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Lessons of the Fall
How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower
By Adrian Goldsworthy
(Yale University Press, 560 pages, $32.50)
Adrian Goldsworthy is a great name for a classicist, and, fortunately, Adrian Goldsworthy is a classicist of the first order. He earned his doctorate at Oxford, and is the author of several books, including the critically acclaimed biography, Caesar, published in 2008. With How Rome Fell, he takes on a subject much debated since Gibbon, and comes up with a compelling answer.
Many recent analyses of the collapse of Roman power have made a point to draw parallels with modern day America, and to disparage American foreign policy in general, and that of George W. Bush in particular. Goldsworthy makes clear in his preface that such comparisons are of little value simply because the United States and Rome, and the context of their times, are so vastly different. He is far too diplomatic to level heavy criticism on his colleagues who have chosen, nonetheless, to do so. He even extends such professional courtesy to Terry Jones (of Monty Python fame) whose book and miniseries Barbarians takes pains to make such comparisons and to criticize the Iraq war. Goldsworthy merely comments that it is "highly entertaining stuff, even if the message is somewhat strained." Aside from being cool towards trying to make serious comparisons of ancient states with modern ones, Goldsworthy is a European scholar who believes that the decline and fall of American power would be a bad thing -- and that is refreshing.
Like Gibbon, Goldsworthy begins his narrative in the late second century, with the reign of Marcus Aurelius. He then takes the reader on the journey through Rome's ups and downs, innovations, and adaptations through to the final collapse of the Western Empire, making use of the latest research and archeological discoveries. He also includes a brief discussion of the continuation of the empire in the east, the short-lived reconquest of Italy and North Africa during the reign of Justinian, and the emergence of Muslim power that would topple the Persian Empire, and ultimately put an end to the remains of a shriveled Eastern "Roman" Empire in 1453.
Though the text is usefully footnoted, it is written with the general reader in mind. Goldsworthy does not overwhelm the reader with the names of many minor figures (doing so to a fault when he mentions one of Aurelian's generals in Egypt, but neglects to point out that the general was the future emperor Probus). He does write the occasional tantalizingly unclear sentence, but for the most part, Goldsworthy's prose is lucid and engaging.
Goldsworthy does not put the blame of the fall of the Western Empire on overwhelming military pressure from the various Germanic tribes (or the Huns) that eventually broke through the Rhine-Danube frontier, or the rise of Persian power in the east. The Goths, Vandals, Franks, and other tribes that eventually toppled the Western Empire were neither more powerful nor more united than they were in the second or third centuries. Their attacks may have been more frequent, but probably only as a result of inviting Roman weakness. Likewise, Persia, though a strong adversary, never posed a serious threat to Rome's survival. Depopulation may have played a role in Rome's weakness in the fourth and fifth centuries, but population estimates are too sketchy for Goldsworthy to base any theory on that. But it certainly was a fact that the Roman Empire was subject to extensive internal warfare from the end of the second century on, that took a heavy toll on treasure and manpower.
Though many have argued that the lack of a clear succession mechanism in the imperial system was inherently destabilizing, Goldsworthy argues that it is not a coincidence that it worked so well for nearly two centuries (at least in comparison to the later empire) before murder and civil war became the usual manner of deciding emperors. The problem, as Goldsworthy views it, was that by the end of the second century, the façade of republican government, which Augustus so carefully endeavored to preserve, had largely been stripped away (entirely so, by the time of Diocletian at the end of the third century). Though the Senate never had much power during the early empire, emperors knew that any challengers they may face would likely come from the senatorial class. Based in Rome, and in constant contact with the Senate, emperors understood the issues of state, and could keep tabs on potential dissent. By distancing themselves from the Senate and Rome, setting up new imperial residences in places like Trier, Milan, and Ravenna, creating vast bureaucracies of court officials, for the purpose of protecting themselves from imperial rivals, and constantly conducting military campaigns in person so as to keep military commanders from gaining too much popularity and favor with the army, the result was, in fact, a system that guaranteed incessant plotting, purges, warfare, and inefficiency.
The apparatus of government evolved into a means to protect the emperor and enrich and the bureaucracy. Goldsworthy writes:
At a basic level the emperors and government officials of the Late Roman Empire had forgotten what the empire was for. The wider interests of the state […] were secondary to their own personal success and survival. […] There had been plenty of selfish and corrupt individuals in earlier periods of Roman history, just as there have been in all other societies. The difference was that by the late empire it was difficult for them to behave in any other way.
This is what led to the empire not being able to deal effectively with problems that it had successfully dealt with in the past, eventually leading to its collapse.
The empire survived in the east largely, argues Goldsworthy, because of the luck of geography, its richest provinces shielded from the Germanic invasions by the Bosphorus and the walls of Constantinople. The Persian Empire on its eastern border was formidable, but easier to deal with than the multitude of forces facing the West. It also benefited from the emergence of some strong leaders such as Anastasius and Justinian. But the surviving Eastern Empire never regained the status of a dominant power.
Though Goldsworthy does not believe in trying to equate Rome with modern societies, there are general lessons from history that he thinks are instructive. In the case of Rome, he believes the cautionary tale is the uncontrolled growth of bureaucracy. He warns, "Bureaucracies are stubborn, they tend to expand on their own and develop their own agendas." This leads to its members losing touch with the original and wider goals, and instead becoming focused on preserving, expanding, and using the system for their own benefit. Interestingly, as an example of this, he brings up nationalized health care. "Thus in Britain we have a National Health Service in which the number of administrators has increased as the number of beds for patients has fallen. Seemingly incapable of such basic tasks as keeping wards clean, as an institution its attitude at times seems ambivalent to the fate of patients, concerned only with numbers passing through the system."
How Rome Fell is an interesting and compelling analysis. It is definitely worth the price to obtain and the time to digest, even if you are not a student of classical history. Rome may not be America, but Roman history still provides valuable lessons.
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- The Podhoretz Method
- Advent Is Coming
- Obama's Foreign Policy Problems, Personified
Pingback| 10.28.09 @ 7:06AM
Twitter Trackbacks for The American Spectator : Lessons of the Fall [spectator.org] links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
Sue| 10.28.09 @ 8:05AM
Quite simple: Fat and lazy citizenry; fat and lazy politicians and bureaucrats accountable to no one; not even to the fat and lazy citizens. Oh, and the "redistribution of wealth" from all citizens to the fat and lazy politicians and bureaucrats.
Sound familiar?
Alan Brooks| 10.28.09 @ 12:08PM
yes, and a border that, if you've got pull and pesos, you can cross and then do pretty much as you please.
William Tucker| 10.28.09 @ 9:27AM
This is a great review and I'm going to read the book. I'm just starting to study Roman history at my advanced age but it's been a treat. (My freshman year at college they skipped Classical Greece and Rome in the World History course and did pre-history, Egypt and Mesopotamia instead. I've never quite filled the gap - although it's been fun catching up over the years.) The thing that has struck me about the comparison between Rome and America is this business of bureaucracy. I'm beginning to understand where the adjective "Byzantine" comes from. That era of the Eastern Empire is stagnant and boring precisely because bureaucrats seem to have taken over everything. When I see how far along that road we have come - the Nuclear Regulatory Commission lumbering along on a 10-year schedule over the licensing of a single nuclear reactor while China and Japan are putting them up start-to-finish in four years - I realize we are already becoming an aging civilization. What can we do about it? It's hard to say. It would take a whole series of Ronald Reagans to revitalize our nation.
R Martin| 10.28.09 @ 10:59AM
What we can do about it, Mr. Tucker, is begin this thousand mile journey with that proverbial first step--elect Hoffman in NY23. Then Specter falls to Toomey in PA, and the people of Delaware deciede they are not going to be forced by the two major parties to choose between the empty suit of Beau Biden or the Specter clone of Mike Castle (one of the eight Republican Representatives who voted for Cap and Trade). I'm sure there are similar scenarios throughout the country. Regan's philosophy is very much alive out there; we just need to get it's practitioners into office.
John II| 10.28.09 @ 1:02PM
Underlying the bureaucracy angle, however, is the moral optic--I mean, questions regarding the causes and consequences of the growth of bureaucracy. I haven't read the book yet, but the review suggests that Goldworthy's own optic is principally humane and moral rather than technical. Gibbon started the techie approach more than two centuries ago, and under the burden of his chic 18th-century rationalist bias, he had nothing but scorn for what clearer minds recognize as the indispensable analysis of St. Augustine.
If you want a richly textured sense of Western Roman decline, its causes and effects, try the first ten books of Augustine's monumental "City of God," composed in the early fifth century A.D., when the whole enterprise was coming unglued.
Bram| 10.28.09 @ 10:23AM
I believe the decline of the Empire can be attributed to bad economic policy driven by the political climate. Taxes and fiscal policies caused the Empire to rot from within. “Tax the Rich” was as popular with the masses in ancient Rome as it seems to be everywhere. Emperors taxed land-owners, particularly Senators into poverty to limit their rivals. Eventually that revenue stream ran dry so the middle class got the bill.
By the end of the Empire, the middle class had been taxed out of existence. Emperor Diocletian prohibited farm-hands (villanus) from leaving their land, thus dodging the crushing taxes. “To escape the burden of tax, some small landowners sold themselves into slavery, since slaves didn't have to pay tax and freedom from taxes was more desirable than personal liberty. Since the Empire wasn't making money from the slaves, the Emperor Valens (368) declared it illegal to sell oneself into slavery.
The small landowner had become a feudal serf.”
http://ancienthistory.about.co.....offall.htm
Doesn’t sound much different than today’s left. They keep trying the same thing and if it doesn’t work, do it harder.
Why would slaves and serfs care if Rome was overrun by barbarians? Germans and Goths were probably viewed with indifference or even liberators. At least they might kill the oppressive aristocrats and their beaurocrats and tax-collectors.
JoshInHB| 10.28.09 @ 10:27AM
""Bureaucracies are stubborn, they tend to expand on their own and develop their own agendas." This leads to its members losing touch with the original and wider goals, and instead becoming focused on preserving, expanding, and using the system for their own benefit."
