Rome's decline was caused less by gaping wounds than gaping inequality, and by leaders unable or willing to remedy it
Basic Books; 352 pages; $32. To be published in Britain in March; £25.a trick. His version of Julius Caesar’s funeral does, admittedly, have its moments. But he might have done even better had he read his Appian. For while the Bard’s version musters oratorical verve, the historian’s offers a coup de théâtre, complete with the astute use of props, sightlines and stagecraft.
Caesar’s reign—and its bloody end and bloodier aftermath—would later come to be seen as a turning point in the history of Rome. And indeed it was, but as Edward Watts points out in “Mortal Republic”, the Republic had been in its death throes for decades. The decline was caused less by gaping wounds than gaping inequality, and by leaders unable or unwilling to remedy it. If that syndrome sounds familiar, it is meant to.
This ominously titled book is his response, furnished with such nudgingly apposite chapters as “The Politics of Frustration” and “The Republic of the Mediocre”. His gambit isn’t new: the classical world is often used as a lens through which to examine modernity. Want to understand China? Read Thucydides. Need to know about Afghanistan? Best study Plutarch. This trick can easily go awry: the past was not just the present in togas, as some historians would do well to remember.
He begins by taking the reader on a brisk march through Roman history. The Republic’s early citizens were legendarily hardy. In the late third century, faced with multiple threats, Rome entered a state Mr Watts describes as “an ancient version of total war”. Two-thirds of the male citizen population between 17 and 30 years old were enrolled in the army, ready to die for Rome. And die they did, cut down in battle after battle like fields of wheat.
Yet while some Romans swilled from ornate goblets, the majority drank a more bitter draught. They endured a life of backbreaking work and the knowledge that they would almost certainly end up poorer than their parents. Such a situation could hardly last—and didn’t., to be replaced by autocracy.
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