Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - How Civilizations Die - with Paul Cooper

Episode Date: June 5, 2026

As Governor of Britannia, Magnus Maximus has a huge army at his disposal, which is just what he needs to secure the Roman imperial throne. But perhaps the impressive general should have looked into the past before focusing on his future. Tim is joined by Paul Cooper, host of Fall of Civilizations Podcast, to explore why powerful civilizations such as the Assyrians, the Han dynasty and the Roman Empire all ultimately collapsed. Paul Cooper is the author of Fall of Civilizations: Stories of Greatness and Decline. For a full list of show notes, see timharford.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting. Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than adds supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, I-Heart's twice as large as the next two combined.

Learn how podcasting can help your business. Call 844-8-44-I-Hart. Pushkin. Britannia. The farthest, bleakest province of the Roman Empire. 390 C.E. A harsh, misty land of savages and strange mystics. Forty thousand soldiers, about an eighth of the Imperial Army,

are needed to control the unruly native tribes, protect the archipelago from pirates, and push any marauders back over Hadrian's wall and into Scotland. Such a mighty army needs a tremendous leader, and they have one, in the shape. of Magnus Maximus. Maximus is a distinguished general. As a younger man, he helped restore order

after the Picts from Scotland, the Scotty from Ireland, and the Saxons from the continent joined forces to attack Roman Britannia in the great barbarian conspiracy of 367 CE. Then he fought in successful campaigns against the Moors in North Africa

and the Alamani on the Danube River. For 10 years now, Maximus has governed Britannia. He's put down raids by the Picts, built a huge church on London's Tower Hill, and forced the country to bend to his will. But he can't wait to leave this wet, windy and wild aisle, this backwater of the empire. He spies opportunity back on the mainland.

A young, unpopular emperor sits on the throne in Rome. His courtiers are turning against him, and rivals are calving their armies. Maximus is a great military general, and he leads the biggest, toughest army in the empire. He instructs the entire Roman garrison of Britannia to board a fleet of ships, and they sail for the mainland and victory. if only Maximus have consulted the history books first. I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. Magnus Maximus wasn't the first governor of Britannia,

with ambitions to be a Roman emperor. Here to tell us all about him, and the history he should have studied is Paul Cooper, presenter of the podcast, Fall of Civilizations, stories of greatness and decline. and the author of a book of the same name. Paul, welcome to Cautionary Tales. It's a great pleasure to be here. Paul, you're going to tell us all about Magnus Maximus, but first I wanted to know

what attracted you to studying the fall rather than the rise of civilizations. My PhD focused on the idea of the ruin in literature and film, and also how various ruins have become figures of importance for culture throughout history. So I've always been drawn to the idea of the ruin, what they mean and what they've meant for people who are creating works of art. Ruins are amazing spaces. Yeah. I was really struck just reading your book really struck by this amazing Anglo-Saxon poem about a ruined Roman bathhouse. And I'd never encountered it before, but it's just spellbinding.

Yeah, it's an old poem called The Ruin, which is found in the collection known as the Exeter book. And it's a marvellous rendition of a person writing. in Old English, a kind of Anglo-Saxon, early medieval British person, wandering through a ruined bathhouse and viewing the crumbling pillars, the baths now overgrown with weed, with frogs, you know, jumping in and out of the pools. And as they're walking these shattered bath halls, they're imagining the place, as it used to be, feasts that might have gone on here, bright warriors in their armour who might have come to celebrate their victories, the kings, and the great society that once built this.

And it's believed that this poem is written about the Roman baths in the town of Bath. One example of many, of a person in history wandering through the ruins of a society that came before. And having that amazing experience that people always seem to have in these ruined places, which is a moment of contact with the people of the past. A sudden appreciation not only of the power of time and its immense size, but also the ability of human monuments to survive the ravages of that very same force. It does raise the question of, well, how could a civilization build such remarkable monuments, achieve such heights of greatness?

And yet somehow that civilization is no longer with us, which is something you explore in your podcast and in your book on cautionary tales. We are scholars of failure. We're fascinated by disaster. Yeah, that we have in common. Yeah, yeah. The fall of civilization seems it's cautionary tales in extreme slow-mo while you're just going, no, stop. So, yes, I really appreciate the crossovers between the podcasts.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's a human fascination with disaster, isn't there? Traditional view of history is one of monuments and great men and victorious battles, but actually the story of failure is one that's completely ingrained in the human epic. These stories of societal failure are as much a part of us as those of success and triumph. So trying to draw out some common threads then in why civilizations do fail. One theme that comes up again and again is violence. And obviously violence is needed to conquer, but it poses dangers to the aggressors too, doesn't it?

