Did the Roman Empire really begin its decline with Commodus or is this a Gibbon meme?

This is autistic. You can trace any political trend back to its conception, that doesn't mean the decline started at the same time. There's this tendency to write of the Roman empire, possibly the most durable political entity of all time, as a state of constant decline from the get go, and it's really baffling to me.

Please tell me how several shit emperors early on didnt corrupt the political system. When Augustus people thought of whose of his decendents would assume power, when Nero died people knew that the dude with the biggest military would get it

That was never the case. Roman military tyranny predates Augustus and was always the fundamental factor in imperial succession. That didn't change with the Flavian or Antonine dynasties, it would have changed with the Julian dynasty either.

This is not even mentioning the fact that Julian emperors being bad is a meme. The only one of them who was truly bad was Caligula, and he was inconsequential.

>Augustus
>replaced the republic
He restored it

the Empire started declining once it wasn't the Republic

t. Senator

The Republican system was breaking down well before the Empire came into being. It was a system of government designed to govern a small Italian city state that found itself controlling a global empire, it was never going to last without serious reform.

>Julians being mad was a meme
>Tiberius was tyranical purge-happy autocrat
>Caligula was the purest definition of crazy
>Claudius was weak
>Nero cared more about prabks than administration and killed himself in the end

I see, im talking to a fucking brainlet

This. In fact Rome was doomed from the 5th century BC onwards

The funny thing about Decline and Fall is that it goes to 1453, so he starts writing about the decline over a millennium before the Empire falls.

>Rome
>1453
Are you american?

It began with the systemic crisis of the 3rd century and had nothing to do with this or that guy being smart or stupid.

Structural situations are what matter. Everything else is memes and bs for brainlets.

>structural situations are what matter, everything else is memes.
>Augustus and Aurelian were memes

>Aurelian was a meme
duh

>Claudius, often considered in top 5 lists for Roman Emperors, was weak, a generic and unrelated term to the argument of Julian's being crazy
>Tiberius utilized strategies that other rulers like Sulla utilized so that made him bad

I can't defend Nero like the other user though. He was on pace to bankrupt the empire. He was irredeemably a bad administrator. Though I don't think he was mad.

>wont make excuses for Nero
>deffends Tiberiuses political purges and sexual abuse of slaves

Also, Claudius had several psycological problems, it was a near miracle he didnt go crazy

Maybe you shouldn't trust uncredible accounts of history from people who had every reason to dislike the people they're writing about.

Tiberius did nothing uncharacteristic of the time, hence why he earned the ire of the senate and they (likely) fabricated rumors about his debauchery that were out of character for him.

Claudius, by most accounts, dealt with a stutter possibly related to a central nervous degenerative disease and nothing psychological beyond the whole coping with everyone in your family being murdered or plotting against you dynamic. He is often regarded as one of the best emperors.

>purge-happy autocrats
>not being the awesome

t. corrupt middle-manager who needs to get GULAG'd

People fail to realize that Gibbon isn't a real historian. He's a histographer who had a very clear set of prejudices, narrative bias, and authorial intent from the very start to color his readers view of the Roman Empire to his own thinking.

He's talking about the actual year in which the last traces of the Roman state were extinguished- that is the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the death of the last Emperor.

This is demonstrably false. He is a product of his time in terms of biases but so is every historian. This meme of historians trying to claim people they disagree with weren't historians needs to fucking die. Prove them wrong with the available evidence because resorting to ad hominem will get less people to listen to you.

>This is demonstrably false
Wrong. Also he is not a historian, he is a histographer.

None of what I said also was a ad hominem attack either, home slice.

That's some great proof you supplied for your claim that no one in the field believes.

Reread my post, amigo. I never said you used ad hominem; I said historians use it against the people they disagree with, nowadays its pop history authors or journalists writing historiography. We both know you're not a historian.

He did the best he could in his time and with his sources to the level people still read him and enjoy it, as it was my case. Of course, if you think his is the definitive History and there were no advancements trough new evidence in 250 years you're pretty much retarded. In that regard I can recommend the podcast "The Fall of Rome".

The decline started with Christianity becoming the prominent religion

Roman Empire fell in 1806

>In that regard I can recommend the podcast
you're getting fed garbage for free

Guess we should throw out all acvounts we have on the nazis that were made by jews, since they had goos reason to hate them

Claudius looks super good because he was surrounded by his fellow julians, most of the achievements of his reign were made by his underlings

The guy who hosted it did his PhD in the subject, how is that garbage?

he has no responsibility to tell the truth
>phd
sophistry

That's a fantastic hyperbole you constructed there; however, if you were learned you would know that Suetonius (the closest primary source to Tiberius' reign) is not regarded very favorably for his authenticity. This is why any modern historian takes his accounts with a grain of salt.

>Claudius looks super good because he was surrounded by people I argued where terrible emperors, specifically his reign was bookmarked by two emperors widely considered to be among the worst emperors, and his achievements were attributed to these people that I have supplied no proof for.

