Ideas - The Never-Ending Fall of Rome

Episode Date: July 1, 2024

Rome fell, because of... divorce. Or was it immigration? Maybe moral decay. IDEAS producer Matthew Lazin-Ryder explores the political history of 'the fall of Rome' — a hole in time where politicians, activists, and intellectuals can dump any modern anxiety they wish.

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood, or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas, I'm Nala Ayed.

The fall of Rome. A dark day in the year 476. The empire had grown too wide at the margins and too rotten at its core. And then, in an instant, it all fell apart. Barbarian tribes surrounded the city. They were lean and battle-hardened warriors, untainted by luxury and excess. In earlier days, the Roman legions would have smashed the invaders. In earlier days, the Roman legions would have smashed the invaders. But now, a life of banquets and pillows had made them weak and soft. And with chaos reigning in the streets, the corrupt and decadent emperor remained in the palace with his concubines and catamites.

The city was overrun. Smoke blackened the sky. Marble columns toppled over and crumbled into dust. over and crumbled into dust. The Romans, in their hubris, let an empire collapse around them and could do nothing but watch as it came to its vainglorious end. Of course, that's not how the fall of Rome really happened. how the fall of Rome really happened. It didn't end in a day. It didn't end in a fire. It didn't end with the sacking of Rome or the toppling of statues. But there is a fall of Rome that exists outside of history. It lives as an idea in the minds of politicians, pundits, intellectuals, and advocates of every stripe, each with their own agenda, each with their own use and misuse of Rome's fall. This episode from producer Matthew Lazenrider is called The Never-Ending Fall of Rome. How are we becoming like Rome? We're expanding government.

Rome collapsed of its own weight, of its own growing promises. Free grain and free olive oil to people to keep them happy. We're a lot like that. It does sound familiar. We do have a declining birth rate. We saw it with Rome. They had a declining birth rate. We saw it with Rome. They had a declining birth rate right before the fall of Rome. It's looking more and more like late stages of pagan Rome, where the

woke rogues are taking over corporate life, taking over Hollywood. Because Rome was suffering and being suffocated by enormous debt levels. They imposed whatever mandate they felt like, whether it was masks, kids, vaccine passports, you name it. They could do it because they were empowered. You go back in history, the fall of the Roman Empire was due to the abuse of emergency power. What parallels are there and why are we thinking about it so much? It collapsed. There you go.

Such a great point. I see parallels with our country. Amen to that. There are at least two falls of Rome. There's the fall of Rome in the past and the fall of Rome today. The one thing that is absolutely clear when you talk about Rome's decline in fall is it did decline in fall, right? I mean, this is a place that 1,900 years ago controlled everything from basically Scotland to Saudi Arabia. And it's not there anymore. And so you cannot deny that there is a decline and a disappearance of the

Roman state. It's 100% true. The question is, what exactly are we talking about? And when exactly are we talking about when we're talking about the decline and disappearance of this state? And I think that's where all of this interpretation opens up. Edward Watts is a professor of Roman and Byzantine history at the University of California, San Diego. In his book, The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome, he charts a couple thousand years of rhetoric. You see the decline of Rome and the fall of Rome invoked by people who are upset about all kinds of things. So in the United States, you've just in the last 50 years, seen it connected to people wearing long hair on college campuses. You see it connected to individuals who are behaving in

ways consistent with the standards of the sexual revolution. You're seeing it where people are concerned about gay rights. You see it in just about any context that might produce some discomfort because the world around individuals has been changing. And when somebody says that your society is in decline, it gives you a way to put a label on this feeling you have. And it gives you a way to potentially trust somebody to make that feeling go away. The news clips you heard earlier were all from American cable news, where the fall of Rome is regularly invoked as a cautionary tale for the United States. But it's not limited to the U.S. or to this particular

political moment. In the Canadian Parliament, the fall of Rome has been a warning dating back to Confederation. In 1930, Senator Jean-Charles Chappé argued that divorce led to the fall of Rome. History teaches us that it was one of the main causes of the decline of the Roman Empire. When Rome had conquered the world, easy and shameless divorce conquered Rome. In 1968, a year which saw many student-led demonstrations and protests, the fall of Rome was attributed to roaming gangs of youth, at least according to the liberal senator Arthur Roebuck. The barbarians who attacked Rome have their counterparts today in the Huns and Vandals

who are disrupting conditions in the cities. And according to Walter Matthews, MP for Nanaimo in 1958, the fall of Rome was due to decadent living. in 1958, the fall of Rome was due to decadent living. The downfall of Rome started when the simple life gave way to high living and extravagance. They became fat and lazy and became prey to other nations. As you can hear, there's a basic template at work. Society used to be great, but now moral standards are falling. Luxury is breeding weakness, and people are losing their civic virtue.