This effect has reached a critical mass in CA. Here for example, the LAUSD spend 50+% of their budget on administration for example, at the same time that less than 50% of the students that enter 9th grade actually graduate. The only 'reform' every proposed is of course more money. The critical mass parts comes from the fact that public employee unions are by far the biggest donors to politicians election campaigns.
In the midst of the worst economy ever in CA (our unemployment rate is actually higher that it was in the depths of the great depression) the bureaucracy continues to grow.
R. Dittmar| 10.28.09 @ 10:47AM
"fat and lazy politicians and bureaucrats accountable to no one; "
Now, now, now. Obama isn't fat.
Flee| 10.28.09 @ 3:08PM
True but their wallets seem to expand exponentially the longer they stick around. Nobel payoff for example.
Jim Hlavac| 10.28.09 @ 10:07PM
No, no physically fat, but fat in the head. Which can often be much worse.
Dittoar| 10.28.09 @ 11:29PM
Yet.
Al Adab| 10.28.09 @ 11:19AM
Any similarity between the United States and the late Roman republic is purely historical. All we await is our Marius.
If, like Cato, we die rather than submit to tyranny, then at least the light of liberty might shine and future generations may rediscover its value. For us the fight goes on.
Is this the hill we want to die for. It may very well be as those who take the beach make clear the way for those who follow, the second wave, to succeed. "If they mean to have a war, let it begin here".
All platitudes aside, the time is now. Conservatives need to take their stand.
tj| 10.28.09 @ 12:09PM
Want to do something constructive... VOTE EM ALL OUT 2010/2012. I just donated to Marko Rubio of Florida, Doug Hoffman of NY, and David Harmer of California. "We the People" can win this if we all take up the mantle against corruption and take back our country. I will never send the GOP any money evuh again until or when they return to conservative values....they just don't get it!!! Duh! What part of you lost the last 2 elections does the GOP NOT UNDERSTAND???
Patrick| 10.28.09 @ 10:08PM
For the very first time in my cynical life, I have actually contributed to a political campaign. Sure, $50 isn't huge, but for a wage-slave in a dead economy, that can feed more than a couple mouths.
No, it wasn't for the worthy likes of Rubio or Hoffman, but for Scott Walker for governor of the People's Republik of Wisconsin. We need more people like him around here.
P.S. Our current governor, "Diamond Jim" Doyle, will likely be nominated as a federal judge. Beware, he is the worst kind of slime.
Alan Brooks| 10.28.09 @ 12:15PM
Bush was a hack, but he had good points, like his father-- unlike my object of intense dislike, LBJ.
LBJ (and the RFK assassination) led to Nixon, who led to that emperor of emptiness and drift, Jimmy Carter. Sad thing is, Carter was the brightest and most well-intentioned of presidents, which something very bad about human nature and politics.
Some conservatives think our 'problems' started with JFK, and there is something to that:
who was JFK's vice president?
Alan Brooks| 10.28.09 @ 12:20PM
... and to say LBJ's presidency had its good points is like saying Mary Lincoln's experience of watching 'Our American Cousin' had its highlights.
Liberal Reader| 10.28.09 @ 12:18PM
You visit ancient Rome and all I get is a warning about the uncontrolled growth in bureaucracy?
Look folks, historical analogies are fools' gold.
They rarely reveal more than they obscure.
In point of fact, the dwindling Roman Empire could have USED better bureaucracy.
Remember, bureaucracy is just executive agency to enforce laws. With no bureaucracy, law is ineffectual and is soon held in contempt.
In the end, it's probably best not to speak of the "fall" of Rome, as though some monumental failure in policy or catastrophic defeat brought it down.
Slavery was a huge problem after a while for the Romans; constant wars brought wealth at times but strained resources at others. Political corruption in Rome itself clearly had an entropic effect.
In the end, there really are very, very few "lessons" to be learned, and please: unless your acumen is truly world class, avoid historical analogies. Especially you conservatives: yours tend to be more obtuse even than most.
Alan Brooks| 10.28.09 @ 12:24PM
"Especially you conservatives: yours tend to be more obtuse even than most."
you might be correct, politics is no science anymore than economics is. No one is objective, even those who try to be, everyone is grinding an ax-- including me and including YOU, liberal roadrunner
Intellectuals are academic-minded con artists
John II| 10.28.09 @ 2:34PM
"In the end, there really are very, very few "lessons" to be learned, and please: unless your acumen is truly world class, avoid historical analogies."
Oh. Is that why an education system dominated by liberals slights the study of history? In a recent session of one of my college classes, mostly freshmen, I got suspicious about some of the responses I was getting and started quizzing them ad hoc. More than half of them couldn't place the Civil War in the right century. And if there are so very few lessons to learn from the study of history, how did you list so many regarding Rome?
In other words, what the hell are you talking about?
Liberal Reader| 10.28.09 @ 3:29PM
John II
I'm afraid I don't see the connection between the unreliability of historical analogies and your students' failure of a history quiz.
If your students don't know history, then roll up your sleeves and teach them history.
You're the teacher. Get busy and do it.
