"The Romans were able to push out violence to the edges of the empire and that gave them the sense that their empire was eternal, and they would rule forever. The Fate of Rome by Kyle Harper Photo: Supplied The city of Rome itself was demilitarised at the centre in a way that Harper said was historically rare. "The Romans combined that natural human psychology with a kind of imperial arrogance." "There's something in our psychology that maybe makes us want to forget the catastrophes that are inevitably going to occur in human history," Harper said.
"It created an ecosystem for infectious disease that ultimately contributed to some of the very serious challenges that the Roman Empire faced."Īt this time, one in four humans alive lived inside the Roman Empire - and at its height, its eventual downfall would have seemed unimaginable.
"Think about the Roman roads and the great networks of seaborne trade that characterised the Roman Empire as well, as kind of an early globalisation," he says. At the time, the Empire was trading with Africa, the near east, China and India, with a huge demand for spices and silk. Harper says the Roman Empire was an early form of globalisation, with extensive trading across the empire which stretched from the northern isles of Britain all the way to the Sahara. Pandemics and the unexpected changes they bring have always been part of the natural world and globalisation tends to increase the chances of disease outbreaks. He says that while we do live in a different world, where we have developed control over infectious disease, there are still lessons to be learnt looking back on ancient societies - and our control over such problems remains imperfect. Professor Kyle Harper is the author of The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease and the End of an Empire, which examines the collapse of the Roman Empire through a modern lens. Listen to the full interview with Kyle Harper on Sunday Morning with Jim Mora
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