Why did the Roman Empire collapse? It’s a question that’s been puzzling writers ever since Edward Gibbon wrote The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in the late 18th century. One classicist — a German, inevitably — bothered to count up all the various hypotheses for the fall, and came up with 210.
The conventional explanation is that, in 410 AD, King Alaric and his Visigoths sacked Rome. Across the Empire, from Hadrian’s Wall to Africa, legionaries folded their tents and deserted their posts.
Several centuries of self-indulgent, over-reaching and in-fighting emperors had done for the whole shooting match, leaving the Eastern Roman Empire to stumble on until the fall of Constantinople in 1453. And so Roman history came to a full stop.
But wait a minute! Here comes Kyle Harper, professor of classics at Oklahoma university, with a delicious new theory.
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