Interesting article on BBC website http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18159752
"History tells us that complex societies do collapse. And the great
constant, along with climate and economic forces, is human nature.
Societies, then and now, are made by people, and they are often brought
down by people. Rome in the 4th Century had been a great power defended by a huge army. A century later the power and the army had gone....Other strands in the collapse of the Roman West are more difficult to
quantify, but they centre on "group feeling", the glue that keeps
society working together towards common goals. Lose that and you get a
kind of nervous breakdown in the social order, which leads to what
archaeologists call "systems collapse"...The British historian Gildas (c 500-570) in his diatribe
against contemporary rulers in the early 500s, looking back over the
story of the Fall of Roman Britain, lists the military failures, but
behind them he speaks bitterly of a loss of nerve and direction, a
failure of "group feeling"." [BBC]
A humorous sketch about the Romans from Monty Python's "The Life of Brian" movie:
No comments:
Post a Comment