Collections: Rome: Decline and Fall?
Part III: Things Bret Devereaux Collections , Fall of Rome February 11, 2022 42 Minutes This is the third and final part ( I , II , III ) of our series tackling the complicated and still debated question of ‘how bad was the fall of Rome (in the West)?’ In our first part , we looked at the question through the prism of ‘words’ – language, culture, religion and literature. There we found a lot of evidence for continuity, supporting the position advanced by the ‘change and continuity’ school that the collapse of Roman political authority didn’t have catastrophic effects in other parts of society. In the second part , we looked at ‘institutions’ – politics, cities and organized religion. Here the picture was far more complex. On the one hand, the states that emerged in the West were successors of the Western Roman Empire and carried with them some of its traditions, but on the other hand they were much weaker, les...