AI note: Key Cassiodorus detail found with AI help. More at the bottom of the essay.
I buy old copies of Greek and Roman histories whenever I stumble across them. Found this one at a used bookstore in Dallas last week.
Its pages are a bit yellow, seventy years old, and already brittle in my hands. If a book from 1958 already looks like it spent 8 hours in the rain, what happened to texts written on papyrus when Rome fell?
Most disintegrated within a few decades. Nobody was paid to copy them anymore when Rome collapsed in 476 AD.
Civilizations survive on maintenance more than glory.
Rome’s Real Problem
Fire and deliberate destruction played their part, but in Rome, the slower killer was the one nobody talks about.
Humidity.
Rome sits on the Tiber, surrounded by hills that trap moisture from the Mediterranean below. Summer humidity runs 65-70%. Spring and autumn bring rain. Winter is damp. No Egyptian desert, no volcanic ash sealing things in place. Just a city wet most of the year, sitting …
