Some absolute political genius sometime in the 4th century worked out that Rome could not survive as a military power, but could survive as a church.
For the next thousand years, Rome effectively controlled much of Europe.
Today, 1500 years later, billions of people all over the world look to Rome for guidance, and Rome still has political sway over large areas of the world.
Let's ignore that Rome had been in decline since at least the Gracchi brothers over 500 earlier. Endless civil wars ended the Republic replaced by a tyranny with only short periods of stability. Rome kept on for 500 years only because they'd conquer their neighbors between civil wars.
Let's ignore that "tolerant" Rome had slaughtered countless Christians starting with Jesus himself (as pagan and Jewish sources also claim).
About cruxifixction. Pagan, yet tolerant, Rome was a slave society built on brutality. Nietzsche's sneers that Christianity is a slave religion are true and Christianity's triumph over Minerva et al. is the conclusion of a slave revolt started by Spartacus whose cruxifixction foreshadows Christ. That or the Romans really loved to impale people.
And anyway, did Rome really fall? Never mind that the Eastern half lasted an other 1000 years; after centuries of Romans using German troops Rome faced Alaric's Roman trained armies. There was no stopping the kraits this time.... and yet the Germans today use the Latin script. They model their bodies and minds under Roman ideals. To this day king in Germans is "Cesar". They worship the God decreed by the Roman Emperor.
Please avoid swipes like this on HN. Your comment makes good points but is spoiled by this opening and the fulminating tone. Please take care to observe the guidelines, particularly these ones:
Be kind. Edit out swipes.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
If the Christians offered to the emperor and participated in state rituals they wouldn’t have been persecuted and executed. There were plenty of cults and religions and most were absolutely fine. The problem was that the Christians placed themselves outside of the normal structures. That was a Big Deal.
The rest, I dunno what happened but you seem to have some chip on your shoulder about the Romans. Nothing they did was out of the ordinary considering the times, or even compared to very recent times.
> In fact, Rome’s legendary founder, Romulus, was the son of a Vestal priestess—Rhea Silvia.
This is far from fact, it is, with near certainty, a legend (which also tells us that the father is the god Mars, btw; or Aeneas, or unknown, depending on the version). The illustrations are from a completely different era that projected a lot of its own politics into its reading of Rome's history and the article does not provide this contextualization.
Not sure what to make of the parts of the article that are new to me, when parts I know about are at least debatable.
The phrasing is slightly ambiguous, but I don't think the author is saying that Rhea Silvia's son was Romulus as a fact.
I think the author is using the fact that the Roman's had a legend/myth that their founder who was the son of a Vestal priestess (even amongst other, perhaps mutually contradictory legends) as evidence that the Roman's held the Vestal priesthood in high regard.
This would be akin to the whole Washington cutting down the tree thing. It's a myth, but you could also use it as evidence that Americans for centuries admired honesty in their leaders.
The ‘fact’ is that the legend claims Romulus is the son of a Vestal priestess, not that he was in reality. Calling Romulus the ‘legendary founder’ implies his mother is also legendary.
Bret Devereaux wrote a good introduction to the scholarly debate between the "decline and fall" camp and the "change and continuity" camp. Christianity was at this point the Roman state religion and the survival of the Church as an institution is considered as a point in favor of change and continuity.
I've read this series before and I still don't buy part I saying this[0] is artistically just as skillful as this[1], only the artist intentionally idealized the depiction of the tetrarchs. To me this is clearly more primitive art.
It’s because we have been taught over and over and over that realism matters and that the Greeks and Romans were the zenith of art and civilisation. We’re basically still living with renaissance propaganda.
They could have made statues more like the one of Augustus. But art is more than realism, and it had to represent other things at this point in time.
I posted this article because it's an interesting read. The blog seems to exist to promote the author's novel which I haven't read and may be terrible, for all I know.
One interesting idea is that we do not actually know when Rome fell in the West. We can pinpoint some events, but the fall was probably long and slow. The people there still had Roman identity, institutions, etc, they were just not politically as unified as before. The Visigoths had Roman Emperors on their coins even in 580 for example.
I think it would be more correct to say that the concept of "the fall (or end) of the western roman empire" is insufficiently defined.
If one imagined an alternative US Civil War, where the war ended in stalemate, the Union and CSA coexisting for decades, before an miraculously resurgent Mexican Empire swept through and engulfed the territories of both, before allowing the original 13 states to continue to exist as a subservient, but nominally independent state that still had nominal local democratic republicanism, and the inhabitants on those states will called themselves "Americans".
When would you say "the United States of America fell" in that scenario?
Arguments about the "when did the Roman Empire fall in the west" are actually arguments about what are the most important aspects to Rome to us, here today in the modern world (particularly in the western world).
The Roman Empire in the east at the time did just fine, though.
The Goths in a (very technical) way "unified" the empire after they took Italy since they got rid of the western emperor and declared that they are now vassals of the one in Constantinople.
In a couple of generations Romans were on the verge of retaking the entire Mediterranean, without the issues with the climate and especially the plague they might have done just fine and we'd be talking about the "crisis of the 5th century" instead of the fall.
The idea of "a fall" is a universal bug in our thinking, I believe.
Most of what we learn has been from dramatization. There is, maybe, slightly less now, offset by more technical text, but that's a really recent change in human history. And even then, how many people's ideas of history are entirely formed from television shows and movies, or even stories told to each other?
We talk about what makes stories compelling. Compelling stories have a beginning, a climax, and an end. History thus also has a beginning, climax, and end.
So we think of the Roman Empire as a thing in history that had a beginning, and a rise, and then a fall.
Yet Rome still exists.
I see this a lot in discussions about businesses. Somebody will do something dumb, and then immediately two camps form: those that throw darts at the exact date that the business will cease to exist, and those that mock the first camp's predictions of timely demise.
So we get these really repetitive, entirely pointless debates after the fact about whether the business is "dead" or not, so everybody can try to figure out which camp was right.
But, in the general case, it never works that way. For every WebVan, there are a hundred Reddits: persistently spectral businesses, online and still making money, occasionally bolstered by some CEO whose job it is to convince everyone that the business is still as full of verve as ever it was, and yet, when people think of it, they think of it nostalgically, if they do at all.
Slashdot is still online and posting stories every day.
Rome never fell; its story changed. It stopped being the main character of historical storytelling for a certain period, but of course that leaves us wondering what happened to that character, and when exactly did that character die?
A city exists in the same place, yes, but you'd be insane to fail to note the centuries of economic decline and the nearly complete disappearance of the bureaucratic state.
> idea of "a fall" is a universal bug in our thinking
Occasionally it did happen that way though. e.g. the Soviet Union was seemingly fine (or not much worse that before) and suddenly it and its empire was in a couple of years.
Their style of communism/socialism went down with them and is pretty much dead.
If we define a country as distinct from a nation, we can certainly say that Rome ceased to be with taking of Constantinople by the Ottomans. For the Western Empire, this would be the overthrow of Romulus Augustulus by Odoacer. A nation would be an identity shared by a people, while a country would be a geographic territory in which a ruling body has a monopoly on the use of force. If we do away with definitions this all gets quite messy.
But did WE ceased to exist. The countries back then were only loosely defined. Odoacer was additionally appointed by the Eastern Emperor to rule over Italy in his name, and he also had the support from Roman Senate. Was this really a country that ceased to exist, or was it just management overhaul?
Even longer than that. Up to the middle of the 16th century, many Ottoman sultans considered it their most important title. After that, it quickly fell in importance and was supplanted by Islamic claim to legitimacy, but it was still used sporadically in the 18th century.
Reminder that the modern pronunciation of "Caesar" has almost nothing to do with the original Latin, and that the German "Kaiser" is actually a fairly good phonetic transcription of the latter.
Yah I guess the delineation is fuzzier, not exactly a single “Rubicon” moment. But you can usually find multiple “starting points” for any event.
