How many times has it been analogized that America is the Roman Empire of the 21st Century? The rise and the fall. Few subjects in history are richer or have been more studied as a cautionary tale. The Kingdom of Rome began as a small Latin village on the Tiber, legendarily founded by Romulus. Seven kings ruled before the last, Tarquinius Superbus (Tarquin the Proud), was overthrown in a patrician revolt. The Republic that resulted was said that its genius was its institutionalism with two consuls, the Senate, tribunes of the plebs and checks on individual power. Rome expanded methodically: first dominating Italy, then crushing Carthage in the Punic Wars (Hannibal crossing the Alps being the nearest Rome came to destruction), then absorbing Greece, Spain, and the Near East. By 100 BC Rome ruled the Mediterranean world and called it Mare Nostrum, “our sea.” I guess that’s sort of like The Gulf of America…
But success broke the Republic. Vast conquered wealth flowed to the elite; small farmers were displaced by slave-worked latifundia; landless veterans became personal armies loyal to generals rather than the state. Marius, Sulla, Caesar, Pompey, Antony, Augustus all brought a century of civil wars culminating in Octavian’s victory at Actium in 31 BC. There were then “Five Good Emperors”. Augustus invented the fiction of restoring the Republic while holding all real power. It worked brilliantly. The Julio-Claudians (Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero) were uneven, but the Empire held. The Flavians stabilized it. Then came the height: Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius. This was the “period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous.” Population perhaps 70 million. Trade from Scotland to Mesopotamia. Roads, aqueducts, law, the Pax Romana. Think of that as the equivalent of out post-WWII glorious 50 years.
And then the fall, the Crisis of the Third Century. Marcus Aurelius broke the adoptive succession by choosing his son Commodus (yes, it sounds like Gladiator). He was vain, erratic, eventually strangled by a wrestler. What followed was catastrophic: 50 years of near-constant civil war, plague, economic collapse, and external pressure from Sassanid Persia and Gothic tribes. Dozens of emperors, most dying violently. The Empire nearly disintegrated. Constantine stabilized the Empire through radical restructuring, dividing administration, inflating the bureaucracy and army, fixing prices (unsuccessfully), and in Constantine’s case, adopting Christianity, which transformed Western civilization. But the cost was immense taxation and a rigidly stratified society. Constantine moved the capital to Constantinople in 330 AD, tilting gravity eastward permanently.Visigoths, Vandals, Huns under Attila, Ostrogoths, wave after wave came for the pickin’s. Rome was sacked in 410 and 455. In 476, the Germanic chieftain Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustulus, the last Western emperor, and didn’t bother appointing a replacement. Rome ended, as they say, not with a bang but a whimper
Why it fell is the eternal debate. Some blamed Christianity and moral decline. Modern historians point to a web of causes. Military overextension… too much frontier, too few reliable troops (Iran, Venezuela, Greenland, etc.). Then there was economic stagnation, a slave economy that discouraged innovation (perhaps we are becoming the slaves of AI or Elon?), currency debasement, crushing taxation, inflation, political dysfunction. No stable succession mechanism meant constant civil war.. Then came climate and plague (global warming and COVID?). But it was the Huns who destabilized the Gothic peoples who then crashed into Roman territory.. There was a loss of civic identity and being “Roman” meant less and less to those nominally under its rule….like the degradation of the American passport today.
And through it all at the end there was the sackings of Rome. In 410 AD the Visigoths under Alaric was the most psychologically devastating. Rome hadn’t been taken by a foreign enemy in 800 years. Alaric’s Visigoths sacked the city for three days after a slave revolt opened the gates. It shocked the ancient world. St. Augustine wrote City of God partly in response. The material damage was significant but not total; the symbolic damage was immeasurable. In 455 AD the Vandals under Gaiseric brought about what is often considered the more thorough looting. Gaiseric negotiated entry with Pope Leo I, who secured a promise against massacre and arson but the Vandals stripped the city systematically over 14 days, carrying off enormous quantities of treasure, including the spoils Titus had taken from the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD. This is where the word “vandalism” originates. In 546 AD the Ostrogoths under Totila, during the Gothic Wars against Byzantium, took and briefly depopulated Rome. Population had already collapsed from perhaps a million to tens of thousands by this point.
I bother with this history because it is all so poignant to me in these times. We are Rome. Commodus would certainly have built a UFC octagon on the White House lawn. Elon is the Hun, the Visigoth, the Vandal, the Ostrogoth. The other Patricians are our billionaires…looting and pillaging through cryptocurrency and perhaps now AI. And now we have a SpaceX rocket ship I.P.O. that can whisk us away to Mars, the Byzantium of the cosmos, for what? Will we get another 1,000 years of eastern rule (think China), before we fall hopelessly into the dark ages of mankind again?
I think I need to go back to bed and find some sweeter dreams. I feel like I have a ringside seat to the end of the universe tonight. Maybe I should have bid for some SpaceX shares…too late. It’s on allocation already. Ah, but then there’s my index funds which have sneaked through the back door (Blackrock bid for $5B…how much did Vanguard go for?). It’s on nights like this that I wish I knew less of history and the world… This is why people go to monasteries to hide out, I guess…at least until the pillage of Rome comes to an end.