I think this is getting traction because of the new Odyssey movie coming out.

I find Mary-Beard satisfying to watch. I'm having trouble finding it but she was on a panel and asked about the fall of Rome and her response was something to the effect of "Asking why Rome fell is the wrong question. A better question is why was it so successful in the first place."

Her reasons were, if I remember correctly, though Romans were brutal, for a long time and for the most part, they provided a better quality of life to many of the subjugated people and provided a path to citizenship. Further, they were adaptable about the places they governed, at least relative to other options at the time, keeping established powers in play, so long as they pledged allegiance to the Roman empire.

From what I gather, Mary-Beard's reasons for why Rome eventually fell was because they became too insular, eventually denying citizenship to larger cohorts of people and succumbing to corruption. I remember her saying that Rome was on the knife's edge of collapse many times and that it was more about their successes that pulled them through than about avoiding failure.

Just as an aside, I've heard that the concept of cyclops might have been from finding old mammoth skulls. The hole in the middle is for the nose cavity could be mistaken for an eye socket. Many pictures show cyclops as having tusks.

This sounds a little off since Roman citizenship expanded until 212 when it was granted to all free men in the empire. But perhaps she was talking about the failure to absorb "barbarian" tribes that came over the border later, that wanted to become Roman and sometimes thought of themselves as Roman.

The sack of Rome in 410 was a shock, but the end of the western Roman empire later that century probably wasn't understood as such at the time since they didn't know that decentralization would be permanent; after terrible civil wars, another emperor would usually reunite the empire. And even much later there were often claims to be a continuation.

Contrast with China where new dynasties would rise after the old one falls.

> they provided a better quality of life to many of the subjugated people and provided a path to citizenship

That varied. The taxation was very oppressive and there is some evidence that QoL (based on skeletal remains) did improve in quite a few places after the empire collapsed for some time.

> for a long time and for the most part, they provided a better quality of life to many of the subjugated people and provided a path to citizenship. Further, they were adaptable about the places they governed, at least relative to other options at the time, keeping established powers in play, so long as they pledged allegiance to the Roman empire.

Sounds quite a lot like Ghengis Khan, who oversaw the largest empire in history until the British one.