Comment by quotemstr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by quotemstr | Hacker News Reader

> the idea of a sudden visible collapse of civilization is not supported by the record

The idea that there was no "fall" and that late antiquity is just a "transition" between arbitrary value-balanced political org charts is what's not supported by the evidence. This revisionist take is annoyingly common these days -- see https://www.amazon.com/Fall-Rome-End-Civilization/dp/0192807... for a masterful refutation and defense of the original interpretation. If you look at industrial output, lead pollution levels, sophistication of literary output, literacy rates, and tons of other metrics, you'll see a dramatic decline around the time that the Roman social order fell apart. Britain became nearly illiterate. Italy was ransacked by the Gothic Wars and its population collapsed. The aqueducts stopped working. The Pantheon was half-buried (the front doors couldn't be opened for centuries) and full of muck. It was, altogether, an absolutely miserable period of history. Gibbon's history of the era is masterful.

In his blog (acoup), Bret Devereaux had a decent sized three part series examining this debate. He mostly comes down on the "decline and fall" side (especially when it comes to the living conditions of people in the region), but does give a fair shake to the "change and continuity" argument.

Part 1: https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-f...

Great series (as expected from Devereaux to be honest), I really enjoyed it. Thanks for sharing!

There is plenty of evidence for the "decline and fall" camp but notably that conclusion varies a lot based on geography and perspective. Relying on mostly archaeological evidence, we do indeed see substantial drops in urbanization and economic output in the 5th and 6th centuries across the Western Empire which surely would have made life significantly, tangibly worse for a lot of people. But that decline happened at very different rates in different places, such that a 5th century Roman in North Africa might have experienced a slow transition whereas their peer in Britain might have experienced a near-total collapse. From a political perspective, many of the successor states in places like Italy continued to rule in a distinctly Roman fashion, using Roman norms, Roman laws, and Roman institutions - in other words, yes, a "'transition' between political org charts." These states were certainly weaker and poorer, but the wealth and capabilities of the Western Empire itself had been shriveling for a century by the time 476 rolled around. The continued expansion of the Church also made up for some of this decline in state administrative capacity among the successors. From a cultural perspective, your point about the sophistication of literary output is flat-out incorrect. And we haven't even mentioned the Eastern Empire - which was always the richer half to begin with, and actually experienced a number of later periods of resurgence and growth. So the actual evidence is much more nuanced, and neither of your conclusions ("an absolutely miserable period of history", "Gibbon's history of the era is masterful") are sustained by any modern scholarship.

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