Its structures were probably unspeakable vile to pretty much everyone else.ДЄs late as 383 AD, captive barbarians were being fed to wild animals in the Colosseum, and its criminal law dealt ruthlessly with anyone seeking to remedy the highly unequal distribution of property. They represented maybe 3% of the whole population. I am still staggered by feats of Roman engineering, blown away by the beauty of some the buildings Romans lived in, and delighted by the sophistication of the empire's literary and political culture.Д«ut these cultural glories were limited to a tiny privileged elite - those who owned enough land to count as gentry landowners. There really was little change at one deep level - the life of the peasant producers who made up perhaps 90% of the population. These revisionist arguments have some real substance. No one denied that many things changed between 350 and 600 AD, but it became fashionable to see these changes as much more the result of long-term evolution than of a violent imperial collapse. At the same time, there still lived in the west many individuals, who continued to describe themselves as Romans, and many of the successor states, it was correctly pointed out, were still operating using recognisably Roman institutions and justifying themselves ideologically with reference to canonical Roman values.Д¬onsequently, by the late 1990s the word 'transformation' had come into vogue.

Is the dark army real