For the republic, the crossing of the Rubicon is when it failed. But really even the first triumvirate was technically a “failure” of a republic (centralizing power in 3).
> For the republic, the crossing of the Rubicon is when it failed.
I would agree with that, though I wouldn't say it was Caesar crossing that did it. It was Sulla crossing the Rubicon that broke that particular seal. And of course, the foundations were laid even before that.
> The issue with Christianity was that it didn’t play nice with the Roman state religion or customs, and worse, it actively sought to convert people, saying its god was the only god. That undermined Roman social order and the way the state had functioned for centuries.
The writer clearly has an axe to grind. This is nothing new; it is somewhat cliché to blame Christianity for breaking the Roman social order and somewhat cause its downfall, at least since Gibbon. But this claim it's just not true.
The issue with Christianity was that, in fact, Roman state religion didn't play nice with it. Christians refused to make sacrifices to the Caesar and this effectively made them outlaws. Rome was tolerant of almost anything provided that adherents of any religion are willing to offer sacrifices to the Emperor. This was not optional; it was a requirement.
Such a demand collided with beliefs of both Christians and Jews, but Jews had rules allowing them to practice their religion. Christians did not.
The story of the last Vestal is interesting enough without needing to resort to this misrepresentation of facts.
I've always been fascinated by the transition from paganism to Christianity in ancient times and how it was even possible. It's hard to imagine a society as conservative and honor-bound as Rome abandoning their ancient traditions for some upstart religious cult. I understand a lot of it was a top-down change driven by converted emperors like Constantine, but even then you'd think there would have been a greater resistance to shuttering old temples and tossing out household shrines, especially when they were so tied to the glory and power of Rome. I wonder what the mood and discourse was like on the ground when Christianity was clearly on the upswing but not yet in a position to displace paganism. Did it feel like a modern culture war, or even like the specter of religious fascism? Or were most people indifferent and just going with whatever religion the emperor mandated for pragmatic reasons?
To build on sibling's points about how Constantine was simply throwing official weight behind a true grass-roots movement, you can look at what happened to Elagabalus for an example of top down religious change that blew up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elagabalus#Religious_controver...
The 2009 film Agora, starring Rachel Weisz, has a portrayal of the period. Of course it's not a historical document and subject to interpretation, but it is one perspective at least. Also there's a novel about Julian by Gore Vidal — I haven't read it but Julian was the last pagan emperor who unsuccessfully tried to receive Hellenic religion and stem the tide of Christianity.
> I understand a lot of it was a top-down change driven by converted emperors like Constantine
No, it was actually driven from the bottom up, as many people converted due to the appeal of a universal savior regardless social class. Christianity however was just one of the many death cults around during that time (meaning they are concerned with offering salvation when you die) such as Mithras or Isis worship.
Constantine legalized it because it was already so popular, especially among the upper classes, that would've been strange to continue to pretend it doesn't exist. The story of his conversion where he saw a cross in the sky and painted the (chi rho, first two letters of Christ in Greek) symbol is likely untrue and just a form of state propaganda.
Also Christianity was a Levantine religion, growing fast in Greece, Asia Minor, Egypt, Syria, and the Levant. The Eastern Roman Empire at the time was far richer, more urbanized, closer to the grain supply, and closer to Silk Road and Black Sea trade access.
Based on some of his other actions (like moving the capital), I'd speculate Constantine's conversion was part of a deliberate pivot to focus on the East (which paid off, as the centralized Byzantine state went on to survive much longer than its Western counterpart). I'm speculating because inferring his intentions has no historical evidence afaik.
> The rise of Christianity is a great puzzle. In 40 AD, there were maybe a thousand Christians. Their Messiah had just been executed, and they were on the wrong side of an intercontinental empire that had crushed all previous foes. By 400, there were forty million, and they were set to dominate the next millennium of Western history.
> Imagine taking a time machine to the year 2300 AD, and everyone is Scientologist. The United States is >99% Scientologist. So is Latin America and most of Europe. The Middle East follows some heretical pseudo-Scientology that thinks L Ron Hubbard was a great prophet, but maybe not the greatest prophet.
