Best of 2022: Decline and Fall

For the next week, I’ll be posting a few more highlights from 2022, some favorite articles I wrote this year that I would like to bring back to your attention.

Below is an article from June 22 addressing the question I keep getting about whether we are in a situation similar to the collapse of the Roman Empire.

I would also like the recommend to your attention an article I had published in Quillette in January making the case for the importance of Ayn Rand’s ideas in today’s context—one of the reasons we are not likely to go the way of the Romans.

These outside pieces are a crucial part of the value The Tracinski Letter offers—that it gives me the base of support to be an advocate for important ideas to influential audiences.

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“Are we in a situation similar to the collapse of the Roman Empire?”

This is a question I get from time to time and one that I heard again recently during one of the Clubhouse chats I do for The Atlas Society. Is our current dire situation similar to what the Romans faced as their republic was overthrown by an imperial dictatorship, or as the empire itself later collapsed?

The question is one that I feel pretty well prepared to answer because I have been immersed recently in Roman history.

As for the collapse of the Empire, see my discussion of the parallels in a book review from last year. When it comes to the Republic, for the past year or so, I have been helping my dad with the big project of his retirement: self-publishing three books about the Roman republic at the time of Julius Caesar. For a long time, this period of history has been my dad’s hobby, and the result is two novels and a (mostly) non-fiction guide.

In the process of helping with layout and proofreading—payback for the many thousands of my words that my dad has proofread for me over the years—I have gained an appreciation for the parallels, but also for how much worse off the Romans were than we are today.

I fully understand the comparisons. I just spent some time on Twitter sparring with people who insist that they can’t be bothered to pay any attention to the hearings about the January 6 uprising and Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election because—well, because there’s some inflation. This is obviously a rationalization. They don’t want to pay attention to January 6 because it makes their side look bad, and they need an excuse. But it struck me that this is much the same rationalization many Germans used to talk themselves into voting for the Nazis in the 1920s and early 30s (after which they were spared the bother of voting). And it would certainly have made these people an eager audience for the bread and circuses of imperial Rome.

Yet what has struck me more is that these comparisons tend to underestimate just how thoroughly dysfunctional the Roman republic was, suffering from problems far greater than anything we face today.

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First a note about my dad’s books and the period of history they cover.

MARIUS! The Third Founder of Rome is a fictionalized account of the flight from Rome of the larger-than-life military leader Gaius Marius, his gathering of an army in North Africa, his return to power at the head of that army in 87 BC, and the vengeance he took on his political enemies before his sudden death at the height of his power.

The Way of the Romans is a guide to the early life of Gauis Marius’s nephew, Julius Caesar, including a description of Roman lifestyle and political organization and the layout of Rome itself. It is mostly non-fiction, but its central fictionalized device is that it is told in the voice of my father’s stand-in, Caesar’s real-life tutor and friend Marcus Antonius Gnipho.

Gnipho is also the narrator of the third book, Jupiter’s Child, which spins a fictional story around a real event, in which a young Julius Caesar is captured by pirates in the Eastern Mediterranean and held for ransom.

As for the literary qualities of these books, I feel like I have too much of a conflict of interest to offer a proper review. But what I told my dad—and he agreed with the comparison—is that I found them to be a bit like The Martian in one respect. The Martian (the original book, not the movie) is going to be a far better read if you don’t mind finding out a lot about science, technology, and the details of planned NASA expeditions to Mars. Similarly, you will find my dad’s books more interesting if you share his fascination with all the details of Roman military and political history, and if you don’t mind discovering more about Mithraism than you thought there was to know.

Then again, I can also tell you that my youngest son, a somewhat precocious 12-year-old, has been absolutely enthralled in reading his grandfather’s books.

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What primarily interests me for our present purpose is the history in these books.

Any comparison of America today to the Rome of roughly 2,000 years ago has to reckon with the fact that we are in far better shape, because the Romans had much more basic and fundamental political problems that they entirely failed to solve.

The figure who dominates these books to an extent I didn’t expect—and neither did my father, I suspect, since he started writing about Julius Caesar—was Caesar’s uncle, Gaius Marius. We tend to think of Caesar as the man who destroyed the Roman republic, but what I really came to appreciate in reading these books is the extent to which the Republic was already in tatters when he came along. Marius, an immensely talented and ambitious man with a forceful personality, is one of the people who destroyed it.

