Could the Roman Empire have survived to the present day?

I am indeed indebted to Setanta for his information. It just goes to show that one cannot believe all one reads. I must confess I was taken in my Gibbon's inclusion as one of the texts used in the collection of "Great Books". I also read J. B.Bury's comment--"that Gibbon is behind date in many details of importance, simply signfies that we and our fathers have not lived in an absolutely incompetent world, but the main thing is that he is still our master above and beyond the rest"

and

Hugh Trevor Howard commented of Gibbon--"The greatest historical work in our language"

I want to thank Sentanta for showing me just how mistaken these supposed great historians were in their judgment of Gibbon.

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Gibbon is discussed here in Germany nowadays again - due to new translations.

I suppose, in the USA, Germany and elsewhere you always will find some great historians, who value that one more than the other - and vice versa.

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Of course, Walter Hinteler, of course. However, I am so far gone after my courses in History that I actually believe what great historians like J. B. Bury have to say. Expertise does make a difference to me. J. B. Bury was one of the most eminent Historians. He did admit that Gibbon had flaws but he said that Gibbon was still our( Historians) master. That's good enough for me.

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old topic, i know.

but to the skeptics of lead poisoning...

wine's acidic nature can and did contribute to lead poisoning.
roman vases/amphorae were glazed with lead salts. and when wines were stored in them, the acid leached lead ions out of glaze.

as for the aqueducts, the piping was actually made of pure lead and lead oxide. so it makes sense that you don't need acid to "dissolve" any lead (which actually doesn't make any sense if you've taken HS chemistry) or whatever you guys were saying; the lead just mixed into the water.

lead causes dementia, and infertility in women. as seen in caesar's repeated attempts to have children and yet only succeeding once, lead was poisoning the roman elite, and ultimately caused clearly incompetent men such as Caligula, Nero, and Commodus to send rome into its fiery end.

read more about the link between lead and the fall of the roman empire here: http://www.epa.gov/history/topics/perspect/lead.htm

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The EPA is a biased source.

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I credited Gibbon for his scholarship, which is what people like Bury are referring to. It is not to be wondered at that he did not understand the economic equation which caused the decay of the imperial system in the west while it continued to thrive in the east. The study of economics simply did not exist in Gibbon's day.

Gibbon is almost rabid in his condemnation of the primitive christians--it is part and parcel of his virulent condemnation of "Popery" in his correspondence and essays. The primitive christians were not good Protestants as he was himself, so he was contemptuous. His contempt for "Romanism" and for primitive christianity strongly colored his historical judgment.

I've already discussed all of this in this thread. No one is obliged to take my word for it, there are libraries enough and more for people to come to their own conclusions.

But i would like to point out something, by way of quoting another lunatic, with a passion for history, George S. Patton: "If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking."

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the tribes from the region were legion.

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Er, having read my Livy, as the, um, Americans refer to him, I am aware of the creation of the order of equites or, um, the guys who could afford horses. I'm also fully aware of the political battles over the distribution of land that preceeded and followed Sulla.

All that bombast aside, it is not clear to me that the slave system is what doomed the Roman Empire. Perhaps the inability, given the logistical limitations of the time-period, of an army to move beyond Persia and back in 6 months time prevented the further acquisition of war booty, one of the primary categories of which was slaves, crippled the old-time economy. That is to say, perhaps the physical limitations of empire at the time prevented the further wholesale acquisition of slaves to which the Roman economy had become addicted under the Republic, but the Roman Empire outlasted the Republic by quite a few centuries and slaves accounted for a huge proportion of the work force long before the introduction of the principate. Thus I find the explanation that slavery per se is the root cause of Rome's fall pretty weak stuff, though it certainly fits the prejudices of our times.

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This is not all that important to me, but i would like to point out that my thesis is that the economic collapse came with the absence of markets, not of slave labor. It is easy to dispute someone's thesis if first you characterize it incorrectly.

