Roman empire
Article
Roman empire is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between May 06, 2021 and September 24, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “There were some 2,500 cities in the Roman empire”; “How will the Roman Empire survive this?”; “then revealing it was from Livy writing in the first-century Roman Empire”. It most often appears alongside Roman empire, 320 AD, 476 AD.
Metadata
- Category: Places
- Mention count: 4
- Issue count: 4
- First seen: May 06, 2021
- Last seen: September 24, 2024
Appears In
- Your Book Review: Through The Eye Of A Needle
- Highlights From The Comments On Acemoglu And AI
- Is There An Illusion Of Moral Decline?
- How Often Do Men Think About Rome?
Related Pages
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- Roman empire (2 shared issues)
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- 320 AD (1 shared issues)
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- 476 AD (1 shared issues)
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- A Collection Of Unmitigated Pedantry (1 shared issues)
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- ACOU (1 shared issues)
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- ACOUP (1 shared issues)
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- ACX Survey Results (1 shared issues)
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- Africa (1 shared issues)
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- African ceramics (1 shared issues)
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- African wines (1 shared issues)
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- Age of Empires 2 (1 shared issues)
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- AGI (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Brown uses these primary sources to narrate the entry of the rich into the Christian churches of the western Roman empire. Christ said, “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” The Church transformed the rich and the rich transformed the church. Many rich Christians gave their wealth to the church – during their life or after their death.
Gradually, the senatorial aristocracy in Italy grew poorer. They no longer had access to their overseas landholdings. Meanwhile, the Christian church grew richer and more powerful as it received donations of land. By 535 AD, this relatively prosperous, post-Respublica order in Italy came crashing down. The eastern Roman empire, led by emperor Justinian, launched a terrible invasion of Gothic Italy. By the end of Justinian’s wars, the remaining wealth of the senatorial elite had been mostly destroyed. “The church became the only great landowner left standing in Italy.”
A more reasonable military engineer tells the first engineer to focus on more pragmatic and immediate risks, instead of wasting time worrying about superexplosions. Cannons are already powerful enough to batter down all but the strongest city walls, he points out. In the near future, the Ottomans might have a cannon powerful enough to destroy Constantinople's walls. How will the Roman Empire survive this?
I’m biased against the introduction, where they pull the old trick of starting with a quote on how society is falling apart, then revealing it was from Livy writing in the first-century Roman Empire. They expect us to be shocked, as if every essay on moral decline hasn’t used the same flourish since - well, since the first-century Roman Empire.
There’s a Twitter meme on how men constantly think about the Roman Empire. Some feminist friends objected that women think about Rome a lot too. To settle the matter, I included a question about this on this year’s ACX survey, “Have you thought about the Roman Empire in the past 24 hours?” (the Byzantine Empire also counted). Here are responses from 607 cis women and 4,925 cis men:
Inline links: settle, this year’s ACX survey
In car with friends on a road trip, we were discussing predicting eclipses with ancient technology. The Roman empire came up as a benchmark for an advanced society in antiquity, and we discussed their time keeping methods.
I'm reading some post-Roman-Empire historical fiction by Ken Follett, set in what's now the UK c. 1000 C.E., and naturally legacy of the Roman Empire comes up (e.g. Latin, the churches).