Comment by HeatrayEnjoyer
2 days ago
Governments and nations collapse. Anyone who was bullish in 235 CE Rome would have died long before their investments would be back in the black.
2 days ago
Governments and nations collapse. Anyone who was bullish in 235 CE Rome would have died long before their investments would be back in the black.
235 CE Rome? The Western Roman Empire lasts another two centuries- Romulus Augustus is deposed in 476 CE. That's longer than the US Constitution has existed (ratified in 1788).
In many respects the deposing of the last Western Roman Emperor is a bad date to use for the "Fall of Rome", given that the general socioeconomic trends of the time are fairly continuous for that period and contemporary sources didn't place much value on the shift of politics.
The Crisis of the Third Century, which starts in 235, is where the inflection point between "broadly stable" and "broadly negative" sets in, and the shocks both of the Crisis of the Third Century and the Plague of Justinian are each larger than the shock of the deposing of the last Western Roman Emperor.
I agree that Augustulus and Ordacer mattered to almost no one by 476, which is why it happened the way it did.
However, the point I was trying to make is that Rome's decline sure lasted a very long time indeed.
Additionally, 235 being so important is only obvious in hind-sight. To anyone living in the Empire in 235, I suspect it felt an awful lot like the Year of the Five Emperors (about as far away from 235 as Diocletian is the other direction) and it wasn't until a while later that it became clear that no Septimus Severus type was going to be able to put it all back together quickly.
> The Western Roman Empire lasts another two centuries
How long to you have to live, to see a return?
235 to 285 were tumultuous times, civil war and all that goes with it