Funnily enough, that was the same political rhetoric going on in Rome long before Rome actually fell. Really, when it was on the rise. The Commonwealth had now grown too large to keep its primitive integrity. The sway over many realms and peoples had brought a large mix of cultures and customs. It was natural, therefore, that men should admire Cato. that men should admire Cato. That's Roman historian Plutarch writing about Cato the Elder, a Roman politician from around 200 BC. Before the emperors, before Christianity, before Caesar, Aurelius, Nero, Commodus, or Justinian, Romans were already playing politics over the decline of Rome.

Romans were already playing politics over the decline of Rome. The moment we first see this is connected really with a movement that leads to the campaign of the political figure Cato the Elder to become censor in Rome. And the thing that's remarkable about that is this moment is actually a moment where Rome has triumphed in the war against Hannibal. It is getting massive influxes of money from Carthage and also from cities in the eastern Mediterranean that it has defeated in war. Its economy is growing really quickly. Its population is growing. Its military power is growing. Everything about Rome is getting better and getting better very quickly.

And what Cato understands is there are people who just are uncomfortable with this. And so what Cato does is he comes forward with a set of ideas that says, in essence, you know, your discomfort is correct. What's happening now does correspond to increasing living standards. It does correspond to increasing living standards. It does correspond to increasing Roman power. But what this is actually doing is creating moral decline among Romans. And the genius in this is, you know, moral decline is very difficult to measure. You know, there's no metric that really corresponds to moral decline.

You can look at an economy shrinking. You can look at the boundaries of a society contracting. But how do you measure moral decline? It's one of these things where you sort of feel it to be right. And what Cato understood is there were a lot of people who felt something was wrong. And when you attribute that problem that they are feeling in their gut

to something like moral decline, it's very difficult to prove that he's wrong. This becomes a way to launch Cato's campaign for censor, and it becomes a way to justify some of the things that Cato does as censor, which include incorporating a wealth tax that primarily targets people Cato doesn't like, expelling people from the Senate for supposedly bad moral behavior. Again, this mainly is people that Cato doesn't like. And so Cato uses this claim that he alone can fix the depravity that's being caused by these shifts in Roman society as a tool to advance his own political fortunes and attack the fortunes of his opponents. When Cato is talking about moral decline, there is this idealized past in his mind. And Cato is the most articulate advocate of the glorious Roman past. One of the problems that Cato has is, of course, that Roman past never existed.

So what Cato has done is kind of manufactured a sepia-toned golden age of Rome that people imagine. And because you imagine it, it can take any form that you feel comfortable with. Romans spent centuries blaming each other for a perceived decline. There were tough times. In the 3rd century, Rome faced a series of crises, plagues, droughts, and famines, and someone had to answer for it. The biggest victims, especially in the 250s, when things are particularly bad, are Christians. What you get in the 250s are two emperors, the Emperor Decius and the Emperor Valerian,

who are very traditional in their understanding of what Roman religion should be, and are also very traditional in their understanding of the interaction between proper religious behavior and the outcomes of Roman political and military life. And so both Decius and Valerian, in different fashions, single out Christians for persecution because they believe that Christians are not participating in Roman religion in the appropriate ways. This is angering the gods. And it's Christians' lack of participation in Roman religion that's causing all the catastrophes in the 250s. So, Decius issued an edict that everyone in the empire, except for Jews, must make a sacrifice to the pagan gods in front of a magistrate.

Jews must make a sacrifice to the pagan gods in front of a magistrate. Many Christians refused, and an estimated 3,000 were executed. And it only got worse for them. Three years later, Valerian became emperor and ordered all Christian bishops and senior clergy killed. It's, I think, reasonable to imagine that at least Valerian is doing this cynically. We have some sources that talk about Valerian actually having dinner with Christians before he became emperor, being relatively close socially with Christians before he became emperor. And so I think in the case of Valerian, at least, we should understand that there is a cynical motivation here where things really are not going well for Valerian. And what he is doing is scapegoating a community that is large and different. The point Watts makes is that rhetoric of decline finds victims. If Rome is heading for a fall, then it's time to do something questionable, illegal, immoral, or otherwise unthinkable. You know, Christians did not do what most Romans did in their religious life.

