of the western Roman Empire, but that people—especially American conservatives—like to pretend were.

How the Roman Empire fell

Since most people aren’t familiar with the actual events that led to the end of the western Roman Empire, I think it is a good idea to do a quick review of some of the major happenings of the last few centuries of the western empire’s existence.

The height of the Roman Empire is traditionally said to have been the second century AD, when the empire was prosperous, at its greatest territorial extent, relatively peaceful, and ruled by competent emperors like Trajan (ruled 98 – 117 AD), Hadrian (ruled 117 – 138 AD), Antoninus Pius (ruled 138 – 161 AD), and Marcus Aurelius (ruled 161 – 180 AD).

In the third century AD, the Roman Empire faced an unprecedented crisis. There was no political stability and the empire endured near-constant civil wars, secessions, and usurpations. Meanwhile, the empire was also devastated by the Plague of Cyprian (lasted c. 249 – c. 262 AD) and a terrible economic crisis caused by hyperinflation.

Eventually, some semblance of order was restored under the emperor Diocletian (ruled 284 – 305 AD), whose reign is traditionally said to mark the beginning of a new period in Roman history, known as the Dominate. The empire made a partial recovery in the fourth century AD. It was also in the fourth century that Christianity really became prominent in imperial politics—a topic I address in this article from a few months ago.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an ancient Roman marble bust of the emperor Diocletian

It’s in the late fourth century, though, that we really start to see the beginning of the western empire’s undoing. At that time, the Danube River served as the northern border for most of the eastern Roman Empire. In the region just north of this river, in what is now Romania, there lived a Germanic people known as the Goths.

Then, in the 370s AD, the Huns, a nomadic people from Central Asia, moved into the region and attacked many Gothic villages, forcing many thousands of Goths to flee their homes. We don’t know exactly what caused the Huns to move into Europe, but it has been speculated that their migration may have been caused by drought in their homeland.

In summer 376, tens of thousands of Gothic refugees fleeing from the Huns arrived along the northern banks of the Danube. One group of Goths known as the Thervings sent ambassadors to meet with Valens, the reigning emperor of the eastern empire at the time, requesting permission to settle in Roman land. They told the emperor that they were willing to convert to Christianity and that their men of fighting age were willing to join the Roman military.

ABOVE: Photograph of a relief carving from Trajan’s Column dated to c. 113 AD showing a Roman watchtower and beacon along the Danube River

Valens was delighted by this and ordered the Roman army to ferry the Thervings across the Danube into Roman territory. Unfortunately, once they were across, the Romans temporarily settled all the Thervings in a small region on the southern side of the Danube. It was unbearably crowded and the Romans didn’t provide the Thervings with anywhere near enough food, leading many of them to starve. Some Thervings grew so desperate that they were reportedly forced to begin selling their own children to the Romans as slaves in exchange for dog meat.

The Roman general Lupicinus decided to move the Thervings south to the city of Marcianople, but, in doing so, he was forced to remove his troops who had been guarding the Danube border, which allowed the Greuthungi, another group of Goths whom the Romans had not given permission to enter their territory, to cross the Danube on their own.

When the Thervings, who were still starving and bitter, reached Marcianople, the Romans refused to let them buy supplies at the town market. This resulted in an incident in which a number of Roman soldiers and Thervings were killed and the Therving leaders were temporarily taken as hostages. After this, the Thervings and Greuthungi joined forces in a rebellion against the Romans.

The war between the Goths and the Romans went on for years. On 9 August 378, the Goths utterly defeated the Romans in the Battle of Adrianople, annihilating roughly two thirds of the eastern Roman army and killing the emperor Valens himself. It was one of the most catastrophic defeats the Romans ever suffered.

In 382 AD, the new emperor Theodosius I and his representatives managed to negotiate a peace agreement with the Goths in which the Romans agreed to let the Goths settle in the Balkans as foederati. It was the usual policy for the Romans to disperse the foreign peoples they let in throughout their empire so they could be more easily Romanized, but they allowed the Goths to remain together as a unified people with their own territory, laws, and culture within Roman territory.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a ceremonial silver dish depicting Theodosius I enthroned, made in Constantinople in around 388 AD

At the same time, however, the Goths didn’t get everything they wanted out of the treaty. They were not granted Roman citizenship and their men were required to serve in the Roman military. Gothic recruits were often placed on the front lines, ahead of regular Roman legions, where they were more likely to be killed in combat.

An uneasy truce between the Goths and the Romans held for about thirteen years until Theodosius I died in 395 AD. His older son Arcadius became emperor of the eastern empire and his younger son Honorius became emperor of the western empire. Around the same time, a group of Goths who would eventually become known as the Visigoths elected a man named Alaric, who had previously served as a Roman general but had become disenchanted with the Roman government, as their new king.

In an apparent effort to demand better treatment for his people, Alaric led the Visigoths on a rampage through Greece. They sacked the countryside around Athens, but spared the city itself. Then they headed south and sacked the cities of Sparta, Argos, and Corinth. The western Roman general Stilicho brought an end to Alaric’s rampage, but the eastern Roman official Eutropius was so angered by the western general’s unsanctioned military intervention in eastern territory that, in 397 AD, he had Alaric awarded the title of magister militum.

ABOVE: Imaginative painting from the 1920s depicting Alaric and his army of Visigoths marching through the streets of Athens

Several years later, in 402 AD, Alaric launched an invasion of Italy. He demanded that the western Romans provide his people with an annual stipend of gold and grain, grant them Roman citizenship, and declare him magister militum. The Romans refused to grant these demands.

Stilicho defeated Alaric twice, first in the Battle of Pollentia and again in the Battle of Verona. Then, in around 405 AD, the two leaders came to an agreement. Stilicho agreed that the Romans would grant Alaric’s people legal right to the lands they occupied and provide them with an annual stipend of grain and gold; in return, Alaric agreed to aid Stilicho in his planned invasion of the eastern empire.

These plans were interrupted by the fact that, that same year, a large group of Goths under the leadership of a king named Radagaisus crossed the Danube and marched into northern Italy, where they plundered towns and sowed destruction. Stilicho was able to surround Radagaisus’s forces near Florence and starve them out until they surrendered. He had Radagaisus executed and drafted roughly 12,000 of Radagaisus’s Gothic warriors into his own army.

Problems for the western Romans only multiplied. In around 406 AD, tens of thousands of Vandals, Suebi, and Alans fleeing from the Huns crossed the Rhine into Gaul. That same year, a soldier named Constantinus launched a revolt in Britain. In 407 AD, Alaric brought his forces back into Italy, declaring that he would launch another rampage if the Romans didn’t give his people the money and supplies they had promised. At Stilicho’s advice, the Romans agreed to pay him.

Then, in 408 AD, the western emperor Honorius made the unbelievably stupid decision to execute Stilicho and all his closest supporters because he had heard rumors that he had made a deal with Alaric. Stilicho was killed. Over 10,000 soldiers who had fought in Stilicho’s army defected to join Alaric.

Later that year, Alaric surrounded the city of Rome itself, demanding that the Romans give his people the grain and gold they had been promised. The Romans refused, so Alaric laid siege to the city. Although the capital of the western empire at the time was the city of Ravenna in northern Italy and Rome had not been the capital for a very long time, it was still one of the empire’s largest cities and it still held immense cultural significance. Over the next two years, Alaric laid siege to the city of Rome three times.

