Why Did Ancient Rome Fail?

820Ṁ168

resolved Oct 5

69%14%

Normalization of political violence; erosion of political norms

11%2%

Corruption

10%2%

Elite overproduction

5%1.0%

Widespread officially-sanctioned slave-trading made it uneconomical to ever move much past human muscle power

4%0.9%

Poor agricultural practices (including farm grants to veterans) driving cyclical famines

41%Other

0.8%

Artificial Intelligence

Foolish embrace of Christianity, abandoning *do ut des*

0.9%

Lead in the water and wine

Rejection of the light of Mithras

14%

Imperial overextension; military expenditure; "barracks emperors"

0.9%

Inability to ever crush the Parthians

0.9%

Inability to ever fully resolve Germanic incursions in Gallia, Pannonia, and Dacia

0.9%

A lack of germ theory or good medical practices, limiting population growth, as evidenced by the Antonine Plague

0.9%

A Carthaginian death-curse

0.9%

"What if there was no cause, and Western Rome just did that naturally? Like JFK's head?"

0.9%

They just hated Romulus Augustus/Julius Nepos *that much*

1.0%

It didn't: they're still around - watching; waiting; biding their time - for the EU and NATO and CSTO and the Arab League to pass away, that Rome might one day rise again

Lack of Artificial Intelligence

Inspired by a post I put together for 4th of July last week.

I think we need to get this hashed out by the end of the quarter. There has been a lot of talk about why Rome failed over the last couple millenia, let's just put an end to it right here on Manifold. Again, we need this by the end of the quarter, thanks.

Resolves to whoever makes the best argument in the comments as measured by number of likes on that comment.

https://patdel.substack.com/p/why-didnt-ancient-rome-have-a-space

Why Didn’t Ancient Rome Have a Space Program?

Get

1,000

to start trading!

🏅 Top traders

#	Name	Total profit
1		Ṁ105
2		Ṁ50
3		Ṁ8
4		Ṁ0

7 Comments

9 Holders

45 Trades

Sort by:

Since there was basically no activity in the comments, then I'm just resolving based upon what I have read and interpretation and basically echoing the article I wrote. The reason I did not select military reasons is because Rome had both expansionist and non-expansionist periods and this didn't really seem to be the core reason for them collapsing per se - same argument with the Parthanons. Poor agricultural practice seemed to be part and parcel with Elite overproduction, corruption and the erosion of political norms that went along with the slow decline and fracturing. Of course one could counter-argue this whole market and point to the Byzantine Empire as being a continuation of Ancient Rome, or state that the Holy Roman Empire or perhaps Tsarist Russia are legitimate extensions of Ancient Rome, of course that's a bit ridiculous (hopefully we don't have any Tsarists coming on here and getting pissed off about that).

@Lorxus
Every ancient empire that rejected Mithraism has collapsed, seems statistically significant to me.

@Joshua Including Ancient Persia itself? Is that why they fell?

mf really said this

and then also this

@Lorxus Yo, it makes sense though when you consider that the Roman Empire was way more conservative than pretty much all of modern society has been though, doesn't it? Also...what does the next part say... Non-adherents what...?

@Joshua

I'm pretty sure there's at least a 20% chance this is true, from the outside view.

Remember Manifolders! You can get trader bonuses for trading on Ancient Markets:

https://manifold.markets/group/ancient-markets-9949fea25641

Ancient Markets

Manifold public group with 1 members

🏅 Top traders

Related questions