How Rome fell

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True, true. If you read the book who's title is something to the effect of How Rome Fell, "The Military Explanation", there were signs of a different type, like the slow withdrawal of resources from the frontier. A failure of will? A lack of resources for whatever reason, perhaps including capable and loyal troops? I can't remember if that was addressed in what I read of the book, but in our case, we seem to be doing OK in terms of the output of our recruiting and training. E.g. this article is apparently not about lowering standards but about adjusting training to achieve acceptable standards at the end of it.

Peter Heather recently wrote a very similar history which I found to be very good: http://www.amazon.com/Fall-Roman-Empire-History-Barbarians/d... Heather argues that the Roman empire was still internally healthy, but that increasing pressure from the Persians and the European tribes eventually overwhelmed the empire. Archaeological evidence indicates that the population densities of the barbarian regions may have increased by a factor of two or three since the early days of the empire. The population was larger and more sophisticated, and thus harder to handle. But just this year Adrian Goldsworthy has written a book countering the new revisionist view that Heather and Williams present ( http://www.amazon.com/How-Rome-Fell-Death-Superpower/dp/0300... ). Goldsworthy argues that the barbarian threat really wasn't that much greater, and tha…