Alternate Historiography Game: Make up your own cause for the Fall of Rome

tus3

I had been thinking about the 210 Reasons for the decline of the Roman Empire: an historian had, as a joke, collected into one list everything which had been claimed to be a reason for the fall of the Roman Empire. It ended up quite a list containing the likes of Lead Poisoning, Tristesse, Villa Economy, and Deforestation; obviously, it also contained mutually contradictory entries like Pacifism and Militarism, Decline of the Cities and Excessive Urbanization, Christianity and Paganism, Rationalism and Irrationality, and Capitalism and Communism.

This made me remember some things I had read on this very forum; for example, I had once encountered here the claim that the Roman Empire fell because of the Senatorial elite abusing their influence to engage in tax evasion and avoidance. Which made me realize we could always add some new items to the list.

So, I thought to make an AHC Game about it, where in every comment you can make up a new Reason for the Decline of the Roman Empire yourself. The quality and plausibility is less important than whether it is fun.

I will go first:

Reason 211: Lack of Decadence:
Thanks to all those civil wars there no longer was enough money and time left for debauched parties, and gladiator fights were banned by Christians; morale plummeted because people no longer could have any fun.
 

Evil Crusader

Oh, it doesn't seem to be there! Dibs, dibs!
213: Too big to be held together successfully.
214: Too small to have strategic depth where it was needed (on the Limes).
 
Mildtryth

Mildtryth

Reason 215: Lack of a stable succession system, which led to civil wars and short-term solutions to avoid them that weakened the empire or made the civil wars worse in the long run.
 
DanMcCollum

DanMcCollum

Reason 216: Not enough Germans. Roman culture had grown stuck in its ways and without an injection of new people and new ideas, it was DOOMED.
 
Mad Bad Rabbit

Mad Bad Rabbit

Reason 216½ : Flatulence. Romans lived on cabbage, onions and beans, the meat and seafood they occasionally got was of questionable freshness, and their water came from the Tiber. The resulting miasma literally ate away at the marble and destroyed their city.
 
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shearsforest

shearsforest

Reason 217: It was simply not a worthwhile venture — later attempts at establishing large European empires would also ultimately fail.
 
Mad Bad Rabbit

Mad Bad Rabbit

Reason 219 : Aliens.
alienhair.jpg
 
Collondi

Collondi

Reason 220: hygene. With the advent of Christianity, and the rise of church dogma denouncing the practice of public bathhouses where dozens of men get naked and bathe together as, in the words of pope Sylvester I, “kinda gay,” bathing began to die out and the per capita stench of the average Roman went up by 133%. The economy suffered as men because less willing to do business with those whose B.O. was particularly strong, and desertion went up as military camps were said to be especially putrid. According to one source, Emperor Romulus Augustulus’s final words before being deposed were “My god, I have had it with this place, won’t somebody please invent deoderant!”
 

Arariboia Guamá

Reason 222: Lack of a eugenic breeding program. (wonder who's gonna get this one)

Reason 223: Not conquering Germania and acquiring a smaller border further to the east.

Reason 224: Not enough garum.

Reason 225: Didn't invent the steam engine and so never industrialized
 

Yeiro

Reason 228: After long periods of peace the Roman army weakended becoming lees efective against foreign threats, the fact that the eastern empire survived can be atribued to having an important threath (the sassanids) in its border forcing them to mantain their troops ready for battle, the western empire on the other hand didn't have any so when an important threat (the german migrations) apeared their armies during much time having known only peace weren't ready and thus failed to many times until it was imposible to recover
 

Chillvillain

Reason 229: Pro-seidonism: In year 39, the heroic Emperor Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus finally declared war on an enemy that had bifurcated the Empire, nearly surrounded the metropole, and had likely killed more Romans than any other enemy in their history. I am of course talking about the sea. Despite the clear threat of this foe, the Emperor has been mocked as a madman for his efforts, and in his time little was spared for the war effort. Because of this failure, Rome died while the Atlantic Ocean survived and is now rising to claim more territory.

Reason i^2 = -1: Unreality Awareness: Romans developed a greater awareness of Donna D2's TikTok content and, since they weren't fooling anyone anymore, decided to throw in the towel.

Reason 230: Monovitalism: The life and death of cultures match their viewpoints on death. Chinese Taoism does not overly concern itself with concepts of death so it never truly dies. Hinduism in India believes that death is followed by life with a new set of circumstances, so the concept of a united India is continually restored in myriad forms. The worldviews that Rome adopted from Greece and then Christianity only allowed for one life before being ushered into the afterlife, so too was the fate of Rome.
 

Stahlo

Reason 231: General dissatisfaction within the Roman citizenry turned to outright rebellion when there was a shortage of a special spicy flavor of garum.
 

Arariboia Guamá

Reason 232: If Rome fell, why it didn't just rise up? Its this easy, just rise up bro. I think they are just lazy, honestly.

Reason 233: The Roman Elite figured out that it was easier to rule multiple states from the shadows, thus allowed the Empire to "fall" and started ruling the post-Roman world from the shadows. Europe has been ruled by a secret elite descended from the Roman Senatorial Class since the 5th century. Every state in the former Western Empire has since been ruled by them, or people fighting their secret scheme. All wars between european states are either fake wars, wars between the ones "in" on the conspiracy and those out of it, or inner-conspiracy struggles. The Eastern Roman elites disagreed with this scheme because all of them wanted the Purple, thus the Gothic Wars and other similar wars between the ERE and the post-roman states. The European Union exists because the Shadow Roman Conspiracy has decided to come out into the open and rebuild the Empire.

Reason 234: The Roman Empire fought a shadow war against an otherdimensional invasion of Orcs, Ogres, Goblins and other monsters, led by a shadowy evil overlord from another reality. The Romans won, but the victory left them vulnerable to Barbarian invasions and civil wars. The Church hid it all. All the medieval legends of fairies, monsters, demons, etc etc, are actually tales about the remnants of the Evil Overlord's army of monsters and otherdimensional beings, who remained hiding in shadows among the ruins of post-Roman Europe. The legend of Saint George and the Dragon is also related.
 

jacob ningen

reason 237: happy primes the bureaucracy became so obsessed with determining if a given number was a happy prime for every base that all resources were devoted to this problem and thus were so distracted the Empire ground to a halt. Unfortunately the only improvement over Eratosthenes was Fermats little theorem which gave several results that were false due to not discovering Euler's square test or Carmichael's proof of false fermat witnesses
 
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