Wasn't in constant decline. Decline started much later. Actually, the period of the 5 good emperors started with Trajan all the way to Marcus Aurelius (90-180) has been described by Gibbon as the happiest and most prosperous time in human history.
The Republic was a constant expansion, from virtually nothing to a large Empire.
5 good emperors when compared to the mess before and after them, the weakness of a dictatorship when compared to a Republic is always going to be present.
it's still 250 great years. how many empires get 250 great years?
250 great years? for whom? Roman citizens who had to deal with a lot of taxation while having to compete with slaves?
And Emperors were paragons of justice? corruption becomes worse the more concentrated power is.
Well as Gibbon said, the happiest and most prosperous time in human history happened during the empire period. Must have included a shitload of people for him to make that assessment.
Yeah, it's called evolution.
Some of them, yeah, they were absolutely amazing people, like the 5 good emperors i've already mentioned. there's almost zero examples in history when an empire had 5 good leaders in a row.
i'm definitely not talking about trump. in this case it's like Octavian times started with Caracalla.
Depends on what you're using to define "better". The empire was bigger, wealthier and more influential, I think that's pretty clear. But the empire was also more corrupt than the Republic and that's saying something because the republic was insanely corrupt.
The only reason that is is because the empire was waay richer than the republic. If the republic had the resources of the empire it would have been just as corrupt. There's no morality play here.
If your scholar is baselessly claiming something as ludicrous as a period being the happiest and most prosperous time in history (from the vantage of the 1700s no less), you should probably find more credible and better historians.
You had to Google him, right?
This post is on the right track lol
You never heard of him either, eh?
It wasn't just a wealth component. The consolidation of power within a dictator for life and scale of the Empire allowed for more and more varied forms of corruption compared to the Republic. The Senate was corrupt but it also acted as it's own checks and balances to an extent.
Gibbons has been out of fashion as a historical source (good histographical source though) for a couple centuries. You might as well be reading medical texts from the 1700s.
You read this on google right now too, right?
Imagine this tortured phrase is the best thing one can actually say about the Senate.
Well first of all I'm an actual historian, albeit an Americanist. The issue with that conversation, and why I said that post was on the right track, was more to do with the sort of presentism hubris that rears its head in these situations
Well, no one argued that the Republic wasn't corrupt. The issue was if the Empire was "better" than the Republic and my statement was that the Empire was significantly more corrupt than the already corrupt Republic.
