The Age of Ambition and the Fall of Rome
Visions of of Late Rome keep many of my friends up at night. Today the world is an uncertain place — infrastructure built generations ago is actively tested, information is becoming less reliable and people more superstitious, and many of the bourgeoisie find themselves unable to imagine alternatives to unsustainable forms of life. As an American educated in the Western tradition, it’s natural to wonder: are we headed for collapse comparable to the fall of Rome?
Short answer: no, not in your lifetime, and you probably don’t even know what the fall of Rome looked like.
Longer answer: There are some striking parallels between current and Roman history that I have found worth pondering — in particular, the era of the third and fourth centuries, rather than the fall of Rome in the late fifth century, was an age of ambition much like our own. I found it worthwhile first to understand what the fall probably actually looked like, to dissuade myself from a crass comparison, and then to take a serious look at specific parallel trends between contemporary and Roman times.
First, let’s recall that the image of collapse is a perennial one throughout Western (and specifically American) history. The “Fall of Rome” image is deeply ingrained in the cultural lexicon thanks to a long tradition of Classicism since the Renaissance and punctuated particularly by Edward Gibbon’s 1776 work Decline and Fall, which makes it an unsurprising subconscious visitor. For example, Thomas Cole (work featured above) lived through the uncertain era of Andrew Jackson’s presidency and painted about it. Cole felt pessimistic about the American Project, despaired over the wanton logging of the Catskills, and worried that his own era was coming to resemble Late Rome. (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. has a splendid book about the age of Jackson that elucidates several of these resemblances.) Hence examining the question, “is the American Project doomed to Roman collapse,” is actually part of a patriotic tradition in which I’m glad to participate.
This in mind, I took a look at the history itself. I am not a classicist, and I have not yet read more than a few chapters of Gibbon, but I did recently peruse the groundbreaking work of the historian Peter Brown. Brown wrote the definitive biography of Saint Augustine and birthed an entire field of history with his The World of Late Antiquity — his work is modern, documentary, and psychological in its approach. I read World as well as his compiled lecture notes from 1978, titled The Making of Late Antiquity, and I also later realized that he had written a chapter in a book I found on the street titled A History of Private Life. Brown is endorsed as a man of the contemporary (at least post-1968) moment as well as an academic trailblazer who is deeply interested in turning vague conceptions into specific answers. In the introduction to World, Brown remarks: “I do not imagine that a reader can be so untouched by the idea of classical Greece and Rome or so indifferent to the influence of Christianity, as not to wish to come to some judgment on the Late Antique world that saw the radical transformation of the one and the victory over classical paganism of the other.” Brown is aware of the power that’s held over us by the fall-of-Rome image, and it’s a delight to read where he takes it to task.
First we ask: what event actually created the image that lives on through Cole? Even in the common understanding of the fall of Rome, the specific date or process is a bit murky. Theodosius died in 395, placing the Roman military in terminal disarray. Rome was sacked a few times throughout the fifth century: by Alaric the Goth in 410, and by the Vandals in 455. The lineage of Western Roman emperors definitively terminated when Odoacer crowned himself in 476. As Brown points out, we should also consider that Odoacer was received rather loyally by the bishops and senate in Italy, and was of course replaced first by the well-loved Theodoric the Great in 493 and by Justinian in 533. By the time that Justinian arrived, bringing an efficient system of taxation that was long forgotten in the West, the landowning aristocrats of Italy — all of whom direct descendants of Romans effectively unmolested by years of Gothic rule — despised him. His war left Italy scorched, and finally in 568 Roman rule of the province permanently ended as it was invaded by Lombards and Saxons. So goes the story that comes to us throug Procopius and Paul the Deacon.
