I recommend this 10-minute YouTube clip: The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) --- Senate scene.
In the big-budget Hollywood movie, the Roman Senate debate whether to expel the barbarians, enslave them, or to allow them to become citizens.
The Roman senators seem to lack the will to make Rome great again. The empire is eventually overrun by barbarians.
3 comments:
Interesting, but what if the Roman Empire was a centralised highly regulated regime but the Barbarians the ancient equivalent of free market capitalists?
The Barbarians probably were the free market capitalists. But when the Roman monetary system collapsed, it was a lot harder to have markets in anything, both inside the empire and outside.
From the point of view of the Romans, the fall of the Roman Empire was a bad thing.
There were no free market capitalists! Conservatives are such liberals! Consumerism consumes all values, character, religion, families, finances, etc. and just produces addiction and aloofness. Anyhow, Gibbon published the first volume of his history in the year 1776. That's a clue.
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