> This can only begin to capture how surprised the early Imperial Romans would be to learn of the triumph of Christianity. At least Scientology has a lot of money and a cut-throat recruitment arm! At least they fight back when you persecute them! At least they seem to be in the game!
How did Christianity win? Pro-natalism won over generations against the Roman elite:
> By the Imperial era, Roman fertility was plummeting. Partly this was because the Romans practiced sex-selective infanticide, there were 130 men for every 100 women, and so many men would never be able to find a wife. But partly this was because the men who could find wives dragged their feet. (Male) Roman culture took it as a given that women were terrible, that you couldn’t possibly enjoy interacting with them, and that there was no reason besides duty that you would ever marry one.
> but no amount of love or money could make them have children. Dense cities discouraged large families, Roman children were expensive … Nor did the sex drive force the matter. Horny Roman men had their choice of a wide variety of male and female slaves and prostitutes - despite Augustus and his spiritual heirs’ fuming about monogamy, this was never really enforced on the male half of the population. When men did have sex with women, it was usually oral or anal sex, specifically to avoid procreation. When they did have vaginal sex, they had a wide variety of birth control methods available, including the famous silphium but also proto-condoms and spermicidal ointments. If a child was conceived despite these efforts, abortion was common albeit unsanitary (maternal death rates were extremely high, but this was not really a deal-breaker for the Roman men making the decision). If a baby was born in spite of all this, infanticide was legal and extremely common.
> Christians followed the opposite of all these practices.
> They recommended that men love their wives, and held this as a plausible and expected outcome. This was not exactly unprecedented, but it was a dramatic reversal of Roman custom. The Christians banned adultery (and, unlike the Roman bans, gave it teeth), meaning that married men who wanted sex had no choice but to go to their wives. They held that sex had to be procreative, banning anal sex, oral sex, homosexual sex, and birth control. And obviously they banned infanticide
> The end result is that while pagans delayed marriage, cheated, had nonprocreative sex, used birth control, performed abortions, and committed infanticide, Christians did none of these things.
> This section gave me a new appreciation for conservative Christian purity culture: it was obviously suited for the environment in which it evolved, and it’s also obvious why its founders would etch it so deeply into its memetic DNA that it’s still going strong millennia later.
Readit News
For the next thousand years, Rome effectively controlled much of Europe.
Today, 1500 years later, billions of people all over the world look to Rome for guidance, and Rome still has political sway over large areas of the world.
Let's ignore that Rome had been in decline since at least the Gracchi brothers over 500 earlier. Endless civil wars ended the Republic replaced by a tyranny with only short periods of stability. Rome kept on for 500 years only because they'd conquer their neighbors between civil wars.
Let's ignore that "tolerant" Rome had slaughtered countless Christians starting with Jesus himself (as pagan and Jewish sources also claim).
About cruxifixction. Pagan, yet tolerant, Rome was a slave society built on brutality. Nietzsche's sneers that Christianity is a slave religion are true and Christianity's triumph over Minerva et al. is the conclusion of a slave revolt started by Spartacus whose cruxifixction foreshadows Christ. That or the Romans really loved to impale people.
And anyway, did Rome really fall? Never mind that the Eastern half lasted an other 1000 years; after centuries of Romans using German troops Rome faced Alaric's Roman trained armies. There was no stopping the kraits this time.... and yet the Germans today use the Latin script. They model their bodies and minds under Roman ideals. To this day king in Germans is "Cesar". They worship the God decreed by the Roman Emperor.
Cite? I'm completely unaware of any non-Christian sources that mention the execution of Jesus of Nazareth.
Please avoid swipes like this on HN. Your comment makes good points but is spoiled by this opening and the fulminating tone. Please take care to observe the guidelines, particularly these ones:
Be kind. Edit out swipes.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The rest, I dunno what happened but you seem to have some chip on your shoulder about the Romans. Nothing they did was out of the ordinary considering the times, or even compared to very recent times.
