June 4, 2021
For over 1,700 years, politicians, warlords, and would-be emperors declared that Rome was declining and only they could restore it. Watts (history, Univ. of California San Diego; The Last Pagan) has written a largely successful survey of the political idea of Rome's decline, which still has currency in the present day. Watts argues that Rome's declines were often illusory and that these baseless narratives were often powerful enough to incite Romans to violence against those deemed responsible. Watts's book is as much a historiography of Rome as it is a history; he analyzes how ancient and more current writers interpreted past events to respond to falling dynasties, the spread of Christianity, the arrival of Islam, and the dramatic shifts in what it meant to be Roman. Supporting this thesis requires a book of enormous scope, and the flurry of emperors, battles, cities rising and falling, heresies coming and going, can become a bit much. A narrower focus on specific ideas of Rome's decline and restoration would have strengthened the argument. VERDICT While not as strong as Watts's last work, Mortal Republic, this is still a compelling read. It will find an audience among classicists as well as readers interested in contemporary discourses concerning American decline and possible renewal that draw from the narrative of Rome.--Evan M. Anderson, Kirkendall P.L., Ankeny, IA
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July 1, 2021
A book with two purposes: to narrate the history of Rome while revealing how the ancient tale of Rome's repeated decline, fall, and renewal affected history and politics across the world. History professor Watts accomplishes an impressive feat by effectively compressing the vast history of Rome and its empire into a relatively short book. For nonacademic readers, however, following the massive cast of characters--emperors, generals, religious leaders, crusaders, poets, and historians from all of Europe and the Middle East--may sometimes prove difficult. The author takes us through many "sacks of Rome" and the community's transformation from city to empire before moving on to the great contest between Christianity and Islam, the church's conquest of Latin America, and the modern day. In such an abbreviated history of much of the Western World, Watts succeeds admirably in his purpose. But his truly novel contribution is his ability to weave in the ways that the "deeply entrenched narrative" of Roman decline and recovery accompanied Rome's growth in the second century B.C.E. and on to its commanding position in the western empire as the seat of Catholicism, before the break with Constantinople. The author engagingly shows how, from the start, Roman leaders used that cyclical narrative of deterioration and restoration both to govern and to divide their people. Long before Edward Gibbon's celebrated work on Rome's decline and fall, the city had already, in many people's view, repeatedly "fallen." This belief continued into the modern era. The American "Founding Fathers" were its legatees; Mussolini employed it to rouse his fascist faithful; and even Ronald Reagan and Phyllis Schlafly invoked it in the 1980s. By our time, Rome's condition had become a "powerful metaphor to speak about the present and future that was now open to all who wished to evoke it." A fresh, complex story of how historical perceptions come into being and are used to persuade and rule.
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