Why Rome Fell — and What Survived

EPILOGUE · 476 AND AFTER · The Rise and Fall of Rome, 264 BC – AD 476

Look at the final map — pale hatch across the west, unbroken red from the Balkans to Egypt — and ask the question this atlas has been building toward: why did Rome fall? Know first that you are entering a 250-year argument with over two hundred published causes (a German scholar, Demandt, actually counted: from moral decay to lead pipes to climate). Gibbon opened it in 1776: “immoderate greatness” — the empire collapsed under its own weight — plus, controversially, Christianity redirecting civic energy heavenward. The modern schools you have already met in the chapters. The fiscal-military acc

The turn: The city that did not fall.

This chapter is one scene of an interactive atlas: the map repaints as the dates advance, campaigns draw themselves, and every chapter argues its causes and consequences — then a field exam asks you to prove it on the map.