The idea of "a fall" is a universal bug in our thinking, I believe.
Most of what we learn has been from dramatization. There is, maybe, slightly less now, offset by more technical text, but that's a really recent change in human history. And even then, how many people's ideas of history are entirely formed from television shows and movies, or even stories told to each other?
We talk about what makes stories compelling. Compelling stories have a beginning, a climax, and an end. History thus also has a beginning, climax, and end.
So we think of the Roman Empire as a thing in history that had a beginning, and a rise, and then a fall.
Yet Rome still exists.
I see this a lot in discussions about businesses. Somebody will do something dumb, and then immediately two camps form: those that throw darts at the exact date that the business will cease to exist, and those that mock the first camp's predictions of timely demise.
So we get these really repetitive, entirely pointless debates after the fact about whether the business is "dead" or not, so everybody can try to figure out which camp was right.
But, in the general case, it never works that way. For every WebVan, there are a hundred Reddits: persistently spectral businesses, online and still making money, occasionally bolstered by some CEO whose job it is to convince everyone that the business is still as full of verve as ever it was, and yet, when people think of it, they think of it nostalgically, if they do at all.
Slashdot is still online and posting stories every day.
Rome never fell; its story changed. It stopped being the main character of historical storytelling for a certain period, but of course that leaves us wondering what happened to that character, and when exactly did that character die?
A city exists in the same place, yes, but you'd be insane to fail to note the centuries of economic decline and the nearly complete disappearance of the bureaucratic state.
> idea of "a fall" is a universal bug in our thinking
Occasionally it did happen that way though. e.g. the Soviet Union was seemingly fine (or not much worse that before) and suddenly it and its empire was in a couple of years.
Their style of communism/socialism went down with them and is pretty much dead.
Ironically this is a pretty good point in favor of GP, since the “powers that were” in Soviet Russia retained a great deal of their power and connections, as sibling comment noted. That said, I don’t think there is even a remote resemblance between the imperial might of Old Rome and its remnants in Italia. What did and does remain are the lineage of Romanized nations that succeeded it in Western Europe, and as many others have noted, the Church, which is a whole other subject in itself.
> between the imperial might of Old Rome and its remnants in Italia
After more than a thousand years that's true.
But Rome remained the "universal [Christian] Empire" well into the middle ages. In a way didn't really matter if its capital was in Constantinople or Aachen or Rome. Or if its ruler spoke Latin, Greek or even German.
Its ~35 years since the the collapse of the USSR, its cultural identity has pretty much disappeared.
Perhaps, yet a reasonably educated person in the Frankish Empire or the early Holy Roman Empire probably wouldn't. It wouldn't even make much sense to them.
> Their style of communism/socialism went down with them and is pretty much dead.
Arguably the absolute worst aspects of it are preserved under the state that exists there today. There's certainly a solid through-line through Putin himself.
Is it? Putin's regime seems like a mostly generic pseudo-fascist dictatorship, except that they have nukes and stuff which they inherited from the USSR.
> absolute worst aspects of it are preserved
While it's obviously horrible, lets not downplay what the USSR was.
Even as late as the 80s when they were pretty much exterminating entire towns and villages in Afghanistan. Of course there are tactical and strategical reasons why they can't do something close in scale to that in Ukraine.
Most of what we learn has been from dramatization. There is, maybe, slightly less now, offset by more technical text, but that's a really recent change in human history. And even then, how many people's ideas of history are entirely formed from television shows and movies, or even stories told to each other?
We talk about what makes stories compelling. Compelling stories have a beginning, a climax, and an end. History thus also has a beginning, climax, and end.
So we think of the Roman Empire as a thing in history that had a beginning, and a rise, and then a fall.
Yet Rome still exists.
I see this a lot in discussions about businesses. Somebody will do something dumb, and then immediately two camps form: those that throw darts at the exact date that the business will cease to exist, and those that mock the first camp's predictions of timely demise.
So we get these really repetitive, entirely pointless debates after the fact about whether the business is "dead" or not, so everybody can try to figure out which camp was right.
But, in the general case, it never works that way. For every WebVan, there are a hundred Reddits: persistently spectral businesses, online and still making money, occasionally bolstered by some CEO whose job it is to convince everyone that the business is still as full of verve as ever it was, and yet, when people think of it, they think of it nostalgically, if they do at all.
Slashdot is still online and posting stories every day.
Rome never fell; its story changed. It stopped being the main character of historical storytelling for a certain period, but of course that leaves us wondering what happened to that character, and when exactly did that character die?