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His promotion of Christianity was historically very significant, as was his promotion of Constantinople as a new seat of power. Granted, he did not have the final say in making Christianity a state religion nor did he build the big walls surrounding Constantinople, but his role was decisive nevertheless in both cases. The influence and role of Christianity does not need any elaboration, yet it was nearly crushed under Diocletian (so they say, at least). Constantinople as a strategically positioned capital city played a vital role in stabilizing the Eastern half of the empire in the 5th century as well as checking the advance of Persians, Arabs and Turks. There are lots of potential if:s in both cases, and the very nature of these hypothetical scenarios leave little doubt as to the importance of his chosen religion and seat of power. For instance, what if Christianity had remained a marginalized sect in the Roman Empire? Would the Empire still have fallen the way it did? If yes, would there have been anyone else capable of fulfilling the Church's role during the Early Middle Ages? What if Constantinople had not been built where it was? Would the Eastern half of the Empire have suffered the same fate as the Western half? Would a Justinian have been possible in those circumstances? Would the Byzantines have been able to withstand the onslaught of Persians and Arabs? If not, what implications would that have had for Early Medieval Europe? Another important impact of Constantine's rule was the very nature of his rise to power. Diocletian had laid out new rules for how the Roman Empire was to be governed, with two Augusta ruling the two halves of the Empire with a further two Caesars ruling under each Augustus. Constantine wasn't supposed to become emperor and the way he did it, he broke Diocletian's system before it had a chance to prove its worth in practice. Without Constantine, would Diocletian's system of governance have solved the chronic mismanagement of the Empire? Hard to tell as it was never given a chance in practice, so Constantine definitely did alter the Roman Empire was governed in a very critical stage of its existence. Constantine did OTOH prove to be a very able and long-lived ruler on his own merits, but as usual the issue of succession was left hanging in the air after his rule. So, to conclude, Constantine's role isn't at all over-emphasized. He, along with Augustus, ahaped events for centuries to come in a way that most emperors were unable to. Of course, influence is not all about personal virtues and capabilities. It's just as much, if not more, about historical circumstances and chance events. If someone like Aurelian or Julian the Apostate would have ruled a little longer, they might have influenced the Empire in a very profound way, but they didn't while Constantie did, snd that's all there is to it.

