I have a copy of the first volume of H.G. Wells\u2019 \u201cThe Outline of History.\u201d\u00a0 And in a real way the Roman Empire is the center of the book.\u00a0 His descriptions of the civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia and Greece are all sort of a set up for Rome.\u00a0 And in a real way Rome is the basis for discussing Medieval Europe but also as a point of comparison, China, India and the Islamic world.\u00a0 And this is not to say that Wells had a romantic or idealized conception about the Roman republic or empire.\u00a0 Far from it.\u00a0 He goes to great lengths to explain why even at the height of the Pax Romana; the something like two hundred years from Augustus to Marcus Aurelius that the people of Rome, with the exception of the truly wealthy, were profoundly and justifiably miserable.\u00a0 And I can see his point of view.\u00a0 I only have to remember that renegade Roman citizen from Greece that Priscus wrote about, who willingly joined up with Atilla the Hun, to realize how the fall of Rome was probably an improvement in the fate of Europe as a whole; though maybe not for the inhabitants of the areas that descended into chaos in the fifth century.<\/p>\n
Among the many short comings of that civilization, Wells counts a lack of scientific curiosity as one of the most damning.\u00a0 He singles out the fact that a working steam engine was created in Hellenistic times but the Romans never took this knowledge and harnessed it in the way that modern Europe did in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with such inventions as the locomotive.<\/p>\n
He further produces as evidence the Romans\u2019 complete neglect of geography as a tool for determining the advantageous borders of their enormous empire.\u00a0 For instance, if they had realized the outline of the North and Baltic seas and the distance to the Caucasus Mountains and the Caspian Sea, they might have realized that conquering Germany and the Slavic tribes would have produced a shorter and more defensible eastern border than the one that allowed the Huns to stampede the German tribes into the western empire and effectively destroy their civilization.<\/p>\n
As for this last claim I have my doubts.\u00a0 This would have required the Romans to occupy all of Eastern Europe, up to and including Poland, Ukraine along with parts of southern Russia and Iran.\u00a0 In defense of my ancestors, I would remind Mr. Wells that those areas are very, very much colder than Italy.\u00a0 Getting Roman colonists for these Hyperborean locales would have been a real stretch.\u00a0 But let\u2019s assume that the emperor Trajan at his height was aware of the geographical imperative to conquer these areas and that he had made it happen.\u00a0 What then?<\/p>\n
Would the Roman legions and the citizens have repelled the Huns when they came crashing into this Eastern border in the fifth century AD?\u00a0 Well, that\u2019s the question.\u00a0 It has been stated that by 180 AD the empire was weakened by a series of plagues that reduced population but also because the downtrodden peasants refused to have children under the onerous conditions they lived under.\u00a0 This seems to fly in the face of the archeological evidence of bustling cities and far-flung trade with India and even China that sent enormous quantities of silver and gold eastward into Asia from Roman coffers.<\/p>\n
What is the truth?\u00a0 I\u2019ll give my opinion in the second part.\u00a0 But feel free to give your ideas in the comments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I have a copy of the first volume of H.G. Wells\u2019 \u201cThe Outline of History.\u201d\u00a0 And in a real way the Roman Empire is the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1263],"tags":[3752,226,462,197,912,276],"class_list":["post-34451","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stuff-that-personally-interests-me-miscellaneous","tag-european-history","tag-fall-of-the-roman-empire","tag-h-g-wells","tag-history","tag-roman-empire","tag-rome"],"yoast_head":"\n