@tedd The Eastern Roman Empire didn’t change it’s name to the Byzantine Empire. Byzantine is a name tacked on by historians now to make it easier to distinguish which Roman Empire we’re talking about. But at the time, contemporaries totally just saw themselves as The Roman Empire.
@LostInParadise The decline and fall of the Roman Empire really took hundreds of years. When exactly the decline started is up for sooooo much debate – you can kinda point to it really early if you like, or really late. And people can’t see the future – I have no doubt that some elites of the time thought that Rome as ending during 180–284, when there were 26 emperors, all of whom were murdered. Towards the end of that period, we have the Imperial Crisis, and things really didn’t look good. But then they picked up again. And then they got worse, and then the empire split (285 AD), was put back together (324 AD), became totally Christian (324), the capitol is moved from Rome to Istanbul and the name changed to Constantinople (324), split again (395 AD), gets its butt handed to it for the first time by an outside force (c. 376, Battle of Adrianople), and then gets sacked, repeatedly (410, 455, 546). You could also put the sort of “official end”, as it were, when Odovacer, a Germanic king, invades in 476 AD and takes the Emperor’s throne. But it takes hundreds and hundreds of years.
And really, don’t we kinda always think things are in decline, that this is the end? It’s kinda the atheist’s version of constantly having an End Of Times be near.