Decline and Fall of the Principate

Abstract

For centuries the “decline and fall” of the Roman empire has been the favorite corpse for anatomical dissection by historians and social scientists. No consensus was ever achieved except the truism that several factors individually or cumulatively have contributed.¹ In its usual form the controversy refers to the dissolution of the Roman empire two centuries later, and it is thoroughly lopsided at that since merely the Western part, long dissociated from the Eastern, declined and fell. At this point it should be emphasized that the termination of the Principate did by no means signify also the end of the Roman empire; on the contrary, under Diocletian (284 to 305) and his successors it was effectively reconstructed as a new political system, the Dominate, which, in turn, imperceptibly was transformed into the Byzantine empire to last for another millennium.