The slow death of the Western Roman Empire

Rome did not fall, it just forgot to get up

If you believe the Western Roman Empire “fell” in 476, like some poorly built building, I am sorry to disappoint you — that is not how it went. There were no crashes of bricks, no Roman legions running ablaze through the streets. What really happened was a long and tedious process of decay, the kind where the patient forgets he is already dead and keeps paying taxes anyway.

The year 476, when the friendly barbarian Odoacer plucked the feathers off the last emperor, Romulus Augustulus, serves more to help history teachers organize their PowerPoints than to explain anything. Ancient Rome had been crumbling for decades, not to say centuries, like a stale loaf of bread.

The so-called collapse of the Roman Empire was more of an administrative act: Odoacer shows up, takes the crown off the boy emperor’s head (and he really was just a boy), sends it to Constantinople, and says, “I’m in charge now.” The rest of the population probably thought, “Whatever, as long as we still get bread and circuses.” But the bread was expensive, and the circus was falling apart.

The Roman Empire had long been ruled by foreign generals, propped up by mercenaries who were about as Roman as I am an NBA basketball player.The Roman economy was as sturdy as an ironing board, eaten away by taxes and corruption. The borders, once guarded by disciplined Roman legions, were now in the hands of barbarians who sometimes defended them and sometimes looted them.

Cities were shrinking, people were fleeing to the countryside, and the infrastructure, once the pride of the world, was rotting away without maintenance. It was the death of the Roman Empire by a thousand cuts.

But the most interesting part and here comes my old quarrel with certain accounts is that, for many people of the time, nothing extraordinary really happened. The farmer in Gaul kept planting wheat, the blacksmith in northern Italy kept forging horseshoes, and the priest went on preaching about the Final Judgment (spoiler: it was not Rome’s).

The idea of the “fall of the Roman Empire” is a retroactive invention, created centuries later to tidy up chaos into a neat chapter of a history book. The Western Roman Empire did not collapse like a toppling colossus; it slowly dissolved until, one day, there was nothing left to call Ancient Rome.

What remained was Rome’s inheritance: the Latin language, mangled beyond recognition; the roads, still working more or less; and the European obsession with thinking civilization is synonymous with a capital packed with bureaucrats.

In the end, Rome never really died. It simply outsourced its decadence and two thousand years later, we are still renewing the contract.

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