Manhole Covers and The Fall of Rome

At Pajamas Media, classicist Victor Davis Hanson chronicles the decline and fall of our once great Republic in a series of eye-witness accounts from central California.  One particular passage caught my eye this week, a followup to his post the previous week reporting on the theft of manhole covers by city staff to be sold as scrap,

"This week?  An epidemic of the theft of honorific bronze plaques from the walls of the city’s schools, civic centers, and public buildings—the sort of commemoration for good deeds that are the stuff of civilization.  It reminds me of Procopius’s description of post-Roman Italy in the 6th-century AD, when lost Ostrogoth and Visigoth souls drifted amid the great cities of the Old Romans, cannibalizing the ancients’ marble, bronze, and lead clamps, and melting down monuments for lime."