And if you want to blame somebody for the catastrophes of the 250s without blaming yourself, you find a scapegoat who you can attribute the anger of the gods to. And this gives you an explanation for why bad things continue to happen despite your best efforts as emperor to try to fix them. Now, a lot of ink has been spilled about modern use of the rhetoric of decline, particularly around U.S. President Donald Trump and his nostalgic motto, make America great again. But the trope of decline is a constant in politics and has been for thousands of years. And comparisons to Rome aren't made solely on the conservative side of politics. America is eerily retracing Rome's steps to a fall.

Will it turn around before it's too late? That's a headline from Politico in 2020, comparing Trump's rejection of the election results to Julius Caesar. Decline and fall, what Donald Trump can learn from the Roman emperors. That's the Huffington Post comparing Trump to both Caligula and Nero. What happened to the Roman Republic when armed gangs doing the work for politicians prevented Rome from casting their ballots. And just after the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol, Democratic Senator Michael Bennett compared

the insurrectionists to mobs in ancient Rome. Because of that, the Roman Republic fell and a dictator took its place. The United States has a special relationship with ancient Rome. Government buildings in Washington, D.C. are decidedly Roman, all marble and arches and plazas. The Supreme Court's 24 Corinthian columns were made from marble imported from Liguria in Italy. Revolutionary France took inspiration from Rome, its government symbols and structures hearkening back to the Republic. Victorian Britain saw itself and its empire reflected in the glories of Rome. Americans and Europeans have long liked to compare themselves or ourselves to Rome, whether the Republic or the Empire. And often we have sought to measure and define ourselves and our place in human history relative

to the political and cultural achievements of the ancient world. And I think the legacy of the ancient world has been both grounds for assurance and optimism at times, but also this testament to decline and decay. Jonathan Theodore studied history at Oxford and King's College, London. His doctoral thesis argued that the fall of Rome, as imagined in politics and culture, acts as a kind of myth for the contemporary world. The myth of the decline and fall has always been used as this paradigm for interpreting the decline or potential decline of other states and societies. Normally, that of whatever author is writing about this so-called decline and fall, that it contains this apparent paradox that the peak of classical civilization may have proved to be the catalyst for us undoing, and therefore other civilizations, nations, empires, or states, which also appear to be at their peak, may themselves contain the seeds of their own decline and eventual potential downfall and destruction. I think any time it is seen that society is, or the fabric of society is fraught for social, economic or political reasons, the Roman Empire is a fantastic one

to return to. It's so often seen as kind of the origin of the Western world. And there's almost a sense of familiarity about it. Think of the TikTok trend right now. People love to identify with the Romans in a way that's much harder to do for the civilizations that came before it. Arguably, the Greeks are little, but certainly not ancient Egypt, the civilizations of Mesopotamia, and those are just those of Eurasia. And that's true, right? Ever hear someone say, single mothers? Why, that's how the Hittite Empire fell. But one person above all is responsible for the popular perception of the decline and fall of Rome, and that's the English historian Edward Gibbon. It was in 1776, the year the American Declaration of Independence was drafted, that he released the first volume of his life's work,

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It was an instant bestseller, and it received a lot of praise at the time. I think he's almost the quintessential Enlightenment thinker. So, from the late 17th century onwards, Enlightenment ideas had really secured the belief that civilization was finally matching and progressing beyond the achievements of the rebirth of learning and inquiry and free thinking, gaining momentum in the Renaissance, and then reaching its pinnacle in the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. And I think as a consequence of this, the problem of what brought the ancient world to ruin haunted many of the philosophers and historians of the Enlightenment. And in particular,

imperial nations from the 18th and 19th centuries were often driven to social and cultural self-examination because in their eyes, it appeared very hard to blame anyone except the Romans themselves for the collapse of their great empire and civilization. And as a result of this, the final fate of the Roman Empire fortified an anxiety in Gibbon and successive writers that in their civilization's greatest moments of triumph lay the seeds of their own destruction. And Gibbon makes clear that the history of Rome is of universal significance and possesses a profound symbolic value. and possesses a profound symbolic value. The memorable series of revolutions in the course of about 13 centuries gradually undermined and at length destroyed the solid fabric of human greatness.