He was able to do so because Rome faced two basic problems as it expanded.

Roman expansion was not just motivated by lust for land and power. It was partly defensive. Rome had been sacked by the Gauls a century before Marius, and Marius himself had saved the city from a massive invasion of Germans coming over the Alps, for which he earned the title, “The Third Founder of Rome.” But as Rome expanded to rule more and more territory, it came to absorb a large number of Italian allies, other city states subject to Roman rule. At the same time, Rome’s patrician and equestrian classes, who had provided most of the city’s military power, were stretched thin and no longer adequate to the task. In particular, the patrician aristocrats who usually served as officers were frequently incompetent and corrupt, chosen more for their social position than for their abilities, with occasionally disastrous results.

The solution was clear, and Marius was one of the people who pushed for it. First, Rome had to extend citizenship to its Italian allies, giving them a stake and a say in the entity that ruled them. Second, Rome had to provide more freedom and opportunity to its mass of poor “plebeians.” This is what Marius had done in response to the military crises of his day, raising armies from among the poor and promising his veterans ownership of farmland in the Roman provinces as a reward. He took untrained plebeians and proved that they could be turned into disciplined and effective soldiers capable of greater courage and greater exertion than the aristocrats. Both as a complaint about the tools and supplies he made them carry, and as a badge of honor, they called themselves “Marius’s mules.”

Both of these reforms were stubbornly resisted by the aristocratic class, particularly the granting of land to veterans. The patricians much preferred the existing system in which conquered land was organized into “latifundia,” vast state-owned farms managed by patricians using slave labor. These leaders had no use for competition from a class of plebeian kulaks.

The result was what really tore the republic apart. The political conflict between the optimates, the “best men” who represented the interests of the aristocrats, and the populares, the “people’s men” who represented the interests of the plebeians, was carried out with increasing violence in the decades before Caesar. Votes in the Senate or in the plebeian Assembly were influenced by attacks from violent mobs on one side or the other. Political leaders assassinated their rivals. A popular leader like Marius—or his patrician opponent, Sulla—could gather a legion or two for Rome’s frequent wars abroad, then use those legions to march on Rome itself and install themselves in power.

Caesar’s decision to march a legion across the Rubicon and establish himself as perpetual dictator was not the first such attempt. It was the last. Well, the second-to-last, since his nephew Augustus had to re-establish the dictatorship after Caesar’s death and then eliminate his partners and rivals.

My dad’s books include the earlier parts of this story in unsparing detail: the corruption, the murders, the rigged prosecutions of political opponents, the wars and assassinations. The Roman republic was in a state of constant crisis and low-grade civil war for many decades before it fell. And I mean real, actual civil war, with armies clashing, mass murder, and blood on the streets, not just the play-acting we do these days on Twitter and cable news.

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On the one hand, this implies that we should be absolutely terrified of anything today that smacks of the kind of political dysfunction that brought down Rome’s republic. A vain and ambitious figure egging on a mob to threaten a vote in the Senate—which is precisely what is being documented in the January 6 hearings—ought to give us a sense of recognition. If unopposed, this is the terminal stage of republican government.

But “if unopposed” is the question, isn’t it? We have a much more educated and engaged populace, and we don’t suffer from the Romans’ inflexible social stratification between patricians and plebeians, or between the capital and the provinces. And above all else, we have a political system designed by our Founding Fathers very specifically to solve the Romans’ problems and avoid their fate. The Romans had only the vague beginnings of a theory of individual rights; our Founders had Locke and Sydney and a whole school of natural rights philosophers.

Two thousand years of subsequent history and intellectual and economic growth are not in vain. We are in a stronger position than Roman civilization ever was. We still need to defend what we have, but we should do so with confidence that we can.

We should also remember that for all its problems, the Roman republic lasted nearly five centuries. Rome overthrew its last king in 509 BC and named Caesar as dictator in 49 BC. At that rate, our republic should have at least two centuries left. The Roman Empire lasted another five centuries after that, and if you include its Eastern half, which survived as the Byzantine Empire, it lasted until 1453 AD—more than two thousand years in all.

If the decadent Romans could survive that long, surely we decadent Americans—with all of our advantages in wealth, knowledge, and experience—can be expected to do better.

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