I don't think that the fall of Rome was necessary for Western development, although I don't think that the fall of Rome necessarily needed to be an impediment for development either. What is an undisputable fact, is that Rome was superior to any other Western European entity at the time of the Roman conquests. With the Roman conquest followed the spread of Roman civilization and technological know-how. Archaeology is pretty much firm on these benefits for Western Europe. OTOH, it's hard to deny that the Late Roman Empire was in an overall state of stagnation or decline (inflation, decline of monumental buildings, less mobility/trade, etc). Yet, at the same time during the Late Roman Empire we see more urban centers develop in the West, and some of these urban centers such as Trier get an unprecedented status of importance. We also see many Roman villas popping up throughout the Roman West during the Late Roman Empire. The few references we have of waterpowered industrial machines in the West are also from the Late Roman Empire (the watermill complex at Barbegal, the watermill-powered stone saws along the Moselle river). During the Late Roman Empire, we also see an increasing political and cultural influence of people from places such as Gaul and Britain. Not only the typical run-of-the-mill military leaders, but also poets, rhetoricians and religious authorities (Ausonius and Pelagius, to name just two), which testifies to the increasing acculturation of the Western populus. Given a century or two more, the West might well have overtaken the cultural primacy within the Roman Empire from the East and this might have given the whole empire a new and fresh impetus, without the need for 500 years of post-Roman chaos and decline. Consequently, I don't see that there was any obvious necessity or benefit for the West to suddenly break free from Rome, given the fragility of state institutions and urban life as a whole in the West. A gradual loosening of the ties would have been a far better outcome in any case than the rapid dissolution that occured in the 5th century. The lights didn't fortunately go out completely, but it did get far too close for comfort to something that could have been the end of civilization. Anyway, this is a highly speculative issue with a lot of if's and but's. For instance, when talking about the "fall of Rome" we usually limit ourselves to the disintegration of the Roman West, but we ignore the fall of the Roman East which came about through the Arab conquests and which put an end to much of Mediterranean trade on which the West also depended. The Arab conquests hit the hardest the most developed parts of the West, namely southern Gaul, Italy, Iberia and Greece (Greece belonging to the common notion of "the West", although being a part of the Eastern Roman Empire). Events such as this need to be taken into account as well. One could also put the issue of Rome's fall into a wider time-frame and consequently argue that the years between 500-1000 were not wasted years but were instead a period of "fermentation" of the new civilization that Europe was about to become and which would eventually bring us to modernity. Maybe it's better to be safe than sorry, given that we now know that we got a "happy ending". If history had taken an alternative route, that might have gotten us to the Moon by the year 1500 but it might (in accordance with the law of unforeseen consequences) just as well have led us nowhere at all or in circles for centuries to come. In the end, the break with Rome wasn't complete and this fact was in itself very crucial to Europe's eventual rise out of the "Dark Ages". Some rudimentary literacy and law survived the fall of Rome in the West and maintained an illusion of continuity. The Church was the most important Roman institution to survive the fall/disintegration and through it the Roman legacy was maintained. As for technology, apart from watermills and possibly the heavy plough, glass production for instance also continued into the Early Middle Ages, so former Roman subjects didn't regress completely back to their ancestral ways. So, to sum it up... Clearly, the dramatic way that Rome fell wasn't necessary or necessarily beneficial in any obvious way for the eventual rise of the West, but neither was the continuation of the Roman Empire necessary in any obvious way. Rome was in many ways little more than the sum total of the cities and provinces that it constituted. Within Rome's borders there were many local coinages and many local tax policies in place and Roman rule was very pragmatic and adapative to the local circumstances that it encountered. The big benefit of having Rome in place was simply as a unifying and pacifying factor for peoples that otherwise never would have interacted with each other or only would have interacted through petty local/tribal wars and raids. In that sense, I think that the idea that Roman central rule somehow stifled progress is an overstated case. Rome wasn't by any means centralized in the modern sense, it was more a collection of city states ruled by a common ideology than anything else. Roman mismanagement could of course be quite bad at times, but I think that any common rule of law and any common culture was in terms of potential progress better than no such common rule of law or common culture in place. The biggest inhibitor for progress would, at times when long-distance travel was rare and perilous, have been the large distances needed for ideas and technologies to travel, not the purported conformity to the iron fist of an emperor in Rome that you only would see on the occasional coin or statue. I think that this common rule of law and culture could have been maintained with or without Rome, once it had taken root. it's also obvious that it did take root to a certain degree in the West through the Latin (spoken and written) language, through Roman law (and its later Romano-Germanic derivatives) and through the Church. However, if I had to speculate, I think that given a century or two more of Roman rule, the Roman West would have been in a far better position to go about its own way, since urban life would have continued to develop, despite the general stagnancy of the Late Roman Empire. The West wasn't completely ready at the time the breakup occured to fend for itself, which is why we got the quite drastical drop in urban life throughout the West following Rome's fall.

The moment in time I would choose would probably be in AD80, more precisely during the inaugural games of the Colosseum. If I would pick one specific moment, then it would be the staged naval battles in the Colosseum, which would have been the most spectacular (and morally least questionable) part of the inaugural festivities. Why? Partly, because the opening of the Colosseum was and still, 2000 years later, remains the archetypal display of Rome's might, splendor and architectural achievements. Strictly speaking, this wasn't really a historically important event, since it was a pure spectacle for the masses. However, given its proper historical context I think this event would still qualify as being "Rome at its very best". Partly, however, also because the latter half of the 1st century AD was as good a time as any to be a Roman and to live in Rome. Much of the archeological evidence points to the 1st century AD as representing the pinnacle of Roman trade, mobility and cultural exchange, three areas which could be branded as Rome's greatest legacy and achievement. What Rome did better than anyone else was to bring together disparate peoples which otherwise never would have had such an opportunity. In the 1st century AD, the centrifugal pull of Rome was the greatest it had ever before been and would ever subsequently be.

This event has always stricken me as a testament to the quite extraordinary potency of the Christian message in the ancient world. In a time when even urgent military matters concerning insurgencies could take years to be brought to fruition, it took only 3 decades from the death of Jesus (an unknown Jewish rabbi from the far end of the empire) and just one decade from the start of Paul's mission to the gentiles, for the Christian movement to become "food for thought" for the Roman emperor and his closest circle. Quite remarkable, but that's for another topic I guess