While the Visigoths were laying siege to Rome, the Roman province of Britannia was facing incursions by Germanic peoples. The Greek historian Zosimos of Constantinople (fl. 490s – 510s AD) records in his New History 6.10.2 that, in 410 AD, the emperor Honorius sent letters from Ravenna to the cities of Britannia telling the inhabitants to protect themselves from invaders. Modern scholars have interpreted these letters as Honorius effectively telling the Roman soldiers who were stationed in Britain that they were on their own and that they could no longer expect reinforcements from the continent. Thus, the western Roman government effectively ceded control over Britannia.

On 24 August 410 AD, the city of Rome fell to Alaric’s army. His soldiers looted the city and many civilians were captured to be sold into slavery. By modern standards, the sack was quite brutal, but, by the standards of the time, it was remarkably restrained. Those who took refuge in the basilicas of Saint Peter and Saint Paul were granted sanctuary, only a few public buildings were completely destroyed, and there was no mass slaughter of the inhabitants.

ABOVE: The Sack of Rome, painted by the French painter Évariste Vital Luminais (lived 1821 – 1896)

Both the Roman Empire and the city of Rome itself survived the sack. Nevertheless, it was the first time in nearly eight hundred years that the city of Rome had been taken by a foreign enemy. People all across the empire were shocked and horrified when the news reached them that Rome had been sacked. The Christian theologian Jerome, who was living in Bethlehem at the time, half a world away, laments in his Letter 127 to Principia, as translated by W.H. Fremantle, G. Lewis and W.G. Martley:

“My voice sticks in my throat; and, as I dictate, sobs choke my utterance. The City which had taken the whole world was itself taken.”

Shortly after this, the Romans gave the Visigoths permission to effectively establish their own kingdom in southwest Gaul under nominal Roman authority. Meanwhile, the Vandals, Suebi, and Alans who had crossed over into Roman territory in 406 AD had settled in the Iberian Peninsula. Over the course of the next decade, the Visigoths attacked the Vandals and conquered most of Spain.

Then in 429 AD, a large group of Vandals under the leadership of King Genseric entered North Africa. By 439, they had completely taken over North Africa, Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, and Malta. This really hurt the western Romans because North Africa had been the breadbasket of the western empire and had been the source of the vast majority of the grain that had been used to feed the inhabitants of Italy.

Sometime in around the mid-440s AD, the western Roman emperor Valentinian III made a peace agreement with Genseric which entailed the betrothal of his daughter Eudocia to Genseric’s son Huneric. The marriage could not be carried out at the time because Eudocia was only around five or six years old, but the promise of a future marriage helped to maintain friendly relations between the Romans and the Vandals.

Some of Valentinian III’s other attempts to consolidate power through strategic marriages didn’t pan out so well. In 450 AD, he tried to marry his sister Honoria to a senator named Bassus Herculanus. Honoria, however, did not want to marry Herculanus, so she sent a letter to Attila, the king of the Huns, begging him to stop the marriage.

With the letter, she included her engagement ring. It is unclear what exactly she intended for the ring symbolize; it is quite possible that she merely intended it as a token of sincerity. In any case, Attila interpreted it as a marriage proposal. He declared that he accepted Honoria as his bride and that he claimed half the western Roman Empire as his dowry.

Valentinian III, upon finding out what had happened, exiled Honoria and wrote a letter to Attila declaring that the supposed marriage proposal was not valid. Attila sent an emissary back to tell the emperor that the proposal was valid and that he would claim what was rightfully his by force.

ABOVE: Attila on a Pale Horse, painted by the French Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix (lived 1798 – 1863), symbolically associating Attila with Death, the last of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

In 451 AD, Attila crossed the Rhine and invaded Gaul. He sacked many towns and slaughtered many civilians. Attila’s advance through Gaul, however, led the Visigoths under the rule of King Theodoric I to align themselves with the Romans. On around 20 June 451 AD, the western Romans and their Visigothic allies confronted Attila’s forces in the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains. The Romans and Visigoths both lost many soldiers and Theodoric I was killed, but the Huns were driven back.

Attila retreated from Gaul, but, in 452 AD, he invaded Italy. He and his Hunnic warriors devastated northern Italy, sacking and burning many major cities, including Aquileia, Mediolanum (i.e. Milan), and Ticinum. The Roman general Flavius Aëtius was able to slow Attila’s forces down, but he didn’t have the men or resources to stop him completely. All the same, Attila’s army seems to have faced internal problems—most likely disease and lack of food—and they were forced to halt at the River Po.

Valentinian III sent three emissaries—the civilian officials Gennadius Avienus and Trigetius and Pope Leo I—to negotiate with Attila. Pope Leo I was able to convince Attila to turn back and leave Italy. Attila died less than a year later in 453 and the Hunnic Empire that he had established almost immediately fell apart.

ABOVE: The Meeting between Leo the Great and Attila, painted in in 1514 by the Italian Renaissance artist Raphael

Despite Attila’s death and the collapse of his empire, things didn’t get better for the western Romans. On 16 March 455 AD, Valentinian III was assassinated and a Roman aristocrat named Petronius Maximus became emperor. Maximus forced Valentinian III’s widow Licinia Eudoxia to marry him and her daughter Eudocia to marry his son. King Genseric was naturally greatly angered by this, since, if you remember, Valentinian III had promised Eudocia’s hand in marriage to his son Huneric around ten years earlier.

Licinia Eudoxia appealed to Genseric, pleading him to attack Rome and depose Maximus. Genseric and his armies promptly set sail for Italy. Maximus, upon hearing that the Visigoths would not be coming to his aid, tried to flee on 31 May 455, but was attacked by an angry mob of his own citizens, who stoned him to death, mutilated his body, and threw it in the Tiber. On 2 June, the Vandals entered the city of Rome and began sacking it.

This sack was much more thorough than the earlier sack by the Visigoths under Alaric in 410 had been. The Vandals looted the city for roughly two whole weeks straight; they stole countless works of art, burned several buildings, and captured many Romans to sell into slavery. It is from the Vandals’ sack of Rome in 455 that we get our English word vandalism. Nonetheless, they did not slaughter the population; both the city of Rome and the western empire survived the sack.

ABOVE: Painting of the sack of Rome by the Vandals in 455 AD, painted between 1833 and 1836 by the Russian painter Karl Bryullov

So, if the western empire managed to survive the sack of Rome in 410 by the Visigoths, Attila’s rampage across northern Italy in 452, and the sack of Rome in 455 by the Vandals, what ultimately brought about its end?

In June 474 AD, a man named Julius Nepos overthrew the reigning emperor Glycerius and proclaimed himself emperor. Nepos appointed a man named Orestes as magister militum. On 28 August 475, however, Orestes betrayed Nepos and turned his forces against the emperor. Nepos was able to flee to Dalmatia, where he continued to rule as emperor, but he no longer had power in Italy.

On 31 October 475, Orestes installed his fifteen-year-old son Romulus Augustus as a puppet emperor under his control. The eastern emperor Zenon, who was reigning in Constantinople, declared that Orestes and Romulus Augustus were both traitors and usurpers and that Julius Nepos was the rightful ruler of the western empire.

Meanwhile, the Germanic foederati who had been fighting for the western empire demanded for Orestes to reward them for their services by granting them lands where they could settle in Italy. Orestes refused. Under the leadership of a man named Odoacer, the foederati led a revolt. Orestes and his brother Paulus were both killed at Piacenza on 28 August 476.

On 4 September 476 AD, with the support of the Roman Senate, Odoacer’s forces entered the city of Ravenna largely unopposed and forced Romulus Augustus to abdicate the throne. Odoacer had mercy on Romulus because of his youth and, instead of killing him, he granted him an annual pension of 6,000 solidi and sent him to live with his relatives in Campania. A letter probably addressed to Romulus indicates that he was still alive and receiving his pension in 507 at the age of about forty-seven.

