ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THIS BOOK GREW out of a conversation that Stefan Vranka and I had at the Society for Classical Studies meeting in January 2019. We were concerned about how alt-right figures and white nationalists used events from the fourth- and fifth-century Roman Empire to attack immigration in the twenty-first century. We originally planned that I would write a short essay about the use and misuse of the Roman past, but, as I started digging into this topic, I realized that the rhetoric of Roman decline, the promise of Roman renewal, and the identification of people to blame for Rome’s problems appeared repeatedly in sources ranging across the past 2200 years. The essay grew into a book—and the book quickly grew nearly twice as large as we had planned. I’m extremely grateful to Stefan for both the conversation that led to this book and for bearing with me as it expanded so much.
I am also grateful to the many friends, colleagues, and institutions that supported me over the past year as I put this project together. A great deal of initial work took place at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens in the summer of 2019. I am grateful to the staff there for their support and to the many colleagues who helped me hash out ideas over lunch at Loring Hall. This project also developed through engagement with audiences at Harvard University, Amherst College, Indiana University, Pomona College, UC San Diego, and the University of California Berkeley. I particularly benefited from personal conversations over the past year with Susanna Elm, Peter Guardino, Eric Robinson, Deborah Deliyannis, Colin Elliott, Cynthia Bannon, Giovanni Cecconi, Adalberto Magnelli, Carlos Noreña, Chris van den Berg, Alexander Riehle, Dimiter Angelov, Laura Nasrallah, Susan Harvey, Diliana Angelova, Richard Lim, Jason Moralee, Ben Keim, Bronwen Wickkiser, Tim Shea, Albert Joosse, Jeroen
Acknowledgments
Wijnendaele, Peter Van Nuffelen, Cathy Gere, Denise Demetriou, Maren Niehoff, and Alfons Fürst. Scott Jones gave me the great honor of previewing some of the book’s ideas on his Give and Take Podcast. Michele Salzman, Nate Aschenbrenner, and Jan Willem Drijvers each shared portions of upcoming books with me. These books will be spectacular and I’m thrilled to have gotten a sneak peak at them. Leslie Safford and Rick Delaney did excellent copy editing work on the manuscript while Aishwarya Krishnamoorthy helped coordinate production.
A range of friends and colleagues from around the world have read chapters and offered suggestions on them. These readers include Anthony Kaldellis, Cristiana Sogno, Jeremy Schott, Andrew Devereux, Jan Willem Drijvers, and Nate Aschenbrenner. I would never have had the comfort to cover such a broad range of material without their comments and important suggestions. Mira Balberg read multiple drafts of multiple chapters and helped me understand why a discussion of Isaac Asimov and rockets probably was best left to the side.
Jamie Marvin worked tirelessly in tracking down materials, sorting out footnotes, compiling the index, and sharing portions of her dissertation. These efforts would have been greatly appreciated under any circumstances, but her help was vital as COVID-19 disruptions shut down libraries just as the book’s first draft neared completion.
I also want to give a special thanks to my students in the COVID-19–disrupted undergraduate seminar I taught on this material in the spring of 2020. Despite the remarkably difficult circumstances they were a wonderful, critical audience who challenged my ideas and helped me to think in new ways about the Roman material and its implications for the present.
My work has also benefited greatly from the generous support of Carol Vassiliadis and from ongoing, stimulating conversations about antiquity and our current world with Alexia and Paul Anas, Jeanette Rigopoulos, and other members of San Diego’s Hellenic Cultural Society.
The final word of thanks goes to my wife, Manasi, and my children, Nate and Zoe. Writing a book like this in a little more than a year is difficult under any circumstances. Doing it while chairing a university department amid a pandemic was harder than I imagined—especially when access to research materials stopped toward the project’s end. I can’t say how much I appre-
Acknowledgments
ciate the sacrifices they made so that this project could be completed. Each of them served as a sounding board for my ideas and a source of support throughout the book’s writing, editing, and revising. They also kept me going in those dark spring days when it seemed as if the world were coming undone—a challenging time indeed to write about decline. I love the three of you more than you know!
Carlsbad, California July 10, 2020
MAP OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE AT ITS GREATEST EXTENT IN THE SECOND CENTURY AD.