Now, why are they such ignoramuses when it comes to historical knowledge?
Well, sure -- blame liberals. Why not? It's easy, requires no thought on your part, and probably feels good.
Be sure you don't do anything like think about them problem. Especially being a teacher! We wouldn't want you doing anything like thinking about a problem, John II. Oh, no!
About Rome: we can and must study Rome. We can learn some things, if we are very diligent, about ourselves, but going to the past to learn about ourselves dulls the historical sense and is in general hubristic and sloppy.
Go to the past to learn about the past; don't go to the past to settle scores or find flimsy analogies to prop up some political agenda you have.
John II| 10.28.09 @ 5:28PM
Okay, I withdraw my question. Let me ask instead a more refined question:
Do you know what the hell you're talking about?
No wait. I'm sorry. We can cut to the chase, so to speak, with an even more refined question:
Do you care at all whether you know what the hell you're talking about?
Liberal Reader| 10.28.09 @ 5:41PM
Do I know what I'm talking about?
Yes.
I can say for certain that historical analogies miscarry more than they hit their target.
Yes.
I can say that instead of complaining about student ignorance, teacher's should concentrate on teaching.
Yes.
I think it is pointless and obtuse to blame "liberals" for the ignorance of incoming freshman to a college.
Do you care to dispute on a specific point with reasoned discourse, or are you just going to moan like sick old donkey?
Liberal Reader| 10.28.09 @ 5:50PM
If you're a history teacher, you should be asking a) why student reading comprehension is so low; b) why student attention spans are so fractured; and c) why student intellectual-curiosity is so dull.
Now, if your answer to these questions is "liberals," I'd say you're a fool.
Honestly, you don't really seem like a fool. I think you're just being lazy. Give it some thought.
I'd say children spend too little time spent with adults, parents particularly; children spend too much time in front of screens (a related problem); and childrens' grade school education is being drained of enriching content that stimulates intellectual curiosity.
Want better history students?
Become a liberal and advocate for MASSIVE increases in spending on humanistic pursuits like arts and athletics in grade school education.
John II| 10.28.09 @ 6:04PM
You can say whatever you like, but you're not answering the question, especially the most refined of the three.
If you'd like, you can try an experiment. Read, say, John Dewey's "Democracy and Education," and then fast-forward and read, say, Rita Kramer's "Ed School Follies."
Then, using those two books as your points of reference, tell me whether, at the time of your last posting (5:41 p.m. 10/28), you knew what the hell you were talking about.
In the course of doing so or not doing so, you will incidentally answer the most refined question as to whether you care at all whether you know what the hell you're talking about.
Sick old donkeys don't moan, by the way. A study of animal husbandry would perhaps make this point clear to you. But I don't know whether liberals would be as hostile to such studies as they are to the study of history.
Liberal Reader| 10.28.09 @ 7:52PM
John II
Maybe it would help if you specified which point I've made that you find so offensive or wrong. To gesture at my posts and say, "You don't know what you're talking about," while your right, doesn't make it very easy to respond to you.
Since you never respond to a single point I make, I don't know what you are referring to.
Your vague generalization that liberals are "hostile to the study of history" just seems ludicrous to me.
I like Dewey; I've never heard of the second author. Why not write an epitome of him and explicitly make your point?
For education, my sources include Erasmus, More, Montaigne, Milton, Johnson, and Ruskin. I think these authority sufficient.
John II| 10.28.09 @ 9:41PM
You haven't made a single point yet; my response has been to your presumptuous attitudinizing, which perhaps you mistake for something more substantial.
But if you "like Dewey," what have you found in Erasmus, More, Montaigne, Milton, Johnson, or Ruskin that you find palatable? All those "sources" would surely have found Dewey preposterous.
You're not making any sense, yet you're grinding out the postings as if you think you're saying something of some significance. Or, to put it another way, as if you don't care a whit whether you know what the hell you're talking about.
Sue| 10.28.09 @ 3:58PM
Yea. Enforce the laws - what are you joking? What about the "charges dropped" on the two black panthers who had bully clubs and chains at the polls? No voter intimidation there! Let's just drop the charges and MOVEON.org.
Liberal Reader| 10.28.09 @ 4:59PM
Yawn.
Foil| 10.28.09 @ 11:32PM
Liberal Illiterate, you are an idiot.
Alan Brooks| 10.28.09 @ 12:31PM
... and BTW, why do you blog at AS instead of a site suited more to your temperament and biases?
bloggers here have a very low opinion of human nature, which is one of the main reasons they aren't liberals.
In fact, AS is too optimistic for me. What do i think? I think people will live longer but the outside world will be degraded-- you really do gain the world and lose your soul via self deception and excess materialism.
Bill Kristol provided the solution: withdraw into gated communities if you want to live a clean life, as the more you try to help the depraved, the more they rebel.
But we are just talking at cross purposes-- blogging past each other.
Grzmlyk| 10.28.09 @ 3:38PM
Alan, fools like Liberal Reader - and the mindset he represents, which is sadly ubiquitous among a large segment of our population - merely prove how hopelessly compromised the underpinnings of American Exceptionalism have become.
