Rome and America: Comparing Two Imperial Superpowers

Introduction

The decline and fall of the Roman Empire is a source of fascination for both the general public and the scholarly world. From a European perspective, the fall of the Empire can be regarded as the end of the Classical world, as it brought about a decline in literacy, urbanism, and virtually all other indicators of civilization. Roman civilization is seen as the golden age of art, literature, and law — a period of flourishing culture and development. Both European and non-European societies have adopted Roman architectural, sculptural, and legal traditions. The Founding Fathers hoped that America would revive the virtues of ancient Rome and reinvent the Roman Empire under a new formula whose basis was the Constitution. By speaking of a rising American empire, they invoked the image of the Roman republic as an enduring model: an absolute superpower whose military, political, economic, and cultural dominance was incontestable.

Although the decline of the Roman Empire has been discussed and written about extensively, no scholar has ever been able to provide a definitive explanation, primarily because the demise of a state is a complex matter resulting from a myriad of factors. One cannot point to a single event or causative factor; rather, it is the cumulative power of several historical and political circumstances working together. There are also no reliable predictions about the future of America, or whether its fate will mirror that of Rome. Nonetheless, there are voices who claim America has already turned into a decadent Roman state, citing the percentage of illiterate citizens, increasing corruption, a high rate of illegal immigration, and a Congress that no longer serves the people but acts as a tool in the hands of the privileged.

Rome was founded as a farming village in the eighth century B.C. — more precisely in 753 B.C. — and endured twelve centuries of oscillations before its fall in the fifth century A.D. During its lifespan, the Roman Empire shifted from being a prosperous and even virtuous republic to a corrupt empire which eventually led to its dissolution. The first major historical account of the fate of the Roman Empire was written by historian Edward Gibbon and published in 1776 under the title The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Another historical account discussed in this paper is that of historian Peter Heather, specifically his book The Fall of the Roman Empire (2005). As for the parallel between modern America and Rome, this paper draws on the conclusions and assumptions put forth by Cullen Murphy in his book Are We Rome?

The date widely accepted for the fall of Rome is 476 A.D., when the Germanic leader Odoacer forced the last emperor of the Western Empire to abdicate. This is also the date adopted by the present paper. Nonetheless, many other crucial moments contributed to the decline and ultimate fall of the Roman Empire. Historians generally argue that it was a combination of factors — monetary trouble, moral and social decadence, and the rise of Christianity among them — that brought about the empire's demise.

The fall of Rome did not bring about the complete disappearance of classical elements of civilization, which persisted into later centuries. The notion of "classical" was defined by the Roman Empire, a dictatorship supported by military force that joined together peoples from three continents. Nonetheless, its attempt to forge a unified "classical" culture was ultimately unsuccessful, and the demise of the Empire brought about the shaping of new cultures formed from the "amalgam of classics with the reformed style of Judaism that became Christianity" (Potter: 4). Rome itself had changed dramatically between the year 400 and the age of Augustus, and these changes did not originate in the fifth century but trace back to the first two centuries of the empire's history, when the civilization of the ancient Mediterranean slowly disintegrated under the weight of growing Roman absolutism. By 305 A.D., the process of disintegration could no longer be reversed.

It was under Emperor Diocletian that ancient civilization was truly destroyed under the weight of unchecked development. Poverty and degradation deeply affected the population, which was forced to renounce its freedom in exchange for survival. Those not killed by famine were forced to become branded laborers in regimented state factories. The curtain of the Dark Ages was falling across the societies of Antiquity. This transitional period between Classical Roman Antiquity and the High Middle Ages was characterized by the absence of progress in literature, written history, building activity, and demographic growth. When the Dark Ages descended, they covered a paralyzed civilization in the East and a shattered one in the West, where poverty and ignorance had destroyed the once triumphant Western society. Currency became worthless, trade was virtually blocked, education was forgotten, and agriculture devastated. The military capacity of Rome was dramatically diminished, and the population was scarce, with a deserted countryside and empty urban centers. Waves of barbarian invasions followed — Arab and Viking conquests, the Crusades, and the devastations of the Turks and Mongols — which generated a severe fragmentation of the former empire's territory. This fragmentation eventually saw the re-emergence of an urban middle class in the decentralized successor states, enabling the resumption of cultural, intellectual, and economic evolution in the form of the Western Renaissance.