ABOVE: Imaginative nineteenth-century illustration of Romulus Augustus relinquishing the crown to Odoacer. Romulus Augustus’s deposition has taken on a mythical significance far beyond its actual historical significance.

Odoacer was recognized as a legitimate ruler by both the western Roman Senate and the eastern emperor Zenon, who bestowed upon him the title of patricius. Odoacer portrayed himself as merely a client of Zenon and Julius Nepos, but, in reality, he was ruling Italy as an independent kingdom.

Julius Nepos was assassinated in around late spring or early summer of 480 AD. Odoacer promptly invaded Dalmatia and annexed it. Zenon declared the office of western Roman emperor formally abolished. Despite this, the government of Italy remained, for all intents and purposes, Roman. Sure, it was ruled by a German who was calling himself patricius or rex Italiae instead of a native Roman calling himself imperator, but his job description was basically the same and the Roman Senate remained intact.

In 484, Odoacer invaded the westernmost territories of the eastern empire. This caused Zenon to turn against him. Zenon named the Ostrogothic king Theodoric as the new patricius of Italy and urged him to invade Odoacer’s kingdom. In 489, Theodoric launched his invasion of Italy. Within a few years, he had conquered the whole territory.

On 15 March 493 AD, Theodoric invited Odoacer to a reconciliation banquet. At the banquet, he promptly betrayed Odoacer and murdered him. As he looked over Odoacer’s dead body, he is said to have remarked, “There certainly wasn’t a bone in this wretched fellow.” Afterwards, he hunted down all Odoacer’s loyal followers and had them all killed.

Theodoric ruled Italy until his death on 30 August 526 AD. Under his rule and the rule of his Ostrogothic successors, Italy remained recognizably Roman. The Roman Senate remained, the civil administration was made up entirely of Romans, and Theodoric continued to pay lip service to the eastern emperor, just as Odoacer had before him.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a triple solidus of King Theodoric the Great, dating to between c. 491 and c. 501 AD

Not long after Theodoric’s death, though, the eastern Roman emperor Justinian I decided that lip service from the Ostrogoths wasn’t enough; he wanted to utterly subjugate them. In 535 AD, under Justinian’s orders, the eastern Romans began what would become an extremely long, brutal war against the Ostrogoths to reconquer Italy. This turned out to be one of the bloodiest wars fought in all of late antiquity; it went on for nearly two whole decades and resulted in countless deaths and untold devastation.

To make matters even worse, in 541 AD, in the midst of this terrible war, the first great epidemic of the plague—known as the “Plague of Justinian”—swept across North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. The Roman historian Prokopios of Kaisareia (lived c. 500 – c. 570 AD) claims in his History of the Wars that, at the height of the epidemic, the plague was killing roughly ten thousand people in the city of Constantinople alone every day.

He says that there was no room to bury the dead, so the streets were piled high with the corpses of plague victims and the whole city stank with the smell of rotting corpses. In his Secret History, he records that the plague killed so many people throughout the countryside that Justinian was struggling to collect enough money from taxes to fund his wars, so he passed a decree that anyone who was still alive was required to not only pay the amount he owed in taxes, but also all the taxes owed by his neighbors who had died of the plague.

Although our most detailed records come from the eastern Roman Empire, it is certain that the plague greatly devastated Italy and the rest of Europe as well. Cemeteries of plague victims have been found as far north as Germany. Modern historians estimate that the Plague of Justinian probably killed somewhere between one third and one half of the total population of Europe. Both the Romans and the Ostrogoths were greatly militarily weakened. The first wave of this epidemic lasted until around 549, but it continued to recur for roughly two centuries afterward.

ABOVE: The Plague at Ashdod, painted between 1629 and 1631 by the French painter Nicolas Poussin

Despite the plague and strong Ostrogothic resistance, the eastern Romans persisted in their quest to reconquer all of Italy. Finally, by 554 AD, the Romans had succeeded. For the first time in over a century, Italy was completely under direct Roman control.

Alas, their victory didn’t last long. In 568 AD, a Germanic people known as the Lombards invaded Italy and, within a hundred years, they had conquered nearly the entire Italian Peninsula. The eastern Romans managed to hold onto Latium, Naples, Venice, Sardinia, Sicily, Calabria, and southern Apulia, but they lost just about everything else.

It was with the conquest of Italy by the Lombards in the late sixth century AD that the western Roman Empire finally ceased to exist in any meaningful political sense. The eastern empire, on the other hand, survived until the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks on 29 May 1453. The Principality of Theodoro, the last surviving rump state of the eastern Roman Empire, survived until it was conquered by the Ottomans in 1475.

Everything I’ve said here is just a summary of some of the things that happened to the western Roman Empire in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries AD. There’s a lot of other stuff that happened that I haven’t even talked about, but I think that everyone now has the basic background information necessary in order for me to proceed. Let’s talk about some of the theories people have about what might have caused the downfall of the western Roman Empire that are almost certainly not correct.

ABOVE: Mosaic of the eastern Roman emperor Justinian I from the Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy

Edward Gibbon, Christianity, and the fall of Rome

One of the first people to tackle the question of what caused the fall of the western Roman Empire was the English historian Edward Gibbon (lived 1737 – 1794), who argued in his monumental history, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which was published in six volumes between 1776 and 1789, that the rise of Christianity directly contributed to the Roman Empire’s downfall. Gibbon famously writes in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Volume One, Chapter 38:

“As the happiness of a future life is the great object of religion, we may hear without surprise or scandal that the introduction, or at least the abuse of Christianity, had some influence on the decline and fall of the Roman empire. The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity; the active virtues of society were discouraged; and the last remains of military spirit were buried in the cloister: a large portion of public and private wealth was consecrated to the specious demands of charity and devotion; and the soldiers’ pay was lavished on the useless multitudes of both sexes who could only plead the merits of abstinence and chastity. Faith, zeal, curiosity, and more earthly passions of malice and ambition, kindled the flame of theological discord; the church, and even the state, were distracted by religious factions, whose conflicts were sometimes bloody and always implacable; the attention of the emperors was diverted from camps to synods; the Roman world was oppressed by a new species of tyranny; and the persecuted sects became the secret enemies of their country.”

Gibbon uses a lot of flowery language here, so I will summarize what he is saying. In this passage, we can essentially pick out five individual arguments for how Christianity supposedly contributed to the decline of the Roman Empire:

• The Christian emphasis on the afterlife made the Romans stop caring about this life, thus making them easy to conquer.
• The Christian teachings of pacifism, mercy, forgiveness, meekness, and passivity eroded the Romans’ traditional warrior spirit and made them weak and pusillanimous.
• Christianity led the Romans to waste money on useless things, like feeding the poor, building churches, and maintaining the clergy, rather than devoting that money to the military like they should have.
• Christian theological controversies distracted Roman emperors from the military.
• Christian theological controversies sowed strife among the Roman people.

All of these arguments are full of holes. To begin with, all of these arguments except the last one rely on the assumption that the Romans’ problem was that they were militarily weak. I don’t think this assumption is necessarily correct, though; I think that the western Romans’ biggest problems were infighting and incompetent leadership. When Stilicho was in charge of the army, he was able to repeatedly fend off the Germanic invaders, but then Honorius stupidly executed him and all of a sudden Rome itself was getting sacked by the Visigoths.

Even if we play along with Gibbon’s idea that the Romans were just militarily weak, his arguments are still deeply flawed. There is little evidence to indicate that Christianity made the Romans stop caring about their survival in this life or that it made them into pacifists. Indeed, as we shall see in a moment, the late Romans devoted an extraordinary amount of money and resources to the military. The military was the centerpiece of late Roman society. If the Romans were militarily weak, it certainly wasn’t because they didn’t care about being militarily strong.