INTRODUCTION: A SNAPSHOT AND A STORY
ON JANUARY 20, 2017, Donald Trump’s inaugural address laid out an apocalyptic scene of “American Carnage” amid “poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation,” and a faltering education system. Then he pivoted. “From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land.” Trump bellowed, all Americans would now hear the following words:
Together, We Will Make America Strong Again. We Will Make America Wealthy Again.
We Will Make America Proud Again. We Will Make America Safe Again.
And, Yes, Together, We Will Make America Great Again.
The “American Carnage” speech draws upon a deep tradition of manufacturing the perception of widespread decline in order to destabilize the present.1 These sorts of arguments have two parts. They first make a provocative claim that society is becoming worse at a particular moment for a particular reason. They then suggest a path toward restoration that consists of rebalancing society to address the problems they identify. In Donald Trump’s case, a mismatch of American priorities caused the American Carnage and the purging consists of making every decision solely so it benefits American workers.2 The argument about social decline then exists primarily so that it might justify steps that seem necessary for renewal.
This approach is not unique to the United States. In Spain, the VOX party headed by Santiago Abascal promised to “Make Spain Great Again” through reforms designed to undo many of the legal foundations of the contemporary state that its leaders believe have eroded Spanish vitality.3 Its “100 medidas para la España Viva” (100 steps to a vibrant Spain) offered a
series of proposals to roll back laws granting regional autonomy while putting restrictions on political parties and Muslim groups blamed for terrorism.4 In the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte responded to the perception of widespread crime and drug use by tolerating (or even encouraging) more than 12,000 extrajudicial killings.5 This murderous spree has only increased Duterte’s popularity. Prominent Duterte critic Walden Bello told The Atlantic that “I don’t know if [Filipino] lives are actually better than before, but the perception is that they are. They’re pro-Duterte because they feel he’s cleaned up the place.”6
Bello here points to something important. Descriptions of decline often require very few supporting facts. They are emotional things, driven by stories rather than data. Many of them require nothing more than a compelling storyteller—and people like Trump, Abascal, and Duterte tell captivating stories. In the world their rhetoric creates, facts matter less than emotions—and the emotions these men generate are indeed powerful. One can feel decline even when one cannot see it or document it. One can also feel renewal, even if it is imaginary.
Because these claims of decline often rely on emotion rather than evidence, their power depends a great deal on the way that their underlying stories are told. In fact, decline is sometimes nothing more than a snapshot and a story. The narrative usually determines what the snapshot means. To give one telling example, in 1980 young workers in Flint, Michigan earned salaries nearly 20% higher than young workers in San Francisco. In 2013, young workers in San Francisco made nearly 60% more than their peers in Flint.7 This snapshot can support a number of different stories. It can speak to Flint’s decline, San Francisco’s rise, or both trends. But Flint has become emblematic of American postindustrial decline at least since Michael Moore’s 1989 documentary Roger and Me with the Flint water crisis of the 2010s merely the latest, most shocking evidence of the city’s plight. Showing that Flint was recently a better place for young workers to begin their career than San Francisco underlines its rapid collapse. The same statistic can also tell the story of San Francisco’s rise, but it does not do so with anywhere near the power. No one needs a statistic comparing San Francisco to Flint to understand how San Francisco has risen; there are many other, better ways to tell that story. This comparative statistic has then become yet
another tool to tell a story of American decline rather than one of American progress or resilience.
This book is not about twenty- first- century Spain or America. It focuses on Rome, the state in history that is most strongly identified with the idea of decline— and with good reason. The decline of Rome has been a constant source of discussion for Romans and non-Romans for more than 2200 years. Everyone from American journalists in the twenty- first century AD to Roman politicians at the turn of the third century BC have used the decline of Rome as a tool to illustrate the negative consequences of changes in their world. Because Roman history is so long, it provides a buffet of ready-made stories of decline that can help develop the context around any snapshot. Rome did, in fact, decline and, eventually, fall. An empire that once controlled all or part of more than forty modern European, Asian, and African countries no longer exists. Roman prophets of decline were, ultimately, proven correct— a fact that makes their modern invocations all the more powerful.