I'd argue that Gibbon, while he gets almost everything wrong, he's a magnificently eloquent writer and he's able to stitch together this narrative across over a thousand years of, well, 1300 years of history and almost a million and a half words. Because he's an Enlightenment thinker who's very much in that atheistic Enlightenment tradition, he puts particular blame at the doors of Christianity. He attacks the cultural intellectual traditions of Christianity as a dire superstition that ruined the Hellenic tradition of reason and rationality. And he sees fundamental to the rise of Christianity and its adoption as the official religion of the empire, the marked decline of learning, the lack of pursuit of natural and mathematical sciences, the stifling of public spirit and freedom, the advancement of knowledge in a pluralistic society, and therefore that while the Eastern Empire survives, it's almost medieval in character, that while the Eastern Empire survives, it's almost medieval in character, it's repressive,

it's extremely Christian in the worst possible ways. So forgiven, the adoption of Christianity ruins much of the civic spirit, the moral character, the political ambition of the empire, and plays a huge role in its eventual destruction. and plays a huge role in its eventual destruction. The idea that Christians ruined Rome doesn't hold so much currency anymore. But the core of Gibbon's idea is exactly what Theodore sees now as a living mythology in our own day. That great civilizations aren't brought down by outsiders. They inevitably decay from within. Rome, at the height of its grandeur and its glory, a civilization so powerful

it could never be conquered from without. Yet it found the seeds of its destruction within itself. You're listening to Ideas and to a documentary called The Never-Ending Fall of Rome by Matthew Lazen Ryder. We're a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us on the CBC Listen app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all, true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the

creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. In case you're expecting this episode to answer the question, how did Rome fall? I'm sorry to say, there is no one single answer. In 1984, a German historian named Alexander Dumont tried to compile a list of theories advanced for the fall of Rome. He found 210.

His list includes in no particular order communism, capitalism, bankruptcy, luxury, equal rights, abolition of rights, lead poisoning, mercury damage, pacifism, militarism, vulgarization, intellectualism, and indifference. Matthew Lazen Rider examines the fall of Rome not as history, but as an idea, one that still haunts our cultural imagination.

The fall of the Roman Empire. Not just 304, but all the known emotions a drama of ambition and greed of treachery and violence and the intimate story of a daughter of a caesar whose love was sacrificed for the good and the glory of the roman empire Empire. If Rome had the Colosseum, we have the movie theater. No, wait, that's a ridiculous cliche. Rome had hundreds of theaters. Roman audiences loved them. Let's try this. If Rome had theater, we have movies. The fall of the Roman Empire, not just four or five, but countless thrills. Rome plays a double part man who dare defy him. Rome plays a double part. It is the evil empire with debauchery,

limitless sex, orgies, violence, slavery, blood supports, militarism, and so on. But at the same time, it's also very attractive. It is a kind of a perfect place in which you can have individuals who have preserved their morals and represent the good in us, so that even modern viewers

can recognize themselves, cheer the good people, and hiss and boo the villains. Martin Winkler teaches classics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. He's originally from Germany and graduated from a high school founded while the Roman Empire, at least its eastern half, still existed. And his interest in film was sparked one day when he was just a schoolboy. I took a bus downtown to one of the large movie palaces, as they used to be called and used to be, which was showing a film

titled the undergang des rumishen Reiches which is the fall of the Roman Empire in German I was sort of a late afternoon showing and I was almost by myself in this big theater. And then the curtain opens, the gigantic screen, and then there's a first scene in which you have a panning shot of a Roman border fortress on the German frontier, where the story begins. And a narrator comes on and says,

Two of the greatest problems in history are how to account for the rise of Rome and how to account for her fall. We may come nearer to understanding the truth if we remember that the fall of Rome, like her rise, had not one cause, but many, and was not an event, but a process spread over 300 years. Some nations have not lasted as long as Rome fell.