In 1963, during an address at American University in Washington D.C., President John F. Kennedy reinforced the idea that the United States was "not seeking a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war" (McChesney; Foster: 2004). His remarks were a response to criticism from Soviet texts on military strategy which claimed the U.S. was preparing "to unleash different kinds of war" including "preventative war" (Ibid.). Despite Kennedy's rejection of these claims, the notion of "Pax Americana" would become a justification for war used by those who portrayed the United States as a "benevolent Empire" (Ibid.). Today the Cold War is over and the Soviet Union has long disbanded, yet the United States is still regarded by many as an imperialist power that uses military force unilaterally for its own benefit. Comparisons between Imperial Rome and the Imperial United States, once largely the province of leftists or right-wing isolationists, have spread and gained more momentum than ever (Lind: 2002). These comparisons were further fueled by President George W. Bush's speech at West Point on June 2, 2002, in which he declared: "America has, and intends to keep, military strengths beyond challenge — thereby making the destabilizing arms races of other eras pointless — and limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace" (President G.W. Bush in Lind: 2002).

This paper does not examine the discourse of one particular administration, whether Democrat or Republican. Instead, it strives to illustrate how a certain image of American imperialism has been constructed both within the United States and around the world, irrespective of which administrations have been in office since the American Revolution. A global Pax Americana has given rise to serious controversy. There are those who support it, led by what Murphy calls "the triumphalist-in-chief" George W. Bush (Murphy: 127). There are those who strongly oppose it, denouncing America's military interventions and arguing that "its imperial need for secrecy, surveillance and social control, all in the name of national security, is corroding our republican institutions" (Ibid.). And there is a third category — Murphy's "in-between group" (Murphy: 128) — who argue that America should and could be an imperial superpower, but lacks sound practical judgment.

The Roman Empire: A Short Overview

The thesis of this paper is that the history of the Roman Empire can be matched to that of the United States in terms of economy, political power, and aspirations. Present-day America is in many ways similar to fourth- or even fifth-century Rome, which poses one stringent yet logical question: Will America follow in the footsteps of ancient Rome and meet its demise in a similar fashion? Although this paper cannot definitively answer that question, it examines the current political, economic, social, and cultural situation in America and compares it to the circumstances leading to the fall of the Roman Empire.

Rather than presenting a chronological history of Rome, this section provides a brief analysis of the Roman contribution to posterity, particularly in terms of political, legal, and economic culture. Similarly to other ancient nations, the origins of Rome are clouded by legend. Legend holds that the first inhabitants of Rome were refugees from defeated Troy, led by the hero Aeneas — a claim shared by Roman historians such as Appian and Livy, and by Rome's greatest poet, Virgil, who wrote his epic the Aeneid as an ode to the city's founding father.

The Roman Empire succeeded the Roman Republic, whose lifespan covered 500 years from 510 B.C. to the first century B.C. The Republic had been considerably weakened by the conflicts between Gaius Marius and Sulla, and between Caesar and Pompey. The transition from Republic to Empire was marked by several events: Caesar's appointment as dictator, the victory of his heir at the Battle of Actium, and the Senate's granting of the honorific title of Augustus to Octavian. It was during the age of Augustus that the Roman Empire covered its most extensive territories, encompassing England, Wales, most of Europe including the Balkans and the Black Sea coast, coastal Northern Africa, Egypt, Asia Minor, and the Levant — the area of the Middle East bounded by the Mediterranean to the west and Upper Mesopotamia to the east (modern-day Iraq and western Iran). The inhabitants of the Empire were called Romans and obeyed Roman law.

The Empire was born from the ashes of the old Roman Republic, which ended in 21 B.C. after a hundred years of civil war and social turmoil. Julius Caesar's nephew Octavian claimed to be saving the republic when he was in fact inaugurating a new form of government — the principate — and with it, the first totalitarian rule. The forms of republican government were formally maintained, some even until the end of the Empire in the fifth century A.D. By the second century A.D., the Roman emperor controlled immense territories stretching from Scotland to the Sahara, from the Atlantic to the Euphrates. Roads were built to link major and minor cities, some of which are still usable today. Naval traffic expanded; a survey of shipwrecks during the Roman era showed three times more shipwrecks during the first two centuries A.D. than during the period 400–200 B.C. (Murphy: 42). The capital city of ancient Rome had a population of over a million people — an impressive number not matched until London in the time of Shakespeare.

