this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2025
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Rough Roman Memes
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A place to meme about the glorious ROMAN EMPIRE (and Roman Republic, and Roman Kingdom)! Byzantines tolerated! The HRE is not.
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Nice one!
Who/what destroyed the Roman empire?
The Romans
Overextension of empire then?
More like an internal decay. Like a tooth rotting from the inside out. Bigger or smaller makes little difference - it's the internal dysfunction which drives it until a crushing, agonizing collapse.
A lot of issues are involved. Government instability and lack of legitimacy. Economic decline and irrational economic behavior. Hardening of a corrupt plutocracy into an intransigent aristocracy with independent power bases. Detachment of the population from the core civic identity of the state. Immense incompetence and nepotism in a period of increasingly centralized and bureaucratic control over society. It goes on and on.
Victor Pelevin, a Russian postmodern writer, explained the dissolution of USSR a very zen way: "USSR became so perfect that it stopped existing". Same could be said about the Roman Empire.