Decline in the Roman Republic

The rhetoric of Roman decline appears in some of the earliest surviving Latin literary texts (like Plautus’s Trinummus). Cato the Elder built much of his political brand around the idea that greed, extravagance, and, later, Greek influence undermined Roman virtue. He defended the lex Oppia, a sumptuary law, and directed attacks against figures in the mode of Scipio Africanus. This sort of attack particularly resonated as economic changes and the rise of a new class of super-wealthy Romans emerged in the decades after the end of the Second Punic War. By the 130s, Tiberius Gracchus used similar attacks on the greed and extravagance of Roman and Italian elites to push for aggressive land reforms. Tiberius’s unwillingness to be bound by constitutional norms, however, represented a new sort of decline that ultimately prompted his murder by a mob led by Scipio Nasica.

A Dangerous Idea

The fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the claims that many European powers made to the Roman legacy led to a shift in what Rome’s decline meant. Starting in the fifteenth century but continuing through Edward Gibbon’s famous eighteenth-century book The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, people embraced the idea that Rome’s story has ended. Figures like Leonardo Bruni and Montesquieu placed Roman decline at the end of the Republic. It was only with Gibbon that Rome’s peak moved to the Antonine Age. As this idea became more prominent, Roman decline no longer was something that inspired restoration. Instead it became a story that allows people to point to current conditions and criticize them by invoking Roman parallels. One great exception to this story was the tendency of Italian politicians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to push for a resuscitation of the ancient Roman state, with the ideas of Mazzini and Mussolini particularly notable in this regard.

Old Rome, New Rome, and Future Rome

Eastern Roman control of central Italy became increasingly tenuous as the eighth century progressed. The result was a series of popes gradually exercising greater independence from Constantinople. By the middle of the century, popes had begun using the rhetoric of Roman restoration to provide grounds for papal assumption of territorial control over stretches of central Italy taken from the Lombards by the Franks. Papal temporal authority then rested on a forged document called the Donation of Constantine, a document whose claims underpinned Leo IIl’s crowning of Charlemagne as Roman emperor in 800. Although Charlemagne’s Roman imperial title was manufactured, his new Western Roman Empire was framed as a restoration of traditional Western Roman prerogatives that had fallen away—and his new capital at Aachen embodied this transition with buildings constructed from old Roman materials taken from Italy.

Manufacturing the Golden Age of Trajan

The reign of Augustus showed how claims about Roman decline could become tools to justify regime change. Julio-Claudian emperors tended to emphasize continuity with dynastic predecessors rather than the rhetoric of decline and renewal. Following the death of Nero, Galba and the three new emperors who seized power from him justified their actions by talking about the terrible reigns of their murdered predecessors as times of Roman decline that they will correct. The same pattern appeared again after the murder of Domitian in 96. The reign of Nerva and, in particular, that of Trajan saw many senators like Pliny and Tacitus as well as authors like Plutarch echo these claims in their own work as a way to enhance their own reputations in what they framed as a new golden age.

When Renewal Fails to Arrive

The death of Julian in Persian territory in 363 forced the empire to make a costly and humiliating peace. By the later 360s, the historians Festus and Eutropius helped the emperor Valens use the rhetoric of decline and renewal to build support for a military campaign to avenge Julian’s defeat. Similar rhetoric was used again in the late 370s and early 380s by figures surrounding the emperor Theodosius I as he began a campaign to punish Gothic invaders. When Theodosius failed to do so, he instead embraced the idea of Christian Roman progress and instituted increasingly sweeping restrictions on paganism. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the Altar of Victory controversy, a moment when the pagan senator Symmachus argues that the empire must restore public support for paganism or risk catastrophe. The Christian bishop Ambrose responded that Christianity represented progress toward a better Roman future.

