Mark My Words
The Trouble with Dead Empires
There is nothing quite as stubborn as a historian with a chisel. He will take a dusty old ruin, scrape around in it like a chicken after corn, and then stand up and declare that the world as we know it has been turned on its head. And so it is again, with a company of learned gentlemen who have uncovered a city that, by all previously held accounts, had no business existing. They have brushed away the dirt of centuries, peered at a few broken stones, and announced that Rome did not fall quite the way we thought it did.
I have always suspected that Rome, like any other grand institution, did not so much fall as it tripped, staggered, and eventually found itself sitting down heavily with a sigh, wondering where all the good times had gone. The notion that an empire, built upon bureaucracy and bad decisions, simply collapsed overnight is one fit for schoolbooks, not for reality. And now, we have proof—proof that folks kept on living, trading, and governing themselves even as the official imperial seal was gathering dust.
The Inconvenience of Persistence
The trouble with lost cities is that they have a most inconvenient habit of being found. This one, in particular, has emerged like a ghost at a dinner party—startling, unwelcome to some, and demanding a change in conversation. The learned men of academia had all agreed that civilization went dark when Rome fell, but this city insists otherwise. It suggests that while emperors may have vanished, and legions may have put up their sandals, the common folk carried on, as common folk always do.
The discovery of trade routes, governance, and cultural development in this forgotten place upends the notion that the fall of Rome left nothing but barbarians and silence. It seems that while the official historians were busy writing eulogies for the empire, the people were simply busy living.
History, Like a River, Never Quite Stops
It is a peculiar trait of mankind to believe that history moves in great, decisive moments, like a door slamming shut. But history is more like a river—it does not stop, it merely changes course. Rome did not fall in a single day, nor in a single year. It faded, it faltered, it reappeared in strange and unexpected places, much like a lost city waiting to be dug up by a man with a brush and an overabundance of enthusiasm.
So now we must reconsider our grand narrative. Perhaps the great fall was less of a catastrophe and more of a shuffle. Perhaps the so-called Dark Ages were simply dimly lit. And perhaps, just perhaps, we should be a little more hesitant to declare the end of things, for history has a way of proving us wrong—usually by digging up something that was there all along.
