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Essay: The fall of the Roman Empire

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  • Subject area(s): History essays
  • Reading time: 3 minutes
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  • Published: 15 September 2019*
  • File format: Text
  • Words: 823 (approx)
  • Number of pages: 4 (approx)

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The Roman Empire was strong. It was founded on the strengths of its military, its key geographic location, strong moral values, and wise leadership. It developed from its  social, economic, political, military, and religious strengths. However, when the things that make a civilization begin to fail, the civilization itself begins its fall.

Let’s start with the differences between the United States and Rome. First of all, Rome’s economy was a lot worse than the United States. Rome was engaged in regular wars and constantly overspent to keep protecting the borders of its huge empire. Roman rich also worked just as hard back in their time to pay less taxes, creating an increasing gap between the wealthy and the poor. The United State’s economy is not dependent on colonies or slave labor, but the rising inequality between the rich and the poor. Yes, our economy needs work, but is in no danger of collapse.

There are also many similarities between Rome and the United States. One similarity is that they are approximately equal in size. They both also have an open society. Both are societies made up of many people. With this, it leads to culturally similarities. Romans and Americans can’t get enough of laws and lawyers and lawsuits. They enjoy the ritual humiliation of public figures. Americans through comedy and satire and talk radio. The romans through vicious satire, the public airing, name by name, and more things people should be ashamed of.

There was not a specific issue that caused Rome’s destruction, but plagues did play a big part. The plague wiped out a good amount of the population, but it’s not like that made the empire fall. Because the plagues could infect people so quickly and was very contagious, it caused many family members and friends to die if exposed. This was a disease that was hard to treat. Not only because the people were not as knowledgeable as we are today, but because people were too scared to get near the infection to try and help. Although plagues were a big reason why so many people died, there were other issues that added up to the destruction of Rome.

The civil wars at first strengthened the empire, but as time went on started weakening the empire. In the beginning, their military was maximizing and the empire was growing up to the point to where they couldn’t grow anymore. On the other hand, the plagues killed ⅓ of their population, and many of the were soldiers, this left few people to go to war. This caused the empire to lose strength and overall weaken not only the population, but the empire as a whole.

Many homes at this time had slaves that did their work for them. For the rich, this seemed like a good way to get your work done, without doing it yourself, and even saved them money. Also many of the Roman advances made life much easier so Romans didn’t really care anymore. Also, Romans relied on human and animal labor so they didn’t develop the proper technology to produce the amount of goods they needed in order to sustain themselves.

Since we can’t exactly say what God did, we wouldn’t know what God thought or didn’t think. Personally, I believe God didn’t turn his favor away from Rome. In fact, part of the reason Rome fell was because more people were becoming christian or religious in a way that devoted their attention more to God. People started to realize that they should be worshipping God instead of the Roman emperors. Emperors started losing power to church leaders. The working empire clashed with christians beliefs.

The Roman poor people went through some hard times. When the poor people had enough they rioted, but the empire wanted them to stop. Their solution was to give them grain for free, but this took away money from the empire. They also spent a ton of money on the army. Some people thought it was necessary, but others believe just the opposite. The loss of money did contribute to the Rome’s end.

In the end, Rome was just being stretched too thin. People were trying to take over the empire, Rome had become very poor because irrational financial decisions, and they had a very weak army because they lost all discipline. We should be able to compare the fall of Rome to other countries such as the United States. We have followed the structure of Rome for many years and the problems that happened in Rome are most likely to occur with another country in the future. To prevent anything like this to happen, countries should always be aware of the decisions that were made in the past. This way, we can foresee the future of the nation and act on it and fix the problem before it occurs.

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