The Fate of Rome
I seems to me that Rome is more of a Rorschach test than anything else. Because there was no single cause that definitively ended the empire. Ask 20 historians to tell the prioritized story of Rome&#x27;s decline, and you&#x27;ll get 21 largely distinct tales. If you want to blame moral decline, you can. If you want to corrupt political systems, poor monetary policy, immigration, disease, war, social dis-integration (hyphenated only to emphasize the meaning), wealth inequality, or even self inflicted accidental poisoning - you can.<p>And the worst part of all is that even if we had complete and absolutely perfect information on the decades leading to the end, you probably still couldn&#x27;t find &quot;the cause.&quot; Empires fail long before they collapse - inertia. One can easily argue that the Soviet Union failed decades before 1989. But for anything so monumental, inertia was enough to keep the corpse of a system moving forward for decades to come. And in the time of Rome, when the speed of dictate was that of carriage, sail, (and on rare occasion - pigeon) - this effect would have been magnitudes greater, which is difficult to even begin to appreciate the implications of.<p>Perhaps the most interesting, and telling, thing of all is how empires towards their end tend to share not just one of the &quot;symptoms&quot;, but many.