An Overlooked Cause of Rome’s Decline

An Overlooked Cause of Rome’s Decline

"...Stark, along with other historians, argues that this epidemic was the primary reason for some of the policies usually attributed to Rome’s decline:

“Now… historians recognize that acute depopulation was responsible for policies once attributed to moral degeneration. For example, massive resettlement of ‘barbarians’ as landholders within the empire and their induction into the legions did not reflect Roman decadence but were rational policies implemented by a state with an abundance of vacant estates and lacking manpower.”

He then quotes from Hans Zinsser’s classic 1934 work on the impact of epidemics, Rats, Lice, and History:

“[A]gain and again, the forward march of Roman power and world organization was interrupted by the only force against which political genius and military valor were utterly helpless—epidemic disease… and when it came, as though carried by storm clouds, all other things gave way, and men crouched in terror, abandoning all their quarrels, undertakings, and ambitions, until the tempest had blown over.”

My purpose in highlighting this overlooked cause of Rome’s decline is not to inspire inertia but to merely caution against utopianism...Read all.