[cross-posted on Albion’s Seedlings]
In the past few months, I’ve had a chance to review two substantial books on the Fall of the Roman Empire and its after-effects (Peter Heathers’ Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History, and Bryan Ward-Perkins’ The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization.) These books summarize the post-WW2 archaeology and literary analysis covering the late Roman and post-Roman periods, and offer a useful corrective to a more recent trend in scholarship which has created a soft-soaped “Late Antiquity” … in competition to the “Dark Ages” of popular imagination. For these revisionist scholars of the last thirty years, the migration of barbarians into the Roman empire (both eastern and western branches) was both justifiable (“they only wanted the Roman good life”) and relatively benign (“they settled in and became staunch allies”). Heather and Ward-Perkins discredit this post-modern, New Age image of the Fall pretty thoroughly but we shouldn’t be surprised if major portions of Western academia and literati will choose to hold onto such a rosy-hued version of Roman/barbarian relations. If only the Romans had been nicer to the barbarians, they’ll proclaim, so much unpleasantness could have been avoided.
Equating America with Rome has been a spectator sport for a very long time. A dominant power — economically, militarily, and culturally — is widely resented, and subtly envied, whether by those pretending to dominance themselves, or those merely poor and hungry. Either too vulgar and decadent for ongoing success. Or too conservative and religious for such success. Either too powerful and entangled in every global squabble, or too disengaged and ignorant of the world’s woes and complaints. The Rome analogy is an endlessly flexible tool, especially when historical examples can be drawn from the founding of Rome (roughly 750 BCE) through to the fall of the Eastern Empire in 1453 CE. There’s something for every philosophical and political stripe in a Roman history that lasts more than two millenia. Pick and choose at will.
The Rome/America analogy has certainly been worked overtime since 9/11. Will Goliath topple? It’s the question of the era, just much as it was in the early fifth century. It’s not that people want the barbarians to win. It’s just that they really, really want the new Rome to lose.
A particularly ham-handed example of the comparison was written by Niall Ferguson in 2004 called Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire
. The counter-arguments … about whether America is an empire, about whether its best days are past, about whether “pride goeth before a fall,” about whether its decadence or its sanctimony is the greater global danger … obsess the domestic audience as much as the foreign. So we should brace ourselves for a steady, indeed growing, stream of public commentary that seeks to make comparisons with Rome, and if Heather and Ward-Perkins are correct, seeks to portray any Fall of an American Empire as altogether a matter of minor inconvenience on the way to a far, far better place. The fact that we’d have to see the American economy retrench to the 1820s (before telegraphy and mobile steam power) in order to make the Roman/Late Antiquity analogy ring true seems to have escaped the chattering classes completely. The fate of the hinterlands of modern globalization under such a collapse hardly bears contemplation.
Let’s take a look at a concrete example of how the academic confection called Late Antiquity will be applied to judging America and American options in coming years. Just recently, foreign policy academic Michael Vlahos wrote an article posted on TCS Daily called The Puzzle of New War. The article begins by noting that all the hand-waving about terrorism and guerrilla warfare being something “new” is in fact overblown. The Romans themselves dealt with a variety of antagonists: states (e.g. Dacians, Parthians, and Sassanid Persians), non-state actors (the various tribes, clans, and ethnic groups around Roman imperial borders), and mere “lawless elements” … the bacaudae or bagaudae of fifth century Gaul and Spain.
Then the author describes the Roman solution to non-state parties: negotiation and elite subsidies. If that didn’t work, legionary invasion and ethnocide were applied. The Romans had a very immediate practical use for conquered peoples, of course: slavery. Vlahos notes that the Roman way is clearly not the Israeli or American way. In the current Middle East conflicts, the goal has been the suppression of armed opponents, not the obliteration of civilian populations, let alone their enslavement. America (and Israel) won’t eliminate such populations, so how, Vlahos wonders, can they deal with them ultimately?
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