It’s true that the Christian Romans spent a lot of money on charity, churches, and the clergy, but yet Gibbon seems to overlook the fact that Roman paganism had all kinds of expenses too. The earlier pagan Romans had built colossal stone temples and supported their own expensive hierarchy of priests. In other words, the money that the Romans directed towards Christian stuff is money that they probably would have otherwise just spent on pagan stuff.

Only Gibbon’s last argument—that Christian theological controversies sowed strife in the overall population—seems to have any real merit. Even this argument is deeply flawed, however, when you consider that the eastern empire, which survived until the fifteenth century, was far more Christian than the western empire and faced at least as many theological controversies. Indeed, all seven of the first seven ecumenical councils took place in the eastern empire.

This leads us to ask the question: “If Christianity really weakened the western empire and allowed the Romans to be more easily conquered, why did it not weaken the eastern empire in the same way?” Gibbon doesn’t seem to have an adequate answer to this question.

ABOVE: Portrait of Edward Gibbon, the author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Gibbon’s theory about Christianity being responsible for the decline of the Roman Empire has been recycled in various forms. For instance, a video about the fall of Rome published on YouTube in April 2018 makes the following arguments:

“It has also been argued that Christianity played a role in the decline of the empire. Christianity was legalized in 313 and became Rome’s official religion in 380. The fact that Christianity had a single God was drastically opposed to Roman methods of control. When conquering new land, the Romans would often incorporate local gods into state religion, allowing them to be worshipped by locals or likening them to an existing deity and merging the two. This was an effective tool of Romanization, slowly integrating the newly conquered into Roman society.”

“Having multiple gods also allowed the Roman emperors to be worshipped as gods and it was from this that they gained a lot of their legitimacy. The first emperor, Augustus, deified his adoptive father Julius Caesar and proclaimed himself as the son of a god. Christianity could not allow this, however, leading to the loss of a significant amount of authority for the emperors and making the process of integrating new people much more difficult.”

Neither of these arguments hold up to scrutiny. For one thing, by 380 AD, the Romans hadn’t really been in the business of conquering new peoples for quite some time and most of the Germanic tribes that caused so much trouble for the Romans converted to Christianity relatively quickly (albeit mostly Arian Christianity rather than Nicene Christianity), so it’s hard to imagine how the argument that Christianity made it harder for them to integrate new peoples into their empire is even relevant.

The second argument, that the conversion to Christianity destroyed the emperor’s legitimacy, seems to be based on nothing but ignorance. The Roman imperial cult quickly adapted to Christianity; emperors simply transitioned from being seen as divine beings to being seen as God’s supreme representatives on earth.

If anything, I would argue that Christianity actually made the emperor seem more legitimate, since many people were skeptical about the idea that a human being could literally become a god, but it was much easier for people to believe that a human being could be God’s representative. To get an idea of how this worked, you can just look at the way so many Evangelical Christians today regard Donald Trump as God’s earthly vessel.

If Christianity had any role in the collapse of the western Roman Empire, it certainly wasn’t a major one.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a first-century AD Roman marble statue of the emperor Augustus as a divine figure, holding the globe of the earth in his right hand and a scepter in his left

The Roman Empire and lead poisoning

Probably the most popular theory pertaining to the fall of the Roman Empire among members of the general public claims that the Romans poisoned themselves because they drank water from lead pipes because they didn’t know lead was poisonous. I have already written an article debunking this theory in depth, but, since it is so popular, I will briefly address it again here.

First of all, the whole assertion that the ancient Romans didn’t know that lead is poisonous is nonsense; it was actually common knowledge among educated people in ancient Greece and Rome that lead is highly toxic and that it can even be deadly. We know this because there are at least a half dozen different ancient Greek and Roman authors who all specifically state that lead is poisonous in their extant writings. Here are some examples:

• The ancient Greek physician and poet Nikandros of Kolophon, who lived in the second century AD, wrote a poem about lead poisoning, which is included in his Alexipharmaka. In the poem, he warns that lead is highly poisonous and describes the effects of lead poisoning in great detail.

• The Roman engineer Marcus Vitruvius Pollio (lived c. 80 – after c. 15 BC) warns in his treatise On Architecture that lead is highly toxic, as evidenced by the extremely poor health of men who worked with lead for a living. He goes on to say, “water should therefore on no account be conducted in leaden pipes if we are desirous that it should be wholesome.”

• The Roman encyclopedist Aulus Cornelius Celsus (lived c. 25 BC – c. 50 AD) mentions in his work De Medicina that lead is poisonous.

• The Greek physician Pedanios Dioskourides (lived c. 40 – c. 90 AD) observes in his book De Materia Medica that exposure to lead has a deleterious effect on the mind and that oral consumption of lead can be deadly.

• The Roman doctor Paulos of Aigina (lived c. 625 – c. 690) gives a detailed and accurate description of the symptoms of chronic lead poisoning in his medical encyclopedia Medical Compendium in Seven Books.

In other words, it was widely known among educated elites in the ancient Roman world that lead is poisonous. Despite this, however, the Romans continued to use lead pipes. This may have something to do with the fact that Roman lead pipes probably weren’t necessarily as dangerous as they are often assumed to have been.

A thick residue of calcium carbonate would have quickly built up on the insides of the pipes, effectively insulating the water from the lead. Furthermore, because the water was always flowing, it was probably never in contact with the lead long enough to be seriously contaminated.

A study conducted in 2014 found that, although water from Roman lead pipes probably contained around one hundred times the amount of lead found in the water from local springs, the estimated lead concentration was still not high enough to be seriously harmful. The study’s conclusion states:

“This work has shown that the labile fraction of sediments from Portus and the Tiber bedload attests to pervasive Pb contamination of river water by the Pb plumbing controlling water distribution in Rome. Lead pollution of “tap water” in Roman times is clearly measurable, but unlikely to have been truly harmful. The discontinuities punctuating the Pb isotope record provide a strong background against which ideas about the changing character of the port can be tested.”

Additionally, Roman authors knew the symptoms of chronic lead poisoning and the fact that they don’t describe these symptoms as being ubiquitous indicates that lead poisoning probably wasn’t an extremely widespread problem.

I fully agree that lead pipes are a bad idea, but there’s a difference between something being a bad idea and it being something that could seriously contribute to the downfall of a whole civilization.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing a variety of ancient Roman lead pipes from Ostia Antica

Claims about the Roman Empire’s decline by American conservatives

Nowadays, the people who seem to talk about the fall of the Roman Empire the most are conservatives who are convinced that the United States is the new Rome and that our empire is on the brink of collapse due to the actions of evil liberals.

Below is an image that has been extensively shared by conservatives on social media platforms over the course of the past year. It was even shared by the Alabama Republican Party on their official Facebook page. It lists all sorts of things that conservatives like to blame liberals for and describes them as “root causes for [the] fall of the Roman Empire.”

Many of the items on the list are routinely cited by conservatives as things that supposedly led to the downfall of Rome, so it is worthwhile to examine each of these items and assess how accurate they are.

“Open borders”?

The list gets started off with the one thing that people on the far right fear perhaps more than anything else in the whole world: open borders. The assertion that the fall of the Roman Empire was caused by open borders is extremely widespread. For instance, in February 2018, The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed titled “Open Immigration Was a Disaster for Rome” that starts out with this pompous declaration:

“By 500 A.D. Rome had lost control of every province under its rule to uninvited immigrants who brought devastating economic decline everywhere they went. The lesson? A large indigestible mass of newcomers who, loosely put, don’t speak the language or share the customs of their host country and who have no incentive to do either are going to negatively disrupt the lives of the citizens whose country they land on.”

