What was the conflict that made the roman empire fall?

Answer 1

The classic conundrum of antiquity, "Why did Rome fall?," has withstood legions of scholars catapulting answers at it-over 210 different ones at one point-and still it stands unbreached. Few of the suggestions made have left much of an impression. Many involve "invented histories" of some sort, speaking volumes about the answerer and syllables about the issue. More than one may be dismissed off-hand as so far from what-really-happened that, though they represent someone's history, it's clearly not the Romans'.

For instance, Rome did not fall because of the distractions pursuant to sexual indulgence. Given the universality of Christianity which the Romans had adopted as their exclusive religion by then, the conduct of those living in the fifth century after Christ was relatively sober. Indeed, if the data point to any venereal villains across the great expanse of Roman history, it is the Julio-Claudians who oversaw the height of Roman power in the first century CE and were truly perpetrators of immorality at large. So, to make an argument relating sexual behavior to Rome's "fall"-and to judge it fairly from the historical evidence-involves the ludicrous conclusion that the erotic felonies of a Caligula or Nero, in fact, sustained Rome's triumph, instead of corroding it at its core. That suggests that, to prevent the collapse of their society, the Romans should have kept the orgies up, so to speak, which is patently ridiculous.

Simply put, sex-reproduction maybe, but not sex!-had little or nothing to do with the troubles that brought the Romans to their collective knees in later antiquity. Likewise, the climate and ecology of the time cannot be adduced as the reason for something so earth-shattering as the "Fall of Rome." Nor do any of the other two hundred or so entries cited make the cut in history's time trials, meaning that no one answer has as yet won the day for why the Romans lost. All may have appealed to some but none to all or, more to the point, a majority of scholars.

And some of these answers have come from very good scholars, the likes of Edward Gibbon, the pre-eminent classical historian of England in the later half of the eighteenth century. Brilliant though it was, the thesis he expounded in his monumental and highly engaging The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire-he argued that the rise of Christianity emasculated the native vigor of Rome, leaving it open to more virile conquerors, i.e. barbarians-is a proposition full of holes and inconsistencies, saying in the end less about the Roman Empire than its British counterpart, the real target of Gibbon's book. For example, if Christianity so weakened the Roman West in late antiquity, why didn't it weaken the other half, the staunchly orthodox East which survived nearly a millennium after the collapse of the West? Perhaps it's true that Christianity redirected the attention of many Romans away from affairs of state, but it did not undermine their civilization. To the contrary, it was as natural an outgrowth of their culture, as "Roman" as anything else they created: theatre, epic poetry, gladiators, ship-building, all of which were imports.

B. The Evidence

Any hope of finding a better answer depends on assessing exactly what was happening in Rome at the time of its "fall" and the data do, in fact, contain some clear and significant trends.

Population. First of all, there's strong evidence of a steady decline in population across the entire Empire from the second century on. For example, peaking at around a million or so in the Classical Age, the population of the city of Rome gradually dropped over the course of the next few centuries, reaching a low point of a mere six thousand by the sixth century. The reasons for this drastic if incremental reduction in human resources are not clear, though many Romans' luxurious lifestyle and their concomitant disinterest in producing and raising children must have played some part. So did plagues, no doubt, as well as constant warfare on the frontiers and perhaps even lead-poisoning, evidenced in human skeletal remains recovered from Pompeii which show that the Romans there were indeed exposed to high concentrations of the lethal element. Nevertheless, it's unclear how widespread this problem was.

Economics. Second, economic data point to other factors which doubtlessly contributed to the situation. Well-documented among the travails of third-century Rome-over two centuries prior to its notorious "fall"-is a particularly long period of financial crisis which inaugurated the slow collapse of the economy in the West. This economic depression was due in large part to the failure of the Romans' system of conquest and enslavement. When the flow of cheap slaves began to dry up, estates throughout the Empire could no longer sustain the abuse of human resources on which they had formerly depended. So without any real industry or much agricultural machinery to work the land-Roman land-owners did know about water wheels and windmills but archaeologists have found evidence of very few being used in this period-the aristocrats of late Rome apparently watched the collapse of their economy and disdained practical matters such as retooling their farms to ensure their viability.

Politics. Finally, political affairs contributed to the difficulties plaguing late Rome. The general incompetence of emperors and the failure of traditional politics in the West led to a wretchedly corrupt political structure, characterized by an oppressive burden of taxation levied to support the growing army of soldier-barbari who were bribed-"employed" is too sophisticated a term for this practice-to fend off Rome's foes. This, in turn, led to inflation and debasing of Roman coinage, which bred a lethal mix of apathy and angst that inspired many Romans to flee politics and later the poleis ("city-states") of the Empire, the urban foundation on which rested most of ancient life. With that, actual power in Rome fell into the hands of local lords, and the concept of shared Roman civilization itself came under siege.

But states have survived disasters far worse than any or all of these. In sum, none of the theories or factors mentioned above explains why there's no simple answer to the simple question, "Why did Rome fall?" So, perhaps, it's not the answers that are flawed but the question itself. To a scholar, that demands an all-out Aristotelian response, a syllogism or analysis of the question in terms of its three principal elements: why, Rome, fell.