‘The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome’ Review: The Road From Ruin

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

This is a history of Rome in which the first name is that of Donald Trump and Ronald Reagan’s name almost the last. President Trump earns his place with his inaugural address promising to “make America great again,” President Reagan with a speech in 1969 on the theme of “decline and fall” in which the greatest empire in Western history collapsed in bureaucracy, excessive welfare payments, taxes on the middle class and long-haired students wearing makeup. Edward J. Watts, a professor of history at the University of California, San Diego, is a scholar of the later ancient world, who takes his readers from republican Rome to Republican Washington with a resounding theme that anyone promising to restore lost greatness is probably up to no good.

Throughout the years of his story he finds a range of cases where politicians first claim that society is “becoming worse” than it was during a great past and then “suggest a path toward restoration that consists of rebalancing society to address the problems they identify.” His modern abusers of history come from Spain and the Philippines as well as the U.S. When “radical innovation” is dressed as the “defense of tradition” he sees a trail of victims—immigrants, dissidents and the young.

Roman history, he argues, is the most abused in this fashion because it is absolutely at the heart of Western culture. President Trump, after his appearance in Mr. Watts’s first line, is not mentioned by name again and no one has ever suggested him as a student of Classics. Yet Mr. Watts is not the first to point out the real-estate magnate’s instinctive grasp of rhetorical themes—populist anti-elitism as well as nostalgia—that were well-tested over the Roman ages.

This is a powerful lens through which to view the past, both for those who already think they know it well and those who have practical uses for it. The first villains in the book are identified even before Rome has an emperor, led by the “cynical” Marcus Porcius Cato, who blamed immigrant Greeks for corrupting the Roman young in the early second century B.C. Cato is followed by the down-at-heel aristocrat Lucius Cornelius Sulla, who in the 80s B.C. slaughtered thousands of his fellow citizens in a program of turning back the clock toward a better age. By the end of the book, Mussolini in Ethiopia and Rodrigo Duterte in Manila have joined other villains in what Mr. Watts sees as a pattern of disguising brutal policies within disingenuous history.
There are surprisingly generous words for leaders regularly seen as the worst of their kind, the emperors Caligula (A.D. 37-41) and Nero (54-68), both of whom “prized stability and continuity” with the immediate past instead of embracing the “language of Roman decline and renewal.” These men may have been vicious fantasists, claiming divinity and artistic genius for themselves, but they did not inflict a political fantasy of restoration.
It is hard to make heroes of Caligula and Nero. A firmer positive verdict goes to Antoninus Pius (138-61), a “savior and restorer” in the eyes of those to whom he sent disaster relief, and to the first African emperor, Septimius Severus (193-211), who restored the fabric of Rome at the end of the second century without claiming to be restoring any grander concept. This is the model that Mr. Watts approves. In his final paragraph, he offers his readers two approaches to what he perceives as pressing modern crises—modern “political instability, environmental degradation, wealth inequality and climate change.” Some, like Sulla, create scapegoats. Others, like Antoninus Pius, aim to bring society together. President Trump was certainly a Sulla: whether his successor is an Antonine, Mr. Watts does not say.

The author does give an elegant analysis of how such verdicts came to matter beyond academe. The changing role of Christianity changed the meaning of restoration. Not long after Severus’ death came the edicts from his successors that recovery from military defeats and plague could be best achieved by the persecution of Christians. Another great “restorer” was Diocletian (284-305), who ruled with three colleagues and continued the anti-Christian policy. Only a few years after Diocletian’s death, the emperor himself was a Christian who claimed a very different kind of restoration.

Under the rule of Constantine (306-37), “the glorious Roman past suddenly was irrelevant,” as Mr. Watts puts it. The newly Christian emperor looked back past the time when Rome had ruled from Scotland to Palmyra, even before the time Cato was complaining about the Greeks. The emperor would instead be the new Moses, leading an even bigger world from darkness to light. Mr. Watts has written sympathetically in a previous book, “The Final Pagan Generation” (2015), on the shock felt by citizens, brought up on persecuting Christians, who were suddenly dependent on their god. In this book, Christianity separates the first set of Romans, re-creating greatness, from those who took the theme throughout the world.

These newly powerful Christians had to struggle with the gap between promises of glory and its absence in the real world. Under Constantine’s successors, the boundaries of the Roman empire began to shrink and would never be as great again. Those who saw themselves as Romans had to choose between regret for temporal decline and rejoicing at spiritual progress.

Throughout Roman history deception about the past was a necessary tool. Mr. Watts correctly describes the role of the best-known ancient emperors in falsifying the reputations of their predecessors: Caligula, Nero and Commodus all suffered in the history books so that others could be shining restorers of virtue. Justinian (527-65), though less widely known, is one of Mr. Watts’s worst villains, inventing the idea of a “fall of Rome” in 476 in order to justify the Empire’s restoration from the east. The Byzantines would go on calling themselves Romans, but hundreds of thousands of Italians and centuries of Roman law were erased.

The writer who most firmly fixed “decline and fall” in the Western consciousness was Edward Gibbon, whose six volumes of “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” (1766-88) gave an Enlightenment rationalist’s view in some of the greatest English prose ever written. He blamed much of the empire’s weakness on the barbarization of the Roman armies; it was Gibbon whom President Reagan was citing against the long-haired, perfume-wearing welfare beneficiaries of 1969.

The manner in which Rome “fell” in the fifth century contributed to another modern debate. Starting in the 1970s, in both Europe and the U.S., it suited supporters of a slow continental integration (latterly in the form of the European Union) to argue that the Germanic takeover of territories ruled by Rome had come about mostly by negotiation, not by sack and siege. Literary evidence to the contrary was explained as the heated imaginations of those reluctant to accept the new reality of power. The “Dark Ages” became a concept as officially antiquated as the period it purported to describe, replaced instead by “transition” and “accommodation.” Those more skeptical of European integration preferred the traditional view backed by the archaeological record of ruin, in which, to quote the Oxford historian Bryan Ward-Perkins, a “catastrophe destroys the magnificent Roman dinosaur, but leaves a few tiny dark-age mammals alive.”

Mr. Watts’s analysis of the “eternal decline and fall of Rome,” the “dangerous idea” of his subtitle, extends through the political response to ancient and modern plagues to the abuse by “alt-right figures and white nationalists. . . . of events from the fourth- and fifth-century Roman Empire to attack immigration in the twenty-first century.” The book’s historical range is more, however, than mere material for polemic. He gives a masterly account of the complex family who founded the Roman empire’s last and longest-lasting dynasty, and of its principal figure, Michael Palaeologus (1261-82), who restored Constantinople to its capital status while committing “sins so great that even his successors hesitated to embrace his legacy too closely.” In 1453 those successors lost their city to the Turks.

In Western Europe, Mr. Watts’s story becomes one of emperors who claimed to be Holy and Roman against popes who claimed the same and more, each side using his “dangerous idea” for advancing its interests. The Habsburg emperor Maximilian I (1508-19) hoped to regain Constantinople and once again used “the idea of Roman restoration to justify his violent destruction of an existing political order.” But Maximilian had to balance his responsibilities as Holy Roman Emperor against his duties as a Habsburg. Family land and money would go after his death to his descendants. The title of emperor could be given to a rival family. Though Maximilian was both a restorer and a good family man, his policy, to recall a later slogan, was Habsburgs First.

—Mr. Stothard is the author of “The Last Assassin: The Hunt for the Killers of Julius Caesar.”