Nice article, but the author says up front that he wrote the book with an angle:
> I jokingly said when I started writing, that I wanted people to come out of it with a general feeling of unease about what’s going on in the United States and in the West generally. To emerge from reading the book, go back to flipping on the news, and think, “This is not good.”
So... if you read it and think "wow this is eerily parallel to our current reality," it's going to be hard to know how much of that is because it _really was_ eerily parallel, and how much is because the author _wanted it to feel_ eerily parallel.
He said in the very sentence you cite that he said so jokingly.
Regardless, I read a few books about the fall of the Republic a couple of years ago, all of which were written pre-Trump, and I did indeed find the resemblance eerie.
“When I was doing the History of Rome [podcast], so many people asked me, ‘Is the United States Rome? Are we following a similar trajectory?’ If you start to do some comparisons between the rise and development of the U.S. and rise and development of Rome, you do wind up in this same place. The United States emerging from the Cold War has some analogous parts to where Rome was after they defeated Carthage [in 146 B.C.]. This period was a wide-open field to fill a gap in our knowledge.”
Perhaps it’s is so. Unrelated to his joke, it’s similar and worth the read.
Provided the author <is> constrained by the facts, that's a perfectly reasonable position. If he ignores facts unhelpful to his view he'll be seen through by astute critics.
The author in question is a fairly renowned historian with multiple serious books and podcasts ( in which btw he makes a point of correcting himself when listeners point out mistakes, usually of the bad pronunciation or mistaken year variety), and has a reputation to maintain.
I greatly admire Mike Duncan and I have listened to every episode of his History of Rome _and_ his current Revolutions podcast, as well as read the book this article is about, but ...
I think the assertion that Mike Duncan is "a fairly renowned historian" needs some qualifications. For one, I don't think he has a history degree. And while he seems to be very good at compiling various sources and summarising them in a way that is accessible to the general interested public (and I do agree that he doesn't pretend everything is simple when it's not, and that he corrects his mistakes), that doesn't mean that he does original research, or if he does, that this research is in any way peer-reviewed by the larger community of historians.
This is not a bad thing, but it's something to keep in mind when reading a book that tries to paint a particular narrative. (And I did really enjoy reading the book, FWIW)
Income equality and xenophobia isn’t exactly unique to the US, I don’t think China or Russia has any less income inequality or (governmental) xenophobia.
I’d argue xenophobia is very limited in a population of >300M, it’s just one of those issues where the minority is very vocal which the media loves to magnify. There was just an article on HN about people grossly overestimating the size of subgroups in the populace and I’m sure xenophobes would be one of those overestimations.
The Gini coefficient gives you a measure of income inequality, and the US "wins", handily.
Systemic racism & xenophobia is a bit harder to measure. There's the IPC index, but I can't find a reference comparing the three countries. Immigration rates point to all three being rather bad, with China being the worst. (In that they are the one of the three to have a negative immigration rate)
It's worth keeping in mind that "xenophobia" doesn't make sense, per se. There is, at least in the US, a clear hierarchy of immigration nations, and some are very welcome, while others are decidedly not. I'd assume the same is true in Russia and China. (I vaguely know it to be the case in Russia. I have no idea about China)
Putting aside the big issues with using the Gini coefficient as a measure of income inequality (very different distributions can have similar Gini coefficients) - and the even bigger issue of ignoring wealth altogether - the World Bank data relies on household surveys which are notoriously unreliable even in Western countries. Those numbers ought to be taken with a big heaping of salt.
Here is an article from 2019, the World Bank data you linked includes up until 2018, anyway the article includes the gini coefficient sourced from OECD and it has Russia at #11 (.38), US at #9 (.39), and China at #2 (.51) out of the countries they included in their rankings.
This seems very close to the 2018 World Bank data you linked for Russia and the US, but as you will note the last year of available data for China with the World Bank is 2016 at which point the gini coefficient exceeds Russia.
> Naturalization is exceptionally rare in mainland China; there were only 1,448 naturalized persons reported in the 2010 census[47] out of the country's total population of 1.34 billion.[48] Acquiring Chinese nationality is more common in Hong Kong; the Immigration Department naturalized over 10,000 people between the transfer of sovereignty and 2012,[49] and continues to receive over 1,500 applications per year since 2016.[50]
It's a pretty good book. Mike Duncan was asked constantly if the United States was Rome and is the American Empire about to fall. Mike's position is the late Roman Republic, before Julius Caesar and the empire, is most similar to the present day US. Both countries had just seen their biggest rival Carthage/USSR fall, and so ambitious people started looking inward to gain power instead of outward. This led to a lot of political division and slow erosion of political norms.
USSR fell in 1989, the climate in the US is a post-iraq thing and China is fiercely rivaling and competing against the US in all fronts. Even America's reaction to Russia bs Ukraine is tailored to send a message to China.
The Xenophobia in America is a walk in the park compared to any European country. Still the best place for immigrants. Income inequality is bad but povery has improved a lot and so has crime compared to previous decades. I mean, the great depression was literally before WW2 which is obviously a worse time than now (ask any black person or non-european immigrant how unequal or xenophobic America was back then!) after which there was a great economic boom.
Perhaps the past is easier to measure than the present?
A lot of the political norm that is being erased now is for 20th century norms. I would say Andrew Jackson shooting people on the whitehouse lawn was a norm. Congress attending Church every sunday at the Capitol was also a norm and it was erased.
I think a lot of people correlate without articulating causation to sound smart.
