Thomas

“I was reminded of what is perhaps the fundamental rule of technological progress: if something can be done, it probably will be done, and possibly already has been.”
― Edward Snowden, Permanent Record

“In southern and central Italy, for example, both the Greek colonies and the Etruscan territories have provided much more evidence of trade and sophisticated native industries than can be found in post-Roman Italy. The pre-Roman past, in the temples of Agrigento and Paestum, the tombs of Cerveteri and Tarquinia, and a mass of imported and native pottery and jewellery, has left enough material remains to serve as a major tourist attraction. The same cannot be said of the immediately post-Roman centuries.”
― Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization

“A hung jury, however, suggests that any decline was not overwhelming; and, in common with most historians, I believe the empire was still very powerful at the end of the fourth century. Unfortunately, a series of disasters was soon to change things.”
― Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization

“The new Late Antiquity is in part a deliberate corrective to a previous bias, which assumed that the entire Roman world declined in the fifth century, because this is what happened in the West. Relocating the centre of the world in the fourth to eighth centuries to Egypt, the Levant, and Persia is a stimulating challenge to our mental framework and cultural expectations.”
― Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization