Thank you for this thought-provoking article. I personally find ancient history fascinating and it bothers me that none of these dude-bros seem to know that other (arguably more impressive) empires/regimes/mythological figures existed. Like why not name your kid Ashurbanipal or Quetzalcoatl?? Lol.
Great post! I would argue that many of these contemporary arguments for decline were motivated by cultural changes and the perceived corruption of traditional Roman values (mos maiorum) caused by the acquisition of the provinces and the transition to Empire. Cultural assimilation, particularly the effect of Hellenization, led many to feel they were genuinely losing something of the old Rome. Augustus’ social legislation was designed to arrest these changes, particularly among the upper classes. The decay was a slow process, and Rome’s military and economic might allowed it to endure for centuries. Still, few would argue that the Rome of late antiquity possessed anything close to the social cohesion of the republican period. While I do think there are some parallels to our current situation, I agree with you that many making such comparisons today do so primarily for political effect.
Our benighted Imperium has brought forth no echo of P. Vergilius Maro, that virtuoso of virtus who harkened back to the Republic while legitimizing the Empire.
Like Virgil’s Rome, the United States was created by immigrants displacing longstanding native populations, and both societies were bathed in nostalgia Ab Urbe Condita or 1776.
This is such an interesting piece. It's astounding how little these men actually know about ancient Rome. You make the point so well that fear-mongering is a means of consolidating power.
I agree that the current popular exhumation of Roman history is politically driven and am surely one of the grave robbers. But taking a longer view, I’ve never regretted a moment of reading about events arising from its founding to its dissolution. Your Substack is simply my favorite.
Red Rising is a series where the elites are so obsessed with the romans that they all have roman names. It is clearly a dystopia but sadly I think Musk would see that as inspiration.
We are like the Late Roman Empire - fiscal and demographic exhaustion combined with currency debauchery, plutocracy and poverty. Henry George warned of this in 1879 in the last pages of "Progress and Poverty".
We are like the late Roman Republic, not the late empire. Glory is no longer to be found in war, our great rival (Carthage for them, the USSR for us) has been defeated, and we are the only great power. The spirit of service has dwindled away from politics. Democracy has become the pursuit of raw power, which the common people take increasingly cynically. We have had our Gracchi brothers in the Tea Party and we currentlt have our Sulla in Trump. May god help us when our Caesar reveals himself.
Let me reflect back my understanding of this post. What I'm getting from it is that the Right likes to explain the "Fall of the Roman republic/empire" as being caused by declining birth rates, moral degeneracy and wokeness/effemininity. And they are supported in this by the literature from those times which also used these tropes as people in those days also wrung their hands about such things. OK, that makes sense. But then you refer to the Gracchi brothers, who reported on fields empty of peasants as supporting the "declining birth rates caused the fall" narrative. In the NYT article you point out that they recommended land reform and were killed.
I'd like to suggest a distinction here. The Gracci bros seem to belong to a different tradition. They are not saying that the empire is falling because of declining birth rates. They are saying the birth rates are declining because no one can afford families because all the wealth has accrued to the oligarchs. This is clear from their proposed solution: land reform. Something the oligarchs of the day would not countenace, and the Right of today, likewise rejects. In other words, the Gracchi bros offer a Left explanation of the fall of Rome.
For more on the left explanation, check out Michael Hudson's book, "The Collapse of Antiquity." I'd be interested in your perspective on that. I think the options suggested by these two takes are instructive in our times and it is useful to clarify the distinctions.
FYI, here's a link to the book. https://michael-hudson.com/2023/03/the-collapse-of-antiquity-release/ and the blurb on the back: "Rome's collapse was the forerunner of the debt crises, economic polarization and austerity caused by subsequent Western oligarchies. The West's pro-creditor laws and ideology inherited from Rome make repeated debt crises transferring control of property and government to financial oligarchies inevitable." That "pro-creditor legal philosophy" is what enables "creditors to draw wealth, and thereby political power, into their own hands, without regard for restoring economic balance and long-term viability as occurred in the Ancient Near East through Clean Slates."
I recently joked with someone that if you were to use "decline" as an orientating concept in a graduate-level history course you'd get a D. Whatever it's poetic resonance and use historically as a rhetorical political trope, it's use as an epistemological concept is limited. It reminds of the French historian Alfred Cobban who was frustrated with the political discourse of the post-WWII era that rhetorically used the French Revolution in Cold War rhetoric--that idea being something vaguely called "Jacobinism" or something similar was categorically used to condemn all political radicalism. Because he had actually done the difficult labor of writing histories of the FR, he knew that it's impossible to distill something as wide-ranging and all-encompassing as the FR in simple terms. It's true of any time period. So much of the popular conception of the past--distant and recent--is just propaganda. More personally, as someone who studied history in school and is at the age where I can feel the sense of history following through me and around me and myself back into history, the world is too complex, too multi-faceted to be understood through the prism of "decline". If only people could be mugged by historiography.
This was a wonderful read. I'd penciled in an examination of Musk and Rome as one of my next few Substack posts -- I met him in passing on two of his Rome visits, and have closely observed his relationship with Italian PM Meloni. But I think you covered most of the good stuff. I'd somehow missed your NYT column, so I'm glad to have found it here. Excellent.
What if his poor son was named after Romulus Augustulus rather than Remus' brother??
Thank you for this thought-provoking article. I personally find ancient history fascinating and it bothers me that none of these dude-bros seem to know that other (arguably more impressive) empires/regimes/mythological figures existed. Like why not name your kid Ashurbanipal or Quetzalcoatl?? Lol.
There need to be more baby Hammurabis too.