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Setanta wrote:

This is not all that important to me, but i would like to point out that my thesis is that the economic collapse came with the absence of markets, not of slave labor. It is easy to dispute someone's thesis if first you characterize it incorrectly.

To begin with, I did not characterize your thesis being that there was an absence of slave labor, but rather the opposite, that slavery was the root cause of the collapse.

This was based on your first statement, as follows:

Setanta wrote:

The Empire in the west was condemned economically by slavery; in the east, although it survived a thousand years after the sack of Rome by the Goths, it degenerated into fanatical religious navel gazing <SNIP>

And your second, rather snotty, reply which began with a lecture on the struggle of the orders and the establishment of the equites and the beginnings of the Latifundium.

Then, to link with your earlier statement, or so it seemed to me, you wrote:

Setanta wrote:

<SNIP> [The Patres] were driving small holders and small craftsmen out of business. Dependent upon a consumer society for the generation of their wealth, their practices destroyed the consumers upon whom they might have relied, if they had employed wage earners rather than slaves. The continued but decelerating expansion of the empire assured a continuation of their markets for a few centuries, but the politico-economic basis of the empire in the west was corroded away from the time of Sulla onward, as slave-driven industry replaced small business, and as the society's most powerful class abandoned governing (at which they had been abyssmal failures) and took up sybaritic greed as a metier.

So, I think it rather fair to characterize your thesis as slavery destroyed the markets which destroyed the Empire. Constantinople, of course, remained a thriving market despite this posited weakness, for, oh, about a thousand years longer and, well, the Republic grew on the very basis of the posited weakness.

In any case, it was you that established the straw man, not I.

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bayinghound wrote:

All that bombast aside, it is not clear to me that the slave system is what doomed the Roman Empire. Perhaps the inability, given the logistical limitations of the time-period, of an army to move beyond Persia and back in 6 months time prevented the further acquisition of war booty, one of the primary categories of which was slaves, crippled the old-time economy. That is to say, perhaps the physical limitations of empire at the time prevented the further wholesale acquisition of slaves to which the Roman economy had become addicted under the Republic, but the Roman Empire outlasted the Republic by quite a few centuries and slaves accounted for a huge proportion of the work force long before the introduction of the principate. Thus I find the explanation that slavery per se is the root cause of Rome's fall pretty weak stuff, though it certainly fits the prejudices of our times.

This is your straw man. It suggests that it was the inability to continue to supply slaves would be the problem--and i responded that it is not relevant to my argument, because what i have posited is that the contraction of markets--which begins in about the Antonine period--and which resulted from the contraction of the empire, and therefore the shrinking of the markets, caused the collapse of the economy in the west. I have at no time stated that the fall of the Roman empire was caused by this, because i do not accept the old chestnut that the collapse of imperial authority in the west was the end of the empire. I have contended all along that this is not true, precisely because the empire survived in the east. In the east there were established markets, there were small holders and small craftsman who were consumers as well, and who were not faced with the economically unrealistic and unhealthy competition of the latifundia, which were, relative to the state of affairs in the west, largely absent.

So, yes, you did try to twist my statement by a reference to a supply of slaves, which is irrelevant to my thesis. And no, i did not misrepresent what you wrote--it is quoted above, with the silly hypothesis that communications difficulties due to distance lead to a decline in the supply of slaves. If you wish to believe that is so, help yourself. It is a meaningless response to the thesis which i advance.

Your bombast is no more compelling than is anyone else's, and your tone is unnecessarily nasty. Have you been having an unpleasant life? You needn't attempt to take it out on me.

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By the by, to deal with another of your snotty remarks, it is the English who gave the name Livy to Titus Livius, not the Americans--in fact, a concept of "America" did not exist when it occured. I use the name Livy because many people recognize it, but few recognize Titus Livius.

This is the sort of thing which i refer to when saying your tone is unnecessarily nasty. You feel compelled to sneer at Americans because someone has had the temerity to disagree with you? How puerile that is.