Well, that's right. Yeah, any empire is by definition a violent undertaking. But also some empires who build their power, build their territory through this bellicose approach, this excessive, expansionist, aggressive violence, are actually sowing the seeds of their own destruction in doing so. The Assyrians spring to mind, they were quite notorious. Absolutely. The Assyrian empire flourishes mostly in the first half of the last millennium of the BC period. It conquers its neighbours with extreme violence, you know, piling pyramids of heads outside cities, flaying people alive, you name it, you know, Assyrian kings have done it. And people who rebel against the empire are slaughtered, executed in displays of public brutality, often entire populations uprooted and sent to a different part of the empire where they don't know the land, don't know the territory, you know, disconnected from their ability to exploit their knowledge of the land to. resist empire. But in this kind of ruthless, remorseless approach, the Assyrian Empire becomes

absolutely despised around the region. In the end, as the 7th century BC wears on, and the last great king of Assyria, Ashobanipal, dies. You get a succession of weak kings, followed by a rebellion in Babylon, suddenly a horse-rearing people called the Medes who live in the Zagros Mountains of Iran, join in to invade Assyria. You get rebellions in Egypt and suddenly revolts happening all around the empire as outside enemies are uniting against it. The Babylonians and Medes sign a pact in the ruins of an Assyrian city called Ashur. And in the next years, really only a period of about three years, the Assyrian Empire, what was the most powerful empire in the world, is completely dismantled. Many of its cities never recover as centres of population.

Yeah. Because, I mean, they didn't make any friends because they were, incredibly brutal. So when the end comes, it comes incredibly quickly. Yeah. And another theme that you pick out is taxation. And again, if you're going to have a successful civilization, you need some kind of mechanism for levying resources from the populace and deploying those resources to assemble armies and to build these great monuments and so on. But, of course, it's possible to overdo it. And you point to both the Han dynasty of China and the Khmer dynasty of Cambodia as civilizations that overdid the taxation and then that was there

undoing. Yeah, I think I wouldn't describe it as excessive taxation so much as an entrenched sense of inequality, which you see in places like China, obviously, you know, built on labouring peasants. You see in Rome, you know, built on a slave class, a vast slave class, ancient Greek cities. In Athens, you might have a slave population about equal to the free population. But in Sparta, the slave population is ten times the size of the free population, made up of entire conquered ethnicities who are forced to work in the fields. And the entirety of the agricultural sector of this city is propped up by people who hate and despise the people they're feeding. This means that the Spartan army is never able to leave the city for very long. It's never able to stop defending from these constant threatened rebellions from this hell-up class.

So this is one example in which inequality becomes a great weakening agent in a society, preventing them from engaging in long-term planning, from feeding their population without immense resentment building. And there are many examples throughout history of this. Yes, I mean, some of them perhaps not very historical at all. It's very striking to draw these parallels between the modern world and these ancient civilizations. But every now and then I encounter something in the book for which I think, Oh, I'm not sure we have a parallel for that one. And one of them was the Han dynasty in China,

the power very much in the hands of women, which, of course, we do have in the modern world, and eunuchs, not so many eunuchs in power in the modern world. So tell me about them. Yeah, that Han Dynasty in China is a fascinating example. There's an increasing concentration of power in the imperial palace in Luoyang. And the two great power blocks inside the palace are the, eunuch attendants and the dowager empresses, the mothers of both the emperor and previous emperors who

have passed on. Their power and prestige depended completely on their sons, their progeny, and how close they were to the imperial throne. So this meant a constant jockeying for power among these rivals. Dowagers would poison the sons of other empresses in order to get them off the throne and get their son just one step closer to inheriting it. In this way, the imperial palace of China ran red with blood. Now, eunuchs served in the palace because essentially this was the place where the emperor lived with his women. And, I mean, A, it was thought to be safer to castrate these men in order to prevent them from entangling themselves with palace women, shall we say. But it was also a way of ensuring that they would have no aspiration for the throne. It was thought that someone who was

