“It turns out, in short, that the fall of Rome is to human history what the end of the dinosaurs is to natural history…” (Holland, 23). Tom Holland believes that the Empire did not truly die on September 4, 476, and that “the fall” was much like the extinction of dinosaurs. Holland mentions that if the birds can still be claimed to be dinosaurs, then the Roman Empire could have lasted into the Middle Ages and beyond. David Walker claimed that the Roman Empire collapsed because of “declining moral values and political civility at home, an overconfident and overextended military in foreign lands and fiscal irresponsibility by the central government” (Holland, 24). Walker said that he saw these problems in America, and that these same situations
