The Real Reason Rome Fell (It Wasn’t One Thing)
In 1984, a German historian named Alexander Demandt sat down and did something almost nobody had attempted: he counted every serious theory ever proposed to explain why Rome fell. He stopped at 210. Lead poisoning. Christianity. Moral decay. Climate change. Plague. Barbarian invasions. Slavery. Overspending. Lazy emperors. Even, in one memorably odd 19th-century theory, the…