Immoderate Greatness

Immoderate greatness is Gibbon's most compressed and durable diagnosis: the decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. The phrase names a structural condition rather than a moral failure. It does not say that Rome was too proud or too corrupt or too distracted; it says that Rome had grown past the magnitude a structure can sustain, and that at such magnitude the forces of expansion become the forces of exposure. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay: the long peace made the hard civic virtues unnecessary and therefore allowed them to atrophy; the integration that bound the empire's parts into a functioning whole was also the channel through which failure in one part propagated to every other; the concentration of capability in a large and complex system was simultaneously the concentration of fragility. Every extension of the structure extended the frontier that could fail. The causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of the conquest. Applied to the scaling