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The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome The History of A Dangerous Idea Edward J Watts Full Download Chapter
The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome The History of A Dangerous Idea Edward J Watts Full Download Chapter
DANGEROUS IDEA
E D W A R D J . W AT T S
1
1
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the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
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Press in the UK and certain other countries.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190076719.001.0001
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by LSC Communications, United States of America
To Manasi, Nate, and Zoe
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
Map of the Roman Empire at Its Greatest Extent in the Second
Century AD xii
Notes 243
Index 293
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 rhet-
oric 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 ex-
panded 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 sup-
port and to the many colleagues who helped me hash out ideas over lunch
at Loring Hall. This project also developed through engagement with audi-
ences at Harvard University, Amherst College, Indiana University, Pomona
College, UC San Diego, and the University of California Berkeley. I partic-
ularly 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
x 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
series of proposals to roll back laws granting regional autonomy while put-
ting restrictions on political parties and Muslim groups blamed for ter-
rorism.4 In the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte responded to the
perception of widespread crime and drug use by tolerating (or even encour-
aging) 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 sto-
ries rather than data. Many of them require nothing more than a compel-
ling 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 evi-
dence, 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
Introduction3
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 neg-
ative 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, de-
cline 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 cor-
rect— 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
4 Introduction
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 nar-
rative of Roman decline could prove so destructive. Everyone who has a
passing familiarity with Roman history or literature is aware of the pervasive-
ness 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 res-
toration 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 tradi-
tion. 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,
Introduction5
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, renew-
als, and restorations need not be destructive. In the second and early third
centuries, they were often affirmative. The restorers of Rome then had col-
laborators, not victims. They did not upend Roman society. They con-
firmed 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 col-
laborative 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 particu-
larly poignant. In 165 AD, smallpox arrived in the Roman Empire. It horri-
fied 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 com-
munity 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 rhetori-
cian 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
6 Introduction
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 win-
ning 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 gener-
ation 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 fru-
gality 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 conten-
tious 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 commemorat-
ing 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 vic-
tory.10 Games became larger and more impressive. A memorable gladiato-
rial 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, com-
manders 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
Decline in the Roman Republic9
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, dis-
cipline, 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 magis-
trate to prosecute Cato for maladministration after his term had con-
cluded.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 mis-
guided 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 ava-
rice 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
12 The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome
deserted nor filled with large estates in the 130s BC.35 Tiberius, however, was
a powerful speaker who told a resonant tale. Even if the story he told was
not true, it felt true. This was enough to get him elected.
Once he had been elected, Tiberius set to work on a land reform bill.
Inspired, we are told, by slogans and pleas written by his supporters on
walls all over the city, Tiberius gave an impassioned speech in which he la-
mented the impoverishment of the people of Italy and spoke dramatically
about the consequences of farms manned primarily by slaves.36
Despite what he claimed was at stake, Tiberius proposed a mild reform.
Anyone who violated a long-standing law that limited renters to no more
than 350 acres of public land would have to surrender any land above that
threshold in return for fair compensation. The reclaimed public land would
then be redistributed to Roman citizens.37 The law furthermore covered
only certain parts of Italy and would, at best, have allowed perhaps 15,000
families to be resettled—out of an Italian population then numbering sev-
eral million.38
The moderation of the proposal reveals Tiberius’s true objective. He did
not intend to address comprehensively the conditions that led to the sup-
posed decline of the Roman-citizen small farmers. He wanted to voice the
anger that people felt about a Roman order that seemed to reward the greed
of the rich while disregarding the needs of its other citizens.
When Octavius, a fellow tribune of the plebs, blocked a vote on his law,
Tiberius responded with fury. Mobilizing his supporters, “he withdrew his
conciliatory law and introduced one which was more gratifying to the
people and harsher to the illegal owners of the land” by forcing them to “va-
cate the land” and offering them “no compensation.”39 Tiberius pointed out
that Octavius, as a holder of large tracts of public land, had a clear motiva-
tion for opposing the reform. Then, with the flair of a demagogue, Tiberius
offered to pay, out of his own funds,for the property that Octavius would
lose.40 When Octavius failed to back down, Tiberius staged a public vote to
strip Octavius of his office. The newly deposed Octavius barely escaped an
angry mob of Gracchan supporters.41
The removal of Octavius allowed Tiberius’s law to pass, but at a signifi-
cant cost. Not only had Octavius’s deposition occurred amid threats of mob
violence, but Tiberius had also “abrogated the power of a colleague who
14 The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome
Silloin Kitty kertoi juuri sen, mitä mies oli odottanut kuulevansa.
Hän kertoi siitä elämästä, jota kaipasi, sen elämän synkkyydestä,
sisällyksettömyydestä ja tyhjyydestä, josta yritti paeta. Ja hänen
puhuessaan tunsi Patches, kuinka sanomaton sääli ja myötätunto
täytti hänen sydämensä.
»Ettekö?»
»Varmasti en, jollette itse halua kertoa minulle, niin en minä aio
sekaantua asioihin, jotka eivät liikuta minua.»
»Mitä, Joe?»
»Hyvästi, Joe!»
»Herra Acton», alkoi vieras arasti, »on eräs asia; josta tahtoisin
puhua kanssanne.»
»Toivon, ettette käsitä väärin minua, kun sanon, että asia koskee
myöskin neiti Reidiä.»
»Kenties ei», myönsi Phil, »multa luulen Kittyn itse pitävän huolta
itsestään.»
»Ei, mutta hän lähti pois erään — erään irrokkaan kanssa, kuten
hän sanoi.»
»Niin hän itse sanoi. Neiti Reid sanoi, että hänen nimensä oli Joe
—
Joe ja jotakin muuta.»
»Oli, juuri niin se oli. Hän kuuluu Tailholt Mountainiin, sanoi neiti
Reid. Teillä on niin hullunkurisia nimiä tässä maassa.»
»Siksi, että sinä et ole sellainen mies, Phil Acton», vastasi Patches
hitaasti. »Sinä tiedät varsin hyvin, että jos erottaisit minut siksi, että
olen ylläpitänyt ystävyyttä Yavapai Joe-raukan kanssa, niin olisi
minun mahdotonta saada työtä ainoassakaan karjakartanossa koko
maassa. Sinä olet liian rehellinen tuomitaksesi miehen pelkän
epäilyksen perusteella ja liian kunnian mies tuomitaksesi toisen siksi,
että hänkin pyrkii olemaan samanlainen.»
Ratkaisun päivä.
»No niin, sitten Stanin yhtiö äkkiä kutsui hänet lakaisin New Yorkiin
ja nimitti hänet tähän paikkaan. Hänen oli lähdettävä viipymättä
matkalle ja hän sähkötti minulle New Yorkista. Ajattelehan — minulla
oli vain viikko aikaa häiden ja kapioitteni valmistamiseen. Tiesin
tapaavani sinut täällä.»
»Ja koska olette täällä», virkkoi Kitty päättävästi, »niin pitää sinun
ja herra Manningin tulla Williamson Valleyhin viettämään
kuherruskuukautenne meidän kartanossamme.»