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Setanta wrote:

bayinghound wrote:
All that bombast aside, it is not clear to me that the slave system is what doomed the Roman Empire. Perhaps the inability, given the logistical limitations of the time-period, of an army to move beyond Persia and back in 6 months time prevented the further acquisition of war booty, one of the primary categories of which was slaves, crippled the old-time economy. That is to say, perhaps the physical limitations of empire at the time prevented the further wholesale acquisition of slaves to which the Roman economy had become addicted under the Republic, but the Roman Empire outlasted the Republic by quite a few centuries and slaves accounted for a huge proportion of the work force long before the introduction of the principate. Thus I find the explanation that slavery per se is the root cause of Rome's fall pretty weak stuff, though it certainly fits the prejudices of our times.

This is your straw man. It suggests that it was the inability to continue to supply slaves would be the problem--and i responded that it is not relevant to my argument,

No. It suggests that perhaps the inability to continue to supply slaves and other forms of war booty would be a reasonable argument, but most definitely not that you make that argument. It was a suggested alternative to your argument.

I would note that you began the nastiness with the rather condescending:

Setanta wrote:

Read your Titus Livius (known to the Angle-ish as Livy) and you will learn of the creation of the order of equites, or knights.

You continued with the statement that I had mischaracterized your argument, which if you read what I wrote carefully, is not the case ... I stated an alternative explanation.

You further misconstrue my alternative thesis to have something to do with communications, which, of course, had nothing at all to do with what I actually wrote, which had something to do with the logistics of moving a military force.

Funny, I was wondering from the very beginning what brought on your tone: the fact that I asked for you to expand upon what you meant? Solicitation of views is generally considered a compliment where I come from, as in, I'd be interested to hear what you think.

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Setanta wrote:

By the by, to deal with another of your snotty remarks, it is the English who gave the name Livy to Titus Livius, not the Americans--in fact, a concept of "America" did not exist when it occured. I use the name Livy because many people recognize it, but few recognize Titus Livius.

This is the sort of thing which i refer to when saying your tone is unnecessarily nasty. You feel compelled to sneer at Americans because someone has had the temerity to disagree with you? How puerile that is

This is another example of you taking an extraordinarily condescending tone when you don't seem to understand what it is that I said. I, of course, am an American ... and don't sneer at them cause I am one of them ... nor did I suggest that we Americans were the ones to dub Titus Livius "Livy". Why you'd think I was sneering at them because I pointed out that we Americans use Livy too, not just the English, a group to whom I meant no offense either and to whom you refered? Why would you think that I wrote that the Americans had given him the name he's known by in the Anglophone world?

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There is the argument that the Roman Empire really didn't "end" in the West but rather that the "barbarians" built new governmental systems based on Roman law and customs.

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bayinghound wrote:

Setanta wrote:
By the by, to deal with another of your snotty remarks, it is the English who gave the name Livy to Titus Livius, not the Americans--in fact, a concept of "America" did not exist when it occured. I use the name Livy because many people recognize it, but few recognize Titus Livius.

This is the sort of thing which i refer to when saying your tone is unnecessarily nasty. You feel compelled to sneer at Americans because someone has had the temerity to disagree with you? How puerile that is

This is another example of you taking an extraordinarily condescending tone when you don't seem to understand what it is that I said. I, of course, am an American ... and don't sneer at them cause I am one of them ... nor did I suggest that we Americans were the ones to dub Titus Livius "Livy". Why you'd think I was sneering at them because I pointed out that we Americans use Livy too, not just the English, a group to whom I meant no offense either and to whom you refered? Why would you think that I wrote that the Americans had given him the name he's known by in the Anglophone world?

I see your thesis has descended to the level which it ought properly to occupy--nitpicking.

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plainoldme wrote:

There is the argument that the Roman Empire really didn't "end" in the West but rather that the "barbarians" built new governmental systems based on Roman law and customs.