So when was the fall? For Brown, it has to do less with the lineage of Roman rulers and much more with the end of a distinctly Late Antique way of life. (As we saw, Roman subjects could be conquered and ruled without permanent damage to Roman institutions.) This happens, for Brown, squarely under Justinian. However, for me the question is about what psychological salience actually imprinted the powerful image we fixate on. I have no thesis more nuanced than that the “fall” image depicted by Cole must come from the shock and awe of the sacking of Rome. In that sense it’s a fall of a worldview and the beginning of a sense of despair that motivated, for instance, Saint Augustine to write City of God in 426. So perhaps it’s fair to date the “psychological” fall of the empire to the shock of the Visigothic sack in 410. This was a moment whose fallout does directly motivate contemporary reflections. So, in pursuit of comparisons, I looked at Brown’s account of the Gothic War.
Out the gate, Brown has a remarkable take about the Goths: it was xenophobia on the part of the Romans that led to their outright conquest by the numerically inferior Goths. In previous centuries, bands of barbarians were simply allowed to migrate into and settle in Roman territory and become tribute-paying subjects. But, by the fifth century, local authorities refused to allow them. The Goths, presumably pressed from the East by other migrating groups, resorted to violence. Interestingly, local authorities were even more loathe to enlist the help of the Roman military than they were to let the Goths settle and become Romans. The military, as it turns out, had become fundamentally politicized and able to directly appoint emperors, and local authorities basically resented it. Hence, the popular image of barbarian invasion.
Somewhat to their own surprise, the Roman Senate and the young Catholic Church realized that it was much preferable to simply submit to the Goths. There weren’t that many of them, and it was easy enough to let them live cordoned off in their castles as long as they promised to leave Roman institutions alone. This completely freed the Roman elites from any checks by the military, and they found it served their ends quite well. It worked, at least for the short term — Gothic is a dead language, but the Romance languages live on. (As Procopius notes, Theodoric would not even let his children go to school for fear that it would make them less ferocious.) That’s the fall of Rome — local authorities decide that they’d rather be ruled by outsiders than to actually integrate them.
But, as a second slight, the provincial élites explicitly refused to allow the Goths to assimilate to Romanness. They didn’t try to convert them (the Goths were Arians, not trinitarians, and Justinian explicitly uses this religious difference to incite the Franks to invade Italia), they didn’t allow intermarriage, and they didn’t allow Gothic nobles into civil institutions. The result was the collapse of infrastructure, the recession of serious liberal-arts learning into the private libraries of local aristocrats, and the permanent severance of Hispania and Gaul from the Imperial stem. In short, the fall of Rome as an institution in the West was a matter of preferring local and particular institutions to Imperial ones.
And yet, the concept of “Romanness” that motivated the fall lived on for some time, as with the idea of a “universal empire” in the image of Antonine Rome: Charlemagne claimed the crown of the Western Roman emperor in 768, and the notion of universal empire is alive well into the 13th century when Frederick II of Sicily was declared schismatic and likened to the Antichrist. Reductively summarized, a nostalgia for the “pure” Rome caused Western-Rome-as-it-was to go to seed.
(In a way, it reminds me of Lacan’s remark to a hysteric patient: even if your wife were cheating on you, it would be pathological to explode with such anger! One somewhat contrarian conclusion is that, even if immigrants are overrunning your lands and trying to take your resources, it’s pathological to be bigoted toward them. Compare to the Eastern Roman Empire, where Slavic settlement was handled rather gracefully and where new arrivals into the Mediterranean Basin were effectively managed well into the tenth century.)
In any case, this is the picture of the “Fall of Rome” that I glean from Brown: limited to Western Roman provinces and largely the result of internal institutional discontent and the selfish motives of local authorities. The provinces seem to have fallen like Nietzsche’s apples from the tree, off to become (as he writes in The Gay Science) “pioneers of spiritual colonization, and of a new construction of national and social unions.” From new Frankish and Saxon worlds, Western Europe as we know it was born. The remaining Roman Empire, constituting a more urban set of provinces better protected from military antagonism, proceeded onward for a couple of quite successful centuries.