Roman culture was largely a reinterpretation of classical Greek culture and civilization (Fears: 2005), in the sense that Rome became "the bearer of Greek culture" (Ibid.). The writings of Thucydides served as a model for Tacitus, and Herodotus served as a model for the historian Livy. In architecture and sculpture, classical Greece was similarly the model for Roman creations such as the Pantheon, which embodied new Roman spiritual values alongside the great Greek architectural legacy. The peak of the empire in terms of territorial expansion was reached under Trajan, who conquered Dacia (modern Romania and Moldova, as well as parts of neighboring Bulgaria, Hungary, and Ukraine) and Mesopotamia, encompassing a staggering total of around 2.3 million square miles of land, as well as the Mediterranean Sea — which the Romans called mare nostrum, Latin for "our sea."

One of the most striking features of Roman life was that Rome was an urban culture, meaning that the vitality and prosperity of the Empire largely depended on its cities. The core of the Roman family was the paterfamilias, Latin for "father of the family." It was an absolute patriarchal society in which the paterfamilias held complete authority over his children regardless of age, and over his wife. The era of the Roman Empire was also an age of spirituality focused on the concept of the soul. Monotheism began to grow, as this was the age that would generate both Christianity and Islam. The Romans believed there was an imperial divinity that had destined the Roman people to rule an empire. The temple of this divinity — Jupiter Optimus Maximus — was located in the Roman forum of every city in the empire.

The Roman legal tradition is equally significant. It was during the Roman Republic that Roman law established the foundations for the system of jurisprudence still active today in half of the world. Roman jurists such as Ulpian built the empire's legal system on the ideals of natural law, interpreted as the law of God — the dichotomy between right and wrong. The duty of jurists was to translate that dichotomy into the law of mankind (jus gentium) and the law of the individual (jus civile). Both laws sprang from the concept that all men are created equal and possess certain unalienable rights, such as the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Power in the Roman Empire resided in the hands of one man: the emperor. The emperor was supported by the military and the Senate and controlled the economy of the empire. Moreover, "both good and bad emperors controlled the expression of political opinion" (Starr: 8). This severe control of thought originated in the Hellenistic monarchies and derived also from the senatorial distinction between liberty and license, which had censored the plebeians for much of the era of the Roman Republic. The Roman army was one of the greatest and most cost-efficient military forces in history, with over 350,000 soldiers guarding the Empire's frontiers. The network of Roman roads and bridges was far ahead of its time; one can in fact see a bridge built in the first century B.C. standing even today. The economic unity of the Mediterranean world during the Roman Empire was not replicated until contemporary times. Flourishing centers of commerce and trade throughout the empire included Cologne in Germany, London in Britannia, and Alexandria in Egypt.

Wealth was the criterion for advancement in Roman government. It was measured in land and represented a true source of power. Roman senators were required to own land and maintain residence both in Italy and in their native territories (Miles: 655). High officials and senators used their influence to protect certain areas and thus their own interests, which determined a certain detachment from service to the Roman state and a shift toward private interest (Ibid.).

The Roman Empire also put forth a new view on freedom. There were three components corresponding to three different parts of the same entity. First, the national component: freedom associated with the Empire, namely freedom from foreign domination. Second, political freedom per se: the freedom to vote and to choose one's magistrates. Third, individual freedom: the freedom to live according to one's moral and social precepts, provided they do not infringe upon someone else's freedom to do the same (Fears: 2005). Libertas — liberty — was both a private possession of the free individual and a right that rested upon the structure of the Roman state. By the first century A.D., during the time of the senator and historian Tacitus, the term libertas was slowly being modified, gaining new connotations such as private freedom and freedom of speech in the Senate, as well as respect for the senatorial institution from the Roman leader (Starr: 7).

The legacy of the Roman Empire is truly impressive. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, several states proclaimed themselves its rightful successors. The Byzantine Empire was the first, followed by the Holy Roman Empire established in 800 by Pope Leo III as an attempt to re-establish the Western Roman Empire. The fall of Constantinople gave rise to a claim by the Russian Tsar to the inheritance of the Byzantine Empire, and in the fifteenth century the Ottomans claimed that their conquest of Constantinople placed them on the throne of the Roman Empire. Constantinople was not officially renamed until 1930.