And as soon as I heard this last sentence, some nations have not lasted as long as Rome fell, I was completely hooked. Movies set in ancient Rome aren't really about ancient Rome as much as they are about the times they're made in. That's particularly nicely seen in the late 40s to the early 60s, when Romans were in the wake of World War II, were almost, as a matter of course, became analogies to Nazis. Romans are villains, and of course Nazis are too. And if you consider certain films like Quo Vadis or even Ben-Hur

you can see ubiquitously for instance Romans raising their right hand in the so-called Roman salute. Hail Marcus Vinicius, Captain Flavius, Praetorian God salutes you. Hail. Which is not a historical fact. Ancient Romans did not do so salute.

That's a modern invention that became famous or infamous with the fascists in Italy the saluto romano that goes back to Mussolini and so on and then was taken over by Nazi Germany as the German salute so when Romans

raised their right hands and straight arms and say Hail Caesar that's an analogy to Nazis in uniform and others saying, Heil Hitler. As the 20th century moves on, Romans stop being a them and start being an us. We've had to fight long wars. Your burdens have been great. In 1964's The Fall of the Roman Empire, Alec Guinness plays Marcus Aurelius, the wise old philosopher emperor. Aurelius has just fought a war and made peace with the Germans. Now he wants a future of safety and virtue. We come now to the end of the road, here within our reach,

golden centuries of peace. But soon, Marcus Aurelius is murdered by supporters of his no-good son, Commodus, played by Christopher Plummer. Hail Commodus! Hail Caesar! As Caesar, Commodus doesn't care about much. He likes games and frivolities, and sets about ending his father's policies of equality and justice. We will have games. The people of the city will be fed. You and your eastern provinces will send us twice the grain they have been sending. The taxes on them will be doubled. The movie ends with a duel between Commodus and a Roman general named Livius, who was loyal to Marcus Aurelius and his belief in civic virtue. If all of that sounds familiar, it's because it's also the plot to Gladiator, the Ridley Scott film from 2000. In that film, Russell Crowe played the faithful general,

this time named Maximus. Commander of the armies of the North, General of the Felix Legions, loyal servant to the true emperor Marcus Aurelius. In Gladiator, Marcus Aurelius is depicted as carrying the supposed virtues of the old Roman Republic. Commodus, the corruption of the empire. In other words, the way society used to be versus the way it is now. Early in Gladiator, Marcus Aurelius and Russell Crowe's General Maximus talk about the simpler times. My house is in the hills above Tohilo. General Maximus talk about the simpler times. Back when life was about farming and filled with

sunny days and a beautiful wife and an obedient kid. There were no terrible politics in the good old days, but now they dominate everything. It was a good home, worth fighting for. The 1964 film ends with the death of Commodus, but the empire is still doomed by corruption. In Gladiator, it seems like the fall of Rome is entirely averted. Maximus, the general, still manages to kill Commodus and then dies himself. Maximus says that it was the wishes of Marcus Aurelius

that the government of Rome should be returned to the Senate, which is very unhistorical. But that means there's hope for Rome. And the final shot in Gladiator is sort of a morning sunrise, which is a symbol, a cliched symbol, of hope, better things to come and such. There was a dream that was wrong. It shall be realized. These are the wishes of Marcus Aurelius.

Free the prisoners! Go! free the prisoners go so that also then reflects the restraining power at least ideally of the senate affirmation of the good over the evil the evil is an aberration by one

and if you overthrow the evil emperor or kill the villain and whatever rot there may have been structural and such in government in the institutions is left untouched. If you shoot the bad guy, then everything is going to be okay. Gladiator contains one particularly current sentiment. That a decline can be stopped, and maybe even reversed reversed by taking one person out of the equation.

If you lock her up, if you impeach him, you can restore the good old days. Outside of pure politics, stories about ancient Rome also tap into general fears about moral and cultural decadence. Decadence was a big theme in Victorian ideas about the fall of Rome. Decadence was a big theme in Victorian ideas about the fall of Rome. There's a painting in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris by Thomas Couture from 1847 called The Romans in Their Decadence. You can see an image of it on our website, cbc.ca slash ideas. It depicts the aftermath of a late empire orgy. A whole bunch of half-naked bodies are lounging all over marble benches and floors, and that's contrasted with statues from Rome's era as a republic, all standing strong and proud. The metaphor's not very subtle. Sexual degeneracy brought down a civilization. That idea

has a long tail, stretching well into the 20th century. Like this film from the 1920s. This is a film by Cecil B. DeMille, who is famous and infamous for his historical films. In the early 20s, DeMille made a story called Manslaughter, which sort of is an expose of the reckless youth in the jazz age, the flappers and so on. And at one point, there's a party, excessive party that these, you know, the wild youth, young men and women engage in. Of course, what you see on the screen is a bit tame, you know, it's not really orgiastic. But at least at the time, audiences, viewers would get the point.