The broadcast media stopped being the way a huge majority of people got their news starting in the 80s with cable. So the US returned to normalcy, with large portions of the population absolutely hating each other. The post civil war era was also abnormally amicable. Conservative Democrats found it easy to work with liberal Republicans and their constituents would still vote for them out of tribal/regional loyalties.
Hating the political opposition is the norm, not the exception.
I remember pre-2006. I was in my mid-30s by then. I don’t recall much open animosity between Republicans and Democrats. Certainly nothing like today. There was a lot of coming together post 9/11. I do think social media was the main instigator of the country falling into open tribalism.
I can't think of how to make a more constructive response, but I too remember pre-2006 (that really seems funny to say), and I'm just laughing at your response. The laughing isn't to ridicule it, I just think its truly funny how much I disagree. I guess back then it was talk radio that was blamed for stoking the animosity.
While the tribalism definitely existed back then the amount and openness in which it existed was so much less as to be categorically different. For example, people openly blaming one tribe or the other for some aspect of reality that doesn't even fall nicely along party lines wasn't just a fact of discourse back then like it is now.
post-9/11 coming together is an interesting confound. How to you disambiguate a reversion to a more tribal pre-9/11 nature from social media's influence?
The Republic didn’t fall because it ran out of enemies. It fell because the centre of Roman power was incredibly disconnected from the source of Roman power. The source of Rome’s power came from a small number of people who had extraordinary leadership and military command talents, who were able to win the victories required to expand Roman territory beyond the top half of the Italian peninsula. Yet the senate, responsible for wielding the power won by these generals, were just a bunch of aristocrats and demagogues, who routinely saw Rome’s most competent generals as their greatest threat. This tension exists for the entire republic era, and you could just as easily predict that Romans would have to start “looking inwards for power” after the Pyrrhic War.
The senate had a well established history of turning against its greatest generals by Caesar’s time. You mention the defeat of Carthage, but who defeated Carthage, and what happened to them afterwards? Scipio Africanus did at the Battle of Zama, and he was promptly exiled from Rome afterwards by his political rivals (and was lucky to avoid execution really). It is absolutely no surprise that the Roman republic eventually fell to an extremely competent general leading an extremely loyal army, after having the senate try to take him down a peg.
The major link in the chain that you're missing here is the breakdown in the elaborate series of checks-and-balances that underpinned the Roman Republic. For most of the Republic, the army consisted of a citizen militia commanded by military leaders whose terms measured months at most, not years. Even if they possessed "extraordinary leadership and military command talents," generals never spent years in the field with their soldiers. As Rome got bigger and wars became further-flung, you begin to see people in charge of armies for much longer which allowed them to build up the ironclad loyalty required to lead an army against Rome. Scipio Africanus is an early example, but this sort of thing became much, much more common in the late Republic.
I wholeheartedly disagree that those checks and balances actually did underpin the republic in any way. The senate always attempted the keep them in place, but always abandoned them in a crisis. The first Punic war was won by a dictator of Rome. The only thing that changed over time was the scale of the crises that Rome got itself into.
Those checks and balances were simply not needed during peaceful times, and consistently failed any time they were tested during conflict. It’s like how people say Athens never had the position of “dictator”, yet for every significant crisis Athens got into, it found itself ruled by a dictator.
I'm glad you brought up the Roman dictatorship, because it's a great example of the way checks and balances worked in the Roman Republic. There were nearly 100 dictators prior to the 2nd century B.C.E. - often appointed in times of crisis - and not a single one attempted to seize control of the state. There are probably a number of factors that led to this (the fact that dictators were only granted their powers within the realm for which they were appointed; the fact that dictators could only last 6 months at maximum; the fact that dictators couldn't legislate; the fact that the tribunes of the plebs were absolutely outside the authority of the dictator; etc. etc.)
> Those checks and balances were simply not needed during peaceful times
There weren't any peaceful times. Almost literally. Rome was at war for all but 6 years of the entire Republic.
Wasn't the dictator aspect built into their system though? I thought the point was that Rome felt dictators were needed in times of crises. I think the term was 6 months.
Is this analogous to the modern concept of martial law, perhaps, in today's democracies? Including the restrictions placed on them legislatively (albeit few)!
Partially, I'd say. It's been a while since I've read about it, but martial law is a suspension of normal restrictions on police actions. I'm not sure if there are other pieces involved.
A roman dictator on the other hand was anointed by the Senate to "get shit done" until the scourge was over or 6 months, whichever comes first. Normally in Roman times, they tended to shy away from single authority. Even the military was divided between two consuls so that if one got any funny ideas, the other could effectively repel their attack. During a dictatorship though, the anointed would have supreme authority over all things Roman. They could wield armies and the state coffers at their disclosure. This rarely happened and the senate really tried to only anoint people that were worthy of it.
Cincinatti, the capital of Ohio, is actually named after https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucius_Quinctius_Cincinnatus who famously saved Rome twice. He was farming when he was anointed dictator and was very reluctant to stay in politics unless needed. It's a fantastic story.
All western democracies have these features today, and martial law would simply be one way in which they can be used. More broadly they would include basically any “emergency” powers that governments have to suspend ordinary democratic processes. If you look at the way the role of dictator worked in Rome, then most of the world has been run by legally appointed dictators for the past two years. With ordinary legislative processes suspended, public scrutiny and engagement in governance severely drawn back, and with new laws typically being announced via executive authority at press conferences rather than being debated and voted on by representatives. Factually these are what would be described as dictatorships. History is full of examples where dictators have temporarily assumed that level of power for the benefit of the people they’re governing, but the word is such a PR nightmare that no 21st century western dictator would ever accept the label.