The legacy of the Roman Empire enriched global culture with such contributions as the calendar, Christianity, Byzantine architecture, and the infrastructure of roads that endure to this day. Politically, the Roman Empire influenced the constitutions of most European states and many former European colonies. In terms of legislation, the modern world still employs legal thinking derived from Roman law. The science of public administration was also a Roman invention, born of the need to govern a vast territory more efficiently; this need led to the creation of civil service and tax collection systems that have inspired legislators to this day.

The emergence of the Roman Empire was a means of ending the warfare of the Mediterranean, as the Romans were not afraid to take up the burden of building an empire. The lesson the Romans had to learn, however, was that an empire could not be governed by the constitution of a small city-state. Rome was founded as a small city-state in 753 B.C. and became a republic in 509 B.C. That republican constitution was unable to bear the immense weight of a world empire, which arguably drove the ruling class to impose a military dictatorship under Julius Caesar and his successors as the only means of maintaining superpower status. Nevertheless, the legacy they chose to leave behind came at a high price. Roman emperors invoked the theme of Aeternitas as the enduring legacy of the empire, one that would outlive its destiny in terms of art, architecture, legal tradition, and spirituality. Rome became the "eternal city," a metaphor for its never-ending prestige.

Rome was never a democratic society. Nevertheless, during the Republic, power was highly diffused among consuls, the Senate, tribunes, and tribal assemblies. All these institutions were influential to the early Roman state. Independent centers of power were slowly destroyed, leading to the concentration of power in the hands of one man. This process began in the late period of the Republic and reached its peak during the late Empire, when the individual was helpless before a state whose centers of corporate power had been annihilated. Apart from this dramatic increase in state power, newly created constituencies were seizing control of certain social classes with the aim of preventing social change in return for the gratification of their own immediate self-interest. The best examples of this shift are the senatorial aristocracy's decision to close down mines in order to weaken the commercial middle class, and the monopolies held by tradesmen's guilds. During the late Empire this process had reached its peak, bringing about the demise of the republic, reducing it to despotism, and creating a severe opposition between a growing prosperous minority and the millions who would eventually perish through famine and plague.

Why Rome Fell

The decline of the Roman state was not the result of a single factor but of several accumulating over time. By the end of the first century A.D., the peak of the Roman Empire had passed and the decline had slowly begun. Large parts of the population became employees of the state, generating considerable growth in bureaucracy and requiring ever more money for state expenditures. Another major problem was depopulation, which affected both rural and urban areas. The main cause of population decrease was a very low birth rate. The Roman government tried to regulate this through legislation, but instead of providing incentives for population growth, Augustus enacted laws that punished unmarried or childless Roman citizens. Beyond coercive legislation, the Roman state employed mass population transfers intended to move people to newly conquered territories or to depopulated areas. A decrease in rural population left agricultural land unused, contributing to famine. Urban populations also declined as city-dwellers moved to rural areas in search of food, causing the shrinkage of urban settlements. Plague then struck the Empire during a period of harsh economic conditions. Because there was no strong middle class within the Roman social structure, famine was a constant threat even during periods of economic prosperity. The plagues devastated Rome but did not deeply affect the neighboring tribes that would attack the Empire three centuries later.

The Antonine dynasty, whose era is known as the "Golden Age of the Antonines," ended in 235 A.D. and left behind a devastating image of the Roman world dominated by famine and poverty. In fact, the Empire was less populated and less civilized than it had been at the beginning of the first century A.D. The political chaos and social anarchy ended with the accession of Diocletian in 284. He was a "philosopher-king" — a Platonic ideal — both forceful and scrupulous, whose monarchy was not easily corruptible. However, his policies did not aid the empire. On the contrary, his reign practically ensured its downfall. Diocletian expanded the civil service, doubled the number of administrative districts, and increased the number of troops from around 300,000 to half a million. He also imposed harsh state restrictions on trade. State control over citizens' lives increased during the last two centuries of the Empire. In exchange for accepting this control, the population received certain privileges — such as food subsidies from the government. During the reign of Emperor Septimius Severus, oil was distributed for free, a pork ration was introduced, and wine was initially sold at a very low price and then distributed free of charge. The producers and distributors of these goods were forced by the state to perform their duties at state-fixed prices, effectively making them servants of the state. This had catastrophic results on both the private and public sectors, leaving the economy in ruins.

