September 6, 2023

OH MY GOD please stop comparing the US to Rome

Rome didn't "Fall"

Modern Medieval

by David M. Perry and Matthew Gabriele

Imagine us rubbing our temples. Keep imagining it. Then, imagine it some more.

One of the things that we (and most medievalists) agree on is that Rome didn’t “fall.” As we talk about in The Bright Ages, and also as we’ve written about here (in response to the econobros), the way that one frames what happens in 4th- and (especially) 5th-century Europe really matters.

The very concept of the European “Middle Ages” was one that was created. Its position in the middle is predicated on there being a “before” and an “after,” and those who came after - Petrarch with his poetry, Vasari with his artists, Protestant historians with their politics - were so very sure that they were better than their predecessors, and also so very sure they were as good as the as those in antiquity.

In the modern world, much of this stems from Edward Gibbon, writing in the 18th century. As we say in The Bright Ages:

The idea that Rome “fell”… relies upon a conception of homogeneity—of historical stasis. That ages-old idea suggests a centralized proto-modern nation-state that in its idealization much more resembles Gibbon’s own eighteenth-century British Empire than any reality of Antiquity. For him, the crude passion of early Christianity, as he saw it, ruined the glories of Rome and led the clean, stable empire to crumble. But then Gibbon was upset at the time by the turbulence of the French Revolution. Passion, Gibbon thought, was dangerous. He longed for a purer Italy, one he imagined as he gazed upon Rome’s and Ravenna’s ruins as a dilettante traveler. For him, when Rome adapted to deal with the new realities of a shifting European and Mediterranean world, it “ceased to exist.” Germans couldn’t really be Romans, women couldn’t really be rulers, etc. (13)

In other words, Gibbon the dilettante traveler went on safari in the past searching for himself. Oddly enough, he found what he was looking for by cherry-picking bits of the past to make his model work.

Subscribe now

And yet, the trope is recycled endlessly - most recently this week in another NYT op-ed. The author, promoting a just-released book, says that the United States is an empire in decline and can learn salutary lessons from Rome’s decline (ca. 400 CE) and “fall” soon after. It's fine, as these things go. It does the usual moves, talking about immigration now and Germanic immigration then, and unrivaled economic and military power on the wane. It writes:

In the past two decades, however, [the US] has sunk into decline. At the turn of the millennium, the Western world accounted for four-fifths of global economic output. Today, that share is down to three-fifths, and falling. While Western countries struggle to restore their dynamism, developing countries now have the world’s fastest-growing economies. Through institutions like BRICS and OPEC, and encouraged by China, they are converting their growing economic heft into political power.

Let’s leave aside for the moment the unmitigated nostalgia here for an era of Western hegemony that really means colonialism and imperialism (the later example in the essay about the 1999 WTO in Seattle really drives this icky nostalgia home). This is just another version of the econobro need to have there be a fall in order for there to have been a rebirth. We talked about that here.

So instead, let’s focus for a moment on an unusual second move that’s at least unique for essays in this genre, wherein it argues that the United States isn’t so much the western half of the Roman Empire, but rather more like Byzantium (though admittedly the analogy is a bit confused).

Specifically, the NYT essay likens the US vs China to Byzantium vs Persia. It argues that the eastern half of the Roman Empire rode out the “collapse” (again, ugh) of the western half in the 5th century and was even able to establish a hegemonic position over the new kingdoms in its lost western territories. As such, things were actually going alright for Rome. And this situation could have survived indefinitely had the empire not expended vital resources [from the essay], “starting in the late 6th century, in an unnecessary conflict with its bitter Persian rival. Imperial hubris drove it into a series of wars which, after two generations of conflict, left both empires vulnerable to a challenge that would overwhelm them both in just a few decades — a newly united Arab world.”

The US, apparently, is in danger of falling into the same trap.

Now, let’s leave aside the fact that although Persia was overwhelmed, Byzantium limped along for another 700+ years with many centuries of resurgence and growth, and other centuries of contraction and internal chaos.1

No wait, let’s focus on that.

So what does “fall” here mean if the supposedly relevant model for the US is an empire that survived for another 700+ years? What precisely is being lost when we put that fact next to the examples the author provides of the US’ “decline?” What have we lost other than being able to operate as the British East India Company or the United Fruit Company?

And so we’re back to Gibbon. He cloaked an argument about the present within one ostensibly about the past, but his history was poor (in large part because he didn’t care about he actual past). Similarly, contemporary arguments about the supposed “fall” of Rome are political arguments that try to use the past solely as a moral crutch - a stick to cow the reader into submission. As we wrote elsewhere, “When historical analogies are used to foreclose arguments, those analogies aren’t actually historical — they are attempts to leverage one contemporary group’s feelings to sell something.” In other words: no history, all vibes. Don’t be a mark.

Imagine us rubbing our temples…

Thanks for reading Modern Medieval! Subscribe for free to receive new posts every week.