No Barbarians Necessary
There is a strange tendency in modern scholarship to try to say, &quot;actually the fall of Rome wasn&#x27;t that bad&quot;. Which I guess is true from the perspective of several hundreds of years later after new, more successful societies have begun to form, but the fall of the Roman empire really was quite bad. Trade networks collapsed, entire industries disappeared, and animals and people shrunk in size because there wasn&#x27;t as much to eat.<p>The article does make an interesting point though that the decay was from the top. And I think this is largely true. Societies don&#x27;t usually collapse because they get overrun, they get overrun because they&#x27;re already weak.