There's perhaps some relationship, and of course "martial law" can have a wide variety of definitions under different political contexts, but I think it's worth pointing out that the Roman Republic worked pretty differently to most modern democracies despite some nominal similarities. Most of the executive offices of the Republic were extraordinarily weak by modern standards (and had more checks on them than their modern equivalents). This extended to the dictatorship which was really more akin to appointing a temporary executive with the power to run a single part of the government with fewer (but still some!) checks on their authority for a short period of time.
I don't know that much about the Roman Republic and Empire, but I think your commentary misses a few facts:
The Roman Republic, as a political entity, was able to muster enormous resources relative to its size, and in the midst of calamitious circumstances too. The best example is the Republic raising legion after legion with which to challenge Carthage, and maintaining the loyalty of all of the cities allied to it, after Hannibal's army had defeated it in a string of battles, and finally, killed a significant fraction of its male population at the battle of Cannae.
I assume it was the construction of the Roman government, with its elected leaders, and the political culture of the Roman polity, that viewed the people as the source of all power (as exemplified by SPQR), that inspired this cohesion and loyalty, and it was these qualities that were the primary and ultimate source of its power.
Roman generals in later centuries frequently seized power to become emperors, and this in turn undermined the basis of Roman power, which was a large subsection of the population and fraction of power centers being integrated into the political establishment through elected positions, and consequently having a stake in the success of the state. So the suspicion the elected leaders had towards generals may have been well-founded, and been the reason the elected government maintained power for as long as it did.
I don’t think Rome had a significant resource advantage over its enemies during the second Punic war. Carthage was very wealthy at that stage, benefitting massively from their conquest in Iberia.
It’s also a mistake to say that Rome inspired significant cohesion and loyalty. The only groups that remained loyal to Rome during the second Punic war were the northern Latin cities. Many cities in the south defected to Hannibal, a lot of the Gallic tribes that had peaceful arrangements with Rome took the opportunity to restart aggressions, Macedonia and many Greek states also took the opportunity to start various conflicts with Rome.
The characteristic of the senate that you could credit to some extent was that they would simply never surrender. That seems to be a very strong Roman cultural value during that period. Rome lost every battle it fought in Italy during the second war. After Cannae they had almost no army, and Hannibal took his army to Rome, and Rome refused to surrender, and Hannibal… left. Because he didn’t have the resources to besiege Rome, and Carthage hadn’t managed (and never did manage) to reinforce him. So he spent a around a decade in control of large areas in southern Italy, unable to fully defeat Rome, and Rome unable to evict him from the peninsula, and with no realistic prospect of ever being able to.
And they never did. Scipio Africanus removed Hannibal from Italy by first conquering Carthaginian Iberia, and then launching a campaign in Africa. This caused Carthage to recall Hannibal home, where he was subsequently defeated by Scipio, ending the war.
It’s also worth noting that Scipio’s campaign in Africa was not properly funded by Rome. His army had a large contingent of volunteers, and the campaign was mostly funded by his private supporters.
Had a 5th century Roman emperor refused to surrender, after suffering the losses the Roman Republic did in the Second Punic war, his generals and governors would have defected and seceded, respectively. Especially once that emperor tried to press more men into service after over 100,000 had already been killed by an invading force. The Senate was able to remain in power because of a cohesion that didn't appear to be present in rival states or the Late Roman Empire.
The fractious nature of Senate politics was a consequence of a culture and set of institutions that encouraged and allowed domestic conflicts to be settled within the confines of established political processes, so that the Senate as an institution, while often beset by bitter internal political strife, did not face challenges from external centers of power within Roman society. The power and resiliency that this gave the Senate allowed it to maintain control even when Rome was under extreme stress, like it was in its depopulated state during the Second Punic War when it managed to raise two dozen legions.
>>The only groups that remained loyal to Rome during the second Punic war were the northern Latin cities.
You're correct that there was a lot of defection, but most cities in the Italian peninsula remained loyal to Rome.
Your idea of a cohesive and loyal republic here seems to hinge entirely on the fact that the senate never surrendered, which isn’t nearly as remarkable as you’re making it out to be. Carthage didn’t surrender in the 3rd war either, but they were certainly not a highly cohesive entity at that stage.
During the second Punic war nearly half of the republic defected, and almost all Roman allies turned on them. Including a pro-Carthaginian uprising in Sardinia, and and outright defection of Syracuse to Carthage.
I guess you’re free to interpret things however you want, but “cohesive and loyal” is such an incredibly creative interpretation of the Roman republic during Hannibal’s invasion.
The Senate didn't surrender, and still maintained the loyalty of the wider governing apparatus that collected resources for its campaigns. To be able to raise two dozen legions after the losses suffered in the first three years of the Second Punic War, suggests to me an extraordinary level of social cohesion and stability of government rule.
I believe you are incorrect about the defections as well. One source supporting this notion is Adrian Goldsworthy's "The Fall of Carthage: The Punic Wars 265–146 BC", which, by way of Wikipedia, claims:
Immediately preceding the excerpt you chose to copy:
> Several of the city states in southern Italy allied themselves with Hannibal, or were captured when pro-Carthaginian factions betrayed their defences. These included the large city of Capua and the major port city of Tarentum (modern Taranto). Two of the major Samnite tribes also joined the Carthaginian cause. By 214 BC the bulk of southern Italy had turned against Rome.
Ray Dalio seems to think the opposite: that the US is in the falling Empire stages (think 3rd-4th century AD) where there is a lot of internal strife and the economy is stumbling. A new enemy is rising to challenge the existing superpower and the will to expand and fight is no longer there (Germanic tribes and the Sassanids for Rome, China for the US). I think peak US ala the Roman Republic would've either been right after WW2 or right after the USSR fell (Gulf War era basically).