unable to have children would have less desire to topple the emperor, do a palace coup. But what we see in these centuries is a power contest between the Dowager Empresses and the eunuchs, with the emperor being essentially a puppet, a kind of game piece that's being passed between them. And for this reason, the emperor was very often a child. The emperor Shan was actually a six-month-old baby who's crowned emperor while still in his crib. This is because children were easier to control. Yeah, so there's the ultimate symbolic head of state, right? I mean, if it's a six-month-old baby, you can have all of the pomp and the ceremony and they're genuflecting to the imperial throne and none of the difficulty of them actually having any opinions other than I need my

nappy changing. That's right, yeah. But I would contend that that does have echoes in the modern gerontocracy that seems to be taking over in places like the United States. Ronald Reagan used to joke that Soviet premiers kept dying on me, I think he said. But it was true. In the Soviet Union, they had a problem with gerontocracy, with passing on power to the next generation. Power became incredibly encrusted in these men who were in the 70s and 80s, and the society really didn't have a healthy mechanism for passing that power down. we now see that same situation developing in the United States where the election before last saw Donald Trump and Joe Biden

contesting the presidency, you know, both of them in their 70s. And it's that inability to pass on power to the next generation that I think has echoes in something like the Imperial Court of China. Yeah, it is remarkable. I think Biden was the oldest president ever. And if Trump survives to the end of this term, he will be even older than Biden was. Ronald Reagan was, I mean, he was thought of as an old man, but he was young compared to these guys.

He diffused the issue of his age by saying, I refused to exploit my opponents, youth and inexperience for political reasons. And that kind of, yeah, he was, he knew what he was doing, did Reagan? One more question before we return to Roman Britain and the teaser we began with is environmental degradation, because this is, I think, often associated. with the fall of civilizations. I think Jared Diamond wrote a famous book, Collapse, I mean, who's very interested in this problem. Is it the case that climate change or some other environmental problem has historically often been the trigger for the fall of ancient civilizations? Yeah, it's a undeniable resonance with today that in a very large number of the stories we've looked at, there has been some element of environmental change that has struck

these societies. Some crucial examples are the sumer. Sumerian society, which flourished in the third and second millenniums BC in the Valley of Mesopotamia. It's not as famous as the Romans or the Greeks, but the Sumerians, they invented accountancy, they invented writing. They, I mean, they invented the city. I mean, this is really an incredibly important early civilization. Yeah, they were one of the earliest city-dwelling civilizations to really create what we would think of as an empire. multiple walled cities connected by trade networks going up and down the rivers of Tigris and Euphrates. As you say, the first examples of writing in the world are found in Mesopotamia and the city of Uruk.

But as we get to the end of the third millennium BC, so around the year 2200 BC, we get a small localized climate shift that had kind of tendrils happening elsewhere in the world. but in general this was a kind of Eurasian shift, perhaps a change in currents going over the Sahara desert, a drying of air around the Mediterranean. And it must be underlined that this was a very minor climate shift compared to what we're looking at in the coming century. But nevertheless, this caused a period of drought and aridity in the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East. This meant that crops that were flourishing like wheat were suddenly being replaced by hardier, more drought-resist. and salt-resistant crops like barley.

People began to starve in cities, and crucially, because this was affecting the whole region, the rivals of the Sumerians were struggling too. They were then driven to raid and plunder in Sumerian lands. So we see that as the environment tightens its noose around a whole region, that creates conflict, that creates the desire to invade fertile, abundant areas. And this was too much for the Sumerian society to handle. and each one of the Sumerian cities is destroyed in turn.

We see that societies from the past were sometimes completely destroyed by these climate shifts that today we would hardly even notice. This is cautionary tales. I'm speaking to Paul Cooper, the broadcaster and author, about his book and podcast, Fall of Civilizations. And after the break, we will return to Roman Britain, and Paul is going to tell us what happened to Magnus Maximus. feel it in your heart. IR. Radio, Canada's number one streaming app for radio and podcasts,

including IHart Pride Canada, your favorite hits and must have party bangers, plus personalized and curated playlists like back in the day pride. Come together, celebrate, love. Take pride with you anytime, anywhere. Just ask your smart speaker to play IHartPride Canada. Stream us on your phone or listen now at iHeartRadio.ca. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message.

Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-844-I-Hart to get started. That's 844-844-I-Hart. We're back. I'm Tim Harford, talking to the broadcaster and author Paul Cooper about Fall of Civilizations, which is both a book and a podcast. Paul, I wanted you to take me to Roman Britain, really, and perhaps begin by telling me what the Romans initially thought when they arrived in Britain and how difficult did they find Britain to colonise?

Britain had a unique place in the Roman Empire. It was a large island, which is a kind of territory that they had never really conquered before. But this provided problems of supply, problems of connection to the mainland. That would always mean that Britain sat in a slightly awkward position within the Western Empire. When the Romans arrived in Britain, they loved playing up how wild and untamed and semi-monstrous the people were. The Roman writer Amianus Marcolina. even famously describes Britain's sitting in swamp water up to their necks for days on end, living only on nuts. I mean, story checks out. Well, you see jokes about British weather and bad food have been going on for two millennia, it seems. But when Rome slowly conquered and began a process of Romanisation in Britain, they would always find it a restive province. With its long coastline, it was always prone to attack from people like the Attaxia.

Scotty and Scotty in Ireland. These are kind of warlike tribal peoples. From Saxons, Jutes, Geats, you name it, coming from the east in Germany and Denmark, Norway, etc. And from people beyond Hadrian's Wall, the northern limit of the empire. People who had become known as the Picts due to the pictures that they painted on their skins. Now, all of these threats menacing Roman Britain meant that it needed a large garrison. This was somewhere between three to four legions at various times, which is up to 16,000 soldiers. But these were augmented by many thousands of auxiliaries, who are usually local people who are armed and trained and so on by Rome, but who aren't necessarily citizens.

Were they well integrated? Did the British kind of become citizens of the empire in the same way that, for example, the Gauls did? It's an ongoing question of debate, but I would say that Britain struggled to become as integrated as Gaul, which is what we call France today. No Britain ever was raised to the rank of Equite, which was one of the highest ranks in Roman society, and was required to hold positions of power to become a statesman. So we get a sense that Britons were never really considered fully Romanised. Certainly in towns like Camelodonum, Colchester or Lundian, London, there was a great Romanised population. There people were living large on olives and wine from Gaul. red gloss pottery, all of the signs and symbols of Roman excess and luxury.

People were building villas with mosaic floors. But outside in the countryside, people still lived in roundhouses with turf walls and thatched ceilings, living much as people had in the British Iron Age. So we get the sense of a two-tier system. Right. So the old line, what have the Romans ever done for us? The answer is, well, if you live in the country, not very much. Yeah, that's absolutely right.

You know, although it was subject to invasions, raids from, you know, these people outside the empire, the time of Roman Britain was a time of relative peace while the empire flourished. When Roman arrived, Britain had been a patchwork of, you know, tribes like the Aikenai. Famously led by Budaica or Bodhis. Exactly, yes. Who gave the Romans quite a scare. Yeah, I live in Norwich, so Budica is a big figure for us. The Akeene were our local tribe.

and they burnt Colchester to the ground, something I think they've never quite forgiven us for. So, I mean, this is an unruly place. It takes, as you mentioned, a big army to keep the peace. You also need a strong man. You need a strong governor or strong generals to command that army. And we mentioned Magnus Maximus at the beginning of the conversation, but Magnus Maximus wasn't the first of these strong men.

So tell us about Claudius Albinas. He seems very... I'd not heard of him before. reading your book and he's a very intriguing figure. Yeah, he's a remarkable guy who's born in North Africa and is a classic Roman statesman who's flown into Britain to rule over these unruly people as a Roman. He is therefore in charge of one of the largest armies in the empire, which is necessary to defend Britain from all the threats it faces, but also provides an irresistible temptation to anyone who leads it. Was he

militarily successful? Yeah, absolutely. He's a good governor. But the empire is going through a period of political upheaval and turmoil. This is during the reign of the Emperor Commodus, who's memorably played by Joaquin Phoenix in the movie Gladiator. Yes, as a terrible, terrible human being in the movie, and it sounds like perhaps not much better in real life. Well, actually, if you can believe it, I think the movie had to dial down some of the insanity of Commodus. Commodus was fascinated with gladiators and with the idea of himself as a gladiator, and he would actually go into the arena himself to kill animals like ostriches and giraffes and, you know, exotic animals of this kind. He once cut off the head of an ostrich and went to the stands where the senators were sitting and shouted up to them,