So, to answer the question in the premise of the article: no, we’re not living in a time comparable to the fall of Western Rome. There is absolutely no comparison between the political functions of the Roman and the contemporary American militaries. The Founding Fathers had Caesar’s excesses explicitly in mind and centuries later we have not wavered on the role of our commanders. We don’t have local governments eager to submit outright to foreign invaders. We don’t see migrants goaded into attacking the United States, and in contrast we see them quickly and eagerly assimilated upon arrival. Certainly the visa process is Byzantine and many of our institutions are blatantly exclusionary, but in fact less so than ever. It’s the age of Bobos in Paradise. As much as we might like to trot out Cole’s painting as we fear the end of democracy or the collapse of the health care system, I now keep in mind the intepretation that Rome’s infrastructure collapse was effectively voluntary.
But we have to back up. How did the Western Empire get to a place where the military was clashing with the Senate and the Church? How did the local élite arrive from the world of Julius Caesar to the world of Gregory of Tours? It’s in the transitional centuries — the third and fourth, culminating in the meteoric rise of Christianity—where Brown reveals the most striking parallel.
As Harold Bloom wrote, we study history to deliver ourselves from the hysteria of the news of the day and to condition ourselves into a calmer pessimism. To remind ourselves, as implored by the Book of Ecclesiastes, that there is nothing new under the sun. After a few years in Silicon Valley, this idea really sits with me — for a certain class of people, the past has become a kind of resource (an “evidentiary grab bag”) that gets mined for data or for political quips or for salient images such as Cole’s collapse to dress up a marketing pitch. In spite of the somewhat-recent craze about Peter Turchin and his bark beetles, you’d think we wouldn’t go acting like history is some kind of empirical science. But, in what I think is a real parallel to Roman history, we live in an era that is so competitive that we cannot help but try to plunder history for shallow rhetorical benefit.
For Brown, the third century marks the rise of a comparable era of ambition. He attributes it to a number of causes: a roving Marian military that offered social mobility to anyone willing to serve, the opening of far-ranging trade routes, the availability of roads for élites to travel and interchange themselves between Imperial cities and the accompanying sense of envy and increase in the pace of life. In any case, the radical change is very simply the following: in the age of the Antonines, local élites were held accountable to their cities, required to sponsor rituals and allowed to display their wealth primarily through public monuments; by the reign of Constantine, this money was spent on lavish private mansions and on sending one’s children to expensive philosophical academies and later to Rome or Constantinople. There they would saturate themselves in rhetoric, which would be used to curry favor in public life. (For example, see Augustine’s profuse references to Virgil in City of God. It was commonplace for aspiring Roman élites to make reference to Troy or to the early days of Rome.) Indeed, the word ambition refers to Roman senators walking through the streets petitioning!
Accompanying the shift from municipal public life to the political theater of the capital, says Brown, was the shift from the belief in supernatural powers in the form of ritual to the belief in supernatural powers in the form of the powerful individual. Holy men roamed the land, and for this reason Jesus was painstakingly described as not simply another sorcerer. Every Christian saint for the first three centuries after Christ claimed fame by performing great feats, mostly of healing, and was also painstakingly contrasted with the common sorcerer. In sum, power retreats from the polis to the man. And, of course, corruption flourished. In Nietzsche’s words: “corruption” is just a vulgar phrase for “the autumntide of a people.”
Indeed, for Brown, the rise in corruption and the abdication of local civic posts by ambitious pagans opened up opportunities for others. It was among the Roman military — an empire-wide meritocratic institution that eventually came to be able to outright select the emperor — that Christianity began to flourish. Christianity, genealogically, has been the religion of rootlessness and of meritocracy. “Love thy neighbor,” Brown points out, is an injunction that best makes sense to someone who is intent on moving up and choosing his neighbors. And it was in cities like Alexandria that the Christians began to take over public services from the ersatz pagan local aristocracy. In this sense, we’re reminded, the Roman Catholic Church is very directly the continuation of the civic structure of the Roman Empire. Christianization occurred in the cracks opened by ambition, but also encouraged and universalized it.
