Unit 6:: The Fall of Rome and the European Peoples
A Milestone Documents E-text
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Unit 6: The Fall of Rome and the EuropeanPeoples
https://doi.org/10.3735/9781961844582.book.part.026

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Abstract

The idea of a “fall” of the Roman Empire is an enduring one in Western civilization. Since the fifth century, subsequent empires have nervously looked to the example of Rome for warning signs of their own state’s collapse. Such works as Edward Gibbon’s massive set The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, written in the eighteenth century, presented the end of Roman dominance as the result of weakness and moral failings—a loss of essential “Romanness”—and depicted the subsequent medieval age as a disaster for civilization.

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