you will be next. That's not cool. No, it's certainly not. It's a larger-than-life character who's violent, mad, tyrannical, you name it. But Commodus dies in 192. AD and suddenly the empire is up for grabs. And essentially the two contestants who emerge as the last people standing from a period of chaos that's called the Year of the Five Emperors are Claudius Albanus in Britain and the Emperor Septimius Severus. These two come together at the Battle of Lugdenham in 195 and it's an enormous battle that takes place over two days and Claudius Albinus is finally defeated. When he realises he's going to to lose, he runs himself through with his dagger and the Emperor Septimius Severus

tramples him with his horse. This is tragic for Albanus personally, but for Roman Britain, his departure was also a disaster. Because he basically took the entire army to fight Septimius and left Britain without an army, which sounds like it might be an opportunity, but turns out the opportunity for the wrong kind of people. Well, that's right. I mean, if you're going to try and seize the imperial throne, you need every man you can take. The loss of a single unit could mean the loss of a battle. So he took every one of Britain's legions, but this leaves Britain largely defenceless. It's raided by picks from the north, Atacotti from Ireland, who are rumoured to eat human flesh, by the way.

But it wasn't only a military threat coming from outside. It was also the collapse of the British economy. The entire economy in Britain was predicated on the situation of 40,000 armed. Roman soldiers there. Entire industries were built around mining metal, smelting it, forging it into useful things, nails, hobnails, swords, spears, etc. And feeding this vast force as well, of course. The moment these people depart, nobody in these industries is getting paid and you get a freefall economic collapse that affects every part of Britain. Presumably that also redounds to the harm of the empire as a whole.

this source of tin, source of metals, source of tax revenue is in chaos. So the new emperor, Septimius Severus, he could presumably take an army into Britain and pacify it again. What makes that difficult? Well, this is what he does eventually. Severus travels to Britain. He campaigns north of Hadrian's wall for a while. He seems to trample some poor people's he encounters, but doesn't achieve any kind of lasting strategic success. He eventually withdraws, sickenes and actually dies in York. So in some sense, Britain also ended up defeating Severus. Now, this story of British economic collapse of military failure on the mainland is one that Magnus Maximus 180 years later should have learned, because it's a pattern that he repeats

almost exactly. He's in a similar situation. He's in charge of a big army in Britain, and there's an unpopular emperor back in Rome. Yeah, so this emperor is one of the most colourful figures, I think, from Roman history, which is saying a lot. He's the emperor Gratian, who's a young man who has a fascination for all things barbarian. He begins hanging out with a group of Scythian archers. These are men from what's now Ukraine, but at the time the Romans consider them to be barbarians.

They're like horse-riding people. And Gratian begins dressing like a Scythian in the kind of typical pointed cap. robes and so on. And this causes a lot of muttering at court. But if you're a Roman emperor, you can do what you like, until you can't. So what turned this from being a kind of affectation for Gration to being something that was a real political problem for him? Well, it's suddenly barbarians become a bit of a problem in the empire. The emperor of Valens is famously killed when he goes out to fight an army of Goths. He's the emperor of the Eastern Empire and Gration's the emperor of the Western Empire at this point.

Yeah, the empire has been divided at this point, but it's still acting in concert. They often fought together, etc. Okay, but one of them is killed by barbarians, which makes it weird that the other one is dressing like a barbarian all the time. Yes, that's right, yeah. So the Grecian, he's toppled,

and once more, the empire is up for grabs. Enter Magnus Maximus. Here's our man. He's in Britain. He has this enormous army, and he's looking down at, Rome and he's thinking, I fancy this. That's right, yeah. Magnus Maximus sails for the mainland in 383. And once again, just like Claudius Albanus, he brings every man he can to engage in a

battle for the empire. Maximus is exceptionally successful. He's very popular. He's clearly a charismatic character and he wins the battle, unlike Albanus. So he actually becomes emperor. But the moment, he does, his support begins to collapse. And it does so in part because of the anarchy that he's left behind in Britain. He's not only taxed his provinces brutally in order to fund this campaign, but just like Albanus, he's left it completely undefended. Its economy once more collapses, and Maximus is eventually left without support. He's chased out of the throne, finally defeated in battle, and he's actually condemned to the Roman punishment of Danacio Memoriai, which is to have all mention of you scrubbed from the records.

