Go your own way {for freedom now} Re: 2 april '04


FOR SOME YEARS NOW
Attila the Hun bullied Theodosius II as he chose?
His armies devastated and looted right down to the walls of Constantinople and he totally destroyed no less than seventy cities
on the Balkan peninsula!

Theodosius
bought him off by payments of tribute and
tried to get rid of him for good
by sending secret agents
to assassinate him?

IN 451 Attila
turned his attention
to the remains of the Latin-speaking half of the empire
and invaded Gaul.
Nearly every town in northern Gaul was sacked ...
Franks, Visigoths and the imperial forces united against him and he was
defeated at Troyes in a vast dispersed battle in which a multitude of men,
variously estimated as between 150,000 & 300,000,
were killed ...

THIS
checked him in Gaul,
but it did not exhaust his enormous military resources?
NEXT year he came into Italy by way of Venetia,
burned Aquileia and Padua and
looted Milano!


NUMBERS OF FUGITIVES
from these north Italian towns
and particularly from Padua fled to islands in the lagoons at the head of the Adriatic and laid there the foundations of the city state of Venice,
which was to become one of the greatest of the trading centres
in the Middle Ages ...

IN 453
ATTILA died suddenly
after a great feast to celebrate his marriage to a young woman,
and at his death this plunder confederation of his
fell to pieces!

The actual Huns
disappear from history,
mixed into the surrounding more numerous Aryan-speaking populations.
But these great Hun raids practically consummated
the end of the Latin Roman
Empire?

AFTER his death
ten different emperors ruled in Rome in twenty years,
set up by Vandal and other mercenary troops.
The VANDALS from Carthage took and
sacked Rome in 455 ...

FINALLY, in 476,
Odoacer, the chief of the barbarian troops, suppressed a
Pannonian who was figuring as emperor under the impressive name of
Romulus Augustulus, and informed the Court of Constantinople
that there was no longer an emperor in the west.
SO, ingloriously, the Latin Roman Empire came to an end!
In 493 Theodoric the GOTH
became King of
Rome.




ALL OVER
WESTERN AND CENTRAL EUROPE
barbarian chiefs were now reigning as kings, dukes and the like,
practically independent but for the most part professing
some sort of shadowy allegiance to the emperor.
There were hundreds and perhaps thousands
of such practically independent
brigand rulers ...

In Gaul, Spain and Italy and in Dacia
the Latin speech still prevailed in locally distorted forms,
but in Britain and east of the Rhine languages of the German group
{or in Bohemia a Slavonic language, CZECH}
were the common
speech ...

The superior clergy
and a small remnant of other educated men
read and wrote
Latin?

EVERYWHERE
LIFE WAS INSECURE
and property was held by
the strong arm!

CASTLES
multiplied and roads fell into decay ...
The dawn of the sixth century was an age of divisions
and of intellectual darkness throughout
the western world!

Had it not been
for the monks and Christian missionaries
Latin learning might have perished
altogether?!

WHY
had the Roman Empire grown
and why had it so completely
decayed?

IT grew
because at first the idea of citizenship held it together!
Throughout the day of the expanding republic,
and even into the days of the early empire,
there remained a great number of men
consciuous of Roman citizenship,
confident of their rights
under the Roman LAW
and willing to make sacrifices
in the name
of Rome ...

THE PRESTIGE
of Rome as of something just and great and law-upholding
spread far beyond the Roman
boundaries ...

BUT even
as early as the Punic Wars
the sense of citizenship was being undermined
by the growth of wealth and slavery?!!
Citizenship spread indeed but not
the Idea of Citizenship!!!

THE ROMAN EMPIRE
was after all a very primitive organisation;
it did not educate, did not explain itself to its increasing multitudes of citizens, did not invite their co-operation
in its decisions ...

There was
no network of schools
to insure a common understanding,
no distribution of news to sustain
collective activity.

The ADVENTURERS
who struggled for power
from the days of Marius and Slla onward
had no idea of creating and calling in
public opinion upon the imperial
affairs ........

THE SPIRIT
of citizenship died of starvation and no one observed it die ...
ALL EMPIRES, ALL STATES, ALL ORGANISATIONS OF HUMAN SOCIETY ARE,
in the ultimate, things of understanding and will!
There remained no will for the Roman Empire in the world and SO
it came to an end .............

WHICH IS ALSO
what will happen to us
of we let IT slip and go to smithereens in private as well as social life!
HUMAN beings thrive
on MEANING.

WITHOUT IT
we are totally
lost ...



And that's why {among other things?}
I'm writing in myDiary!
engel
11 jul 2004 - bewerkt op 13 jan 2008 - meld ongepast verhaal
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