The Collapse Of Empires: Revisiting Will Durant’s CAESAR AND CHRIST….

I’ve recently been re-reading Will Durant’s magisterial Caesar and Christ, Volume III of the eleven volume The Story of Civilization that ended up being a collaboration with Will’s student and eventual wife Ariel. Each book in the series is a self-contained narrative yet so rich and limpid is the writing, reading individual chapters randomly will offer the reader a great reward.

Any study of history indicates that all Empires follow a similar trajectory. The Roman Empire lasted for 3 centuries.

Can anyone deny that the American Empire is showing signs of the late stages of Imperial decay? How long will the American Empire continue?




VIDEO LINK: Will Durant On Why Rome Fell….

….The fall of Rome, like her rise, had not one cause but many, and was not an event but a process spread over 300 years. A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within. The essential cause of Rome’s decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars.

….Political anarchy accelerated economic disintegration and economic decline promoted moral decay; each was the cause and effect of the other. Barbarian inroads and centuries of mining the richer veins had doubtless lowered Rome’s supply of precious metals. In Southern Italy, erosion and the neglect irrigation canals by a diminishing peasantry and a disordered government had left Italy poorer than before. The cause, however, was no inherent exhaustion of the soil, no change in climate, but the negligence and sterility of harassed and discouraged men.

….What caused this fall of population? Above all, family limitation. Practiced at first by the educated classes, it had now seeped down to the proletariat classes named for it’s fertility; by A.D. 100, it had reached the agricultural classes.

….Moral decay contributed to the dissolution. Sexual excesses may have reduced human fertility while the avoidance or deferment of marriage had a like effect; the making of eunuchs increased as Oriental customs flowed into the West.

….The virile character that had been formed by arduous simplicities and a supporting faith relaxed in the sunshine of wealth and the freedom of unbelief; men had now — especially in the upper and middle classes — the means to yield to temptation and only expediency to restrain them.

….Urban congestion multiplied contacts and immigration brought together hundreds of cultures whose differences rubbed themselves into indifference. Moral and esthetic standards were lowered by the magnetism of the mass: sex ran riot in freedom while political Liberty decayed.

….If Rome had not engulfed so many men of alien blood in so brief a time, if she had passed all these newcomers through her schools instead of her slums, if she had treated them as men with a hundred potential excellences, if she had occasionally closed her gates to let assimilation catch up with infiltration, she might have gained new racial and literary vitality from the infusion, and might have remained a Roman Rome, the voice and citadel of the West.