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The Decline
of the West
or the gloomy outlook of the Russian émigré historian
Mikhail Ivanovich Rostovtzeff:
The evolution of the ancient world has a lesson and a warning for
us. Our civilization will not last unless it be a civilization not of
one class but of the masses… But the ultimate problem remains
like a ghost, ever present and unlaid: Is it possible to extend
a higher civilization to the lower classes without debasing its
standards and diluting its quality to the vanishing point? Is not
every civilization bound to decay as soon as it begins to penetrate
the masses?
12
These discussions could take a more positive or at any rate activist
turn. Occasionally, parallels with Rome were employed to suggest
how people might survive the coming disaster; most recently in the
proposal of Morris Berman for a ‘new monasticism’ to preserve
the finest products of Western culture from the spiritual anomie
and socio-economic breakdown of modern America: ‘While the
parallels between the Roman case and the American one are not
exact, the analogy does suggest some transformative possibilities.
If, for example, we are indeed slated for another dark age, it may
not have to last six hundred years this time around.’
13
More often,
the comparison is invoked by those with a firm conviction that they
understand the nature of the threat to modern society as a means
of bolstering their arguments, validating their views and supporting
their call for specific action to preserve Western civilisation (or the
United States, which is frequently assumed to be the same thing).
A wide range of lessons have been drawn from Rome’s decline
and fall. One of the most prominent is the need to deal effectively
with the barbarians at the gates, a popular theme both among
French writers in the first half of the twentieth century, confronted
by the self-proclaimed successors of the Germanic hordes that had
conquered Rome (‘Roman civilization did not die a natural death;
it was assassinated’, in the words of one French historian) and
among the cheerleaders of United States power over the last decade
(‘Modern high-tech terrorists are the new barbarians’).
14
However,
Rome’s fall has also been blamed on excessive bureaucracy, the
stifling of freedom and free enterprise by over-regulation and the
unendurable weight of taxation – and on the weakness of the central
state and its shortage of resources.
15
It has been attributed to a
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132
ThE roman EmpIrE
shortage of manpower and to over-population, to ‘race suicide’, with
the pure blood of the original Romans diluted and overwhelmed by
weak-willed, emotional Orientals – and to the failure of the Romans
to extend their civilisation far enough amongst its subjects.
16
Various
Enlightenment rationalists blamed Christianity and its effect on
the civic spirit of the aristocracy; Josef Stalin firmly asserted that
Rome had been brought down by the revolt of the slaves.
17
It might
seem that modern preconceptions and ideological assumptions are
simply being read into the past, but in fact almost all of these
themes – albeit not expressed in precisely these terms – can be
identified in the analyses of social crisis developed by authors at the
time. Modern preconceptions and ideological assumptions merely
determine the selection of particular classical views as providing
the true explanation of their civilisation’s problems.
One of the major problems in studying ancient authors’ accounts
of ‘decline and fall’, and hence in drawing parallels between ancient
and modern, is that for many of them the Empire was always already
in decline.
18
Writers of the late Republic, faced with a crisis of
their political system and the social and economic consequences of
empire, mourned the loss of the virtue and frugality of their ancestors
and denounced contemporary tendencies to neglect tradition.
The efforts of the new Augustan regime to present innovation as
tradition and revolution as restoration were riddled with doubts
and inconsistencies – Virgil and Livy seem to raise questions about
the official line even as they promulgate it in their works – and
plenty of authors of the early Principate mourned the loss of the
liberty of the Republic and saw the corruption and luxuriousness
of their own society as presaging the end of Rome. A long Christian
tradition, building on Jewish precedents, emphasised the flaws of
the Empire and of the whole worldly order as an argument for the
need for spiritual renewal and a new view of the relations between
god and man. Traditionalist authors of the fourth century blamed it
all on Constantine’s rejection of everything that Rome stood for by
converting to Christianity. At all these periods, it should be noted,
there were also plenty of sources proclaiming the happiness of the
times and the magnificence of the empire.
19
A full account of the history of the later Roman Empire and
of the characteristics of the period known as ‘late antiquity’ far
exceeds the scope of this book. It is a rich and complex subject,
which is no longer interpreted solely in terms of the decadence of
the classical and the collapse of civilisation into the Dark Ages –
and as such it is almost entirely irrelevant to the use of the image
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EnvoI
133
of Rome in modern discourse. Arguments about whether the
period might be better conceived as a transition from one form
of society to another count for nothing in the face of the power
of the image of ‘decline and fall’ in the Western imagination. That
image is vague in the extreme; there is little precision, and little
sense of any necessity for precision, in defining
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