Is the middle picture on the “weird followers” page (wow, no kidding!), the sleeping lady on the couch, Roseanne Barr? 
Anyway, Frost’s other theories aside, the fact remains that this theory of his doesn’t account for the fact that the western part of the empire fell while the eastern part didn’t, given that the same eugenical pressures towards peace were affecting the entire empire.
^
The Eastern Empire was richer, had a larger population, and had been civilised for millenia. Many parts of the Western Empire had been filled with nomadic tribemen in living memory.
Put another way: The Eastern Mediterranean simply remained civilized after the Western relapsed into barbarism – the East (Greece, Egypt, Anatolia, Syria, etc.) having been civilized long, long before Rome conquered it, while civilization in the West was still a tenuous matter of roads and scattered outposts and colonia.
Hey KOBAL2, you know the drill, it should ALWAYS be preceeded by “Cheese Eating” etc.etc.
Just get it right man.
I wonder if Septimus Severus or Trajen had attempted to destroy Persia when they each had the chance, would success in the East have helped the Empire survive. The crises of the third century was compounded with the new threat in Iraq. One part of me says that it would have solved most of Romes problems. Another part says all it would have accomplished would have been to introduce a whole new set of issue for the Empire.
Is a couple of months enough for zombification?
If the Empire had expanded to the east, it would have bumped into India, just as Alexander the Great did. That would become the “big threat.” And so on.
And…the bigger the empire gets, the greater the threat from internal disorder!
The Roman Empire might have been saved – for a while – by something like telegraphy. Otherwise… Ka-Boom.
This is so mundane and pointless I didn’t even want to put it in MPIMS, but here seems good and it’s only partly a hijack-
I was watching part of some documentary on The History Channel last week that mentioned the barbarian sack of Rome. It was reenacted using a set any community theatre could probably have matched, but what irked me was that the barbarians were wearing Alley Oop/Clan-of-the-Cave-Bear costumes, as if barbarian meant some sort of high functioning Neanderthal on holiday in Italy. Did anybody else see this piece of schlock? (I"m not even sure what the subject was [i.e. whether it was Nostradamus backwards predicting the fall of Rome or whether crop circles caused it] but I do know the Fall of Rome™ was a segment rather than the entire focus.)
Barbarian just meant ‘not Roman [originally not Greek]’. Many of their leaders were in fact Roman educated and rich as any Roman aristocrat, their soldiers were often as well armed- often identically armed- to Roman troops, and many were in fact former soldiers in the Roman auxiliary legions. It helps in understanding how ‘barbarians’ overran a great city (that was not the capital city any more anyway)- they really weren’t knuckle draggers swinging clubs against swords.
So I take it the armies in the History Channel documentary didn’t look like this:
http://www.durolitum.co.uk/images/banner.jpg
Technically, that’s a reenactment of Roman soldiers, but Alaric’s Goths or Giseric’s Vandals would be similarly dressed and equipped.