I perhaps should have said “some command of the history”. But generally the expression in English does not imply you have the canonical or final view of it, it means you have a command of (some) the canon.

This should have been further obvious, as the proposition that Rome fell because they lowered the gold content in their coins is, to say the least, humorous, if not plain ridiculous. And I have read a fair amount of Roman history and I asked for an attribution for this statement.

The “Fall of Rome/an civilization” is a construct that came out of the Renaissance and continued through the Romantic period, especially because of Gibbon who used it in the title of his history of Rome (which still is quite reliable in many ways). No modern historian uses this construct as in “the Fall of Rome was caused by…”, since its meaning is essentially meaningless. Except to deprecate.

There are lots of disagreements around what were the salient FACTORs in Imperial Rome’s decline, but basically no one has the temerity to suggest this it was one thing or even largely one thing.

I disagree completely that “we can decide for ourselves…” Facts and their relationships to understanding is known as empirical analysis. We can hear a whole new fact and disagree about its importance in a particular interpretation of events. Or we can undertake a general revision of the current understanding. That’s having a command of the canon.

But part of the problem of the current state of things re: economics and politics is the belief that scholarship (learning, study and using empirical methods) should discarded in favor of “deciding for ourselves”. Learning means what we understand of things can change because new facts or combinations of them come along. It doesn’t mean you can just pick and choose what feels good to you or you believe it supports your argument in some other realm.