Such persistent and empty moral vanity is a classic sign of our culture's gangrenous decadence just as surely as the tenacious vulture patiently hovering over a desert straggler's delirious clawing is a harbinger of that poor soul's imminent death.
These preening popinjays are fond of grabbing attention by sprinkling their paths with the cheap perfume of their own moral vanity - which they invariably mistake for precious, heard-earned wisdom - but which in fact is a noxious concoction that merely adds to the stench of their squalid narcissism and surpassing ignorance.
In other words, if we want to know why the future of this country involves the yoke of servitude and obeisance to a deaf, dumb, blind and mute Leviathan, an avaricious, capricious and ill-tempered State, we need look no further than the ever-credulous postings of Liberal Reader, a happy cog in the abattoir that is Utopia.
Liberal Reader| 10.28.09 @ 5:04PM
Grzmlyk --
Your gaseous, content-free post plods on four paragraphs longer than it should.
Aliquando sufflaminandus erat!
Now, reread your post. If there is any point you are trying to make, repost that point, succinctly and clearly written.
Never mind all this braying and bullshit. You sound like an utter fool.
I've made substantive points on this thread; if you want to ignore them, feel free. If you want to respond to them, do it like a man. Respond to them.
Doorgunner| 10.28.09 @ 6:03PM
"... but going to the past to learn about ourselves dulls the historical sense and is in general hubristic and sloppy. "
" Want better history students?
Become a liberal and advocate for MASSIVE increases in spending on humanistic pursuits like arts and athletics in grade school education. "
The first remark is the stupidest that I've read all week... and I suffered Thomas Frank's 'me too' Fox News pile-on in the WSJ this morning.
And the second has been dis-proven more authoritatively, and perhaps more often, than "Octo-Mom's" virginity.
Jackass.
Liberal Reader| 10.28.09 @ 7:55PM
Doorgunner --
Why don't you tell me WHY the first point is "stupid"? That's what people do when they engage in reasoned debate?
And what studies have "proven" my second point incorrect?
Why not offer REASONED responses.
The anti-intellectualism of our children's PARENTS is the single greatest obstacle to educating them today!!!!!!
fundamentalist| 10.28.09 @ 1:48PM
I guess everyone has their pet theory on why Rome fell, but I particularly like that of the great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises. He tells of repeated devaluation of coins by mixing base metals with gold and silver. The devaluation caused huge spikes in prices, sometimes increases of 1,0000%. The state would try to counter price increases by fixing prices, which would do nothing but cause producers to quit producing items for which the price was below their costs. The cities depopulated because farmers quit selling them their food, so people had to move out into the country side to grow their own. When producers abandoned unprofitable businesses, the state passed laws requiring them to remain in their family business. Eventually, all farmers were required by law to remain on their farms and the feudal system was born.
All states derive their power from the productivity of their economies. If state power declines, look for the problem in a decline of the economy. The state survives only on taxes or loans, and when the citizens no longer have the wealth to tax or loan, the state will fall and there is no solution.
Bram| 10.29.09 @ 9:33AM
I agree that the debasement had horrendous affects, but it was still a symptom. The root cause was a grasping Executive and bureaucracy appealing to the mob. (Now and then)
Got rivals? Destroy them – even if they are the most productive members of society and the main source of tax revenue. Tax them out of existence, or just proscribe them and seize their property (large estates, GM bondholders, AIG bonuses).
Out of money (see above)? No problem, just mint some more using paper or tin. Use it to buy bread and circuses to keep the stupid peasants happy. And, always ignore the middle class – trapped between their overlords and the mob, they can be squeezed dry.
Polyester Mather DD| 10.28.09 @ 2:41PM
The locus classicus of this decline and fall was Victor Davis Hanson's replacing the copy of Xenophon on W's bedside table with a DVD of 300
BobSledd| 10.28.09 @ 2:53PM
Just take a look at NYS for example..
They have taxed and regulated business out of the State. As a result, many upstate communities resemble Appalachia. Small business that thrived due to larger manufacturers are dying. Property tax, as a result, goes up, and property values, go down..
The people left behind are either on the dole or have migrated to GOVERNMENT jobs.
As a result, there is much less tax revenue and MUCH MORE payments to recipients, whether they work for the schools, the Thruway, local sewer authorities , are on the dole etc..
There are LESS worker bees now that companies have fled high tax and high regulation, and more TAKER bees in the form of public employees and takers from the state.
The Government makes or produces NOTHING and is the quintessential "SERVICE" company.
The workers that pay taxes PAY for this bloated service organization..
This cannot last and will ultimately end badly.
Ken (Old Texican)| 10.28.09 @ 3:09PM
Bobsled
Just about as clean description of events as can be stated!
Thank you.
Now picture this on a national scale...(gulp)
Is it time to act?
http://judgeroy.wordpress.com
David| 10.28.09 @ 4:05PM
Anyone know the artist of the picture at the top of the column?
John II| 10.28.09 @ 9:54PM
I was wondering the same thing. It looks extremely familiar to me, at least in technique: like something from the French neoclassical period. Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, maybe, or Jacques Louis David. I dunno. They cranked out a lot of that sort of painting in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. I'll try to track it down.