So that didn't go well at all. He's basically brought down because he abandoned Britain, and the weakened empire that he was trying to rule could not cope with the chaos that that decision unleashed. At what point do the Romans just go, you know, this whole occupying Britain is just not worth it? Well, the date officially given to it is 410 AD when the Emperor Honorius declares that Britain should look to their own defences. But really, I think de facto, the complete loss of Britain is the revolt of Constantinus, who is a common soldier who seems to rise to governor through some kind of military coup. He's risen from the ranks of the soldiers in Britain.

He has no experience as a governor or statesman. He seems to have been elevated purely because his name reminded people of the great emperor Constantine had ruled less than a century earlier. People thought, that's a lucky name, we'll go for this guy. That feels like a pretty thin basis for giving anybody authority, but okay. Yeah, certainly. He rebels in 407 AD and makes much the same pattern as Maximus and Albanus. He marches on Rome. He actually manages to force Honorius into sharing the throne.

with him for a while. So he does actually rule as co-emperor, this common soldier, but soon an alliance of challenges, you know, disgusted at this guy forcing his way into imperial power, eventually chase him out of the capital. Most of the soldiers he brings with him will never return to Britain. Essentially, I think 407 is the time when Rome really has no administrative power over Britain anymore. And after this point, the entire Romanized economy that we talked about, really begins its terminal decline. After the break, we are going to find out what happened to Britain after the Romans left, why it affected everything from British riding to the British dinner table.

Stay with us. We'll be back with Paul Cooper after the break. Pride is like love. You feel it in your heart. IAR Radio, Canada's number one streaming app for radio and podcasts, including IHart Pride Canada. Your favorite hits and must have party bangers Plus personalized and curated playlists

Like back in the day pride Come together, celebrate love Take pride with you anytime, anywhere Just ask your smart speaker to play IHeart Pride Canada. Stream us on your phone Or listen now at iHeartRadio.ca. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting,

think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think Iheart.

Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-844-I-Hart to get started. That's 844-844-I-Hart. We're back. I'm talking to Paul Cooper about his book and his podcast of the same name, fall of civilizations. So, Paul, the Roman emperor, Anorius, has basically washed his hands of Britain. Forget it, it's too much trouble.

The Romans have left. So then, was that a cause for celebration for the native population? Well, undoubtedly, there were people who might have celebrated the departure of Rome, but the entire Romanized economy that we talked about earlier now began its terminal decline. Romanised cities slowly fell into disrepair, their populations slowly left. Great monuments like Hadrian's wall were also abandoned, left to overgrow. People began to rob them of stone in order to build houses, build walls, things like that. Roman bath houses, which require quite a lot of maintenance by skilled workers.

And also the hypercoursed systems that heated Roman houses from under the floor, both fell into disrepair. pair, the baths silted up. We get a sense of the complete falling apart of the house of cards that is a society. You know, people stopped mining iron ore. They stopped smelting iron. They stopped hammering it into nails. And this meant that people now had no hobnails in their shoes. And people began to scavenge in the Romanised cities for things like nails that were left behind. And horseshoes, they lost the ability to make horseshoes or at least to, you know, they became too expensive. Yeah, and no horseshoes means you don't want to ride your horse on the stone roads that the Romans have built. So the roads slowly begin to overgrow as well. People go back to using

paths and tracks. So people stopped making the large pots that you would use to cook a stew, which meant that people began eating roasted meat rather than stews. The Romanised kitchen gardens that had grown things like parsley and coriander were no longer around and these crops disappeared from the British diet. No more olive oil. Yeah. And for a while in Romanized cities like London, you get a kind of enclave of Romanized citizens

still almost going through the motions of living this Romanized life. But around them the city is depopulating. We get a fascinating layer of something called dark earth appearing in the archaeological record, which historians believe is the remains of kind of like wasteland sites, where previously there had been a building. once the roof falls in, the walls collapse, brambles and ivy and elder and so on take roots in those sites,

leaving a layer of mulch, which becomes that dark earth. So it shows that parts of the previously densely populated city were becoming overgrown, full of vegetation. It must have been quite an eerie site to walk through the streets of somewhere like London or Colchester and see, you know, that it was becoming a ghost town. Yeah, real sort of post-apocalyptic vibes. So taking a step back from Roman Britain and taking on board the sweep of your podcast and your book, all of these different civilizations that have risen and fallen in human history, were they also looking back at the civilizations before them and discussing their own cautionary tales?