I remember reading this theory a bit ago and I thought it was one of the more compelling observations. It depends on whether you're focusing on foreign or domestic politics, because both fit in various ways. When the republic fell to an empire, it was due more to domestic issues: the agrarian middle class was displaced by slave labor and mostly forced into professional military careers, and the very rich infought into conquering the state. The the empire fell (at least, the Western empire) it was foreign issues: the central state was over-extended and unable to hold the full Pax Romana territory any longer.
The useful lesson from the "falling Empire stages" is to gracefully cede influence without entering into counterproductive wars with new rising powers, as you mention with China.
That's a popular take, but I don't know how much it holds water.
What really does seem to be the sad, sad reality is that America needs external enemies or else it feeds on itself. Since the fall of the USSR politics have gotten steadily nastier, but all the sudden people are finding lots of common ground in solitary against the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
But will that solidarity last more than a few news cycles?
Dalio said without reservation or probability that at the start of COVID we were in a global depression. Oops, 100% wrong but no one cares.
IMO the entire narrative that Americans are so divided is largely an illusion. People are highly divided over wedge issues in online arguments.
If you turn off the internet, the phone and FOX/CNN/MSNBC people are pretty much the same.
Sporting events are a good example of reality. If the media narratives were true getting a 100k people in a sports stadium would result in utter chaos.
We are certainly not as divided as in the 60s. That is so apparent if you read any history from that time.
Actually, if we suffer from anything it is exactly represented by Dalio. Conflating extreme wealth accumulation with extreme intelligence and wisdom. The ideas of billionaires are given far too much weight. Not based on the ideas themselves but on the size of their net worth.
IMO if Feynman or Einstein were alive today no one would listen to them, "If you are so smart why don't you have a billion dollars???"
We have a little bit of a self-vision problem. Historically, America focused on conquering new frontiers: manifest destiny (with all the nastiness that includes), industrialization, the space race, computing. It's not really clear what the next national frontier will be, and a lot of the domestic politics are anchored more around the allocation of resources from past frontiers rather than the establishment of a new frontier. This is all orthogonal to external enemies like the USSR, which I just see as a relatively generic phenomenon; countries frequently unify around external enemies, and you're probably right that the current situation with the USSR won't have a very long-lasting effect.
After the cold war ended we had Iraq. And then the war on terror. War makes money.
I hear people say that our response to 9/11 shows that the terrorists won. I think actually bin Laden did a huge favor to the military industrial complex - they won.
>and so ambitious people started looking inward to gain power instead of outward. This led to a lot of political division and slow erosion of political norms.
On the other hand the narrative that America is going the way of Rome has been an ongoing thing since at least the 1950s, in different decades the thing that the person crafting the narrative felt was really bad became the cause of Rome's fall. I suppose it is a favorite to write about because Rome was a Republic once, and America is a Republic, and Rome fell and it was a big, big deal. So people can get really worked up over this idea.
Many of the 'causes' of the coming downfall have been bad morals in one way or another; narrative is that Rome fell because of its weakening moral fiber, so in the '50s this weakening was caused by miscegenation, in the 60s debauchery and emasculation of the younger generations, 70s the same and maybe just being tired out by the discipline required for maintaining empire, 80s homosexuality, I think 90s was emasculation of younger generations again although I think there was still quite a bit of gay panic then too.
So nowadays hmm, "ambitious people started looking inward to gain power instead of outward" oh yeah, putting personal ambition ahead of social duty, that's a recurring one, I think it was a common complaint in the 50s as well.
I mean I sure do think things are not that great, but not sure if I buy that there are any more actually relevant similarities between the fall of Rome and U.S than there are between the Kennedy and Lincoln assassinations.
That seems to be discussing the period shortly after this book. Duncan's book is more about the Sulla and Marius generations, and ends when Caesar is still a small player. Syme's book seems to be about the rise of Augustus.
You know, a lot of people like to correlate things with the fall of the roman empire but when it comes to causality theu theorize. Ok, maybe this was true about the romans, so what? It's the symptom, not the disease, and as symptoms go they can indicate any number of diseases.
I can agree that income inequality, racism and xenophobia are symptoms of an underlying disease but even if America has the same disease as the Rome, this is a different host with different strength, weaknesses and immune system. Rome wasn't found upon rebellion, it didn't have a civil war at the scale of america andnit didn't have WMDs, fighter jets, interlinked supply chains and the internet. It could be worse or better or a seasonal bug.
You should also understand that the eastern Roman empire lasted up until only a few hundred years ago. And it was no joke. It took over a millenium for Rome to fall. Constantinope fell on 1453, columbus discovered america on 1492. If Rome is strictly western Rome then the equivalent would be America losing global influence and military power but still remaining relatively prosperous and strong with perhaps few states splintering.
Different variable, different input, similar symptomps but likely different output imo.
> it didn't have a civil war at the scale of america
Only barely so, and not for lack of trying, and Rome still had massive and frequent civil wars both in the late Republic as well as throughout the imperial period.
Republican Rome stretched from Spain to the Nile River in the south and Syria in the East. Over 350,000 (and quite possibly a lot more) Roman soldiers, out of a population estimated to be around 60,000,000 (most of whom were not citizens), fought at just the Battle of Actium at the end of the Republican era.
In a pre-industrial era with a pre-industrial economy.
The American Civil War had more soldiers, yes, and proportionally more with regards to population--but also had an economy that could support it. And it happened once. Not "every few years for centuries on end". Roman civil wars were titanic and they went on for decades. (The third century CE is referred to as an ongoing crisis for a reason.)