High level discourse, user.

>t. basement dweller "historian"

If he attaches his name and academic credibility to his production, then yeah he has every motivation to tell the truth. So provide examples where he blatantly lied or misinformed people or stifle your cries.

gibbon has the intelligence of the animal he was named in honour of

>prove hes lying
I don't need to. I just proved he has no reason to be truthful. There is no law that says he is to be truthful. He did not agree to be truthful. He sent 'it' onto the internet and you all started sucking his cock, that's all he did.

>proof
I never claimed "proof" in the first place, kiddo. I stated a widely held academic belief on Gibbons.

Low quality bait.

If you want me to start listi g every single roman that keep Claudiuses reign floating i wont bother further then the likes of Aulus Plautius.

Additinally, your point of "sources are doubtful therefore it most likely didnt happened is quite flawed. If most of his contemporaries labeled him as a mosnter it should indicate these acusations must contain some truth

Gibbon cover Byzantium as well tardo.

I just finished the first volume of the Decline and Fall. Gibbon asserts that the Decline began with the Praetorians killing Commodus and auctioning off the station of emperor to the highest bidder. That action set precedence for the Praetorians and other Legions to claim their own emperor without Senatorial authority.

However, Gibbon does not compare with the Year of the Four Emperors, which had a similar course of action (upstart emperors from Legions around the realm).

You mean 3rd century
(Hint:Crisis of the 3rd century)

>histographer

histographer (plural histographers)

one who describes organic tissues; a histologist

en.wiktionary.org/wiki/histographer

If you actually read Gibbion you'll know that he cites the sources extensively throughout his work. If you obtain a modern copy of the work, you'll also find editorial corrections in the text where Gibbon got it wrong.

>stay a brainlet

>>phd
>sophistry
PhD: Doctor of Philosophy

It's not a widely held view unless you just genuinely don't know the difference between history or historiography. He made historiographic anecodotes in The Decline but the work is a work of history, bit historiography. If you're going to assert this is widely held view in academia then surely you could supply someone referring to The Decline as a historiographic work.

I'll throw out an ad hominen for that user and call him a brainlet because he tried to read Gibbon but his prose was too formal for him and stopped

Gibbon's writing is a lost art, people should write like him more. Churchill loved Gibbon and his oration and writing are heavily influenced by him.

>Regarding Claudius

So if you have all these lists of people then why not supply me with some source that states Claudius' successes were attributed to his advisors.

>Regarding what Tiberius' contemporaries said

user we don't know what his contemporaries said because the closest living historian we have works for was born decades after his reign. Suetonius and Tacitus have also shown a tendency for not regarding what we would consider as historical authenticity very high. I'm not making this up.

>Suetonius
If I recall, Suetonius's life of Augustus is considered to be somewhat accurate, since at the time of writing the life, Suetonius was granted access to the imperial archives. He supports events with "this is what I read in Augustus's own hand..." etc..

But he goofed up and lost that privilege, I forget for what reason though

late republic was a mess but returning to monarchy wasn't much better. Flexibility usually comes at the cost of accountability and therefore competence

Not to mention Claudius being elected emperor.

Gibbon, as noted above, is somewhat full of shit on the topic.

t. Cato

The Gracchus bros showed the people you could do whatever the fuck you wanted and after their deaths the decline started.

The trouble with pinpointing a decline is you can always point to one thing and say "this is when it started" but then you can see what feeds into that and go back further and say "this is when it started"

The truth therefore is that the Decline of the Roman Empire began at the foundation of the Roman Empire.

Probably because it was an empire that somehow in its 500 years never established an even remotely clear system of succession, and while it had all the pretences of a Divine Emperor, no one really believed it, and they only ruled as long as they could constantly defend their position.

It wasn't durable or stable, the constant fragments and civil wars tell you that. The only reason it lasted so long is because the idea of Rome kept it alive.

roman empire fell in 1917

At least you admitted to making a personal attack.

He wasn't a "historian" anymore than Herodotus was.

I think he was a professional shitposter. Sort of like Voltaire whenever he wanted to indulge himself in commenting historic stuff. History as a serious discipline didn't start until the scientific method applied to social sciences and humanities happened. Or even better, until Gramsci happened.

Before that, what you had, and specially in the XVIII, was the kind of prolific wankers like Gibbon having a preconcieved idea (obviously lacking all basis and scientific scrutiny) about something and then writing a book to support his own preconceived ideas with the final goal of congratulating himself and orgasming again and again and again from reading out loud his own intentionally biased, unscrutinized, unchallenged, prejudiced and preconceived masturbatory prose in which the narrative is cheatingly engineered to lead right to where he wanted it to lead in the first place. What we would call nowadays; propaganda.

I think his name, Gibbon, was very suiting.

