Still, there were families in those days with unfathomable wealth. If memory serves me well, one was so wealthy that when they sold their land after becoming Christians they caused a real estate crisis across the Roman Empire. (Source: The inheritance of Rome, Chris Wickham, one of the early chapters.) And just a few centuries earlier, Julius Caesar arguably was one of the richest to have ever lived on earth. It's sensible to expect that families with that kind of wealth to leave a trace in their ancestry. And yet with rare exceptions they did not.
The concept of wealth fundamentally depends on the society its created in.
If I am the last person on earth, i effectively "own" the entire earth, but it means nothing.
Same for a man staving to death on top of a mountain of gold.
Which makes this billionaire New Zealand apocalypse compound trend all the more ridiculous, if society collapses, being a billionaire is going to mean absolutely nothing, you would think the money would be better spent ensuring that doesn't happen in the first place
> It's sensible to expect that families with that kind of wealth to leave a trace in their ancestry.
The ancient patrician families had trouble with going extinct. Their decline started long before the imperial period.
Later European kings had the same problem, sometimes just failing to produce any heir. It only takes a single generation and the family is gone.
If anything, I'd attribute family extinctions like this to monogamy. The two standard defenses against a failure of this type are (1) letting a man marry into the family by wedding a family daughter (as opposed to having the daughter marry out into the man's family); and (2) taking more than one wife, which offers dramatically greater opportunity to reproduce.
Well, wealth during that period was determined by military power, not by an International system as we now know. Without a good army there was no way to maintain land ownership, for example. Similarly, slaves could only be maintained by the threat of armies. Therefore, all the fabulous wealth of Roman families declined to practically nothing with the end of the Roman Empire.
Sort of off-topic; what was your overall impression of Wickham's book (or the greater series that his is a part of, if you've read them)? Do you think they're generally humble overviews of their respective periods?
Wickham's book is extremely hard to read - and as a matter of fact, I've never pulled off reading it to the end, even on the 3rd try. The issue is he's extremely meticulous, and goes on ad nauseam on methodology, on what to make of the sources he's referencing, and so forth. This is all extremely interesting, mind you. But the amount of methodological asides is such that you rapidly lose track of where you were in the narrative, and it's easy to go through a chapter without remembering what the first few pages were about, or indeed anything at all.
For the others in the series I've no idea. They've been on my reading list forever.
Is it a sensible expectation though? I would fully expect the richest/powerful to bear the brunt of retaliation as a civilization crumbles. The sins of the father and all that.
Would you want to be related to Trump if the economy tanked and social services started breaking down?
I wanted to make that point when I read this line:
>> But the Avars ruled Central Europe for over two centuries, and it is not a given that their civilization had no worth and did not represent a future we would have flourished in.
A civilizations worth is always measured by those who might seek to control it. You could have a bunch of people getting on just fine, living out perfectly normal lives. But if there isn't any way for them to produce excess - be that labor output or extraction of natural resources - then they are not seen as valuable and will not be written about.