As for the rest--the differences between the Western Roman Empire and the East are so significant that even if you happen to be right (and you might be, I don't find it credible myself) it strikes me as it'll be by accident.
Myths aside, we don't really know anything about the founding of Rome. But it's clear that (like the United States), Rome was originally a "frontier" place, situated at the intersection of several older groups of Italic peoples.
> it didn't have a civil war at the scale of america
The Social War would certainly beg to differ - a war fought over who got to be full-fledged members of the Roman community.
> it didn't have WMDs, fighter jets, interlinked supply chains and the internet.
One of the most stunning features of the late Roman Republic (and subsequent Empire) is the degree to which trans-Mediterranean trade takes off in the second century B.C.E. after the Roman defeat of Carthage. By the standards of the ancient world, the late Roman Republic was incredibly interconnected.
I'm not trying to argue that the parallel totally fits or that the outcome will be the same. But I think there are more similarities here than you give credit for.
I've definitely decided that fishing for parallels is counter-productive. It's worthwhile to educate yourself on history (and Duncan's book is a great read) but I personally do my best to quell that anxiety-response "Is this us?" question while I read.
History is path-dependent and all stories are retro-actively told. There are a lot of cases where it depends on the people in the room, or the sentiment of the people in the room that day, or even something so random as taking a wrong turn and coming across a group of anarchists ready to throw some bombs (WW1). When looking at Rome, it's better to draw broad parallels with little weight.
Yes and no. To take your anarchists with bombs - sure, the specific moment and way to start WW1 depended on that.
But at the same time, the network of defense agreements led to a rise of regional power blocs (increasing polarization). The Anglo-German arms race led to a surplus of military, and an increasing rift between the German and the British bloc. The Russo-Japanese war caused a shift of Russian interests to the Balkans, which also mattered to Austria (sort-of part of the German bloc). The insults of 1870 and the Marocco crisis led to a deepening rift between Germany and France.
The Italo-Libyan war exposed that the Ottoman empire was extremely shaky, further stoking interests in colonial expansion. Which promptly happened with the Balkan Wars.
Those anarchists with bombs were the particular match to a powder keg sitting around. Chances are there would've been a different match on a different day, had this not happened.
Maybe there still would've been a small path away from the conflagration if the assasination and consequences hadn't happened. But each previous event narrowed that path.
History may be path-dependent, but there are some paths that are narrowing down the options you can consequently take. The same holds for Rome - the actions taken increasingly narrowed down the possible ways forward. (And that, I'd argue, are the main lessons to draw from any collapse - what actions narrowed the solution space, which ones broadened it)
I find people who constantly look for parallels insufferable. Yes you can look two a few factors and say they look like some other society but the buck stops there. America isn’t Rome and won’t go the same path regardless. There’s a certain type of person I see on my social media who equates every single bad thing in history with the current day. Nazi Germany and now Ukraine “giving you their guns” is the goto. Rome has an allure to it, I get it I feel it myself, but history doesn’t repeat itself and groups of humans (especially civilizations) have so much more nuance to them it’s a disservice to both Rome and American history.
>I get it I feel it myself, but history doesn’t repeat itself and groups of humans (especially civilizations) have so much more nuance to them it’s a disservice to both Rome and American history.
I agree, it's imprudent to try and draw direct parallels between the US and any other historical empire, including Rome.
That said, we can learn much from history. And in the US and Europe, we can learn even more from the history of the "West."
As Eugen Weber[0] put it[1]:
...But where should we start? Perhaps the first
thing to ask is what the scope of a series on the
history of Western Civilization should be?
And the best way to think of it is that we are going
back to the old country. We're going back to where
many of our ancestors came from. To see where their
stories came from, and their memories and their
habits and the way they are, which has made us the
way we are.
This is what history is about. Where we come from.
What lies behind the way we live and act and think.
How our institutions, our religions, our laws were
made.
As the old saw goes, "history doesn't repeat, but it often rhymes."
Understanding the thoughts, fears, triumphs and failures of our forbears is an important window on our human nature and the things that have driven us since time immemorial, and continues to drive us to this day.
Whether it's the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and the many civilizations of the Levant/Fertile Crescent as well as Rome, the Abrahamic[2] religions and the thinkers/ideas of the ensuing millenia, they all have something important to teach us about the world we live in now. They did, after all, birth many of our core beliefs, ideas and institutions.
While it's generally not productive to point at specific issues and exclaim "This is just like Rome!" or something similar, understanding the culture and practices of our ancestors can give us insight into our current world.
But that's not enough. While human nature is human nature which hasn't really changed in a couple hundred thousand years, times do change.
And when they do, we need to, as Lincoln pointed out[3]:
The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the
stormy present. The occasion is piled high with
difficulty, and we must rise -- with the occasion.
As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act
anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we
shall save our country.
tl;dr: While it's dumb to see history as a blueprint for the future, it is a wonderful trove of knowledge and information about the human condition and its response to a vast array of stresses.
As we are keenly reminded by Paul M.M. Cooper and his Fall of Civilizations[4] podcast.
For sure I’m not saying there aren’t lessons, just that the type of people who cherry pick a few examples and take them as given proof of some historical trend aren’t likely to find these lessons.
>For sure I’m not saying there aren’t lessons, just that the type of people who cherry pick a few examples and take them as given proof of some historical trend aren’t likely to find these lessons.
Apparently, I'm on a tour of "old saws," so here's another one:
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him
drink.
