CLAS 659The Decline of the Roman Empire and its Conseqences for the Mediterranean

An examination of the compound crises which afflicted the Roman Empire in its later centuries, with a view to identifying and analyzing the underlying social, economic, political, logistical and ecological forces at work in creating them, as well as the various "solutions" to these crises which people applied across the Mediterranean which led to what we call the "Medieval" era. Taking as its starting point Joseph Tainter's, The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988), the class will look at various explanations for Rome's "Decline & Fall" advanced by scholars from the time of Gibbon to current applications of ecological theory to the analysis of historical events. Relevant comparisons to other cultures which have suffered similar declines, as well as to present-day events, will be made as they arise in the chronological order of the course material.