And then there's a flashback in connection with this modern excessive party. And that flashback is to the fall of Rome. And you see Romans sort of in the aftermath of sex and, I almost said sex and drugs and rock and roll, but it's more like sex and wine and, you know, the serious music and whatever else. And they're sort of lying around draped on couches and whatever else,

completely enervated. And a bit later, there's a second flashback to the same scene. And at this time, it's German vandals with their sort of horned helmets and such are storming and taking over. And that is the fall of the Roman Empire. In other words, the fall of Rome

is the excessive sex, lust, immorality, non-Christian, anti-self-restraint, whatever, kind of orgiastic, excessive life that comes with luxury and such on this. Whenever sexual standards or practices change, the anxiety that civilization is becoming immoral and weak soon follows. Here's a bizarre example. President Richard Nixon recorded every meeting in the Oval Office.

They're now referred to as the Nixon tapes after they came to light during the Watergate scandal. One day in 1971, Richard Nixon, with Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman and White House Counsel John Ehrlichman, are palling around talking about television. So Nixon is telling Haldeman and Ehrlichman that he was trying to find the baseball game on television the night before. Nixon, instead of watching the baseball game, says he found a movie about a working-class guy and two gay people. What was it called?

Arson, I've got to say. After a bit of back and forth, it turns out Nixon was confused. It wasn't a movie at all. It was an episode of All in the Family, a massively popular TV comedy in the 70s. Apparently, this episode of All in the Family dealt with homosexuality in a positive way, and Nixon didn't like it. You never see what happened to the Greeks. Homosexuality destroyed them. The last sex Roman emperor was in the bags. You see, homosexuality, immorality in general, these are the enemies of strong societies.

That's why the communists and the left-wingers are cleaning it up. They're trying to destroy us. So now, with ideas about sex and gender being contested all over the world, we inevitably find people arguing that changing mores will lead to civilizational decline. Historically, the movement toward androgyny occurs in late phases of culture. This is feminist and academic Camille Paglia. As a civilization is starting to unravel, okay, and that you can find it again and again and again, whether it's the Hellenistic era,

whether it's the Roman Empire, whether it's the move decade of Oscar Wilde in the 1890s, whether it's Weimar Germany. And podcaster Joe Rogan. And I think this happened with the Greeks and it happened with the Romans. It's a thing that happens where men start becoming women, women start becoming men, and it becomes like a big focus, like cross-dressing and all this stuff. This happens at the end of every civilization's reign. There's also an entire cultural movement that sees the Roman Empire and parts of Greek history as icons of masculinity, part of what's colloquially known as the Trab Movement. You can find it on YouTube like this from Matt Walsh. The Roman Empire was also a time, like in any ancient civilization,

where what we would call traditional masculinity reigned supreme. Men were men and were rewarded and celebrated for being men. These are the things we think about when we think about the Roman Empire. So you might think this is where I bring on a historian to say, actually, Matt Walsh is wrong. In Roman times, people had just as many sexual and gender arrangements as we have today. But that's not the issue at all. It's that our ideas about gender and sexuality, however traditional or progressive, simply don't translate across thousands of years. If you were dumped in the middle of ancient Rome, you wouldn't find any

gay people, or straight people, or trans people, or cis people, because those categories are the way we think about it, not them. For example, in parts of Roman history, here's how they thought about the relationship between sexuality and manliness. If I'm reading a Roman text and I see the statement that some Roman troops were involved in a battle and there's a Latin word virtus, which basically means manliness, though it's cognate with the English word virtue, that somehow their virtus was lacking, their manliness was lacking, and they lost the battle.

It often in practice means personal courage. So it's the guy with the sword or the guy with the lance or the guy with the spear, you know, in hand-to-hand combat with somebody else. Matthew Roller is a professor of classics at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He says, absolutely, ancient Romans had a very strong sense of manliness. Men were praised for being manly and insulted for being womanly. But the question is what these ideas meant to them. It still fundamentally means manliness, and it also turns up in other contexts that aren't necessarily military. There's other dimensions of manliness also, and in particular, in relation to sexual behavior. And we may not necessarily automatically in our own society link, you know, the courage of a soldier with sexual behavior, but the Romans did.