Or, more caustically, but more apropos given the subject matter:
You can lead a fool to knowledge, but you can't make
him think.
That leaves history and its lessons to those of us who would heed Santayana's warning[0].
That may be a very uncharitable reply to and about edgyquant, but I'll go with the more charitable interpretation that it's a realistic observation about unspecified others; those who fixate on one or two historic parallels and leap to the conclusion that "OMG this is exactly the same, our realm[1] is 100% for certain going to fall just like Rome in 471!". From an onlooker's perspective, it feels like you guys are pretty much in what used to be called "violent agreement" on Usenet, when flamewars broke out between participants who actually agreed on almost everything, but through miscommunication didn't realise this.
I think if one[2] of you could just a bit more explicitly acknowledge that you are not saying "OMG this is EXACTLY the same, America is 100% for certain going to fall just like Rome in 471!" but only "there are quite a few parallels here, here, and there, so it might well behoove us to keep an eye on this, this, and that"; and/or the other could apply this more charitable reading -- which seems to be the precise point they're arguing -- to what the first is saying, then it looks to me like there really isn't any (or at least, not much) actual disagreement between you at all. Or is it just me that's totally misreading one or both of you?
Hey BTW, thanks for that second more caustic formulation of the saying; hadn't seen that one before. I may, when sufficiently exasperated, use it in future... But there is actually a bit of optimism to it: While you can't cure stupidity, you may be able to at least alleviate ignorance -- one issue and one fool at a time. (After the fool in question has been led to knowledge on issue X, he won't need to think about it for himself any more; while still in general a fool, hopefully he won't, armed with newfound knowledge as he now is, act like one on this issue in the future.)
__
[1]: Not being an American, "America is going to fall...!" doesn't have the same direct relevance for me, but I can see the same parallels being applied to other realms -- and AFAIK, they have been used like that about lots of nations, since about forever.
[2]: nobody9999? Not sure; possibly getting who is on which side of the argument mixed up since I see only the comment I'm directly replying to on this input screen. Could be the other way around.
>I'll go with the more charitable interpretation that it's a realistic observation about unspecified others
Good call. I have no issue with edgyquant.
They said:
For sure I’m not saying there aren’t lessons, just
that the type of people who cherry pick a few
examples and take them as given proof of some
historical trend aren’t likely to find these lessons.
And I seconded their assessment with a bit of color.
>I think if one[2] of you could just a bit more explicitly acknowledge that you are not saying "OMG this is EXACTLY the same, America is 100% for certain going to fall just like Rome in 471!" but only "there are quite a few parallels here, here, and there, so it might well behoove us to keep an eye on this, this, and that"; and/or the other could apply this more charitable reading -- which seems to be the precise point they're arguing -- to what the first is saying, then it looks to me like there really isn't any (or at least, not much) actual disagreement between you at all. Or is it just me that's totally misreading one or both of you?
Unless I missed something, neither edgyquant nor I asserted anything even close to "OMG this is EXACTLY the same, America is 100% for certain going to fall just like Rome in 471!"
If I read them correctly, edgyquant pretty directly dismissed such "reasoning," and I never even approached saying anything close.
But you're right. Edgyquant and I seem to be (mostly) in agreement.
What's more, I didn't get the sense from edgyquant that they thought we were in conflict, nor did I contradict anything they said. Rather, I elucidated why I thought that history was valuable.
Perhaps edgyquant got a different vibe. I don't know. Perhaps they can chime in.
> Rome wasn't found upon rebellion, it didn't have a civil war at the scale of america
The founding of Rome involved one brother killing the other over a hill… and if you don’t think they had large scale civil war, you simply haven’t read Roman history
IIRC Rome was conquered (EDIT: sacked, see replies) at least once during its history as a republic and forced to rebuild. An event like that could just as easily have indicated "the end" for them, but it didn't for whatever reason.
Republican Rome was never conquered. Rome was sacked--which, it is often theorized, created a long-standing cultural fear of the Gauls/Celts that remained largely until Julius Caesar's Gallic conquests/genocides--but the attackers did not stay and did not attempt to replace the governing apparatus.
Roman history, particularly pre-imperial, does show a lot of "why exactly will they not just die?", but some level of resilience in large Mediterranean powers of antiquity was pretty common. (Carthage took two wars and decades to lose the Punic Wars.)
Rome itself became less important over time, and the later emperors never even went there as they were too busy fighting the many civil wars, traitors, etc. or just being assassinated
This is entirely true of imperial Rome, but less true of the republican Rome. In the context of this particular thread, the conversation was centered on republican Rome and whether a recent civil war was an indicator of the transition to empire. I and my parent were observing that republican Rome had endured multiple existential crises which might suggest a civil war wasn't uniquely noteworthy for the progress to empire, but see my other comments for better answers on why I believe that. (I'm not sure history can be charted with that obvious a causality.)
An interesting aside, the civil war being referenced was actually over a question of Roman citizenship, which used to only apply to people in the city. For quite some time, the (now-)Italian peninsula was under Roman control, but its inhabitants were given a sub-citizen status with much lesser rights. The civil war established that citizenship could be offered to a much wider area.
Right era, but I disagree with the reference to which war. The Social War was absolutely not republican Rome's finest hour, but the "uh oh" seeds were planted 15-20 years earlier with the Marian reforms to the army. The Marian reforms created a standing army rather than a conscript-civilian army, which did then fight in the Social War, but the fuse set by those reforms didn't really blow up until after the Social War when Marius and Sulla started fighting over just who got to have all of the consulships and just who was the bigger, manlier man who got to have all their enemies murdered by the public for gold.
...Ahem.
