The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome

Abstract

The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome: The History of a Dangerous Idea traces the development and use of the rhetoric of Roman decline and renewal across 2200 years. Beginning in the Roman Republic at the turn of the second century BC and stretching to the uses of Roman decline in the present day, the book argues that the use of this common rhetoric frequently blamed people for sparking Roman decline. It also evolves over time. In the Republic, politicians like Cato pointed to decline in the present and promised future renewal. Augustus and other emperors beginning a new imperial dynasty often claimed to have sparked a renewal that corrected the decline caused by their predecessors. Early Christian emperors like Constantine and Theodosius I experimented with a rhetoric of progress in which they claimed that Rome’s embrace of Christianity meant it would become better than it ever had been before. The fifth-century loss of the West forced Christians like Augustine to disentangle Christian and Roman progress. It also enabled the Eastern emperor Justinian to justify invasions of Africa, Italy, and Spain as restorations of lost territories to Roman rule. Western emperors ranging from Charlemagne to Charles V used similar claims to support military action directed from the West against the East. Figures as diverse as Napoleon and Mussolini show that the allure of restoring Rome remained potent into the twentieth century, but the story of Rome’s decline and fall, popularized by eighteenth-century writers like Montesquieu and Gibbon, is now most frequently evoked as a warning about the consequence of social or political change.