While the claim that Rome was in decline appeared often across the centuries, the particulars of these claims evolved dramatically over time. In the early second century BC, the Roman politician Cato the Elder gave rousing Latin speeches blaming Roman moral decline on luxury goods and Greek teachers. Seventeen hundred years later, rhetoricians speaking Greek in Constantinople praised the Christian Roman emperor Manuel II Palaeologus for reversing the Roman military declines of the 1300s through his inspired policies. One cannot imagine that any Roman enchanted by Cato’s anti-Greek rhetoric in the second century BC would understand the Roman decline that Manuel Palaeologus reversed. I mean this statement quite literally. Not only are the claims unrecognizably different, but also the very language in which they were made shifted from Latin to Greek. The Greek language, which Cato claimed would degrade Roman virtue, became the tongue in which claims of Roman renewal were later expressed.
Ambitious Romans often fashioned stories of decline so that they could build power for themselves by destroying present conditions. It often worked, too, but the destruction they wrought had very real consequences. Politicians who claimed they were restoring Rome sometimes trampled on
the rights, property, and lives of the people whom they blamed for blocking Rome’s recovery. The Roman rhetoric of decline and renewal left a trail of victims across Roman history.
I wrote this book to explain how this common, seemingly innocuous narrative of Roman decline could prove so destructive. Everyone who has a passing familiarity with Roman history or literature is aware of the pervasiveness of this story. No one has brought together the stories of the people who spun these tales of Roman decline and peddled Roman renewal. This book does.
It is not a comprehensive history of the rise of the Roman Republic, the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, or modern ideas about Rome. Each chapter will instead offer the historical context necessary to understand a moment or a series of moments in which Romans, aspiring Romans, and non-Romans used ideas of Roman decline and restoration to remake the world around them. The story begins during the Roman Republic just after 200 BC. It proceeds through the empire of Augustus and his successors, traces the Roman loss of much of western Europe in the fifth century AD, and then follows Roman history as it runs through the Eastern Roman Empire (which many people now call Byzantium) until its fall in 1453. The final chapters look at ideas of Roman decline and renewal in western Europe from the fifteenth century until today.
Rome shows that, while prophecies of decline and prescriptions for restoration may seem like inert rhetoric, they can cause deep, profound, and permanent changes to a society and its political life. This rhetoric can justify the elevation of new leaders and the overthrow of old regimes. It can upend existing customs by redefining radical innovation as the defense of tradition. Above all, it can produce victims. Romans knew the power of these ideas. They used them anyway.
But not all Romans. For long periods of Roman history, Romans told stories of their society progressing or renewing itself without undermining the conditions of the present. In the second and early third centuries, Romans spoke often about the restoration of buildings, cities, and political stability without blaming anyone for their decline. Buildings needed to be restored because they got old. Cities needed to be rebuilt because natural disasters damaged them. Civic traditions needed to be revitalized because,
over time, people had lost interest in them. Outside invaders needed to be repelled and punished.
All of these real problems urgently needed to be addressed but, in these moments, Romans did not use the need for renewal to attack other Romans. A successful society repairs things that break or wear out. It defends itself against invasion and responds to military defeats. These responses, renewals, and restorations need not be destructive. In the second and early third centuries, they were often affirmative. The restorers of Rome then had collaborators, not victims. They did not upend Roman society. They confirmed its health and vitality. If Rome illustrates the profound danger of targeting other Romans who supposedly caused Roman decline, it also demonstrates the rehabilitative potential of a rhetoric that focuses on collaborative restoration when real decline sets in.