David| 10.29.09 @ 11:49AM
Thanks John! I just can't place it...
Paul Crowley| 10.28.09 @ 8:43PM
“I'm just starting to study Roman history at my advanced age but it's been a treat. (My freshman year at college they skipped Classical Greece and Rome in the World History course and did pre-history, Egypt and Mesopotamia instead.” [William Tucker| 10.28.09
@ 9:27AM]
Hi William:
You post has an anachronistic style to it, in the sense of making something (yourself in this instance) sound older than it is.
If you’re an American, then your age can’t be too advanced, or else you attended a rather novel university or college.
The prerequisites of freshman-level survey history courses in World History are a new innovation. It was implemented nation wide, beginning only about 20 years ago. The shift was begun on a large-scale in about 1989.
I'm still only in middle age and have yet to turn 60 years old, but I missed this.
Prior to that, then the norm was prerequisites in freshman-level survey history courses in Western Civilization. The first semester, of the two-semester course, covered all of the elements that you list here, as well as the Greek periods and Roman Republic and Empire (obviously). As I recall, the period through to about Charlemagne would have been covered to the mid-term, with the second half of the material in the first semester, covering the period through to 1518.
Even if you were among the very first to have entered college while the shift was being made, that would place you in only in your late youth, or very early middle age: about 38 or 39 years old or very early 40s.
True, "second grade" is an advance in age relative to "third grade," to use the manner of dating ourselves that is common to children, but not much of one. Where the phrase "advanced age" is concerned, then your age can't be too very "advanced."
As to Ronald Reagan, then that would mean that you were only a kid when President Reagan held office.
Paul Crowley| 10.28.09 @ 8:48PM
That's 1518 A.D., not 1518 B.C., of couse.
Paul Crowley| 10.28.09 @ 8:56PM
“This is a great review and I'm going to read the book.” [William Tucker| 10.28.09 @ 9:27AM]
Hi William:
Just out of curiosity:
1.) If you haven’t read the book, then how do you know that this review of it is great?
2.) After you buy and read the book, then what standards will you apply in accessing the quality of its content?
Paul Crowley| 10.28.09 @ 9:08PM
“I'm just starting to study Roman history at my advanced age . . . [William Tucker| 10.28.09 @ 9:27AM]
Hi William:
There are other possibilities than only the one I list. Perhaps you spent your freshman year as one of the much ballyhood individuals dubbed a "returning student."
Either way, in light of your comments, then you should understand why my curiosity and why I ask the two questions above.
Pingback| 10.28.09 @ 9:13PM
Book Review: “How Rome Fell, Death of a Superpower” & “Reappraising the Right, the Pa links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
Paul Crowley| 10.28.09 @ 9:28PM
“everyone is grinding an ax-- including me and including YOU, liberal roadrunner.” [Alan Brooks| 10.28.09 @ 12:24PM]
Hi Alan:
I protest!
Who the individual is that is posting comments under the pseudonym “Liberal Reader,” then I don’t know. For all that I know, then it could be you having a pseudo-conversation with yourself.
You may very well know the individual personally, and so know something about what his motives are. I can only say that his statements are as pseudo as his name.
At any rate, then you certainly know yourself better than I do.
As to your broad inclusion of (to quote yourself) “everyone” as “grinding an ax” (which means precisely what?), then I can say that you’re quite wrong.
You should: “Speak for yourself.”
philfl63| 10.28.09 @ 9:43PM
You do not have to be a Ph.d to reason that human nature is the only constant in human history. Hairstyles change, language changes, technology changes. The base, evil nature of man does not change. That is not my brilliant analysis, but God Almighty's. As long as we are a God-fearing nation and willing to confront evil (Obama and his ilk, liberals etc.), we will stand strong. If we waiver and turn away from God, we will lose his divine favor. America can fall just as Rome did. New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, and our gutless response after 9-11 are prime examples of what awaits us.
Liberal Reader| 10.28.09 @ 9:58PM
philfl63--
You imply that Rome fell because it lost the favor of God.
Does that mean when Rome was the most powerful country on earth it had the favor of God?
I may be misreading my New Testament, but I think the early Christians might disagree.
I don't recall a Jesus with a terribly nationalistic agenda, and he didn't have anything to say about the U.S.A.
Some things he left to us. Sorry, we can't just "turn it over" to God. We have to do the work.
I don't know either what you mean by our "gutless" response to 9.11.
It seems like our country sought revenge. Revenge, you will have observed, besides being inimical to all civilized values, is proscribed by the New Testament.
Read Romans: "Vengeance is mine."
Literate| 10.28.09 @ 11:38PM
YOU read Romans, you illiterate fool! It clearly states that government is God's instrument for taking vengeance.
Mary Louise| 10.28.09 @ 10:04PM
Adams said that our own revolution was really an evolution, in that the final decisions leading to war had a history that was definable, digested and well-ordered.
I'm on the second volume of Gibbon's Decline and Fall, and I appreciate his talent so much. It's a joy to learn how to use language from him. And thank you for this review.
