The decline of the Roman Empire refers to the gradual societal collapse of the Western Roman Empire. Many theories of causality prevail, but most concern the disintegration of political, economic, military, and other social institutions, in tandem with foreign invasions and usurpers from within the empire. The English historian Edward Gibbon, author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire made this concept part of the framework of the English language, but he was not the first to speculate on why and when the Empire collapsed. "From the eighteenth century onward," Glen W. Bowersock has... remarked, "we have been obsessed with the fall: it has been valued as an archetype for every perceived decline, and, hence, as a symbol for our own fears." It remains one of the greatest historical questions, and has a tradition rich in scholarly interest. In 1984, German professor Alexander Demandt published a collection of 210 theories on why Rome fell, and new theories have emerged since then.
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