I am writing this in April of 2020, while the world reels in the face of the COVID-19 epidemic. At this moment one Roman example seems particularly poignant. In 165 AD, smallpox arrived in the Roman Empire. It horrified and terrified a population that, unlike ours, had constant experiences with death from infectious diseases. Smallpox victims endured fever, chills, upset stomach, diarrhea that turned from red to black over the course of a week, and horrible black poxes that covered their bodies both inside and out until they scabbed over and left disfiguring scars. Perhaps ten percent of the 75 million people living in the Roman Empire never recovered. “Like some beast,” a contemporary wrote, the sickness “destroyed not just a few people but spread across whole cities and utterly destroyed them.”8
The so-called Antonine Plague killed so many soldiers that military offensives were called off. It decimated the aristocracy to such a degree that town councils struggled to meet, local magistracies went unfilled, and community organizations failed for lack of members. It cut such deep swaths through the peasantry that abandoned farms and depopulated towns dotted the countryside from Egypt to Germany.9
The plague left even more profound psychological scars. The rhetorician Aelius Aristides survived a nearly lethal case of the disease during its first pass through the empire in the 160s.10 He became convinced that he had lived only because the gods chose to take another instead, a young boy whom Aristides could even identify. Survivor’s guilt is not a modern
phenomenon—and the late-second-century Roman Empire must have been filled with it.
This catastrophe could have been a moment to focus on Roman decline, to identify culprits, and blame others for the suffering. Romans did so at other points in their history—including during another plague that hit the empire in the 250s. This was not the general response in the 160s and 170s. The emperor Marcus Aurelius reacted to the deaths of so many soldiers by recruiting slaves and gladiators to the legions. He filled the abandoned farmsteads and depopulated cities by inviting migrants from outside the empire to settle within its boundaries. Cities that lost large numbers of aristocrats replaced them by various means, even filling vacancies in their councils with the sons of freed slaves. The empire kept going despite death and terror on a scale no one alive had ever seen.11
The response to the Antonine Plague by the Roman historian Cassius Dio shows that one can choose not to use ideas of decline even when talking about the most serious catastrophes. Dio lived through the plague of the 160s and 170s, but he also saw the Roman recovery from it.12 This Roman resilience prompted Dio to call the empire under Marcus Aurelius “a kingdom of Gold” that persevered admirably “amidst extraordinary difficulties.”13 Rome survived the plague. Its communities rebuilt. Just about any snapshot one could offer of the Roman smallpox epidemic would have looked horrible. But, even under those circumstances, one could use that snapshot to tell a story that affirmed the good qualities of a dynamic society.
Throughout this book, it is important to remember that the Roman prophets of decline chose to tell that story in a particular way. Some of them, like Marcus Aurelius, responded to immediate crises in ways that made Rome stronger by enhancing the bonds that held imperial subjects together. Other Romans spoke about decline with the intention of dividing their society. They had the option to do as Marcus did. They chose not to do so.
The past cannot predict the future, but it can show the dangerous consequences of certain ways of thinking and behaving. It is my hope that we can use the example of Rome to think more responsibly about how we talk about and respond to the challenges of our own changing world. Perhaps, we can then embrace a different sort of story that builds cohesion rather than division in the face of the very real, very serious social, economic, and personal challenges we now face.
DECLINE IN THE ROMAN REPUBLIC
DISCUSSIONS OF ROMAN decline appear in some of the earliest surviving Latin literary texts. The Trinummus, a play written by the early Roman playwright Plautus around 190 BC, mocks Romans concerned with moral degeneration caused by growing wealth.1 The play opens with an allegory in which the divinity Luxury (Luxuria) commands her daughter Poverty (Inopia) to enter the house of a man whose extravagant tastes “destroyed his patrimony.”2 Megaronides, the first mortal character to appear in the play, explains that the goddess’s words reflect “a sickness that has attacked our good morals here,” “overcomes that which is beneficial to the common good,” and “interferes with private and public matters.”3 These criticisms sound serious, but, as the play develops, Megaronides and a host of other officious characters become, in the words of a modern commentator, “moral prigs” and “self-righteous pompous ass[es].”4 Plautus knows his audience will have heard claims like these and he wants his audience to see that these are the absurd musings of silly people.
Comedy like this works because it mocks ideas that matter. Many Romans in the 190s and 180s BC did feel that extravagance and the pursuit of luxuries were driving Rome to ruin. Some of this viewpoint grew out of the way that these extravagances had suddenly appeared in Rome after two decades of austerity and deprivation caused by Rome’s war with Hannibal. Rome’s long and brutal conflict with Carthage in the Second Punic War created two generations of Roman heroes. Rome survived Hannibal’s invasion of Italy because of the calculated policies of established leaders like Fabius Maximus. These men enacted sumptuary laws, preached frugality, parried Hannibal’s initial assaults, and gradually rolled back his Italian gains.
