Taking a cue from the Roman Empire
Our fascination with the Roman Empire lingers on, as if it were a great beach read we just can’t put down. This is only natural. There’s all that sex and gore, at least as imagined in pop depictions (the BBC’s “I, Claudius’’ in the 1970s and the BBC-HBO series “Rome’’ of late). On a more serious level, in our Christian-majority country, there’s a natural interest in a regime that bore responsibility for pivotal exclamation points in Christian history, from the crucifixion of Jesus to the fourth-century conversion of the emperor Constantine, which led to the state sanctioning of the faith.
There’s another peg for our Roman interest. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has been called the modern Rome, a superpower with unrivaled economic and military might. The first Rome fell rather messily. Might our dominance have an expiration date, or can we learn something from the empire’s fate?
That turns out to be a trickier discussion than you might think. According to “How Rome Fell,’’ a German scholar has counted 200 theories about what brought down the empire. British historian Adrian Goldsworthy, author of a much-praised biography of Caesar and military histories of Rome, gives a special nod to 18th-century writer Edward Gibbon’s view. In his classic, multivolume “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,’’ Gibbon decried a loss of moral virtue and civic participation among Romans. (He partly blamed Christianity and its emphasizing the next world over this.) Religiosity and “bowling alone’’ being frequently noted American hallmarks, this does not bode well for us.
Goldsworthy’s conclusion, after surveying the third through sixth centuries, stresses the debilitating effects of numerous civil wars. The Roman Army killed itself as frequently as it did enemies, while internal strife sucked it away from the frontiers, where it could confront foreign threats. Later emperors were preoccupied, first and foremost, with their own survival, not the public good. This weakened the empire so that it was slowly hacked to death by invaders.
“Perhaps we should imagine the Late Roman Empire as a retired athlete,’’ Goldsworthy writes. “In the end, it may well have been ‘murdered’ by barbarian invaders, but these struck at a body made vulnerable by prolonged decay.’’ Judiciously, he insists on the numerous differences between Rome’s situation and America’s. One relevant lesson is that the greatness of superpowers wards off immediate collapse, but “major catastrophic failures often arrive both suddenly and unanticipated.’’ Banking crisis, anyone?
“How Rome Fell’’ is exhaustively researched. It comes to life at moments (those imperial murders, and the empire’s own violence, could be gruesomely memorable). Provocatively, Goldsworthy argues that Roman rule brought benefits to the ruled; the famous Pax Romana was a rare peace in a world with many expansion-minded regimes. And unlike Gibbon, Goldsworthy squeezes his study between just one set of covers.
Yet swaths of the book might seem ponderous to nonacademics who aren’t interested in the names of every short-lived pretender to the imperial seat. Goldsworthy’s narrative sweep, while grand, runs over cobblestones of excruciating detail; it’s similar to reading a history of the American presidency filled with the names of duds like Millard Fillmore. That may be unavoidable in a textbook, and after all, “How Rome Fell’’ is published by an academic press. But the approach undeniably hinders the storytelling at times.
In the end, perhaps Rome was too big to hold on to all those territories and people. The same can be said of this book and its grasp on the average reader’s attention.
Rich Barlow can be reached at barlow81@gmail.com. 