(This passage also references the assertion about the supposed “loss of common language,” which I will address later in this article.)

First of all, it’s worth noting that the concepts of “open” and “closed” borders are modern and that it is inherently anachronistic to apply them to the Roman Empire. Today, we are accustomed to well-defined borders, which are usually shown on our maps as solid black lines. In many places, though, the borders of the Roman Empire were not especially well-defined at all and more-or-less consisted of whatever territory the Romans could maintain control over.

The borders that are most directly relevant to the decline of the Roman Empire are the empire’s borders in northern Europe. These borders were relatively well-defined and had extensive fortifications along them. These fortifications were, however, intended to keep out invaders, not immigrants; the Romans freely welcomed lots of ordinary travelers, merchants, and refugees into their empire from the very beginning.

The Roman policies on who they let in didn’t really change much over the course of their history. Therefore, it is inaccurate to say that the Romans adopting any kind of “open borders” policy resulted in the destruction of their empire. It is true that the fall of the western Roman Empire was partly a result of the Romans mishandling a migration crisis. I, however, would argue that it wasn’t letting foreign people in that hurt the Roman Empire, but rather mistreating them once they were already in.

The original reason why the Goths revolted was because the Romans weren’t giving them enough food and supplies. The reason why Alaric led his rampage through Greece was almost certainly because he wanted better treatment for his people. Finally, the reason why he ultimately sacked Rome in 410 was because the Romans were refusing to give his people the money and food they had promised them. If the Romans had treated the Goths better and done a better job of integrating them into the empire, they wouldn’t have caused nearly so many problems.

As for some of the other groups that came into the Roman Empire, the problems the Romans faced weren’t because those people didn’t “speak the language or share the customs of their host country,” but rather because those peoples were actively hostile to Roman governance. The Huns didn’t come into the empire as immigrants or refugees; they came in as a invaders looking for lands to conquer. It is therefore completely inaccurate to compare present-day Mexican or Middle Eastern immigrants who are coming to the United States peacefully to the Huns.

ABOVE: Painting by the French historical painter Georges Rochegrosse (lived 1859 – 1938) of the Huns plundering a Roman villa in Gaul

It is also worth pointing out that the United States does not currently have open borders and it is highly unlikely that this country will adopt any kind of genuine “open borders” policies anytime in the near future, especially when you consider:

• The current president, Donald Trump, is strongly opposed to the idea of open borders; he has made vilifying immigrants his signature issue and, in 2016, he campaigned on the promise that he would build an enormous wall along the United States-Mexico border.

• The Democratic nominee for president, Joe Biden, has explicitly stated that he does not support “open borders,” that he is opposed to the idea of decriminalizing border crossings, and that he is opposed to the idea of abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Given that Biden never supported any of these ideas while he was in office as Obama’s vice president, I see little reason to suspect that he will suddenly change his attitude as soon as he is elected (assuming that he is elected).

In other words, conservatives are freaked out about something that’s definitely not going to happen any time soon, may never happen at all, and, if it does eventually happen, probably won’t be anywhere near as bad as they imagine.

“Corrupt politicians”?

The Roman Empire had corrupt politicians from the very beginning. For instance, the emperor Vespasian (ruled 69 – 79 AD), who ruled very early in Roman history and is generally known as one of Rome’s better emperors, was notorious for openly exploiting his office for personal financial gain. The Roman biographer Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (lived c. 69 – after c. 122 AD) describes Vespasian’s corrupt dealings in his Life of Vespasian, chapter 16, as translated by J. C. Rolfe:

“The only thing for which he can fairly be censured was his love of money. For not content with reviving the imposts which had been repealed under Galba, he added new and heavy burdens, increasing the amount of tribute paid by the provinces, in some cases actually doubling it, and quite openly carrying on traffic which would be shameful even for a man in private life; for he would buy up certain commodities merely in order to distribute them at a profit.”

“He made no bones of selling offices to candidates and acquittals to men under prosecution, whether innocent or guilty. He is even believed to have had the habit of designedly advancing the most rapacious of his procurators to higher posts, that they might be the richer when he later condemned them; in fact, it was common talk that he used these men as sponges, because he, so to speak, soaked them when they were dry and squeezed them when they were wet.”

Later, in chapter 23, Suetonius records a series of humorous anecdotes about just how flagrantly corrupt Vespasian supposedly was:

“Having put off one of his favourite attendants, who asked for a stewardship for a pretended brother, he summoned the candidate himself, and after compelling him to pay him as much money as he had agreed to give his advocate, appointed him to the position without delay. On his attendant’s taking up the matter again, he said: ‘Find yourself another brother; the man that you thought was yours is mine.’”

“On a journey, suspecting that his muleteer had got down to shoe the mules merely to make delay and give time for a man with a lawsuit to approach the emperor, he asked how much he was paid for shoeing the mules and insisted on a share of the money.”

As I’ll discuss later, Suetonius isn’t usually a very reliable source and he says a lot of stuff that’s almost certainly not true, but it’s definitely true that Vespasian had a reputation for money-grubbing and corrupt dealings. My point here is that, despite all of this, the empire survived for centuries after his death.

I do think you could argue that corrupt politicians did play a significant role in the decline of the western Roman Empire. Certainly, the prioritization of selfish political interests over the good of the empire was a major factor in the western empire’s collapse. Political corruption, however, isn’t enough to destroy an empire on its own; it can only act as an exacerbating factor. Just because politicians today are corrupt doesn’t necessarily mean that the end is nigh.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a bust of the Roman emperor Vespasian, who ruled very early in Roman history and was notorious for his overt corruption and greed

“Loss of common language”?

The Roman Empire never really had a “common language” in the same way that English is the common language of the United States; it was multilingual from the very beginning.

When the Romans first started to expand their empire outside the region of Latium in central Italy in the fourth century BC, they conquered other peoples in the neighboring regions who spoke various Italic languages. Then, in the third century BC, they conquered the Greeks in southern Italy who spoke Greek, the Etruscans in northern Italy who spoke Etruscan, and the Cisalpine Gauls in northern Italy who spoke Lepontic.

Then, over the course of the third and fourth centuries BC, the Romans conquered peoples in Spain who spoke Iberian languages and peoples in western North Africa who spoke Punic and Berber languages. They also expanded into Greece and Asia Minor, where most people spoke Greek, but some people also spoke languages like Galatian, Neo-Phrygian, Pisidian, and Isaurian.

In the first century BC, they conquered Gaul, where people spoke various Celtic and Germanic languages, Syria, where people spoke Greek and various Semitic languages, and Egypt, where people spoke Greek and Egyptian. In the first century AD, they conquered Britain, where people spoke Brittonic. In the second century AD, they conquered Dacia, where people spoke Dacian.

ABOVE: Map from Wikimedia Commons showing areas of the eastern Mediterranean where Greek was widely spoken during the Hellenistic Era, before the Roman conquest

Over the course of the first two centuries AD, Latin gradually became the dominant language throughout most of western Europe and western North Africa, while Greek remained the dominant language of the eastern Mediterranean. Native languages continued to be widely spoken, but Latin and Greek became the languages used for most official purposes. As a result of this, it was common for educated people from regions where languages other than Latin and Greek were spoken to be trilingual; they would learn to speak Latin, Greek, and their native language.

In other words, this whole idea that Latin was originally the sole language of the Roman Empire and that the Germanic peoples who came into the empire in late antiquity ruined everything because they couldn’t “speak the language” is complete nonsense. Latin was just the language that happened to be the most widely spoken in the western portion of the empire; there were plenty of other languages.