The old guard saved Rome from Hannibal, but the young general Scipio Africanus brought about Carthage’s ultimate defeat. An incredibly charismatic and controversial figure, Scipio launched his career by winning election to a series of offices that he was technically too young to hold.5 Empowered by strong popular support, Scipio brazenly broke with the strategy of the older generals who had saved Rome from Hannibal. He took the war to the Carthaginians, winning victories first in Spain and then in North Africa. Scipio’s rapid political rise and the unconventional ways in which he secured offices aroused the initial hostility of the older generation of leaders, but they particularly resented the wealth that Scipio brought back from Africa and the public way in which he spent it.6
Flush with North African plunder, the dashing Scipio returned to the capital the richest Roman in history. During the war with Hannibal, the Republic had legally restricted the ownership of luxury goods and displays of wealth. Scipio’s public profile excited Romans who were tired of the frugality of a wartime economy—so much so that, in 195 BC, the lex Oppia, the last of the legal limits on Roman spending, was repealed following a contentious public debate.7 Scipio also had a good idea of how to use his wealth to maintain popularity. He rewarded his 35,000 soldiers with plunder equal to four months of military pay and an acre and a quarter of land in Italy.8 He even paid for lavish games and a series of public monuments commemorating his military victories. The most evocative of these was a garish arch with seven gilded statues that Scipio erected on the Capitoline Hill in Rome.9
Scipio’s largess helped to spark an arms race through which elite Romans used their riches to build up their public profiles. Soldiers came to expect bonuses from their commanders even if they had won only a minor victory.10 Games became larger and more impressive. A memorable gladiatorial show in 200 BC had twenty-five pairs of fighters. By 183, a similarly memorable gladiatorial performance required sixty.11 Returning Roman officers also sponsored more grandiose public works. By the 180s, commanders were not just decorating existing temples with war spoils but building entirely new ones as well.12 Even dinner parties and feasts, which were often open to selected members of the public, became so opulent that, by the late 180s BC, they could stretch across multiple days and fill the Forum with reclining guests.13
Perhaps nothing better encapsulated this moment than the triumphal procession led in March 186 by Gnaeus Manlius Vulso following his victory over the Greek Seleucid kingdom.14 The historian Livy describes how he “brought into Rome for the first time, bronze couches, costly coverlets, tapestry, other fabrics, and . . . pedestal tables.” The slaves he captured also changed Roman banquets. Guests quickly came to expect elaborate meals prepared by skilled chefs, served by attractive waiters, and accompanied by “girls who played on the harp and sang and danced.” All of these tasks used to be done in Rome by menial laborers, but now these “servile offices came to be looked upon as a fine art.”15
These disorienting changes all happened very quickly. Within a generation, the flow of money and slaves generated by Rome’s wars changed Roman political competition. Established politicians who were too old to take command in one of these lucrative campaigns had no hope of matching the glory, wealth, and popularity of successful younger men. They could, however, contrast their supposed fidelity to genuine, traditional Roman virtues with the ostentatious devotion to luxury that their younger rivals displayed. The most potent criticism they could make of this new social order highlighted its break from an idealized past.
Plautus poked fun at just this sort of moralizing. Some of the people he mocked were indeed easily dismissed old, curmudgeonly blowhards like Megaronides. But not all of them. The person who best articulated the idea that rapid moral decline now afflicted Rome was Marcus Porcius Cato.16 Although Cato is now remembered as the very sort of old curmudgeon whom Plautus mocks, he cut a very different figure in the 190s and 180s. Cato was then at the peak of his rhetorical powers and stood out as one of the Republic’s most influential politicians. Cato took it upon himself to combat the moral decline that he saw afflicting Rome.