This is far from fact, it is, with near certainty, a legend (which also tells us that the father is the god Mars, btw; or Aeneas, or unknown, depending on the version). The illustrations are from a completely different era that projected a lot of its own politics into its reading of Rome's history and the article does not provide this contextualization.
Not sure what to make of the parts of the article that are new to me, when parts I know about are at least debatable.
I think the author is using the fact that the Roman's had a legend/myth that their founder who was the son of a Vestal priestess (even amongst other, perhaps mutually contradictory legends) as evidence that the Roman's held the Vestal priesthood in high regard.
This would be akin to the whole Washington cutting down the tree thing. It's a myth, but you could also use it as evidence that Americans for centuries admired honesty in their leaders.
I note that she was a vestal priestess, not a vestal Virgin. Though around that time such a thing was supposedly possible.
https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-f...
[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/67/Ve... [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/eb/St...
They could have made statues more like the one of Augustus. But art is more than realism, and it had to represent other things at this point in time.
If one imagined an alternative US Civil War, where the war ended in stalemate, the Union and CSA coexisting for decades, before an miraculously resurgent Mexican Empire swept through and engulfed the territories of both, before allowing the original 13 states to continue to exist as a subservient, but nominally independent state that still had nominal local democratic republicanism, and the inhabitants on those states will called themselves "Americans".
When would you say "the United States of America fell" in that scenario?
Arguments about the "when did the Roman Empire fall in the west" are actually arguments about what are the most important aspects to Rome to us, here today in the modern world (particularly in the western world).
The Goths in a (very technical) way "unified" the empire after they took Italy since they got rid of the western emperor and declared that they are now vassals of the one in Constantinople.
In a couple of generations Romans were on the verge of retaking the entire Mediterranean, without the issues with the climate and especially the plague they might have done just fine and we'd be talking about the "crisis of the 5th century" instead of the fall.
Most of what we learn has been from dramatization. There is, maybe, slightly less now, offset by more technical text, but that's a really recent change in human history. And even then, how many people's ideas of history are entirely formed from television shows and movies, or even stories told to each other?
We talk about what makes stories compelling. Compelling stories have a beginning, a climax, and an end. History thus also has a beginning, climax, and end.
So we think of the Roman Empire as a thing in history that had a beginning, and a rise, and then a fall.
Yet Rome still exists.
I see this a lot in discussions about businesses. Somebody will do something dumb, and then immediately two camps form: those that throw darts at the exact date that the business will cease to exist, and those that mock the first camp's predictions of timely demise.
So we get these really repetitive, entirely pointless debates after the fact about whether the business is "dead" or not, so everybody can try to figure out which camp was right.
But, in the general case, it never works that way. For every WebVan, there are a hundred Reddits: persistently spectral businesses, online and still making money, occasionally bolstered by some CEO whose job it is to convince everyone that the business is still as full of verve as ever it was, and yet, when people think of it, they think of it nostalgically, if they do at all.
Slashdot is still online and posting stories every day.
Rome never fell; its story changed. It stopped being the main character of historical storytelling for a certain period, but of course that leaves us wondering what happened to that character, and when exactly did that character die?
A city exists in the same place, yes, but you'd be insane to fail to note the centuries of economic decline and the nearly complete disappearance of the bureaucratic state.
Occasionally it did happen that way though. e.g. the Soviet Union was seemingly fine (or not much worse that before) and suddenly it and its empire was in a couple of years.
Their style of communism/socialism went down with them and is pretty much dead.
For the republic, the crossing of the Rubicon is when it failed. But really even the first triumvirate was technically a “failure” of a republic (centralizing power in 3).
I would agree with that, though I wouldn't say it was Caesar crossing that did it. It was Sulla crossing the Rubicon that broke that particular seal. And of course, the foundations were laid even before that.
The Franks had them even longer.
The writer clearly has an axe to grind. This is nothing new; it is somewhat cliché to blame Christianity for breaking the Roman social order and somewhat cause its downfall, at least since Gibbon. But this claim it's just not true.