Even when it comes to just Latin, there were many different varieties of Vulgar Latin that were spoken throughout the Roman Empire. The kind of Latin you’d hear, say, in Gaul was never identical to the kind of Latin you’d hear in Italy. It is from these different dialects of Vulgar Latin that the Romance languages we know today eventually arose.

The Roman Empire was able to thrive for centuries despite never having a single common language. Far from being proof that immigrants coming to the United States who can’t speak English are a threat, it actually proves the opposite: that empires can flourish, despite being multilingual.

ABOVE: Simplified map from Wikimedia Commons showing just a few of the regional languages other than Latin that were spoken throughout the Roman Empire at its height around the middle of the second century AD

“The welfare state”?

The idea that wasteful spending on frivolous pursuits like feeding the poor helped bring down the Roman Empire goes all the way back to Edward Gibbon, who blamed Christianity as responsible for such supposedly wasteful allocation of public funds.

In reality, though, the Roman welfare state—if we can indeed call it that—existed from the very earliest times. In fact, ensuring that citizens had food was considered one of the primary duties of the Roman state from its very foundation. In 123 BC, during the Roman Republic, the tribune of the plebs Gaius Gracchus proposed a law for the regular distribution of subsidized grain to freeborn Roman citizens. This proposal was approved by the Plebeian Council.

The grain dole continued for over three hundred years after Gaius Gracchus’s death in 121 BC, lasting throughout the most prosperous period in Roman history. Then, during the reign of Septimius Severus (lived 193 – 211 AD), the government began distributing shares of bread and olive oil instead of just grain. Later, under the emperor Aurelian (ruled 270 – 275 AD), the government began distributing wine and pork as well.

This distribution of bread, olive oil, wine, and pork continued until the very last years of the western empire. There is no evidence that it caused the decline of the empire; on the contrary, in general, the system seems to have worked remarkably well and it probably helped keep the lower classes from revolting. As it turns out, panem et circenses wasn’t a bad strategy.

ABOVE: Wall painting from the Roman city of Pompeii showing a family buying bread at a food stall

“Violent entertainment”?

The claim that the decline of the Roman Empire was the result of violent entertainment is one that I’ve been hearing for years. When I was a freshman in high school, I rode the bus both to and from school. There was a sophomore girl who lived in the house down the street who rode the same bus. We lived closest to the school, so, naturally, we were the first ones to get on the bus in the mornings and the last ones to get off the bus in the afternoons.

On the afternoon of the Friday before the Super Bowl, when the bus driver was taking us home, he asked the girl if she was going to watch it. She replied that she didn’t watch football because it was too violent. Then she remarked, “You know, gladiator games became popular during the fall of the Roman Empire.”

Now, I’d been reading a lot about the Roman Empire because it was the subject for that year’s academic team competition, so I nervously cut in, “Actually, gladiator games were fairly integral part of Roman culture from the very beginning.”

“But they became more popular towards the end,” she insisted.

As it turns out, she was completely wrong in this assertion. Gladiator games didn’t become “more popular” in the last years of the Roman Empire; instead, they were actually banned. As I discuss in this article I originally published in February 2019, early Christians were strongly opposed to gladiatorial combat. For instance, here is what the early Christian writer and theologian Tertullianus (lived c. 155 – c. 240 AD), a North African of Berber origin who wrote in Latin, has to say about gladiators in his treatise On the Spectacles, chapter 19, as translated by Reverend S. Thelwall:

“We shall now see how the Scriptures condemn the amphitheatre. If we can maintain that it is right to indulge in the cruel, and the impious, and the fierce, let us go there. If we are what we are said to be, let us regale ourselves there with human blood. It is good, no doubt, to have the guilty punished. Who but the criminal himself will deny that? And yet the innocent can find no pleasure in another’s sufferings: he rather mourns that a brother has sinned so heinously as to need a punishment so dreadful.”

“But who is my guarantee that it is always the guilty who are adjudged to the wild beasts, or to some other doom, and that the guiltless never suffer from the revenge of the judge, or the weakness of the defence, or the pressure of the rack? How much better, then, is it for me to remain ignorant of the punishment inflicted on the wicked, lest I am obliged to know also of the good coming to untimely ends–if I may speak of goodness in the case at all!”

“At any rate, gladiators not chargeable with crime are offered in sale for the games, that they may become the victims of the public pleasure. Even in the case of those who are judicially condemned to the amphitheatre, what a monstrous thing it is, that, in undergoing their punishment, they, from some less serious delinquency, advance to the criminality of manslayers!”

Tertullianus was not alone. Other Christian apologists and theologians, including Lactantius (lived c. 250 – c. 325 AD), Ioannes Chrysostomos (lived c. 349 – 407 AD), and Augustinus of Hippo (lived 354 – 430 AD), condemned gladiatorial combat as immoral.

Ultimately, in 399 AD, the emperor Honorius (who was a Christian) shut down the gladiator schools and, in 404 AD, he banned gladiatorial combat altogether. For all Honorius’s many faults as a leader, he did do at least one good thing.

ABOVE: Detail of an ancient Roman mosaic from Torrenova dated to the early fourth century AD depicting gladiatorial combat

“Decline in morality”?

It is impossible to measure how moral a civilization is, since morality is inherently complicated and deeply personal. You might be able to say that some people in late antiquity were behaving immorally, but every civilization is made up so many diverse people that it is impossible to assess how moral the civilization is as a whole.

“Decline in fertility rate”?

We don’t know if there really was a decline in the Roman fertility rate in the fifth century AD because we don’t have any kind of statistics on how many children women were having. Nonetheless, we do have evidence that at least some people at the time thought that the fertility rate among the wealthy was declining.

Apparently, in the fifth century AD, there was a trend among elite Roman families to make their daughters take religious vows at a young age so that they would never get married so that the family’s wealth would not be divided up through dowries. The emperor Majorian was greatly disturbed by this trend and, on 26 October 458 AD, he issued the Novella Maioriani 6, which prohibited anyone under the age of forty from taking religious vows.

It is unclear how serious the problem Majorian was trying to address really was. Our sources for the period aren’t especially detailed and, as I mentioned earlier, we don’t have any kind of statistics. In any case, the problem seems to have only really been prominent among the wealthy, who only made up a small percentage of the Roman population anyway.

Regardless of all this, it is certainly true that there was significant population decline in western Europe during late antiquity, but this seems to have mostly been due to the large number of people dying in all the civil wars, plagues, and invasions that were happening. Whatever was going on with the fertility rate was only a very small part of this.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a gold solidus of the Roman emperor Majorian

“Rise in pedophilia”?

We have almost no information whatsoever about the sexual exploitation of pre-adolescent children in the Roman Empire, mainly because it was universally taboo and probably almost always done in secret, so very few people wrote about it. The biographer Suetonius does, however, record these horrifying tales about Tiberius (lived 42 BC – 37 AD), the second emperor of the Roman Empire, in his Life of Tiberius, chapter 44, as translated by J. C. Rolfe:

“He acquired a reputation for still grosser depravities that one can hardly bear to tell or be told, let alone believe. For example, he trained little boys (whom he termed tiddlers) to crawl between his thighs when he went swimming and tease him with their licks and nibbles; and unweaned babies he would put to his organ as though to the breast, being by both nature and age rather fond of this form of satisfaction.”