This was a cynical move. Cato himself had benefited from a lucrative command in Spain following the conclusion of his consulship in 194.17 Cato also understood how he could use his considerable rhetorical gifts to capitalize on the unease created by the disorienting changes affecting Roman life in the early second century. Cato had already positioned himself as the protector of traditional Roman values by arguing against the repeal of the lex Oppia in 195, but his attacks on the newly elegant men of Rome became
The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome
fiercer as time progressed. These men possessed, Cato claimed, an avarice that “included all of the vices so that whoever was considered extravagant, ambitious, elegant, vicious, or good-for-nothing received praise.”18 Cato assailed newly fashion-conscious Romans for breaking with a past in which one dressed simply to “cover their nakedness” and “paid more for horses than for cooks.” That was an age when “the poetic art was not esteemed and, if anyone was devoted to it or frequented banquets, he was called a ruffian.”19
Cato did not just attack the Roman turn toward ostentatious consumption. Another feature of Roman life in the early second century BC also attracted his ire. Cato saw Rome’s growing engagement with the Greek world as a threat to the Roman and Latin culture he idealized. His xenophobic attacks greatly exaggerated the impact of Greeks in Rome. Most Greeks would have come as slaves following a series of second-century Roman victories in the East. Relatively small numbers of free Greek philosophers, teachers of rhetoric, and doctors had come to Rome, but it was precisely these high-status, high-visibility Greeks whom Cato targeted. Cato said that Greeks “will corrupt everything” in Rome and predicted that the Romans would lose their empire when they began to be “infected with Greek literature.”20
Cato used this malignant rhetoric to support a series of reactionary policies. When he campaigned for election as censor for 184 BC, he “proclaimed that the city needed a drastic purification” through which he could “cut away and cauterize the luxury and degeneracy of the age.”21 This message of moral decline and the promise of a radical return to a more virtuous Roman past propelled Cato into office.
Cato then used the pretext of moral renewal to attack his enemies. He expelled senators and sanctioned Roman knights who, he claimed, had fallen into degeneracy. Among them was a man named Manlius whom Cato cast from the senate because he was seen to have passionately kissed his wife while walking with her and his daughter in daylight.22 Cato removed the brother of Scipio Africanus from the equestrian order because Cato disliked Africanus. Cato also ordered an assessment of the value of all clothing, carriages, women’s jewelry, furniture, and silverware owned by wealthy Romans. Those items worth more than 1500 denarii, an arbitrary figure that
Cato had set, were then rated at ten times their actual value and taxed at this rate.23
Cato later turned his attention toward purging Rome of the decadent and dangerous Greek influences that he claimed threatened to corrupt Rome. To this end, he publicly rebuked Scipio Africanus for the Greek habits he had adopted while in Sicily and later backed measures expelling Greek philosophers from the city.24 He even pushed for the deportation of the Athenian ambassador and Platonist philosopher Carneades after Carneades gave a lecture on justice that displeased Cato.25
Romans had mixed reactions to Cato’s policies. Those who believed that avarice, excessive luxury, and foreign influence had afflicted Rome applauded the radical measures that Cato backed. They even erected a statue in Cato’s honor that bore the inscription “when the Roman state was sinking into decay, he became censor and, through his wise leadership, discipline, and guidance, it returned again to the correct path.”26
Cato’s story of Roman decay seduced some Romans, but the reality of his moral renewal appalled many others. Wealthy opponents aggressively pushed back on his calls for reform and even persuaded a friendly magistrate to prosecute Cato for maladministration after his term had concluded.27 The Republic of the early second century was robust enough to roll back the most unpalatable parts of Cato’s program.
Parts of Cato’s agenda that were not soon reversed aged quite poorly. His attacks against Greek teachers and doctors looked particularly misguided to later generations of Romans. By the first century BC, nearly all of the leading political thinkers in the Roman world had embraced one form of Greek philosophy or another. These Greek-trained Roman philosophers included such lions of the late Republic as Cicero and Brutus, but the most notable of all of them was Cato’s own great-grandson (often now called Cato the Younger), a man defined by his devotion to Stoic philosophy.28 Three generations later, not even his own family continued to embrace Cato’s xenophobic anti-Hellenism.
While Cato’s visions of Roman renewal died, his larger claim that avarice and luxury corrupted Rome endured for more than a century and a half. On the one hand, he had a point. The rapidly expanding Roman state contracted out administrative tasks like tax collection in much of its