By the fifth century, the free market economy of the Empire had been replaced by a frozen society that was neither productive nor competitive. The economic policies of the emperors had a heavy impact on citizens and, consequently, on the history of the Empire. Money was acquired through taxation or by finding new sources of wealth such as land. By the time of Trajan, however, the economic situation was already precarious, as emperors such as Commodus (who ruled from 180 to 192 A.D.) had depleted the imperial treasury. Nero and other emperors reduced the value of Roman currency in order to supply a demand for more coins (Bartlett: 5). The method of debasing the currency was to make it representative not of its own intrinsic value but of the silver or gold it once contained (Ibid.), and this process of debasement led to severe inflation. Emperors also imposed heavy taxation on the senatorial class with the aim of limiting their power. The resulting financial situation worsened until there were no funds to pay the army, support the infrastructure, build ships, or protect the frontier. The Roman Empire grew increasingly frail and vulnerable to barbarian invasions, as fiscal deterioration led to the incapacity to defend its borders.

The economic decline was not offset by technological advances. A steam engine had been invented by a Greek named Hero during the reign of Augustus, but it attracted little interest. Roman traders and producers preferred to employ more slave labor rather than invest in technological progress, and so the steam engine remained an unused invention that would not be rediscovered until the eighteenth century. Economic activity severely declined, especially in the Western Empire, where infrastructure was also deteriorating despite efforts from the ruling class to restore it. During the first half of the third century, government policies actually encouraged wealthy men involved in trade and commerce to save their money rather than invest it in new business ventures. Prices began to rise and the feeble middle class went bankrupt. More and more people turned to begging and became homeless. Towards the middle of the third century, piracy grew, as did pillaging and attacks on Roman-controlled cities along the coast of Northern Africa by tribal peoples from the Sahara.

The Roman Empire also relied on a primitive form of feudalism that required workers to be tied to their land so that they would continue to produce and pay taxes. This obligation eventually led some small landowners to sell themselves into slavery as a means of escaping the imperial taxation system. In this sense, freedom from taxes was more desirable than personal liberty (Bartlett: 10). Nevertheless, in 368 — during the reign of Emperor Valens — it became illegal to sell oneself into slavery (Ibid.).

Edward Gibbon's eighteenth-century explanation for the fall of the Roman Empire focuses on the loss of civic virtue as conducive to Rome's decline. He argues that the Romans gradually became unwilling to fight and maintain a military lifestyle. In the case of Rome, "the decline was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness" (Gibbon: Chap. 5) — that is, the incapacity of the empire to resist the pressure of its own enormous weight. Corruption was a plague that deeply affected imperial society. As the population of the empire came not only from the Italian peninsula but from conquered lands, barbarians inhabiting those lands were also regarded as Roman citizens. Gibbon captures the vicious dynamic this created:

"The victorious legions, who, in distant wars, acquired the vices of strangers and mercenaries, first oppressed the freedom of the republic, and afterwards violated the majesty of the purple. The emperors, anxious for their personal safety and the public peace, were reduced to the base expedient of corrupting the discipline which rendered them alike formidable to their sovereign and to the enemy; the vigor of the military government was relaxed, and finally dissolved, by the partial institutions of Constantine; and the Roman world was overwhelmed by a deluge of Barbarians." (Gibbon: Chap. 38)

Religion played a key role in the demise of the empire. Ancient Roman religion was a mixture of different cult practices based heavily in Greek and Etruscan mythology. Originally the empire followed an animistic tradition in which a large number of gods and goddesses governed the entire myriad of human activities. After conquering Greece, the Romans embraced the Greek gods and fused them with their own. With every new territory annexed to the empire, Roman religion came to enclose and eventually dissolve hundreds of other religions. The imperial cult also transformed emperors, beginning with Julius Caesar, into god-like figures. Eventually, Christianity replaced the old pantheon with a monotheistic worldview that absorbed the remnants of the original Roman religion.

The main advantage of Christianity — which also accounts for its rise within the Roman Empire — was that it had a more human face and offered a coherent worldview according to which slavery was an entirely human matter, since in the eyes of God no one is a slave and all are equal. Christianity was immensely appealing to the poor, who were promised salvation after death. Another factor contributing to its appeal was that it was an inexpensive religion to join compared to others such as the Great Mother Worship (Smitha: Christian Success and Martyrdom).

