Frightening: This Description of the Decline of Rome sounds like America - Intellectual Takeout

Frightening: This Description of the Decline of Rome sounds like America - Intellectual Takeout

• The date traditionally assigned to the Fall of the Roman Empire is 476 A.D., when Odoacer marched on Rome and deposed the last emperor.
  
• But Rome’s internal decline began long before then. As Will Durant famously said, “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within.”

In his 1899 classic Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire, Samuel Dill described some of the signs of this internal decline. 

The signs listed in the following paragraph eerily mirror some of the same things America is currently struggling with:

“...long before the invasions of the reign of Honorius, the fabric of Roman society and administration was honeycombed by moral and economic vices, which made the belief in the eternity of Rome a vain delusion. 

• The municipal system, once the great glory of Roman organising power, had in the fourth century fallen almost into ruin. 
• ...At the same time, the upper class were increasing in wealth and power...were aided by the tyranny and venality of the officials of the treasury...
• And while the aristocratic class were becoming more selfish, and the civil service more oppressive and corrupt, the central government was growing feebler..."

...Hmmm… It sounds all too familiar.