The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – was written ""with a tiny bit of cribbin' / from the works of Edward Gibbon"". In 1995, an established journal of classical scholarship, "Classics Ireland", published punk musician's Iggy Pop's reflections on the applicability of "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" to the modern world in a short article, "Caesar Lives", (vol. 2, 1995) in which he notedAmerica is Rome. Of course, why shouldn't it be? We are all Roman children, for better or worse ... I learn much about the way our society really works, because the system-origins – military, religious, political, colonial, agricultural, financial –
Historiography of the fall of the Western Roman Empire to the fall of the West Roman Empire (395-476), in his book "The Fall of the West: The Slow Death of the Roman Superpower" (2009). William H. McNeill, a world historian, noted in chapter three of his book "Plagues and Peoples" (1976) that the Roman Empire suffered the severe and protracted Antonine Plague starting around 165 AD. For about twenty years, waves of one or more diseases, possibly the first epidemics of smallpox and measles, swept through the Empire, ultimately killing about half the population. Similar epidemics, such as the Plague of Cyprian, also occurred in the 3rd century. McNeill