Finally, the transition to Late Rome was accomplished by the emergence of the Christian strivers as a class unto itself. Themselves halfway-educated — not all of them were like Augustine, put through the exorbitant Classical education of a Carthaginian schoolhouse before shipping off to Milan — and concerned primarily with running hospitals and abbeys and parishes and common schools, the Christians began to make their bourgeois life into a hereditary deal. To be born into a middle-class Christian household meant effective separation from both the life of the working man and the life of the pagan élite. This class would grow relatively wealthy on its accomplishments, having enmeshed itself into the Roman social fabric, would go on to hold many ecumenical disputes, and would eventually lose most interest in Christianizing anyone who was not a Roman. (Although a few brave souls would go north to the British Isles or east to Mesopotamia and India to proselytize.) With the success of Christianity, ironically, would come the creation of a rather xenophobic civic pride.
The parallel to today’s situation is more clear: certainly one can look at the decline of public institutions in favor of private ambition and think “yep, today we have the track through the Ivy League to San Francisco and New York City — no one’s going back home to Cleveland.” We can see how, if the “Great Awokening” is an apt term, at least one strain of our recent political shift toward explicit identity politics is doing something similar to what the early Christians accomplished. At once, we are trying to reach at least some of the more excluded members of society by transforming public services enough to annoy the Wall Street Journal and also (as far as I can tell) preaching pretty unmodified neoliberalism to them. Increasing competition for tertiary education, much of which offered by institutions that require little to no Classical learning, promises to make membership in this upper middle class increasingly hereditary. And, moreover, the fragmentary familiarity with philosophy and literature to which our strivers cling seems to perfectly mirror the education that Brown describes early Christians receiving.
As I remarked in a previous article, I have come to believe our scientific civilization is at a sort of autocannibalistic moment. Our social structures — universities, corporate jobs, dating apps — are subjected to scientific scrutiny and the often self-loathing desire by ambitious professionals to “optimize” outcomes. Our habit of grabbing from the evidentiary bag stems, in my estimation, from a glut of highly-trained people frantic for new domains unto which to apply the methods of science. (For instance, to use a crass historical comparison, after the fall of the Soviet Union the influx of math PhDs to the United States produced disastrous uneployment rates.) The training produces an expectation of a certain payout, hence, lots of competition. Many of these math PhDs famously turned to Black-Scholes-powered options trading instead of research. Here I think Peter Turchin does have a point: the age of ambition is the age of the overproduction of élites.
Thus, to flesh out the second answer in the article’s premise: If anything, today’s world resembles the third or fourth century, where ambitious people weaponize rhetoric — such as quick comparison to the past, or sophistries such as giving a geometry to the world of ideas — to clamber over each other in pursuit of élite appointments.
An example: once, in the low-interest-rate before-times, I found myself hanging out with a group of day-drunk Stanford PhD students and Google employees discussing the history of economic growth. One of them was puzzling over a certain graph of global GDP since 1700. It basically showed a steady state perturbed by two bumps: one at the discovery of internal combustion; and the other at the invention of the semiconductor. Perhaps compelling evidence that digital attention would replace fossil fuels as the defining technology of the next century, but it was terrifying him that there’s no way to put it into a model that would predict the next bump. Another student was trying to explain why there’s a colossal amount of venture capital sitting around — the answer was that we had reached the edge of the space of ideas. He had constructed a model of “possible technological ideas.”
They’re all nice folks, but I won’t mince words: trying to take “technological ideas” and cram it into a mathematical space speaks at the very least to quite a lot of pressure to publish work according to a certain formula. (I also found it interesting that this study of the history of economic growth didn’t really seem to be concerned with the effects of chattel slavery.) Not that I think that research on the history and future of technology is rooted in bad intuition, but surely the use of historical GDP as a single measurement or the mathematical formulation of a “space of ideas” are publish-or-perish hammers in search of nails. Surely you’d only be writing these papers because you’re scrambling in the academic competition.
Yes, if you look into the past, you will find what you are looking for. Certainly my own reading of Brown is colored by a highly selective lens: obviously the chronology of the Christianization of Rome is more specific, filled with highly contingent events and all sorts of other processes that I have neglected to highlight. But the goal here, as with all history, is to contemplate and to free ourselves from the despair that accompanies naive formulaic thinking.
Hopefully, this should all serve to underscore the primary point: today does a bit like a certain part of Roman history, centuries prior to the fall of the Western Empire, but we must take seriously that this is only a resemblance for our contemplation.
