Abstract:A series of recent publications, both scholarly and popular, has identified the physical environment as a primary historical agent in the Roman Empire’s development and decline as a major (and distinct) political, cultural, and economic entity. This essay presents a critical review of the professional scholarship that argues for Rome’s putative “decline and fall” due to major environmental crises, namely climate change and the first global pandemic of the bubonic plague. Particular attention is given to the problems of historical agency and causation, environmental determinism, interdisciplinarity, and the role of discourse in studying the human experience of environmental change in Late Antiquity. It offers some preliminary suggestions for a “second phase” of scholarship, which could potentially correct current methodological problems and offer a path toward understanding the irreducibly complex relationship between human and non-human historical agents.

中文翻译：

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罗马的新环境衰落：方法论考虑

摘要：最近的一系列学术和流行出版物将自然环境确定为罗马帝国发展和衰落的主要历史因素，作为一个主要的（和独特的）政治、文化和经济实体。这篇文章对专业学术进行了批判性评论，该学术研究认为罗马因重大环境危机（即气候变化和黑死病的第一次全球大流行）而“衰落和衰落”。特别关注历史代理和因果关系、环境决定论、跨学科以及话语在研究古代晚期环境变化的人类经验中的作用等问题。它为奖学金的“第二阶段”提供了一些初步建议，