Speaking of the jaded Imperium Romanorum, a parallel process happened with its high culture, as described by Thersites at the very end of this video:
"The Roman empire would eventually recover from the third century crisis and go on to last a couple of hundred more years, but it was never really the same. It was never as vibrant. It was never as powerful as before. And also, a lot of its traditional culture had been lost, and would never really be recovered.
To give but one example: Rome had largely been fairly easy-going when it came to sexuality for most of its history. But after the third century crisis, Roman writers are very prudish, very judgemental, very uncomfortable with sexuality. They also tend not to have much of a sense of humour, if any. Almost all the Roman literature, and I guess also all the Greek literature from the Roman period, that occurs after the third century crisis, is very bitter. It’s acrimonious. It’s not fun. There’s no life in it. The scholarship becomes very stilted, very backward-looking.
Rome just really isn’t the same, and it’s hard to explain if you haven’t dealt with the material in great detail. Just the fundamental mood of Rome, the fundamental mindset just goes through a major shift after this fifty year crisis. In many ways, you can argue that, for all practical intents and purposes, the Roman empire ends with the third century crisis, and the middle ages begin."
I can support this view based on my own readings. Ammianus Marcellinus is interesting, but he never ignites laughter. Procopius is likewise largely bereft of humour, despite thrilling material. Suetonius, in contrast, offers plenty of gossip fun and jokes, having Augustus quote the Illiad’s lines for a spear-waving hero upon seeing a well-endowed dockworker, or immortalizing this rhyme on the building of Nero’s golden palace following the great fire of Rome:
“The palace is spreading and swallowing Rome,
Let us all flee to Veii and make it our home.
Yet the palace is spreading so damnably fast,
That I fear it will gobble up Veii at last.”
Even the dry Tacitus will sometime skewer someone with his sharp pen. On Galba: “He was a man whom everyone thought would have made for a good ruler, if he had not ruled.” The later Roman stuff makes for more boring reading.
This draining of fun from the culture helps explain emperor Julian’s self-deprecating humour in the Misopogon (the Beard-Hater), which did not find any takers at all in such a humourless age, least of all in the very Christian city of Antioch. The bookish Julian was refreshingly out of sync with his own times. Filled with the enterprising energy and vigour of high antiquity, he modelled himself on classical Greeks and Romans. Julian wanted to revive both paganism and Augustus’ Principate, and sought to tear down the stilted and openly autocratic Dominate established by the nigh-on totalitarian Diocletian. To Julian, the emperor should be accessible and approachable, the first citizen among theoretical equals, and able to both take and give jokes, quips and puns. Just as had been the case before the crisis of the third century, before humour withered amid severity.