(It is not a pleasant period of history to read about.)
> income inequality, racism and xenophobia are symptoms of an underlying disease
And what is that? India (and Pakistan and Bangladesh), China, Russia, and all the Gulf States, are also xenophobic and racist and have high levels of income inequality. Most countries are xenophobic and racist by American standards—if they lack income inequality it’s because everyone is equally poor. So what’s the common thread?
That's a fantastic question, and as someone who feels some kinship with the OP but without any further understanding of their viewpoint, let me stipulate that, to me, it's emergent xenophobia, racism, and inequality.
If these things are rampant, but on the decline, it's not the same thing. If they were more or less in check, but are now running wild through the decaying empire, that's the signal.
Again, my opinions are totally my own (and maybe somewhat overstated here) and don't reflect OP at all. Just a thought.
Is xenophobia and racism getting worse? There's clearly a massive vested interest in perpetuating the idea and fearmongering that it is. But if you go back even a decade or two, democrat presidents would be considered ultra-right-wing nazi-adjacent on their rhetoric about illegal aliens and border control.
Tolerance and permissiveness seem to be rising since then as far as I can see. Although you may be referring to the troubling rise in policies of institutional racism like race discrimination in university admissions, which I agree is one obvious thing that seems to be going backwards in recent times.
I didn't claim to have. The concept does not exist in many western european countries that they openly admire as models to emulate though, so I'm still interested to see where you're going with this even if you aren't able to answer my question.
I think it is very comparable. That you can pick out one difference in policy that isn't even the main one responsible for being called far-right racist xenopobic doesn't really change my point.
Even Obama was a right wing xenophobic racist nazi for suggesting the border should be secure, deporting illegal immigrants, separated and caged children. Not to mention all the other horrible stuff like claiming that marriage was between a man and a woman.
So yes I think I'm on good grounds to believe xenophobia and racism has been decreasing even within the past decade.
It doesn't, you just cherry picking one difference you could think of and try to claim that is the only thing that matters. That doesn't rebut my argument.
Obama absolutely would be called a racist xenophobe today based on his stated policies of border control, his mass deportation of illegal immigrants, and instances of separating immigrant children from their families. That is how far the window has shifted on this topic. Birthright citizenship doesn't change that.
So that's how far the window has shifted on the subject in a few short years. Therefore I think it is quite reasonable to question the allegation that racism and xenophobia is getting worse.
The Eastern empire lost its ability to project power across the Mediterranean by the mid 600s and completely lost its ability to project anything more than local power by about 1000 AD. By 1453 the Byzantines couldn't even be considered any sort of empire.
Western Rome also lost huge ability to project power when it fell and decomposed into its constituent states. Whereas as recently as the reign of Diocletian Rome was projecting power well into Germania proper by the end of the 4th century Rome couldn't even defend its own borders. The equivalent for the US would be China/Russia wantonly attacking American client states (Germany, France, Israel, Taiwan) without fear of retaliation.
I think it’s a stretch to say the Eastern Roman Empire lost its ability to project power in the Mediterranean by mid-600s.
During the Macedonian Dynasty (867-1056), they were arguably still the dominant power. Arab-Byzantine Wars lasted for 500 years and involved the entire Mediterranean. The Byzantine Italy existed until 1071.
Even after, the Komnenian Restoration (12th century) revived the Empire to some extent in financial, cultural, and territorial form.
Sure, they weren’t as powerful as the Roman Empire at its peak, but still could project plenty of power after mid-600s.
What is interesting about Rwanda is the artificiality and strength of the division between Hutus and Tutsis. I wonder how many people know that the history; that the 1994 massacre was of the formerly "upper-class" Tutsi.
The highlighting of divisions - imaginary or real rarely helps and almost always makes things worse.
There's a reason retaliation in soccer is an automatic red card. It's not that the retaliation isn't warranted; it's because it typically is.
While the role of Europeans in exacerbating existing tensions shouldn’t be overlooked, it’s incorrect to call the division between Hutus and Tutsis “artificial.” Tutsi were originally a herding class, and Hutus were farmers. Divisions and conflicts between such groups run deep throughout history in many locations. Eventually Tutsis became feudal overlords, and imposed practices such as a system of indentured labor that had to be provided by Hutus. The distinction was sufficiently developed that Hutu women were prohibited from marrying Tutsi men (presumably to control inheritance): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuhake.
It’s like when people say that the British created the tensions between Muslims and Hindus on the subcontinent. That overlooks the millennia of Muslim invasions and rule by sultanates (the process by which I came to have an Arabic surname despite being born 8,000 miles from the Middle East).
They brainwashed an entire social group into thinking the best way to get what they want is to kill the otherside. China sold them machetes, but in America, we have half the world's guns.
It's unlikely that the US will fall into chaos and political disarray so those are not really the problems people are talking about when they mention increasing income inequality and more polarized politics. And you're right that empires don't really fall in short time frames, it's a more drawn out process but when decaying institutions are combined with shocks to the system like global warming, famines, wars, pandemics, etc. then it becomes much harder to be optimistic about the status quo and the people in charge of managing these shocks.
Things are a lot more fragile and unstable than people realize so it's important to zoom out and look at all these issues in aggregate in order to formulate effective plans for revitalizing decaying democratic institutions so that we can properly deal with the inevitable shocks that cause the decline and collapse of nations.
My initial take is that this article is trash. To build up their empire, the Romans literally conquered people that weren't like them; you could probably argue they should have had more conquering zeal and xenophobia.
Also, why does the tech community have an obsession with Rome?