This is not super graphic, but this is how I talk to my students. The primary distinction in antiquity is between the role of the sexual penetrator and the person who is the penetrated person in a sexual act. And the role of the manly person is always to be the penetrator and never to be the penetrated. In fact, the manliest men are pretty voracious in their appetites, and they don't necessarily put a fine point on the gender of the people or the sex of the people that they take as their partners. As long as they are the penetrator. Exactly right. As long as you play the correct role in the sexual act. role in the sexual act. And what that opens up for us is the very clear possibility and in fact certainty that the manliest of Roman men had sex with males regularly. I invite the reader's attention to the process of our moral decline,

to watch, first, the sinking of the foundations of morality as the old teaching was allowed to lapse, then the rapidly increasing disintegration, then the final collapse of the whole edifice, and the dark dawning of our modern day when we can neither endure our vices nor face the remedies needed to cure them. That's from Roman historian Titus Livius. It might ring true today, but it wasn't written anywhere near the fall of Rome. It was around 20 BC, about 450 years before the commonly cited date of the end of the Western Roman Empire. Livy, like many writers of his time, was immensely concerned with moral decline.

But it turns out, everyone is. All the time. Really what stuck out about that quote is, except for a little bit of old-timey language, you can find people saying very similar things today. That's a little bit of old timey language, you can find people saying very similar things today. And that's a little bit of the trick that we pull at the beginning of the paper. Every paper that's about some illusion of decline or people thinking things have gotten worse has to do this trick

where I show you someone complaining about things getting worse. And then I pull back the curtain and reveal, aha, that was a person 2000 years ago saying this. Don't you feel silly now? Adam Mastroianni is an experimental psychologist and recent postdoctoral research scholar at Columbia Business School, as well as the author of the substack Experimental History. So I have for a long time been frustrated with people who say that things are different now

than they used to be without the evidence that it takes to make such a claim. So really, this was a paper written out of spite. His paper, which started with that quote from Livy, was published in the journal Nature. And in it, Mastroianni wanted to get to the bottom of a quandary. If Livy thought Roman society was in moral decline and people today think we're in moral today than they used to be? And we have this data going back all the way to 1949 where people are asked questions like this. So the first thing I did was just gather up all that data and see, okay, when other people have asked this same question in a million different ways, what have people said? And what they say overwhelmingly is, yes, people are worse today than they used to be.

So this is majorities of people, not just in the United States, but in every country that has ever been surveyed where people have been asked this question. People say whatever positive pro-social trait you ask them about, they will tell you that people have less of that today than they used to. So they're less ethical, they're less civil, they're less respectful, they're less friendly. Even when you ask them, do you really think that people used to treat each other with more kindness and respect in the past? Or is this just nostalgia for a past that never existed?

Still 75% of respondents will say, no, this is not nostalgia for a past that never existed. This really happened. People don't treat one another as nicely today as they used to. When you ask these questions, what do you mean by moral decline? There's a lot of differing opinions about what's good and what's bad. However, there's also a lot of agreement on what's good and what's bad. So no one thinks it's fine to walk into your workplace and slap your boss across the face. So what about things like that, that consensual core of morality

have those things changed. And by the way, this is mainly what people mean when they say morality is declined. It's a pretty small minority of people who say things like, oh, look at the way teens dress these days, or we've got too much swearing on TV. Their top answers are things like people don't treat one another with respect anymore. Our government and business leaders lie to us. So we want to know, okay, is there any evidence that that kind of stuff has changed? So here too, we've got a lot of data going back all the way into the 60s where people are asked questions like, well, how would you rate the state of morality right now? And they're asked this question over time.

