Comparing the end of Rome to the ‘crisis in the West’ is crazy – 04/13/2024 – Reinaldo José Lopes

For reasons unknown to reason itself, every now and then crazy far-right influencers, both national and imported, develop a fixation with the Roman Empire. (My working hypothesis is that they have a fetish for bronze breastplates with scenographic nipples, but I still don’t have enough data to corroborate it.) The fact is that these people want to draw parallels between the fall of Rome and the current situation in the “West”. One of these figures, a professor of philosophy, declared these days, with the greatest seriousness in the world, that the Roman Empire had gone to hell for the following reasons:

1) uncontrolled immigration;

2) drop in birth rates;

3) loss of religious feeling among the population.

(Maybe there were more reasons on the list, but I confess that I didn’t have enough gastric juice to continue digesting the guy’s video.)

The serious debate over the end of Roman rule is (as the reader might imagine) complicated and full of divergent views. Even taking this into account, however, it is possible to say without a shadow of a doubt that the “causes” cited by the guy in question don’t make any sense at all.

Starting with the second factor –simply because it is the easiest to address–, I would really like to know where these people get this supposed data on the birth rate of the imperial population.

I know that another fetish of some people is the idea that the Romans were the supreme bureaucrats, storing data on absolutely everything that happened in their domains (one of these crazy people already put his foot down with me saying that, if Jesus had really existed, he would certainly records of his trial before Pilate would have been preserved).

It turns out, however, that nothing even vaguely resembling an average birth rate has ever been noted, as far as we know, by any scribe of the Caesars. There is zero information about a supposed difference between the number of children per woman at the height of Rome (around 100 AD, say, the era of Trajan and Hadrian) and the moment when the empire began to swing in earnest, after the year 400. And trying to measure this indirectly, using archaeological methods, involves an entire Colosseum of statistical uncertainties.

I also couldn’t understand item 3, honestly. The period of imperial decline in Western Europe involves precisely the moment when Christianity became the official religion. There is no one becoming an atheist there – just the replacement of ancestral polytheism with a new faith, quite militant and self-assured.

As for item 1, it is true that Germanic groups (such as the famous Visigoths and Ostrogoths) were infiltrating the empire. But things only get worse when alliances between the leaders of these groups and the Roman generals and emperors themselves transform them into independent military forces – which later decide to carve out chunks of the empire for themselves.

Finally, all this talk about factors in Roman decline and their similarity to today’s “West” conveniently forgets… the Eastern Roman Empire. Based in Constantinople (present-day Istanbul), it faced almost all of the same changes as the western side of Rome’s domains and survived for “only” another entire millennium. Can you see the contradiction in the arguments?

That’s why, if you see people on the internet saying things similar to the list above about Rome, you can easily stick the “100% scam” stamp on the citizen’s forehead. “Causa finita est”, as the Caesars said.

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