You cannot look at a state which lasted for fifteen centuries, six of those as absolute masters of Europe and the middle east, and say it wasn't durable. The lack of a clear succession system was a flaw, but it was far from the thing that doomed it.

>Guess we should throw out all acvounts we have on the nazis that were made by jews, since they had goos reason to hate them
agree

If you want to measure decline in the sense of things getting gradually worse, regardless of decision-making, it begins with the Antonine plague. If you want to blame one person for the decline, it goes to Septimius Severus.

The cause of Rome's decline through a lens of policy-making really gets going at the 3rd century crisis, and if you could blame one person for that crisis, it's Septimius. The constant imperial usurpations and the consequences that followed were a product of a military culture that Severus fostered.

You can blame Commodus in the sense that he gave Severus nothing to work with as far a the Senate goes. Commodus' purges made it difficult for Severus to even pretend that the Senate was relevant, but that pretending was at the core of what made the Principate system work.

Severus' enrichment of the soldiers and the scorning of all other men laid to bear the reality that the nominal authority of the Senate truly counted for nothing as far as political legitimacy goes. This gave every 2-bit general the idea that it would be too easy to seize power if the opportunity arose, and the external threats of the Sassanids and Barbarians created those opportunities..

Is this pasta?

yes that autist commodus started it
>imagine having a hooligan organizer as your president

>You cannot look at a state which lasted for fifteen centuries,
Look we all know the Byzantines were the continuation of Rome but to seriously consider it the same state and entity is just foolish.

it was
>until ivstinianvs I
>before iraklios (cultural hellenization)

>to seriously consider it the same state and entity is just foolish.
Why? Any date proposed for marking a differentiation between them is completely arbitrary.

It is indisputably the same entity. You can debate the cultural "Romanitas" of the empire and argue the people lost whatever it was that made them Roman, but politically there is no break whatsoever between the antique and medieval empire.

empirical evidence is a joke

Let's take a look at the run-up to the Crisis of the Third Century:

>Antonine Plague wipes out possibly up to a third of the population of the Roman Empire. This plague was ongoing during the reigns of Marcus Aurelius and Commodus, and had a severe impact of trade, manpower, agricultural output and tax revenue.
>Marcomannic Wars, a protracted series of damaging conflicts which even threatened Italy
>Commodus' wasteful and corrupt reign, spending ridiculous amounts of money (which was being rapidly debased) on games and festivals. Allowing the whole administration of the Empire to suffer.
>The Year of the Five Emperors: a clear demonstration of the dangerous power of the Praetorian Guard, setting a truly awful precedent with the auctioning off of the Imperial office and the seizure of power by Septimius Severus using nothing but the loyalty of the army.
>The Severan dynasty itself: generally incompetent. Septimius expanded an already overly powerful military and bribed them a ridiculous amount. Caracalla did much the same, but without any of the military competence of his father.
>One of the most important but overlooked factors: the replacement of the Parthian dynasty with the Sassanians. Suddenly Rome was not only facing threats on multiple fronts, but for the first time ever it was set against a truly formidable opponent in the east which could - and nearly did - completely overrun Syria, Armenia, and even Egypt.

Clearly Commodus is just a small part of the overall decline which was going on in the second half of the 2nd century.

The policy of lavishing more donatives on the soldiers than the state was able to pay was something Commodus got going. Commodus lavished them so well that they came to expect their bloated salaries and when the senate-appointed Pertinax tried to restore sanity to the budget, the praetorians chimped out and murdered him and auctioned off the office as a giant “fuck-you” to the senate. The problem of succession had been an issue which had been percolating ever since Augustus made the Empire into an unofficial monarchy without clearly delineated laws of succession.

Severus was more a symptom of the disease than the cause, but his lasting contribution to Rome’s decline was his dynasty, so dysfunctional and drunk with power as to make the Julio-Claudians seem well adjusted. After Septimius you get Geta and Caracalla, both spoiled little demon-children who hates each other’s guts, degenerate tranny Elagabalus who’d rather be getting fucked in the boipucci, and Alexander, a timid wimp of a mama’s boy who sat on his hands as the Persian Empire renewed itself with a vengeance. With a line up this weak, any political philosophy would have been doomed to fail when you’re relying on les enfant teribles and their equally terrible mothers to enact policy

Kingdoms die from within in all cases. Pointing fingers is what the last of the romans did and they all died in public view with none weeping for them.

Commodus just blew a lot of money on stupid shit. The Roman empire easily could have recovered from that. The Antonine plague was more important. Commodus was just a colorful idiot leader. The real decline starts at the Crisis of the Third Century.

By what metric are you rating it to talk about decline? Militarily it probably peaked around Constantine I.

Part of the issue here is that Rome wasn't necessarily getting worse, but its enemies were getting stronger - ie the Sassanids replacing the Parthians and the Germanic tribes becoming more organized.

Then of course there's the issue with inflation and inflated soldier's pay, but what could realistically have been done about the inflation problem?