The Republic of Violence and the Empire of Peace

Both conservatives in the senate and populist reformers learned how to use violence as a political tool in the years after Tiberius Gracchus’s murder. Populists allied with figures like Marius made increasingly effective use of mobs to sway elections. The senate used the senatus consultum ultimum to deprive citizens of their rights. Sulla’s use of his army to seize power over Rome and dictate the terms of his restoration of the Republic represented a natural evolution of this process. By the late 50s BC, it had again become clear that Republican political norms had deteriorated to such a degree that prominent citizens could not trust that their rights would be protected. In Cicero’s formulation, Rome had become a Republic of violence. This violent climate prompted Julius Caesar’s march on Rome, but it took Augustus’s victory in the civil war with Antony to fully restore peace and the rule of law.

Rome, the Arabs, and Iconoclasm

By the early seventh century a combination of Persian invasions and, ultimately, Arab conquests removed the Roman Empire from the Middle East and North Africa. Although the emperor Heraclius sparked a brief but dramatic Roman resurgence in the early 630s, these traumatic losses pushed Romans to reintroduce the rhetoric of decline and renewal. Instead of focusing on the traditional, pagan Roman past as Romans had done in earlier centuries, their seventh- and eighth-century counterparts thought about how the empire’s Christian religious practices had fallen away from the ideals that had once made Rome a powerful Christian empire. One result was the Iconoclastic controversy, an argument between Romans who embraced the role of icons in Christian worship and others who wanted to suppress their use. Both sides claimed that the religious practices for which their opponents advocated had broken with the traditions that had once made the empire strong.

Decline and False Renewal

The rhetoric of decline, which had largely disappeared from political life by the late Antonine period, came back in the middle third century as political instability prompted new emperors to discredit the final emperor of the dynasty that preceded them. The lack of long-lived dynasties between 235 and 285 meant that many new emperors and imperial pretenders emphasized how the failings of their predecessors had brought Rome to a crisis point. Each deployed the rhetoric of restoration; the separatist regime of Postumus did so to a great degree. The restorations these new emperors promised often claimed significant numbers of victims, ranging from the Christians persecuted by Decius and Valerian to the soldiers and civilians killed in Aurelian’s wars to reunify the empire in the 270s. Christians like Cyprian also used rhetoric of decline to speak about persecutions, though Cyprian focused on moral deterioration within the Christian community.

The Loss of the Roman West and the Christian Future

The Roman decline that Symmachus prophesized arrived in the West as the fifth century began. The first half of the fifth century saw Rome sacked in 410 and the empire then lose extensive territories in Gaul, Spain, and North Africa between the 410s and 440s. Christian thinkers like Orosius, Salvian, and Augustine struggled to respond effectively to pagan criticisms that Rome’s break with its pagan traditions had precipitated this loss of territory. Augustine’s City of God in particular asked Christians to privilege the community of God over the troubled empire of this world, an empire that nevertheless could still serve a beneficial purpose to Christians. Writing after the capture of Gaul by barbarians, both Sidonius Apollinaris and Paulinus of Pella embraced a post-Roman future in which Christian devotion remained meaningful even after their ties to the Roman state had ended. The Christian and Roman futures had now diverged in the West.

The Fall of Roman Constantinople and the End of Roman Renewal

The Roman Empire that Michael Palaeologus again centered on Constantinople lost significant territory across the fourteenth century to rivals like the Serbian kingdom and the rising Ottoman sultanate. A long Ottoman blockage of the capital that began in 1394 prompted the emperor Manuel II Palaeologus to travel to the West to seek help for the faltering empire. The empire was saved by Tamerlane’s defeat of the Ottomans in 1402 and Manuel then spearheaded a restoration of Roman control over parts of Greece that contemporaries celebrated in terms that evoked past Roman greatness. But the restoration was short lived and Constantinople fell to the Ottomans and their sultan Mehmet II in 1453. As the city fell, the populace waited for divine deliverance that would again spark a Roman recovery—an idea that authors like Ducas persisted in believing even after the city fell.