The Fate of Rome?

The best-known fact about the Roman Empire is that it declined and fell.

The Roman Empire (1982)

No question has been more widely debated than the reasons for the decline of the western empire. Some historians have sought to isolate a single factor as the underlying cause; others see a number of developments combining to produce an ultimate disintegration. . .

Students of Rome’s decline will want to make their own determination about its causes.

Civilizations of the West (1992)

For centuries, people have speculated about the causes of the collapse of the ancient world. Every kind of reason has been put forward, and some suggestions seem to have nothing to do with reason at all.

The Heritage of World Civilizations (1994)


Although the topic has been popular, and a myriad of reasons has been offered to explain Rome’s fall, no consensus has emerged, and historians of the twentieth century have multiplied the variety of explanations many times over. A recent book in German, almost 700 pages long, lists some 210 factors that have been adduced as causes of Rome’s fall.

The Fall of the Roman Empire(1986)

Barbarians and Christianity:

Voltaire: "Two flails at last brought down this vast Colossus: the barbarians and religious disputes."

Edward Gibbon: "the triumph of barbarism and religion."

Several Other Theories:

1) Marxist --> class struggle in which army became involved on side of peasants

2) political --> weak rulers, succession problem with emperors, instability

3) pseudoscientific --> climatic change, lead poisoning, race-mixture

4) economic --> dependence on slave labor, high taxes

5) deny the "fall" altogether --> stress continuity between Late Roman Empire & Early Middle Ages

To Fall or Not To Fall?:

The advocates of change are too strident in their insistence that the fall of Rome destroyed everything Roman. Likewise, the advocates of continuity all too often ignore the obvious fact that not everything survived the barbarian invasions of the fifth century, that indeed dramatically significant changes occurred in the West from AD 400 to 500.

The Fall of the Roman Empire (1986)

What are the weaknesses of Frank's race-mixture argument:

This Orientalizing of Rome’s populace has a more important bearing than is usually accorded it upon the larger question of why the spirit and acts of imperial Rome are totally different from those of the republic, if indeed racial characteristics are not wholly a myth. There is today a healthy activity in the study of economic factors. . .

that contributed to Rome’s decline. But what lay behind and constantly reacted upon all such causes of Rome’s disintegration was, after all, to a considerable extent, the fact that the people who built Rome had given way to a different race. The lack of energy and enterprise, the failure of foresight and common sense, the weakening of moral and political stamina, all were concomitant with the gradual dimunition of the stock which, during the earlier days, had displayed these qualities.

It would be wholly unfair to pass judgment upon the native qualities of the Orientals without a further study, or to accept the self-complacent slurs of the Romans, who, ignoring certain imaginative and artistic qualities, chose only to see in them unprincipled and servile egoists. We may even admit that had the new races had time to amalgamate and attain a political consciousness, a more brilliant and versatile civilization might have come to birth. . . .

It is apparent that at least the political and moral qualities which counted most in the building of the Italian federation, the army organization, the provincial adminstration system of the republic, were the qualities most needed in holding the empire together. And however brilliant the endowment of the new citizens, these qualities they lacked. . .

Tenney Frank, "Race Mixture in the Roman Empire," AHR (1916)