The issue with Christianity was that, in fact, Roman state religion didn't play nice with it. Christians refused to make sacrifices to the Caesar and this effectively made them outlaws. Rome was tolerant of almost anything provided that adherents of any religion are willing to offer sacrifices to the Emperor. This was not optional; it was a requirement.
Such a demand collided with beliefs of both Christians and Jews, but Jews had rules allowing them to practice their religion. Christians did not.
The story of the last Vestal is interesting enough without needing to resort to this misrepresentation of facts.
No, it was actually driven from the bottom up, as many people converted due to the appeal of a universal savior regardless social class. Christianity however was just one of the many death cults around during that time (meaning they are concerned with offering salvation when you die) such as Mithras or Isis worship.
Constantine legalized it because it was already so popular, especially among the upper classes, that would've been strange to continue to pretend it doesn't exist. The story of his conversion where he saw a cross in the sky and painted the (chi rho, first two letters of Christ in Greek) symbol is likely untrue and just a form of state propaganda.
Based on some of his other actions (like moving the capital), I'd speculate Constantine's conversion was part of a deliberate pivot to focus on the East (which paid off, as the centralized Byzantine state went on to survive much longer than its Western counterpart). I'm speculating because inferring his intentions has no historical evidence afaik.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-rise-of-chr...
> The rise of Christianity is a great puzzle. In 40 AD, there were maybe a thousand Christians. Their Messiah had just been executed, and they were on the wrong side of an intercontinental empire that had crushed all previous foes. By 400, there were forty million, and they were set to dominate the next millennium of Western history.
> Imagine taking a time machine to the year 2300 AD, and everyone is Scientologist. The United States is >99% Scientologist. So is Latin America and most of Europe. The Middle East follows some heretical pseudo-Scientology that thinks L Ron Hubbard was a great prophet, but maybe not the greatest prophet.
> This can only begin to capture how surprised the early Imperial Romans would be to learn of the triumph of Christianity. At least Scientology has a lot of money and a cut-throat recruitment arm! At least they fight back when you persecute them! At least they seem to be in the game!
How did Christianity win? Pro-natalism won over generations against the Roman elite:
> By the Imperial era, Roman fertility was plummeting. Partly this was because the Romans practiced sex-selective infanticide, there were 130 men for every 100 women, and so many men would never be able to find a wife. But partly this was because the men who could find wives dragged their feet. (Male) Roman culture took it as a given that women were terrible, that you couldn’t possibly enjoy interacting with them, and that there was no reason besides duty that you would ever marry one.
> but no amount of love or money could make them have children. Dense cities discouraged large families, Roman children were expensive … Nor did the sex drive force the matter. Horny Roman men had their choice of a wide variety of male and female slaves and prostitutes - despite Augustus and his spiritual heirs’ fuming about monogamy, this was never really enforced on the male half of the population. When men did have sex with women, it was usually oral or anal sex, specifically to avoid procreation. When they did have vaginal sex, they had a wide variety of birth control methods available, including the famous silphium but also proto-condoms and spermicidal ointments. If a child was conceived despite these efforts, abortion was common albeit unsanitary (maternal death rates were extremely high, but this was not really a deal-breaker for the Roman men making the decision). If a baby was born in spite of all this, infanticide was legal and extremely common.
> Christians followed the opposite of all these practices.
> They recommended that men love their wives, and held this as a plausible and expected outcome. This was not exactly unprecedented, but it was a dramatic reversal of Roman custom. The Christians banned adultery (and, unlike the Roman bans, gave it teeth), meaning that married men who wanted sex had no choice but to go to their wives. They held that sex had to be procreative, banning anal sex, oral sex, homosexual sex, and birth control. And obviously they banned infanticide
> The end result is that while pagans delayed marriage, cheated, had nonprocreative sex, used birth control, performed abortions, and committed infanticide, Christians did none of these things.
> This section gave me a new appreciation for conservative Christian purity culture: it was obviously suited for the environment in which it evolved, and it’s also obvious why its founders would etch it so deeply into its memetic DNA that it’s still going strong millennia later.