These stories are almost certainly made up; Suetonius is often an unreliable source in general, he wrote this account nearly a full century after Tiberius’s death, he does not cite any sources to support any of his claims, and even he seems to doubt the truth of what he is saying. Tiberius had many enemies in the Roman Senate and he spent years in isolation on the island of Capri, which led many senators to speculate that, since they couldn’t find out what he was doing, that obviously meant he was engaging in all sorts of depraved activities.

In any case, Tiberius was the second ruler of the Roman Empire and we have no evidence to indicate that pedophilia became more any more common in late antiquity. It certainly didn’t become any more widely accepted.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an ancient Roman marble bust of Tiberius, the second emperor of the Roman Empire, whom the biographer Suetonius alleges was a pedophile

We have much more detailed information about ephebophilia (i.e. the sexual exploitation of adolescents) in the Roman Empire than we do about pedophilia. In the early years of the Roman Empire, both male and female adolescents were often sexually exploited. Among the wealthy, women were usually forced to marry in their mid-to-late teenaged years to men who were usually in their late twenties or early thirties.

Meanwhile, pederasty (i.e. sexual relationships between young adult men and teenaged boys) was tacitly accepted. The Romans adopted pederasty from the Greeks. There were some who disapproved of it, but they were many who certainly engaged in it. For more information about Greco-Roman pederasty, you can read this article I wrote about ancient Greek homosexuality last year.

Ultimately, pederasty actually fell out of acceptance as a result of the rise of Christianity, since Christians strongly disapproved of it and viewed it as evil and immoral. The forced marriage of teenaged girls to significantly older men continued, however.

As sickening as the sexual exploitation of adolescents in ancient times is, I see little evidence to indicate that it was even a minor contributing factor to the decline of the Roman Empire.

ABOVE: Tondo from an Attic red-figure kylix by the Briseïs Painter dated to c. 480 BC, showing an erastes (the young adult male partner) kissing an eromenos (the adolescent boy partner)

“Unchecked debauchery”?

As I discuss in this article from February 2019, the popular belief that the ancient Romans were constantly having orgies and throwing wild sex parties is a misconception that originates primarily from extremely naïve readings of Suetonius’s biographies and works of ancient Roman fiction, especially Gaius Petronius Arbiter’s novel Satyrica. This misconception has been greatly popularized in recent decades by Hollywood films, which revel in portrayals of ancient Roman debauchery.

There are stories about Roman emperors engaging in various sexual depravities, but most of these stories are of highly dubious veracity. Moreover, virtually all of these stories actually pertain to the early emperors who ruled while the empire was young and prosperous, like Tiberius, Caligula, Nero, Vitellius, Domitian, Commodus, Caracalla, and Elagabalus. You never hear stories about later emperors like Theodosius I, Honorius, Valentinian III, Majorian, or Romulus Augustus having wild orgies.

There’s also a claim that has become popular recently that the ancient Romans were so horny that they harvested a plant called silphium to extinction because it was a highly effective contraceptive. Nearly every aspect of this story is false. I’ve already written a whole article debunking this claim, but I’ll quickly address it again here.

Silphium was a real plant and there is evidence that some people in the Roman Empire did believe that it was an effective contraceptive, but there is little evidence to indicate that it was actually effective. Furthermore, its primary use was actually culinary; it was seen as a gourmet food item and, in ancient Roman texts, it is almost exclusively mentioned in culinary contexts.

Finally, there’s actually no good evidence that the Romans harvested it to extinction. The whole claim that it went extinct is based solely on one passage from Pliny the Elder in which he simply says that the plant hasn’t been found in Kyrenaïka in a long time and that the Romans have been having to get it from Persis, Media, and Armenia instead, but the silphium from those places doesn’t taste as good. Indeed, there’s actually quite a lot of evidence that silphium didn’t extinct. Notably, all sources recommending the use of silphium as a contraceptive come from after it supposedly went extinct.

The long and short of everything I’ve said here is that the idea that debauchery and perversion ran rampant in the late Roman Empire is almost entirely a modern misconception.

Moreover, even if debauchery really did run “unchecked,” it is unclear how exactly this could possibly be a “root cause” for the collapse of an empire. Are we supposed to assume that Roman elites all just spent so much time having orgies and sticking weird things up their buttholes that they totally forgot they had an empire they were supposed to be running? Come on guys, you know that’s silly.

ABOVE: The Roses of Heliogabalus, painted in 1888 by the English Academic painter Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, one of the most iconic modern representations of (alleged) ancient Roman decadence

“Class warfare”?

You could certainly make a very strong case that class conflict was a major contributing factor to the decline of the western Roman Empire. We see this especially in how the Goths, a mistreated underclass of non-citizens, rose up to demand better treatment through violent means. This serves as a lesson that mistreating the inhabitants of your empire tends to be bad for the empire in the long run.

On the other hand, this one falls into roughly the same category as the point about “corrupt politicians”; class conflict is a perennial issue throughout human history and, if you look hard enough, you can find it in basically any situation. Most of the time, the existence of class conflict alone isn’t enough to bring down an empire. The fact that there was class conflict in the last years of the western Roman Empire and there is still class conflict today doesn’t necessarily prove that the American Empire is about to crumble.

I’ll also note that it’s really interesting to see conservatives talking about class conflict; usually that’s kind of a Marxist thing.

“Unbearable taxation”?

Finally, after naming ten things that are either completely irrelevant to the decline of the western Roman Empire or so vague that they could apply to virtually any political situation, the author of the list has seemingly accidentally stumbled upon a real problem specific to the late Roman Empire. The “unbearable taxes” of the late Roman Empire, though, are nothing like the kinds of taxes that exist in the United States today.

During the Third Century Crisis, emperors became increasingly desperate for greater and greater resources to support the military, which was rapidly becoming the center of all Roman society. Because currency became basically worthless (for reasons I’ll address shortly), cash-based taxes were largely abandoned and emperors began to increasingly rely on just taking property from civilians, especially things like wheat, barley, meat, olive oil, wine, clothing, horses, camels, mules, and oxen. Nearly all of the goods collected went to support the military.

These taxes in goods continued even after the end of the Third Century Crisis. Civilians were required to raise certain amounts of certain kinds of goods for the military. Those who failed to raise enough goods could be severely punished.

It would be interesting to see how conservative Republicans who spend so much time complaining about how they’re supposedly being taxed too much and how we supposedly aren’t spending enough on our military would react if they were told they needed to personally farm a certain amount of grain for the military each year and manufacture a certain number of military uniforms using their own resources.

These taxes were so exorbitant that many people tried to flee their professions in order to avoid having to raise goods for the military. Many farmers tried to flee and abandon their lands. Thus, laws started to be passed forbidding people from leaving their professions. In many cases, sons also became required by law to take up their fathers’ professions. Farmers became legally bound to the specific lands they worked and forbidden from moving away from those lands. Those who were farming lands that belonged to others became effectively serfs.

Meanwhile, taxation on the extremely wealthy and powerful was ineffective, because senators and other ultra-powerful elites could use their influence to get out of paying taxes, so the government relied on taxing the lower elites and commoners. This naturally resulted in greater wealth inequality.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a relief from the city of Trier depicting Gallo-Roman workers harvesting crops

“Outsourcing”?

Alas, the string of two right answers in a row couldn’t last.

The Roman Empire had a pre-industrial agricultural economy. Most people were subsistence farmers, who grew their own food on their own land or on land that they were renting from someone else. The majority of wealth was in land. There were no large factories for the production of goods. Capitalism as we know it did not exist. At least for the vast majority of people living in the Roman Empire, “outsourcing” wasn’t something that was even possible. You can’t exactly “outsource” work as a subsistence farmer to someone in Germania.

