“Marked by opulence and a distracted upper class, depending on foreign born nationals and the impoverished to defend them from the mob.”
I’m not sure how linked to the Fall of Rome these things are when they existed throughout basically the entire history of the Roman Empire (and even the Republic before it). The “secession of the plebs” was effectively a general strike of the commoners that happened multiple times between the 5th venture BCE and the 3rd century BCE — many centuries before the Fall of Rome.
CrabAndBroom@lemmy.ml 5 months ago
I would also assume that over time, a lot of the idiotic day-to-day shit probably gets forgotten about and as successive historians retell the events they naturally focus on the bigger, more important sounding stuff because it makes for a better read, so things probably get puffed up to sound loftier than they actually were.