Gibbon points to Christianity as the second source of decay for the Roman Empire. Yet he also acknowledges that religion served as a source of comfort that eased the fall and helped people come to terms with their conquerors: "Religious precepts are easily obeyed which indulge and sanctify the natural inclinations of their votaries; but the pure and genuine influence of Christianity may be traced in its beneficial, though imperfect, effects on the barbarian proselytes of the North. If the decline of the Roman Empire was hastened by the conversion of Constantine, his victorious religion broke the violence of the fall, and mollified the ferocious temper of the conquerors." (Gibbon: Chap. 39). The clergy encouraged the virtue of patience and discouraged active virtues in society. The military spirit was buried, and a large part of public and private wealth was consecrated to charity and divine devotion (Gibbon: Chap. 38).

Constantine was the emperor who allowed religious freedom in the Roman Empire. Although he was not initially a Christian himself, he issued a decree establishing religious toleration. In 313, Constantine came to an agreement with Licinius — the ruler of the eastern part of the empire — and issued the Edict of Tolerance, which recognized each ruler's authority and established that Christianity was to be considered equal to all other religions. It also provided that property unlawfully taken from Christians was to be returned. Constantine eventually converted to Christianity, though he was baptized only on his deathbed, leaving the depth of his affiliation somewhat unclear (Smitha: Rome's Christian Emperors). He also seized control of the Church through the Council of Nicaea, whose purpose was to regularize Christianity so that it would be compatible with imperial government. The emperor ceased to be considered a god and became instead godsent — a human representation of the divine.

Peter Heather's The Fall of the Roman Empire offers a coherent theory centered on the role of external barbarian pressure. Heather argues that the Empire was in good shape during the first two centuries A.D. and that high taxation increased production, laws restricting labor reflected high population rather than labor shortages, and bureaucratization increased social efficiency. He also claims that culturally speaking, no one group can be considered superior to another within the context of the Roman Empire. His central thesis regarding the fall of the empire is that the attacks of the barbarians generated the decline and fall: "Without the barbarians, there is not the slightest evidence that the western Empire would have ceased to exist in the fifth century." (Heather: 449).

Heather traces the beginning of serious trouble to the mid-third century in Iran with the emergence of the Sassanid Persian Empire: "The Sassanids were sufficiently powerful and internally cohesive to push back Roman legions from the Euphrates and from much of Armenia and southeast Turkey. Much as modern readers tend to think of the 'Huns' as the nemesis of the Roman Empire, for the entire period under discussion it was the Persians who held the attention and concern of Rome and Constantinople. Indeed, 20–25% of the military might of the Roman Army was addressing the Persian threat from the late third century onward…and upwards of 40% of the troops under the Eastern Emperors." (Heather). Heather further argues that the decades spent coping with the Sassanid threat were supported by stripping western provincial towns of their regional taxation income. Although the Romans managed to expand their military forces in the Middle East and stabilize the frontiers, the reduction of provincial income had a negative long-term impact. Officials found themselves unable to continue local infrastructure development due to insufficient funds. A second consequence was a shift in the interests of the provincial elite "from local politics to imperial bureaucracies where the money was."

Heather also notes that the Germanic tribes on the Empire's northern border had changed significantly since the first century: through contact with the Roman Empire, they had accumulated considerable material wealth and developed a true ruling class, capable of controlling far larger groupings than in previous centuries and of becoming formidable opponents of Rome. He connects the Gothic invasion of 376 to Hunnish movements around the Black Sea, and the invasions across the Rhine at the beginning of the fifth century to Hunnish invasions in present-day Germany, thereby linking the fall of the Western Empire directly to the Huns. This propagated external pressure, he concludes, could have brought the Western Empire down at any point in history, since barbarian tribes had grown more powerful than in any previous era.

While the Western part of the Empire was disintegrating, the Eastern part still ruled over Asia Minor, Palestine, Syria, Egypt, and Greece. The main force linking them together was trade, seconded by an authoritarian imperial rule headquartered at Constantinople. Constantinople remained very prosperous mainly due to trade, which did not cease once the Western part fell. Greek became increasingly spoken as Latin declined, used solely on official occasions. Constantinople was a profoundly Christian city, adorned with numerous churches, convents, and monasteries.

The fall of Rome was a major event in the history of mankind, one that shook the unity of the world and forever changed world order. However, in an important sense, Rome never entirely fell: "Its methods of agriculture, its patterns of trade, its cities and ports, its buildings and infrastructure, its modes of administration, its names for objects and places, its laws, its elites — to varying degrees in various places all of these things lived on, for longer and shorter periods, making the path forward an irregular transition rather than a catastrophic revolution." (Murphy: 190).