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Comment by whatshisface | Hacker News Reader

The fall of the Roman empire interpreted as a moment has no explanation because as you point out, there was no specific moment to explain. The fall of the Roman empire interpreted as a process taking place over centuries has an explanation, and longterm factors like lead poisoning fit the bill.

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Perhaps a more fitting replacement for 'fall' is "failure to rise".

The Roman empire had plenty of places to expand to (much of Africa, all of Russia/Asia). Yet they didn't manage that.

It controlled most all the resource-producing regions of Africa north of the Sahara. Russia and Germania were densely wooded or covered in plains, in either case sparsely populated and not of substantial interest to a rich Mediterranean power. Persia was the only viable region of expansion, but after Trajan’s inability to incorporate them, the effort seems to have been abandoned

Persia (current Iran) itself was an empire with similar ambitions to incorporate at least the eastern parts of the Roman empire. Too sad that the two most progressive systems of governance in history were in war for around a thousand years, possibly leading to the fall of both.

I’m dubious that this is the explanation, it’s too simple and too neat. Real life is messy and complex and usually defies simple explanations.

This explanation also strips agency from the various peoples who made their own decisions to setup autonomous Roman style rule, throw off Roman rule, or peel off Roman territory and traditions for their own pre-existing polity.

Implicit in the hypothesis, it seems to me, is the idea that the Roman Empire was the good and proper state of affairs, which its administrators could and should have maintained in perpetuity, if not for having had their brains pickled by lead.

As you point out, a whole lot of the Empire's subjects had a very different take on the matter.

The fact that quality of life improved for the average person after Rome fell, and the fact that the average person probably knew that would happen, is likely to have contributed to the fall.

Wasn't there a major regression in the quality of craftsmanship, the size of urban settlements and the volume of commercial trade, after the Roman Empire collapsed?

On the other hand, from what I understand, there is some evidence that there was a significant pick up in the rate of technological innovation after the fall of Rome. Not sure how that stacks up against the technologies lost in the early Middle Ages.

Yes, but most of those were made by slave labor. The drop off in state capacity also made it impossible for the state to afford large armies for war, which further improved the quality of life for the average citizen.

The focus on the decline of public works and art is fundamentally an elite view, since they were never coerced to labor for them or die in the fields protecting the empire. For the common man the empire was much worse, but the common man doesn’t write the history books.

I think it's very useful to consider the ways in which a drop in state capacity can benefit the common man, so I appreciate that perspective.

Still, I have trouble imagining a decline in economies of scale / specialization that large scale trade brings wouldn't have harmed the quality of life of the common man.

You know what also strips agency from people making their own decisions?

Toxic heavy metal poisoning.

To some degree, yes. But this telling still has (as a sibling comment put it) an implicit assumption that the empire was good and stable, and the only thing that matters was the lead poisoning of the elites.

That might be splitting hairs. It was probably a multiple of factors, but lead poisoining, if it occurred on a mass scale, undoubtedly had a big part to do with it.

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