Or they're asked questions about things that they do or that others do. Like, have you given up your seat on a bus to someone who needed it? Or have you looked after someone's plants, mail, or pets while they were away? How often do you encounter incivility at work? Can people in general be trusted or can you not be too careful in dealing with people? And over and over again, we find that answers to these questions have not changed. Even though every year people tell us things are worse this year than they were the year before. Well, the year before they gave us the same answer that they gave us this year. There's obviously a lot to worry about in the world, but if you feel like people at their core are in moral decline, getting nastier, greedier, more promiscuous, corrupt, decadent, and that Rome is about to fall, you might find at least some comfort in the fact

that people have always been taken in by that illusion. Yeah. So we think that this illusion can be produced by two phenomena, which makes it make more sense as to why people might think that the best year is the year in which they were born. One of those phenomena, one of these mental phenomena is a negativity bias. So we know from a bunch of research that people tend to pay attention to negative information more than positive information. And they tend to get served more negative information than positive information. So the newspaper is going to tell you about all the lying, cheating, stealing and killing in the world. And that's what people are mainly going to read about. They're not going to flip to the next page and check, I don't know, the

forecast. That's the first phenomena. The second is what's called the fading affect bias, which is where the negativity of negative memories fades faster than the positivity of positive memories. So if you ask people to keep track of things that happen to them and rate how good or bad each one is, the bad memories lose their badness faster. Just like you can't estimate murder rates by looking out your window. Like you can't estimate how things are getting better or worse by just like how you feel. And this is something that I hope that I've gotten better about doing a lot of this research about how people think things have changed versus how they've actually changed, that it's easy to have conviction, but it's hard to have evidence that like to really know how today is different from some point in the past. Like you got to go wading through a lot of numbers. You got to read a lot of stuff, but

your mind doesn't tell you that. Your mind just goes like, oh yeah, this is what it was like to be a kid in the nineties. Like this is what the the world was like in the 50s. It doesn't give you a signal that's like, hey, we don't have any data here. We're really just making this up. We are, I mean, we are an internal chat GPT that's hallucinating sources here. You have to get better at realizing that that's happening to yourself. Children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority. They show disrespect for elders. They contradict their parents and tyrannize their teachers.

Want to guess who said that and when? That was Socrates, nearly 2,500 years ago. It's probably good that we rationalize the bad things that happen to us, but not necessarily the good things because it makes us feel okay. And so even if I could turn those things off to prevent this illusion of moral decline, I don't know that I would want to. And so I think we're stuck in this situation where you get this feeling that things are getting worse, even though you look at the data and you know that it isn't happening. And I think that might be about as good as it gets. That like this feeling that you have, you can accept it and know that it's not reflected in reality and hope that it passes. And I think where this is most important is that you don't act on it, right?

Like there's a reason why politicians so often claim that things are getting worse because it then leads into their next bullet point, which is vote for me and I'll make them better again. This is where I think this illusion matters the most is in looking for some kind of quick fix to get us back to the good times, when those good times like never really existed. There are always times that feel bad. This is what it just feels like to be alive. That's the lesson for Edward Watts, too, author of The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome. If Rome is always falling, there's always going to be someone to blame. If Rome is always falling, there's always going to be someone to blame. I think anytime you hear a politician or a leader talk about something being in decline, you need to listen very carefully for whatever comes next.

Because mentioning decline and identifying whatever problem you see is causing that decline is only the beginning of a sentence where the second half of it is going to be something you otherwise wouldn't agree to. I think what Rome shows us is this rhetoric is always there because somebody is trying to do something that changes the way the society is functioning. And often what they're trying to do is create an emergency that necessitates a radical change that people generally would not be okay with otherwise. what that metaphor is doing is providing the groundwork for some sort of shift that's going to be very radically different from whatever came before it. You are listening to Ideas and to a documentary called The Never-Ending Fall of Rome by producer Matthew Lazenreiter. Thanks to Patrick Ridgely at Johns Hopkins University, Christina Sessa at Ohio State

University, and Bonnie Efros at the University of British Columbia. Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast. If you liked the episode you just heard, check out our vast archive where you can find more than 300 of our past episodes. Technical production, Danielle Duval. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Acting senior producer, Lisa Godfrey. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas, and I'm Nala Ayed. is the executive producer of Ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyad. According to Edward Gibbons, the author, of course, of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, there are five common signs of the imminent fall of great dynasties.

One, rapid increases in divorces. If only Edward Gibbons were here to chronicle the devastation. Number two, higher and higher taxes. Number three, the mad craze for pleasure. And yet think like Gibbons, the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. All these stocks, especially Equinix, are in the danger zone. Number four, the decadence of the people. If you don't read the Bible, read Gibbons. The decline and fall of the Roman Empire?

Are you kidding me? It's like reading the newspaper today. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.