Great post! I would argue that many of these contemporary arguments for decline were motivated by cultural changes and the perceived corruption of traditional Roman values (mos maiorum) caused by the acquisition of the provinces and the transition to Empire. Cultural assimilation, particularly the effect of Hellenization, led many to feel they were genuinely losing something of the old Rome. Augustus’ social legislation was designed to arrest these changes, particularly among the upper classes. The decay was a slow process, and Rome’s military and economic might allowed it to endure for centuries. Still, few would argue that the Rome of late antiquity possessed anything close to the social cohesion of the republican period. While I do think there are some parallels to our current situation, I agree with you that many making such comparisons today do so primarily for political effect.
Our benighted Imperium has brought forth no echo of P. Vergilius Maro, that virtuoso of virtus who harkened back to the Republic while legitimizing the Empire.
Like Virgil’s Rome, the United States was created by immigrants displacing longstanding native populations, and both societies were bathed in nostalgia Ab Urbe Condita or 1776.
Long before Il Duce, Mussolini,
Romans worshipped their ancestors,
The Latini.
It’s a very old impulse we’re seeing again
To Make Etruria Great Again.
This is such an interesting piece. It's astounding how little these men actually know about ancient Rome. You make the point so well that fear-mongering is a means of consolidating power.
Brava!
I agree that the current popular exhumation of Roman history is politically driven and am surely one of the grave robbers. But taking a longer view, I’ve never regretted a moment of reading about events arising from its founding to its dissolution. Your Substack is simply my favorite.
The increasingly disturbing linked images are … increasingly disturbing!
Red Rising is a series where the elites are so obsessed with the romans that they all have roman names. It is clearly a dystopia but sadly I think Musk would see that as inspiration.
We are like the Late Roman Empire - fiscal and demographic exhaustion combined with currency debauchery, plutocracy and poverty. Henry George warned of this in 1879 in the last pages of "Progress and Poverty".
We are like the late Roman Republic, not the late empire. Glory is no longer to be found in war, our great rival (Carthage for them, the USSR for us) has been defeated, and we are the only great power. The spirit of service has dwindled away from politics. Democracy has become the pursuit of raw power, which the common people take increasingly cynically. We have had our Gracchi brothers in the Tea Party and we currentlt have our Sulla in Trump. May god help us when our Caesar reveals himself.
Let me reflect back my understanding of this post. What I'm getting from it is that the Right likes to explain the "Fall of the Roman republic/empire" as being caused by declining birth rates, moral degeneracy and wokeness/effemininity. And they are supported in this by the literature from those times which also used these tropes as people in those days also wrung their hands about such things. OK, that makes sense. But then you refer to the Gracchi brothers, who reported on fields empty of peasants as supporting the "declining birth rates caused the fall" narrative. In the NYT article you point out that they recommended land reform and were killed.
I'd like to suggest a distinction here. The Gracci bros seem to belong to a different tradition. They are not saying that the empire is falling because of declining birth rates. They are saying the birth rates are declining because no one can afford families because all the wealth has accrued to the oligarchs. This is clear from their proposed solution: land reform. Something the oligarchs of the day would not countenace, and the Right of today, likewise rejects. In other words, the Gracchi bros offer a Left explanation of the fall of Rome.
For more on the left explanation, check out Michael Hudson's book, "The Collapse of Antiquity." I'd be interested in your perspective on that. I think the options suggested by these two takes are instructive in our times and it is useful to clarify the distinctions.
FYI, here's a link to the book. https://michael-hudson.com/2023/03/the-collapse-of-antiquity-release/ and the blurb on the back: "Rome's collapse was the forerunner of the debt crises, economic polarization and austerity caused by subsequent Western oligarchies. The West's pro-creditor laws and ideology inherited from Rome make repeated debt crises transferring control of property and government to financial oligarchies inevitable." That "pro-creditor legal philosophy" is what enables "creditors to draw wealth, and thereby political power, into their own hands, without regard for restoring economic balance and long-term viability as occurred in the Ancient Near East through Clean Slates."
Hashtag Debt Cancellation Jubilee time!
This was exceptionally well written. I would love to read your thoughts about the Gracchan reforms
I recently joked with someone that if you were to use "decline" as an orientating concept in a graduate-level history course you'd get a D. Whatever it's poetic resonance and use historically as a rhetorical political trope, it's use as an epistemological concept is limited. It reminds of the French historian Alfred Cobban who was frustrated with the political discourse of the post-WWII era that rhetorically used the French Revolution in Cold War rhetoric--that idea being something vaguely called "Jacobinism" or something similar was categorically used to condemn all political radicalism. Because he had actually done the difficult labor of writing histories of the FR, he knew that it's impossible to distill something as wide-ranging and all-encompassing as the FR in simple terms. It's true of any time period. So much of the popular conception of the past--distant and recent--is just propaganda. More personally, as someone who studied history in school and is at the age where I can feel the sense of history following through me and around me and myself back into history, the world is too complex, too multi-faceted to be understood through the prism of "decline". If only people could be mugged by historiography.
I really love the way you articulated the political usefulness part in particular!
This was a wonderful read. I'd penciled in an examination of Musk and Rome as one of my next few Substack posts -- I met him in passing on two of his Rome visits, and have closely observed his relationship with Italian PM Meloni. But I think you covered most of the good stuff. I'd somehow missed your NYT column, so I'm glad to have found it here. Excellent.
What if his poor son was named after Romulus Augustulus rather than Remus' brother??
It's was a very common idea that wealth brought a decline in virtue/masculinity as they viewed it, and its true.
Herodotus, Caesar, Columella, Alexander Fraser Tytler, Livy, Diodorus, Polybius, Tacitus etc... all talk about it
Interesting as always. I actually wrote about Musk and Rome in a substack from February. Would love to know your thoughts if you ever have time in your schedule: https://americanrex.substack.com/p/emperor-elon-the-fortunate-conquered