| Since I got some updoots here is some trivia: The opening guitar that will get burned into brain is of unknown provenance. It's just called 'guitar solo #3' and came with the free sound editing software when he bought the audio card. The USA is not falling like Rome. Rome lasted 800 years and the fall was imperceptable to them. Everything used as a marker for the fall happened more than once. The capital was moved away from Rome but came back several times. There were two Ceasars many times but they went back to one many times. Rome was sacked but recovered more than once. The eastern roman empire lasted arguably another thousand years. The Romans had a rule that every man was instantly out of the army when coming back from war when they crossed a small stream near rome called the rubicon. To prevent what J. Ceaser did, keeping his army together and taking over. Rome had about 400 really good years, 200 as a republic, J. Ceasar, then 200 years of the empire. Things didnt change all that much with the end of 'democracy' for a while. J Christ was alive during emperor Tiberius, and is not mentioned in their records at all. No reason for it, he was unknown during his life and lived in an insignificant province at the very edge of the empire. all from memory of course, YMMV. |
That's somewhat arguable. As far as we can tell the 410 AD sack was relatively organized and the violence was somewhat limited (by ancient standards at least..).
By 455 AD the population was almost 50% lower than it was before the first sack and the Vandal sack possibly also wasn't that brutal (no wholesale slaughter or destruction of buildings).
However the end of the 400s while the city still had a massive population by premodern standards (>100k) it was barely 10-20% of the population it had in ~100 AD and then it was almost entirely depopulated during the Gothic Wars and the plague. After that it didn't really recover until the modern era.
> what J. Ceaser did,
He wasn't exactly the first to do it and the precedent of leading an army into the city to overthrow the current government was well established by Caesar's day. Even Pompey himself basically used the threat marching his army into the city to force the senate to concede to his political goals.
Also it's not certain that the Rubicon thing was contemporary (of course legions couldn't technically cross the pomerium/sacred boundary of the city itself without disbanding and Caesar had no legal authority/imperium outside of his province to begin with).