Were they learning from the mistakes of their history? I think learning from mistakes would be taking it too far. You know, the people of the past didn't have a sense of history as well. we do as a body of knowledge that can be debated and analyzed. They viewed history as the exploits of great men and great stories, societies contending for victory in great contests. But that isn't to say they didn't have an awareness of the societies that had passed before. One example is the Sumerians and Assyrians and all these people who lived in the plains of Mesopotamia who looked around them and saw the ruins of even more ancient civilizations crumbling around them. You know, that part of the world

has been occupied for at least 10,000 years with some kind of city-building societies. And they came up with stories like the Great Flood, which, you know, survives in the Bible in Genesis, to explain how these societies had been destroyed, you know, for their pride. Stories like the Tower of the Barbel, which is probably written in response to the site of the ruin of the Zygirate of Ur. all of these are ways that people have responded to the ruins of the past. And you know, things like Homer's Iliad, which is the story really of a war that probably did take place in some way, a clash between the Mycenaean Greeks in the late Bronze Age with the Trojans, who are kind of a peripheral subject of the Hittite Empire.

And there seems to have been some kind of war in which the city of Troy was burned. but there's a period that follows it called the Bronze Age collapse, the late Bronze Age collapse, that sees the collapse near simultaneously of multiple powerful civilizations around the Near East, and it's followed by a period called the Greek Dark Ages, which is a contested term, but basically means that there's no written sources

about this period of history. And this story is kind of repeated again and again by poet singers, you know, passed on by word of mouth, and it's elevated to the level. of this apocalyptic clash between civilizations, full of great heroes and marvelous duels of single combat and so on that we know today. And it's when the Roman general, Scipio Amelianus, many centuries later, is looking at the besieged city of Carthage,

as his own Roman forces sweep into it, burning it and sacking it. Scipio is said to quote a line from the Iliad about how he fears that one day Troy, will be destroyed, to have shed a tear and begun weeping, because he has this moment of historical realization that his great city of Rome will one day face the same fate, that history is this cyclical series of patterns. And indeed, five centuries later, Rome is sacked during its own catastrophic decline. Paul, you've studied the rise and fall of so many different civilizations. Is there a single lesson that you think it's important that we learn?

I think when I started this series, I believed that I would come away with advice, a list of things not to do if you don't want your civilization to collapse. Here's how to prevent it. But I think as time's gone on, I've become something of a cynic about the human ability ever to learn from history. Like albinus and Maximus and Constantinus, we seem to always pass again and again through the same patterns, the same mistakes, tyranny. and dictatorships, economic collapse, environmental degradation. I think the lesson I'd really like people to take from this is that if you ever feel despair,

if you ever feel alone with that feeling, actually that feeling is extremely ancient. People have been feeling that since the dawn of time and that it's one of the most fundamental human feelings, perhaps. At the end of the day, societies collapse and they are replaced by a more sustainable one. A society that's unable to survive ends up being replaced by one that can. And wherever we see collapse, we also see the green shoots of recovery coming through the ash, like the new growth after a forest fire. So at the end of the day, it's about building connections with the people around you that will survive times of upheaval, times of degradation and even poverty. It's about building things in your

life that will survive history. I've been talking to Paul Cooper, Paul's book and podcast are The Fall of Civilizations. Paul, thank you so much for joining us on Cautionary Tales. Yeah, thanks so much for having me on and for your thoughtful questions. It's been great to be here. Cautionary Tales is presented by me, Tim Harford. It's produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music are the work of Pascal.

wise. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohn, Corinne Gilead Fischer, Benderdaf Haffrey, Eric Sandler, Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey and Owen Miller. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. It really does make a difference to us. And if you want to hear it, add free and receive a bonus audio episode, video episode, and members-only newsletter every month, why not join the Cautionary Club? To sign up, head to patreon.com slash cautionary club. That's Patreon, p-a-t-r-e-on-com slash cautionary club. This is an I-Heart podcast, guaranteed human.