As I have mentioned in various past stories, I subscribe and read faithfully the National Geographic magazine. I find its array of stories extremely consistent with my interests. Those interests are about the world around us and especially about the history of our world and our species. My generation was taught Western Civilization in school and while that ethnocentrically ignored a great deal of world history (especially Eastern Civilization), it did tend to start with the Egyptians, the Greeks and then the Romans. I always found the Egyptians and Greeks fascinating, but still somewhat less riveting than the history of the Roman Empire. Whatever focus I placed on Rome and its historical dominance, was further reinforced by living in the Eternal City for three years during my formative high school days…while studying Latin as a primary subject to boot.
National Geographic does a great job of spurring my reading interest by reinforcing its articles in short headline blasts over its subscriber emails that I get every few days. It’s impossible for me to NOT read an article about the real reason why the Western Roman Empire fell after an amazing 1,200 year run in A.D. 476. I have been a part of what is arguably the latest and greatest modern empire to dominate the world convincingly now for arguably a mere 250 years, the American Empire. And despite its historically young age (even the British Empire lasted 400 years before dissolving), the world is very much focused at the moment on the decline and fall of the American Empire as extreme nationalism tugs at the foundations of a powerful economic monolith that has brought more prosperity to more people of the world than any other empire, including the great Roman Empire. People use the term Camelot, the legendary castle and court of King Arthur, to represent an idealized kingdom of chivalry, honor, and justice. It symbolizes a golden age of noble knights, righteous rule, and moral perfection, though the stories often explore how this ideal ultimately proves fragile and temporary.
While people like to reference JFK and his three years in the White House as Camelot, more broadly, “Camelot” represents any idealized period or place characterized by noble leadership and high ideals, cultural flourishing, a sense of hope and possibility, and, often, something beautiful but ultimately fleeting. The term carries both aspirational and melancholic undertones representing humanity’s longing for perfect governance and society, while acknowledging that such ideals may be impossible to sustain in reality.
The question of why the Western Roman Empire ended has intrigued historians for generations, fueling a debate that is nowhere near reaching a consensus. Rome’s collapse has previously been blamed on internal corruption. In his great work History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon wrote: “The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight.” The Roman economy became stagnant by the third century A.D. due to its overdependence on slave labor. The Roman Empire’s bureaucracy and army also created a burden that dragged on the costs of empire with increased taxes and serious internal corruption. This all left the empire more vulnerable to external threats.
But now, a new theory has emerged focused on the impact of climate change and epidemics… sound familiar? According to Kyle Harper, a classics professor at the University of Oklahoma, ”It is a story in which humanity and the environment cannot be separated.” And then there were the epidemics…apparently, the great Roman Empire allowed disease to proliferate in the third century with tuberculosis, leprosy, and malaria spreading on a limited scale, while others diseases grew into major epidemics. Public baths alone, while seeming to be hygienic, were hotbeds for bacteria, parasites and disease. The Antonine plague was the first major epidemic to affect the entire Roman Empire (A.D. 165–180), originating in the east (familiar again?), it is thought to have been a smallpox epidemic that killed 10% of the population. As we know today, smallpox was largely eradicated by a vaccination effort led by the World Health Organization (WHO). President Trump called for eliminating funding for the World Health Organization on the day of his second inauguration, when he issued an executive order saying the United States will withdraw from the WHO and pause the future transfer of U.S. funding to the organization.
`The Antonine Plague was followed by the Plague of Cyprian which, while still a mystery to modern historians and epidemiologists, could have been smallpox, measles, viral hemorrhagic fever, or possibly an early form of Ebola. All of these diseases have effective vaccines developed for them, also sponsored by the efforts of WHO. All of these epidemics weakened the Roman Empire, bringing about its collapse soon thereafter. How prescient and ironic that it is RFK, Jr., the nephew of our very Arthurian JFK, who has been put in place by Trump to further the decline and fall of epidemiology and research into whatever epidemic next looms for the world.
You may remember that Attila the Hun ruler of the Hunnic Empire in the 5th century AD, referred to as “the Scourge of God” brought barbarian power to a crescendo that threatened the civilized world. Attila led devastating campaigns across Europe and specialized in extracting enormous tributes from both the Eastern and Western Roman Empires, forcing them to pay massive annual tributes. Sounds a lot like our current tariff wars and “deals” that Donald Trump is playing out across our modern world. In 452 AD Attila invaded Italy and was heading to Rome when he was persuaded to withdraw, reportedly after meeting with Pope Leo I, though disease and supply problems likely also influenced his decision. It is noteworthy that Roman generals frequently ordered the poisoning of wells of cities they were besieging to spread diseases like Malaria among the attacking Huns, only to infect their own troops along the way. History is unclear as to whether it was Attila’s campaigns, the climate souring in the Mediterranean (some suggest it forced the migration of the Huns westward to Rome) and/or the spread of deadly epidemics (accidental or tactical) that contributed most to the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the great migrations that reshaped medieval Europe.
History tells us that over the millennia, the greatest killer of humanity has been plague rather than war. The Black Death (1347-1353) killed an estimated 25-50 million people in Europe alone, perhaps 50% of Europe’s 14th century population and some historians estimate the disease led to even higher death tolls, up to 200 million. The Spanish Flu (1918-1920) killed more people in a single year than the Black Death killed in four years. It infected about one-third of the world’s population and had a case fatality rate of around 2-3%, which was extraordinarily high for an influenza pandemic. The pandemic’s massive death toll contributed to the end of World War I and had profound social and economic impacts worldwide. While 20th Century wars had enormous death tolls, wars are typically more localized now with relatively fewer deaths and last considerably shorter periods than do plague pandemics. We used to be able to say we could cure plagues through epidemiology, but not so the conditions that lead to war. Now, it is unclear that we are willing to continue our epidemiological advancements and we are also promoting one of the major causes of war through trade and economic brutality.
All empires fall. Empires typically fall due to a combination of interconnected factors rather than a single cause. The patterns for decline are well known and include economic decline due to overextension, military overstretch, internal political divisiveness, corruption, barbarian migrations, social and cultural decay, failure to adapt to new technologies, and let’s not ignore the climatic and epidemic forces of nature that man simply cannot seem to prevent or even sometimes brings to bear on himself. RIP empires.