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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026

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The real conquest was that of the Tough Barbarians by the Empire. They tried to emulate the society they had conquered, they set up as emperors themselves, not tribal chieftains. They were quite happy to inherit baths and togas (as they understood them) rather than pulling down the marble halls to live in mud huts like their forebears.

Not really, and when they did try, they failed hard. They certainly did not take up the toga (that kind of thing happened centuries earlier when the Roman Empire was still strong). They didn't immediately take up the title of emperor. The first person to try that was Charlemagne. Odoacer was quite explicit about not doing so, he called himself king and had coins struck with an image of him with a (barbarian) mustache and hat.

The marble halls and the baths fell apart on their own, and mud huts did certainly come back in style. That might not have been ideological, but it happened all the same, because the economic and social collapse was total. Long-distance trade ceased, cities were nearly or wholly abandoned, and in quite large swathes of the fallen Roman Empire, money itself fell back out of use for a time.

The Roman Empire had had a fairly complex economy. It had plantations that grew cash crops, it had brickyards and pottery factories and so on. We shouldn't forget that these were worked mostly by slaves, but still, per capita production was really quite high for a pre-industrial society. The barbarians might not have meant to do it, and the Romans in later years certainly did much damage too, but they kicked the whole thing over. The population about halved as food production fell. Barbarian kings were ceremonially buried with crude pottery that a Roman peasant 200 years earlier would've spat on. Even royal complexes, outside maybe Italy itself, were wood and mud and thatch, not bricks and tiles, let alone concrete, which was famously lost entirely.

If they wanted the baths and the marble halls, well, they didn't get them.