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 survived with borders essentially intact for several centuries (until the Muslim conquests), the Empire as a whole had initiated major cultural and political transformations since the Crisis of the Third Century, with the shift towards a more openly autocratic and ritualized form of government, the adoption of Christianity as the state religion, and a general rejection of the traditions and values of Classical Antiquity. While traditional historiography emphasized this break with Antiquity by using the term "Byzantine Empire" instead of Roman Empire, recent schools of history offer a more nuanced view, seeing mostly continuity rather than a sharp break. The