Everyone seems to write about the fall of the Roman Empire – Gibbon et al. I guess they look at the end of the Empire as the seminal event because it marks the end of a thousand years of Roman power and the onset of the Dark Ages. I, however, would rather study the fall of the Roman Republic because it is much more interesting. First of all the Republic is a classic governmental form like the democracies of Greece. The Empire, by contrast, was a corrupt totalitarian system which was bound to collapse at some point under its own weight.
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