I do think a Nation grows weary. I'm not sure if we're tired or not, but I suspect we are.
I read a piece recently that called for a complete reordering; a hard and fast break back to a stark and undeniable federalism. And though I'm sure the writer didn't intend it, his piece read like an assault against civilization as it exists today, in the concrete. He wrote that, no doubt, there would be pain, but what can that mean for us as a Nation comprised of so many millions of souls? What will that mean concretely?
A Union fought the Cold War, not 50 disparate States, each of its own accord, deciding that the Evil Empire had to fall. For better or worse, we're a Union now in body and soul. Was it Chesterton who said we were a Nation with a soul?
I think our biggest strength, as long as it holds, is that we're an idea. We're also not Manicheans. Voegelin found refuge here. Popper found hope in America when he'd despaired of it elsewhere. These men were not only influential, they were at odds.
The Puritans are thought to have been Manichean, but I'm not so sure. In one of his books, C. S. Lewis noted that a correct view of the Puritans would have to be one that was opposite of the one we presently hold of those who currently bear that name.
NYS is a very underrated State in terms of its beauty and variety. Letchworth State Park and some of the surrounding hamlets let you easily peek back into history. Homes, a few as old as 150 years, meticulously built and maintained. Minor details that transform merchant class homes and even some agrarian homes into veritable works of art. Precision and beauty without bombast; I’m intensely attracted to that.
My dad is a stone-cutter and his handiwork dots the small town that I grew up in. It will remain long after he’s gone. We always had a pile of burgundy sandstone and a pile of sand in a small area in our back yard. And there my dad would be with his chisel, and there I would be sitting on one of the stones, and being with my dad. I love the heft and cool feeling of stone. Yet when I travel to Italy I make it a point to visit a small church in a town called Pescocostanzo. For whatever reason this town avoided the Allied bombings. The Altar, the pulpit, are all wood. Beautifully worked wood. Warm and lively wood. It was as beautiful as St. Peter's to me. Maybe more so.
Mary Louise| 10.28.09 @ 11:05PM
Bombast is wrong. Should be without being garish.
Paul Crowley| 10.28.09 @ 10:34PM
"everyone is grinding an ax-- including me and including YOU, liberal roadrunner.” [Alan Brooks| 10.28.09 @ 12:24PM]
Hi Alan:
This is the second time in less than a week that I've seen this word come up on The American Spectator. Someone asked me last week if I was doing it, my answer was no.
My statement for you to speak for yourself, where your saying that "everyone" is “grinding an ax,” is in reference to the common colloquial sense of the word: Something that an individual is attempting to gain or to promote for gain.
My inclusion of "(which means precisely what?)" was unnecessary, but included in case a different meaning has been substituted (which is all too common these days).
For example, I still use disneyland in an older sense of the term: In reference to something as being unreal and fantasy-based.
Patrick O'Hannigan wrote an essay, just posted here on The American Spectator, in which he presented the amusement park that the term derived from as an example of "yes we can" made by the late Walt Disney (in the context of American culture, patriotism, and the meaning of America) [The Patriotic Lessons of Disneyland By Patrick O'Hannigan on 10.20.09 @ 6:07AM
http://spectator.org/archives/.....of-disne].
Given that O'Hannigan's essay and comments with it, and some comments by some individuals, were effectively a radical redefining of a once common term, then I don't believe that I'm being unreasonable to wonder if perhaps there is a different meaning, or meanings, of "grinding an axe" being used by yourself.
Maybe you mean something else by this word? Something more reasonably argued as being universal, as in being descriptive of the actions or motivations of all individuals who make up the whole of the human race?
At any rate, I don't doubt you when you say that you are grinding an axe, meaning that your actions here are for promotion or gain of something. However, I will say that not everyone is doing this. Not everyone is attempting to gain something or to promote something for gain (personal or otherwise).
That your doing it, is one thing, but given your admission, then most important, of course, is what precisely are you "grinding an axe" for? What exactly are you promoting for gain? Especially here on The American Spectator.
If it's only a pay check, due to being your job, then who pays you? And Why?
Are you paid to spend your time writing comments on The American Spectator? If so, then who in the world would pay someone to do such a thing? Again, why would someone pay someone to do such a thing?
Given the content of your comments, here and in other strings that I've seen, then what exactly are you promoting or seeking to gain by the comments?
I'm still curious who finances The American Spectator so that it can provide all of this freely?
In contrast to the meaning of the term in its name, then that The American Spectator has an agenda, as the saying now goes, is all too obvious. However, what is it, precisely? What is the axe being grinded by it?
Paul Crowley| 10.28.09 @ 11:53PM
“Lessons of the Fall. . . How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower” [By Brandon Crocker on 10.28.09 @ 6:06AM]
The cultural theme of The Fall of the Roman Empire seems to be right on schedule where the reform of American culture and our population is concerned.
The literary ground work for the British version of The Fall of the Roman Empire was laid in the last decades of Victorian Britain.
The cultural reform of Britain and its population was laid during the Georgian-Victorian interregnum and throughout the Victorian period.