In fact, Boss, this is precisely the best view to take, according not simply to me, but those who study the period of the "barbarian" invasions. When Alaric lead Gothic tribes into Italy, eventually sacking the city of Rome, he was demanding that the empire honor its commitment of federation to his people (a disingenuous argument--they simply didn't want the land which had been allocated to them), and was privately irked that he had not been given high military office as he felt he deserved. The imperial administration in the west sent Stilicho to deal with them, he was the magister militum (basically, commander in chief) in the west--and he was of German descent. When Aetius destroyed the Hun army in northern France (as we would know it), ending the reign of terror of Attila, he did so in large measure because of the aid he got from Merovius and the Salian Franks (complicated thing here--the German tribes did not necessarily have kings, but had "royal" families available should the need arise; for the Salian Franks, that was the Mervings--what the actual given name of this individual was, i don't believe is known).

J. B. Bury in his series of lectures delivered at Cambridge on the barbarian invasions of western Europe states that the Lombards effectively ended imperial administration in the west. Italy was become practically a desert, with agriculture little practiced and small craftsmen almost non-existent. When the Lombards arrived, they forced upon the weak government at Ravenna a federation agreement which stood tradition on its head. Instead of receiving the usual one third of public land, the Lombards insisted that all the land were vacant, and that they receive two thirds. The imperial administration caved in, and it was only a matter of time thereafter until a Lombard calling himself "King" (an office for which they in fact had no tradition), set himself up as the Augustus in the west.

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I have not read this line for line, but the page linked here has a rather simple and good explanation of the constantinian organization of the empire at the time of the barbarian invasions. Reading this allows both the understanding that imperial administration in the west collapsed due to the pressures with which it could not deal, and that this did not result in the "fall" of the empire, but simply in a contraction of the empire.

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Setanta -- This is interesting. Plus, you used the word, "strawman," correctly. I hate the way people misuse it. Grrrr.

I had an experience with a friend was an art historian (was because she died four years ago). We were at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and were looking at some intricantly formed silver statues and brooches from the Late Roman Empire, tiny and exquisitely detailed. Then we walked into the Medieval Galleries where crudely carved wooden figures were on display. I felt I had been slapped. "Mary, come back here a minute," I said to my friend, telling her about my epiphany. She was as stunned as I had been. We could both understand the meaning of "Dark Ages."

I took a course called The Dark Ages and the professor was amazing. His lectures were organized chronologically and geographically. He started in the east and moved to the west, across Europe. When he finished an era or a century or an event, he would return to the east, in the next era or century. Amazing feat!

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What you are discussing is the Pirenne Thesis, the product of two late 19th century economic historians Henri Pirenne ()Belgian) and Alfons Dopsch (Austrian). The current promoter of this thesis is Michael McCormick (Harvard). A synopsis by Bryce Lyon,

The Middle Ages in Recent Historical Thought, Washington, American Historical Association, 1965,

http://teaching.arts.usyd.edu.au/history/1025/sect4/pirennelyon.html

the essential characteristic and lifeblood of the Roman Empire - its unity and coherence, resting upon control of the Mediterranean from the Bosphorus to the Strait of Gibraltar. For centuries the Mare Nostrum of the Romans had been the cement that held firm the great imperial structure; over its waters had passed trade and commerce, the Roman military and naval might, and the vital exchange of ideas.

German kingdoms had no effective political ties with the eastern half of the Empire, they had still partaken of the Mediterranean unity and had enjoyed unbroken economic exchange with the East.(3)

The Arab conquest destroyed this Mediterranean rapport; political, economic, and cultural exchange ended. Except for the most tenuous of ties between Constantinople and a few Italian ports the Arabs had rolled down an iron curtain between East and West that remained down until the eleventh century.

The West which had always been parasitical, drawing upon the superior economic resources of the East, reverted to an agrarian economy or, as Pirenne said, to "an economy of no outlets."

Perinne's two major works are:

Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe (New York, 1937).

Mohammed and Charlemagne (New York, 1939)

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Could the Roman Empire have survived to the present day?

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