The Fall of Rome

The History and Legacy of the Western Roman Empire’s Collapse in the 5th Century

By: Charles River Editors

Narrated by: KC Wayman

Length: 2 hrs and 14 mins

Publisher's summary

"The City which had taken the whole world was itself taken." (St. Jerome)

For the people of the ancient Mediterranean and beyond, the city of Rome had been a symbol of power for centuries, and entering the early 5th century CE, the Eternal City hadn’t been taken by an enemy force since the Gauls had done it about 800 years, an unheard of period of tranquility in a world wracked with almost constant warfare.

Thus, when the Visigoths, whom the Romans considered uncultured and inferior, took the city of Rome and sacked it in 410, the world was stunned. It made theologians of the newly Christianized empire question God’s plan on Earth, and it encouraged many leading Romans to look east to Constantinople for their future. Indeed, the Western Roman Empire would completely collapse in the late 5th century, less than 70 years after the Visigoths sacked Rome, and just how it went from being a superpower to a poorly led, weak, and vulnerable shadow of its former self has preoccupied historians for centuries.

To this day, it remains difficult to trace just when the decline began, but it’s fair to say that the sack of Rome was the result of a number of factors that had been coalescing for many years. Only Roman arrogance kept the empire from seeing the grave peril its capital was in, which helped bring about the events leading up to the fall of Rome itself. The Latin phrase imperium sine fine (“empire without end”) neatly summed up not just the geographic reach of the mighty empire, but the feeling that it would never end. Nonetheless, little more than 300 years after the end of the Pax Romana, the Western Roman Empire had all but ceased to exist. During the same period, the population of the city of Rome itself declined from over a million people to less than 30,000. Within the walls of Rome, vast areas returned to pastureland and shepherds grazed their flocks in a surreal landscape where the ruins of structures representing the might of the empire, such as the Patheon, Colosseum and Theatre of Marcellus, rose above a barren vista of scrub and forest.

In the end, the fall of the Roman Empire was not a tale of cataclysmic events that shattered the sprawling power, but the culmination of centuries of internal dissent and decay, combined with growing external threats that led to gradual decline and eventually to the empire’s final destruction.

©2022 Charles River Editors (P)2022 Charles River Editors

all things are finite....

it's a good short and sweet explanation of the events of how the empire brought itself to collapse. good informative book.