Rome: The Rise And Fall Of Rome

Historical evidence would suggest that the factors that contribute to the collapse of a civilization are inversely related to those that contributed to its rise. A civilization that rises utterly independently may fall under the power of another. A civilization built on a solid agricultural industry may fail as the result of over-farming. A civilization that expands massively may dissolve as the capital loses control of the farthest reaches. The fall of a civilization (or the absorption of a civilization by another) is caused by a critical combination of internal struggles and external pressures: internal problems include political corruption, socioeconomic inequality, lack of medical care, and exhaustion of resources, while external problems …show more content…
According to the ancient story, two boys, Romulus and Remus, were raised by a she-wolf after having been abandoned at the Tiber River. As adults, they wished to found a city but conflict arose around the details of location, leadership, and the name of the city. The result was fratricide: Romulus killed his brother and named the city Rome, after himself. As time went on, the success of Rome was built on conquest, political competence, and military might, and at its largest, Rome spanned from Northern Africa to Northwestern Asia, including all of what are now Italy and Spain, encompassing much of the land bordering the Mediterranean Sea. It is from Rome that we get our governmental systems, architecture, road design, the calendar, sanitation and plumbing, and even the building blocks of our language. The Romans (or at least those who were comfortably middle-class) were educated, well fed, politically savvy, abundantly hydrated (thanks to the impressive aqueduct system), and protected by a fierce and competent military. And yet they fell! How? To this day, historians are not entirely sure. In an attempt to explain the fall of Rome simply, some historians suggest that Romans were poisoned by the lead in their piping systems, or that mosquitoes carrying a deadly illness infected the population. More likely, the vast geographic span of the civilization resulted in a dilution of power. So many people lived across such an enormous area that many did not feel even remotely associated with the noble capital. Rome shrank as the far-flung outer reaches drifted from the centralized power of the Senate; warfare along ill-defined borders disrupted trade; and invasions by Goths, barbarians, Huns, Goths, Anglo-Saxons, and other nomadic peoples weakened Rome by exacerbating problems already existent within the city. Meanwhile, corruption, inflation,