As someone in the tech community who fell into an obsession with Rome, I think my fall into it was mostly just familiarity. Out of all the great empires of the ancients (China, Rome, Persia, Khans, Greeks, etc), who is the most responsible for what I am today? I write in Roman letters and speak roman words thousands of years later. My ancestors from England lived in cities built by Rome and lots of American political culture is Rome-inspired. Heck, Cincinnati is named Cincinnatus who was responsible for saving Rome on more than one occasion.
The question isn't why are we obsessed with Rome. It's why not.
> Also, why does the tech community have an obsession with Rome?
This question comes across as a bit sneering (more so one of its answers), but I'll say general intellectualism. This is what the orange site is about after all.
You could make a case for Chinese history being equally rich, if not more. But note that the language and cultural barrier would be greater for most people on this site. Its relevance for the shaping of the "Western" world would be less relevant. The amount of study material and analysis in the English language would be less. But if there were decent enough articles on it, it would result in a flood of submissions to this site.
The article is not about the fall of the Roman Empire, but about the fall of the Roman Republic and its replacement with a dictatorship under Julius Caesar. The Empire expanded after that point.
Rome was bloodily founded, with the forced subjugation of other nations and peoples across what is now Italy.
The correlation seems less about the fall to ruin, but that that somewhere like the US would fall into a dictatorship and has many ingredients as Julius Caesar served to claim emperor. I would also add a hefty amount of backwards looking rhetoric also to the mix - things were better, more moral in the past; or we must address sins of the past. Putin has been using similar rhetoric to Caesar swapping the Ukraine for the Celts.
I recommend Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History on the Celtic Holocaust that poses that the whole expansion and annihilation of the Celts was a money making scheme by Julius Caesar to grasp power.
My memory of Carlin's episode on that one is that it's broadly accurate as per the historical consensus, but as a note one should beware of taking Carlin too seriously more generally. Good for the basic shape of things, maybe good for tone, but probably not good for the why things actually happened most of the time. Too deep in the dad-history bucket.
(But that's not to diminish that Julius Caesar was a bad dude.)
> The correlation seems less about the fall to ruin, but that that somewhere like the US would fall into a dictatorship and has many ingredients as Julius Caesar served to claim emperor
And it's not like it's something completely out of the question - there was literally a coup attempt to circumvent election results (which are already gerrymandered to hell) a year ago.
This article is so poorly written because it attempting to cater, and it misses several key facts.
The best example is this gem
> The ultimate consequences of allowing the Italians to become full roman citizens was nothing. There were no consequences. Rome just became Italy and everybody thrived, and they only did it after this hugely destructive civil war that almost destroyed the republic right then and there.
This is incorrect.
Citizenship ( and subsequent Military outsourcing) was devalued in imperial times because citizenship was liberally granted . "Barbarian" tribes on the borders would be granted citizenship. Even the Apostle Paul was reputed to be a citizen. This dynamic led the eventual collapse of the Roman work ethic, and the filling of Rome with destitute populations depending on handouts (bread & circuses). The cultural loss of Roman-ness
Would this cavalier attitude come back to bite them?
Of course it did. Many times, but foremost is the name Arminius [1]. Yes, the same Arminius, a barbarian child, became a Roman citizen, and later on as an officer, led Roman legions to the great debacle of the Teutoborg Forest [2]. Because he knew Roman tactics inside & out, it enabled him to destroy completely three legions (17th, 18th, and 19th legions, three cavalry detachments and six cohorts of auxiliaries) - Some of the auxiliaries may have become part of the ambushing force. Later on, this became so rampant that even words to describe the outsourced military to barbarians became synonomous with the barbarians themselves. When they eventually threw off their labors, conquering Rome was easy, as many of the barbarians were the standing military of Rome at that time.
Similarly, it was also Alaric of the Visigoths that sacked Rome, having become familiar with Roman tactics after working for them for years. After several shakedowns, he finally just took Rome.
Of course, I am not talking about other key points such as currency devaluation & Inflation/Hyperinflation
" Nero was one of the first emperors to devalue the denarius, and by the time Gallienus took the throne in 253 AD, the coins contained approximately 5% silver and consisted of a bronze core with a thin layer of silver. By 265 AD, the denarius contained 0.5% silver; the result was inflation of up to 1,000% across the empire. By this time, Rome had no more enemies to steal from so taxation was raised. The resulting mess completely paralyzed trade. By the end of the 3rd Century AD, the vast majority of trade was localized with barter methods used instead of the exchange of currency." [3]
I recognize the fully irony of the military outsourcing of the Romans, and ours, with Blackwater and the other associated Private Military Companies. Our currency debasement, and more recently, inflation, just to name a few. There are many more parallels.
The article and book are about the late Republic, before even Julius Caesar rises to power, let alone Augustus or the subsequent emperors. And I think the quote ("there were no consequences") refers to granting Italians Roman citizenship, not the decisions by later emperors to grant external tribes citizenship.
Surely there was a balance between the two extremes that Rome failed to achieve?
To retain culture, and to forge a national identity without appearing weak and establishing a Roman policy of "buying off enemies", and, "using citizenship as part of the buy".
This set up precedent for military service (auxiliaries to citizen). I guess we could call it the flawed path to citizenship......
> I jokingly said when I started writing, that I wanted people to come out of it with a general feeling of unease about what’s going on in the United States and in the West generally. To emerge from reading the book, go back to flipping on the news, and think, “This is not good.”
So... if you read it and think "wow this is eerily parallel to our current reality," it's going to be hard to know how much of that is because it _really was_ eerily parallel, and how much is because the author _wanted it to feel_ eerily parallel.