The basis for his claim that the Chinese had an essentially modern state is IMHO very weak. His argument basically boils down to the Chinese having a strong monolithic central government (a concept that was neither applicable nor necessary nor desirable in the multi-cultural polis-based ancient Mediterranean and feudal medieval European spheres, with maybe the single exception of pharaonic Egypt) and to the existence of the meritocratic selection process for government officials as provided by the imperial examination system (however, he ignores the substantial practical limitations of this meritocracy). At the same time, he does concede that imperial China unlike medieval Europe (I'd also add, unlike the Roman Republic/Empire which he completely ignores in the book) lacked proper (i.e. codified) rule of law and that imperial China also unlike medieval Europe (I'd also add, unlike the Roman Republic and classical Athens which like I said he completely ignores) lacked any check on the power of the ruler. As a side issue (though a very important one), he also concedes that China never developed a proper market economy (I'd also add that China never developed a proper scientific culture, which he fails to mention even though it's another equally important side issue). Yet, despite acknowledging these important deficiencies in part or in whole, he is so enamoured by the bureaucratic apparatus of imperial China with its examination-based recruitment system (in reality only achievable for the precious few who could afford a very good education on their own, and this meritocracy was always subservient to the non-meritocratic nepotism of imperial eunuchs and concubines - and, of course, the almighty emperor himself) that he disregards everything else that he's mentioned, however briefly, and arbitrarily dubs imperial China as history's first modern state - a highly problematic conclusion, if you ask me! As for Francis Fukuyama himself, he's obviously good at writing, summarizing and repackaging existing thoughts and ideas. However, as a theorist and thinker I'd say that he's quite shallow and unoriginal - often biased and incorrect in his conclusions. I'd nevertheless still recommend this book as a very approachable text on a usually very dry subject as long as you don't uncritically accept all his conclusions and leaps of logic (which, as you might have guessed, leaves a lot to be desired).

I thought it was Seneca's quote But looking at Seneca @ Wikiquote, the attribution of the quote to him seems to be under dispute...

One plausible theory is that it was simply because of the difference in geography, since the Arab cavalry was most used to and most comfortable in flat (preferrably desert) environments where they could easily outmaneuver their enemies. This does OTOH not explain the ease with which the Arabs conquered Persia but the Persian case might be an exception to the rule because of the instability in Persia that preceded the Arab conquests. The Arabs were stopped at the Pyrenees and in Anatolia, maybe this is more than a coincidence? Of course, they raided past these mountainous regions, but for conquests you need fast and secure supply lines and mountain ranges can complicate matters... Your tribalism is simply overwhelming. I don't think it's tribalism to say that he is happy that his culture wasn't overrun by a foreign culture in the past which would have drastically changed his current cultural heritage which he feels a strong affinity to. This does not in itself imply disrespect or even lack of interest in the culture of others, only that he prefers his own culture for himself I'm happy too that Constantinople acted as a bulwark against Islam, thus enabling Europe to continue develop itself largely free from external conquests and tyranny. Looking back in retrospective I think this has worked out just fine and I wouldn't want it any other way Coincidentally, if you look at the way the Greco-Roman heritage is treated today in north Africa and the Middle East, it's in a rather sad state of neglect and indifference which makes me wonder whether it might not be due to the radical cultural break that Islam introduced with regard to the region's glorious Greco-Roman past, but that's a whole other subject.