The only rationalization I can think of to make “outsourcing” even remotely plausible as a “root cause” of the decline of the Roman Empire is if you argue that, maybe, by “outsourcing” whoever wrote this list might have actually meant the replacement of native Roman military recruits with foreign mercenaries. I don’t think that’s what the person who made this list had in mind, but one thesis that was popular among historians in the nineteenth century does claim that the hiring of foreign mercenaries was a significant factor in the decline of the Roman Empire.

The thesis claims that native Roman recruits were more loyal to the empire because it was their actual homeland; whereas foreign mercenaries supposedly tended to be less loyal and less committed because they had no ties to the empire and most of them were only interested in defending it for the money. Consequently, they were supposedly only loyal to the person who paid them and, if they weren’t getting paid enough, they rebelled.

This thesis is no longer as popular as it once was and its accuracy is debatable. Whether the thesis is actually correct or not doesn’t really matter, though, because nothing like what the thesis describes is happening in the United States right now. The U.S. president is not hiring, say, Canadian paramilitary groups to defend the United States in the place of the United States military.

ABOVE: Detail of a plaster cast of the relief on Trajan’s Column, dated to c. 113 AD, showing three Germanic foederati behind a Roman legionary

“Trade deficits”?

As I mentioned before, the Roman Empire’s economy was primarily based on subsistence agriculture. The vast majority of its trade took place within its own borders. Nonetheless, Roman people did do some trade with people of other nations. The Romans exported metals such as bronze, silver, gold, copper, zinc, and tin. Roman glassware was especially highly prized internationally. Roman coins and glassware have been found as far east as China.

Meanwhile, the Romans imported goods such as spices, silk, gemstones, perfumes, ivory, and sandalwood from India and China, amber from the Baltic, and gold, ivory, salt, exotic animals, and spices from sub-Saharan Africa. One of the most remarkable pieces of evidence for the extent of Roman trade with the far east is an Indian ivory statuette of the Hindu goddess Lakshmi that was discovered in the ruins of the Roman city of Pompeii.

Nonetheless, we have no evidence to suggest that the Romans had any kind of outstanding “trade deficits” and certainly no evidence to suggest that such “trade deficits” were a “root cause” of the Roman Empire’s decline.

ABOVE: First-century AD Roman fresco from the Casa del Naviglio in Pompeii showing a maenad wearing a dress made of Chinese silk

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman glass vessel enamelled with the image of a gladiator that was discovered in Bagram, Afghanistan

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an Indian ivory statuette of the Hindu goddess Lakshmi discovered in the Roman city of Pompeii

“Exploding debt”?

The concept of a national fiscal debt did not exist in the ancient world. The Roman Empire did not loan money like the United States government does. There was no ancient Roman equivalent of bonds. Indeed, there was no way for the Roman government to make money by selling future obligations in any way whatsoever.

Roman emperors did sometime exhaust the imperial treasury, but they were never able to put the government massively in debt. When Roman emperors needed money, they would do things like impose higher taxes, confiscate people’s property, or adulterate the currency. All of these things could potentially hurt the economy in various ways, but none of them involved borrowing money.

The idea that the Roman Empire was wrecked by massive government debt, then, is essentially false.

“Money devaluation”?

Astoundingly, once again, seemingly by pure accident, the maker of this list has managed to list a factor that was actually hugely significant in the decline of the western Roman Empire: currency devaluation.

This one is absolutely real. Over time, Roman emperors realized that the only way to maintain control over the empire was by maintaining control over the military, the only way to maintain control over the military was to keep the soldiers happy, and the only way to keep the soldiers happy was by paying them lots and lots of money. Over time, the soldiers came to demand more and more exuberant payments.

This problem came to a head in the third century AD, when the Roman Empire was devastated by near-constant civil wars and usurpations, in which the military naturally played a key role. Over the course of the third century, various emperors greatly decreased the quantity of silver in their coins so they could mint more of them so they could pay their soldiers.

ABOVE: Chart from Wikimedia Commons showing the decline in the fineness of Roman coins over the course of Roman history

This resulted in the economy being flooded with tons and tons of massively debased coins. As the percentage of the coins that was actually silver decreased, they became less visually appealing and it became visibly obvious that they were being made of much cheaper metals like bronze. Naturally, this excessive minting of debased coins resulted in hyperinflation and wildly out-of-control prices.

Once the Third Century Crisis had been resolved, the emperor Diocletian tried to bring prices back under control. Unfortunately, he didn’t exactly choose the most effective course of action for dealing with the issue; instead of addressing the root problems of inflation and currency devaluation, he set maximum prices for all products and declared that anyone who tried to sell any product for more than the price he had set would be executed.

This resulted in greater economic inefficiency, as sellers stopped bringing certain kinds of goods to market because they felt the maximum prices were lower than what they were willing to sell those goods for. This only contributed to increasingly extreme control over the economy by the military state.

In any case, the kind of extreme hyperinflation that scholars generally think happened in the Roman Empire in the third century is certainly not happening in the United States today. Modern fiscal policymakers generally understand that printing massive amounts of money creates massive inflation and is not an effective way to fund the military.

ABOVE: Chart from Wikimedia Commons showing the rapid debasement of the antoninianus over the course of the third century AD

“Military cuts”?

This one is completely wrong. As I just explained, if anything, it was actually excessive spending on the military that contributed to the decline of the western Roman Empire, not “military cuts.” Of course, the reason why such excessive spending on the military was necessary was because there was so much political instability and, by the third century, soldiers were fighting more out of desire for profit than out of loyalty to the empire.

“Terrorist attacks”?

I don’t even know what to make of this one. Rome did face various uprisings and foreign invasions in late antiquity, but I think it is deeply misleading to describe these as “terrorist attacks.” There was no ancient Roman equivalent of Al Qaeda, ISIL, or Boko Haram, nor were there any bombs, guns, airplanes, grenades, or any other modern weapons at the time that could have been used by hypothetical terrorists.

Conclusion

Nearly all the items on the list are wrong. Even worse, the list leaves out a lot of really important, obvious factors like perpetual infighting, usurpations, and civil wars (which are the main things that left the empire vulnerable), climate change (which is probably what led the Huns to migrate into Europe), a large number of incompetent leaders (such as Honorius, Petronius Maximus, and Orestes), and multiple devastating plagues (such as the Antonine Plague, the Plague of Cyprian, and the Plague of Justinian). I guess this means you shouldn’t get your historical information from images shared by conservatives on social media.

A lot of people have theories about what caused the fall of the western Roman Empire. Naturally, these people have a tendency to draw parallels between what they think happened to the western Roman Empire and things going on right now in the United States. Unfortunately, most of these people are poorly informed about how the western Roman Empire actually fell. Next time you encounter one of them, ask them who Stilicho was. If they can’t even answer a simple question like that correctly, their theories probably aren’t worth taking seriously.

I personally think that people get too hung up on the idea of the “fall of Rome” and they forget about just how long the Roman Empire actually lasted. The Roman Republic first came to dominate the Italian Peninsula in the early third century BC and the empire persisted until the fall of Constantinople on 29 May 1453 AD. That means the empire lasted roughly 1,700 years. Few other states have survived so long.

Let’s imagine for a moment that the United States really is going to fall “just like Rome.” We’ll imagine that the twentieth century was the peak of American power, just as the second century was the peak of Roman power, and that the twenty-first century is the first century of American decline. If all these things are true, that means the U.S. still has about 1,250 years left.

It’s also worth noting that, even after the Roman Empire ceased to exist as a political entity, the Roman people didn’t just disappear, nor did Roman culture. The modern nations of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East are all to varying extents products of the Roman Empire and the Roman legacy has impacted every culture on earth in some way or another.