Get the latest tech news
The Last Vestal Virgin and the Fall of Rome
Ask twenty different people what led to the fall of Rome, and you’ll get twenty different answers. Experts will give you an array of opinions, depending on their area of specialization or what thesis paper they’re writing. There is no single right answer. Political squabbling, weakened borders, a di
So, even though many Romans still honored those ancestral pagan gods of Rome— you know, Jupiter, Juno, Mars, Venus, Vesta, and others—Christian emperors like Theodosius, influenced by powerful bishops, began to enact increasingly harsh anti-pagan laws. Great is the force of custom, said the illustrious Roman Senator Symmachus as he pleaded with the emperor to preserve the ancient ways of Rome, and to resist the suppression of religious freedom that he saw getting increasingly worse. For Coelia and those like her, the Rome they knew—even if it was just shadows of what it used to be—probably fell in 394 or 395 CE, shortly after the battle of Frigidus, when the sacred fire of Vesta was extinguished on the order of the Christian emperor Theodosius.
Or read this on Hacker News