A few reviews of the book Aristotle au mont Saint-Michel ("Aristotle at Mont Saint-Michel", book not yet available in English): Europe's debt to Islam given a skeptical look - http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/28/world/europe/28iht-politicus.2.12398698.html The West?s Cultural Continuity: Aristotle at Mont Saint-Michel - http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/3732 The Not-So-Dark Ages - http://www.thecatholicthing.org/content/view/1883/2/ This book basically outlines the West's continuity with its classical past and delivers some heavy blows against the idea that "were it not for the Muslims" that Europe would somehow have remained ignorant of its classical past. An interesting point in case is that the works of Aristotle actually had been translated directly from Byzantine sources in Greek in the monastery at Mont Saint-Michel in France, several decades before Arabic translations had even reached Moorish Spain, though for some reason the Arab translations were the ones that ultimately were diffused throughout Europe. My own main gripe however with the Arab translations is the fact that I don't see that this in itself is anything to be particularly grateful for. When the Arab Muslims conquered the Byzantine provinces, they found libraries full of Greek texts in places like Alexandria, which were being cared for by scribes who read, copied and diffused them from generation to generation. What followed after the Muslim conquests was that Greek as the lingua franca for the past millenium or so (at least since Alexander's conquests) was suppressed in favor of Arabic. This was in stark contrast to the policy of the Latin-speaking Romans who had a high reverence for Greek culture and language, and who left this Greek cultural presence running largely untouched. The consequence of the suppression of Greek as the official language was inevitably that anything that wasn't translated in the first few generations was bound to be forgotten and to fall into decay since there would be no Greek-speaking scribes to read, copy and diffuse these works that were in less demand. We know for instance that the Arabs were largely uninterested in Greek poetry, theater and epics, of which incidentally little remains (most of what we have is from papyrus fragments found at archeological sites like Oxyrhynchus). Unlike Aristotle, who had aroused some interest among Arabic speakers, much of Plato's works were ignored in the Muslim world and only became available in Europe through Byzantine scholars in the early 15:th century. Euclid's Elements, the foremost mathematical treatise of ancient times, was introduced to the Arabs through the Byzantines in 760, which is rather strange, given the prominence of this work and that only some cataclysmic event could have made it virtually dissappear from the eastern Mediterranean (the cataclysmic event would have been the neglect of Greek language). This may be an indication that other prominent scientific works (perhaps from the likes of Ctesibius and others) may have shared the fate of Plato and Euclid under Muslim rule. Another issue with the translations were the intentional (religious) as well as unintentional corruptions of the original texts that were introduced. Basically, whenever the Greek originals of any such work became publicly available, it sooner or later replaced translations from Arabic (though of course many Arabic sources remained in circulation for a long time). Today Arabic sources are used only for works that didn't survive in the Greek original, like Ptolemy's Almagest. Having said all of this, there were some obvious advantages for the Europeans as far as the Arabic libraries in Toledo were concerned and Arabs did bring some new knowledge into the mix (algebra, for instance). However, had it not been for the Muslim conquests of the eastern Mediterranean, Europeans would never have become isolated from places of learning like Alexandria in the first place, where learned people of late antiquity, like Boethius, may have studied and come into contact with these works. Boethius even planned to translate many of Plato's works into Latin, though his life was cut short and this never materialized. Just a century later, well-versed intellectuals like Boethius would be unthinkable in the West for the next several centuries at least in part due to the Arab conquests. Incidentally, these conquests also led to the stagnation of technological know-how in the Byzantine world which had peaked with the construction of the Hagia Sophia aided by scholars educated in Alexandria. Another issue with the Muslim conquests is that it also brought an end to the supply of papyrus to Europe, leaving only the much more expensive vellum as writing material doubtlessly bringing down literacy and the diffusion of Greco-Roman texts during the Middle Ages. To be fair, though, later on during the reconquest of Spain, Europeans acquired Chinese papermaking technology through the papermaking factories that the Moors had left behind. However, there is no doubt that the Arab Muslim contribution was far from positive overall and whenever positive, their contribution has to be weighed against the fact that they did not simply fill a vacuum but on the contrary conquered and profited from an existing civilization that was fairly well integrated with Europe, while at the same time depriving the West further access to these sources (that is, until the Spanish reconquest).

There was less internal cohesion within the empire as the 3rd century crisis showed, so Rome was not necessarily seen as the undisputed center it had previously been. The increased threat of invasions from all directions also meant that protecting Rome would be a constant headache and would further strain the already limited military resources available. The arrival of a new set of provincial military emperors during the 3rd-century crisis with little if any connection to Rome or Rome's aristocracy, meant that the new ruling elite had less regard for any symbolic value that Rome might have as capital. If I'm not mistaken, Ravenna was surrounded by swampy terrain which is what made it so difficult to conquer. I remember when reading about Belisarius' campaign against the Ostrogoths that this was mentioned as the reason why the Ostrogoths had retreated to Ravenna to make their last stand. I don't know about Milan though...

I admire the fact that Roman society despite being ancient at the same also time seemed surprisingly modern and accessible in so many ways. It's easy to relate to Rome and Romans from a modern perspective, which cannot as easily be said for other ancient societies. They even had running water in their houses (at least the filthy rich ones had), it's hard not to relate to that I admire the fact that Rome's history beats anything that Hollywood can come up with From the Punic Wars against Hannibal, through Julius Caesar's life, to its long and protracted "fall", there's so much to analyze, discuss, explore and sometimes also enjoy on the big screen. It's virtually impossible to ever get bored of Rome. Finally, I admire the fact that Rome left so much legacy after its fall, so much in fact that it cannot be said that it truly ever fell. This legacy is felt in language, culture, religion, practically everywhere. Who doesn't at least once in a while stumble upon (or perhaps even use) some cool Latin proverb or phrase? To me, Latin is the coolest language ever conceived, the elegance and eloquence of Latin is simnply unrivaled

Failing crops in northern Europe as well as a harsher climate on the central Asian steppes probably provided the necessary impetus for the population migrations that put pressure on Rome. Additionally, as a result of the colder climate the Rhine and the Danube rivers freezed over during winter for the first time in a very long time according to chroniclers, which facilitated the breakdown of the Roman border defence system in Europe. In Asia, the Persian threat also became more serious around the same time time period due to the ascendance of a more aggressive dynasty there. Additionally, less gold and silver was available after the 1st century AD when the output from the Roman silver mines in Spain decreased and spoils of war became increasingly rare. So, less revenues and greater military expenditures border defence. The internal instabilities didn't exactly help either...