The ground work for the popular version of The Fall of The Roman Empire, that was popularized full-blast during the Edwardian era, began about the summer of 1897, with Kipling’s poem, Recessional.
After the Second Anglo-Boer War, the noise continued loud and long through to the Second World War, and then peeps continued in post-war Britain and neo-Elizabethan Britain to about 1959, dying out all-but completely by about 1960-67.
Although, some anglophiles, especially American, and British colonial types (Aussies, Canadians, South Africans, and New Zealanders), never did lose the old favorite, and rather whiney sounding, phase, from its dying days: “Just Lost The Will.”
The majority of Englishmen, Scotsmen and Welshmen that I’ve know, were, and are not, in the least anglophile (which is interesting). The English people have been a distinctly non-martial (“warrior” is the popular term today) people throughout most of their history and acquired an overt taste for 'Guns and Bugles,' to use a bygone phrasing, only from about 1884-1945 (cultivation of it began overtly about 1872).
It all came to an abrupt end with World War II. The Second Boer War, and the two world wars, of 1899-1945, definitely took the starch out of most Britons where the glory Kipling’s romantic “far flung battle line,” and cant like it, was concerned.
There are a number of English anglophiles who have emigrated from Britain, and immigrated to America and who, along with a number of their British colonial anglophile counterparts (ex Canadians, Aussies, and South Africans) are now ensconced in the new conservative elements of the mass-communications media, including websites and periodicals.
Just what our country needs. . .
The foundations for the present-day revival of this theme, now exported across the Atlantic Ocean, here to America, has been laid by the political left and the libertarians, with contributions from elements of the political right, world-wide, especially via the World Wide Web, for a solid eight years now. Data bases and websites with snippets of information and quotations abound across the internet, for use by the professional propagandists (i.e. Axe grinders?).
This new version, as one would expect, is not merely a blatant recopying of the first. This has plenty of other elements from the past 100 years or so, added to the new synthesis.
All in all, however, this new Fall of Roman Empire theme synthesis being applied to America is another thing that is purely post-Cold War American Culture Struggle. The finalization of the American Counter-Revolution of the past 45 years.
It follows the “World War Two was Yesterday” theme, that was common in the U.S.S.R. until the end of the Cold War, and then transferred from the ex Soviet Union to America, during the first decade of the past 20 years.
There’s a lot of experience (i.e. Lessons Learned) available for the use of the Fall of the Roman Empire theme for manipulation of de-sensitized, de-cultured, rootless peoples the majority of which have been reformed so as to render them amoral, via good ole fashioned English “vitriol and instruction.”
The technology of the mass-communications media of the Edwardian era made the Fall of the Roman Empire theme in this use quite formidable. The past 110 years of history, lessons learned in social engineering, especially by the British, French and Russians, and the technological advances of the mass-communications media due to the Digital Electronics Revolution, will probably make it all vastly more so today.
So stand by America.
John II| 10.29.09 @ 1:55AM
"The technology of the mass-communications media of the Edwardian era made the Fall of the Roman Empire theme in this use quite formidable. The past 110 years of history, lessons learned in social engineering, especially by the British, French and Russians, and the technological advances of the mass-communications media due to the Digital Electronics Revolution, will probably make it all vastly more so today."
What a fascinating pottage of gibberish--thick with smugness, illiteracy, malice, and despair. Is that you again, Liberal Reader?
Carol| 10.29.09 @ 1:02AM
We who fail to understand and appreciate history are very apt to repeat former mistakes made by others in the past, by not learning from them what resulted - both the good and the bad consequences.
If that is a fairly valid and common sense logical assumption, that to study history is good for us, then I do not understand why :
"going to the past to learn about ourselves dulls the historical sense and is in general hubristic and sloppy. "
To me, that sounds like one is saying that history really isn't anything important to waste our time on - or to paraphrase something like, "studying history is a waste of time".
Well, that's what it sounds like, to me.
It also occurs to me that if the goal is for students to better understand history then the more money budgeted to teaching history would result in increased schooling in this area. That just seems like common sense.
Thus, to suggest in order to create better students of history, one should spend more money on the arts and athletics - things like painting, music and sports activities - though important studies in themselves as is history, for different reasons, some of it to do with having a rounded education, including all studies, history as well as others - doesn't seem like budgeting funds for increasing those non-history related classes would result in students learning more about history.
Again, to me, it just seems like common sense, you want more history understood, then you budget more money toward history studies, not toward something non-history related.
So it sounds to me like someone really dislikes the study of history, would rather not know about the past and is demonstrating his or her dislike for history by those kinds of remarks. That is the only message I come away with when reading it.
But I think it's valid to study history to learn about the past, when and how things happened and the results of former decisions - out of intellectual curiosity for one purpose, as stimulating; but also for the matter of actually learning, so not to repeat the same mistakes in the current and future, which also results in a waste of financial and social resources - thus implying that the study of history might also be cost-savings in a round-about way - by not having us repeat former mistakes from our past.
The idea of spending more money on the study of history in schools instead of on arts and athletics would seem to increase the amount of history understanding - and the savings from not repeating former mistakes would seem to justify the monies spent in genuine fiscal terms.