The Modern Cultural Myth of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Jonathan Theodore

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137569974
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This book investigates the 'decline and fall' of Rome as perceived and imagined in aspects of British and American culture and thought from the late nineteenth through the early twenty-first centuries. It explores the ways in which writers, filmmakers and the media have conceptualized this process and the parallels they have drawn, deliberately or unconsciously, to their contemporary world. Jonathan Theodore argues that the decline and fall of Rome is no straightforward historical fact, but a 'myth' in terms coined by Claude Lévi-Strauss, meaning not a 'falsehood' but a complex social and ideological construct. Instead, it represents the fears of European and American thinkers as they confront the perceived instability and pitfalls of the civilization to which they belonged. The material gathered in this book illustrates the value of this idea as a spatiotemporal concept, rather than a historical event – a narrative with its own unique moral purpose.

© The Author(s) 2016

Jonathan TheodoreThe Modern Cultural Myth of the Decline and Fall of the Roman EmpirePalgrave Studies in the History of the Media10.1057/978-1-137-56997-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Jonathan Theodore¹

(1)

Manchester, UK

End Abstract

Representation and Myth

For this book, I am investigating the “decline and fall” of Rome, as perceived and imagined in aspects of British and US culture and thought, from the late nineteenth through the early twenty-first centuries. It is an interdisciplinary study of these representations and their cultural functions. I am inquiring into the ways in which writers, ¹ filmmakers and the media have conceptualized this “decline”; and the parallels they have drawn, deliberately or unconsciously, to their contemporary world. My work fits within a broader collection of studies examining the continuing impact of the Greco-Roman heritage on our present cultural and ideological horizons. However, though the representation of various areas of antiquity is a fast-growing field of scholarly inquiry, the theme of this project has been little examined in this context.

By “representation” I refer to the ways in which material has been transmitted, rewritten, adapted and reimagined. The re-presentation of past eras in new cultural forms is a complex activity, one that is bound up in a much broader set of social and historical processes. The reception of classical and medieval culture has a rich and meaningful history of its own. These successive interpretations of the past can prove to be far removed from the events or ideas they describe. And yet one can never fully understand the history of the post-classical world without some measure of direct reference to the ancient cultures against which it has never ceased to define itself, by varying methods and means.

By looking through the prism of the sociology of representation, however, it becomes possible to emphasize the subject’s value in a rather different light: as “illuminating textual manifestations of the mentalities of the societies from which they arose.” ² The standard model of the cultural “representation” of history theorizes that these media are primarily a vehicle to articulate contemporary concerns. While this approach is at least partly correct, it sometimes misses out the recurring constancy in the value of older historical and cultural narratives, of which our topic in question is a prominent one. Expanding on this approach by incorporating such narratives and traditions helps us understand that the “decline and fall of Rome” is no simple unfiltered “fact,” but a “myth” in the academic sense coined by Claude Lévi-Strauss, meaning not a falsehood but a complex social and ideological construct. ³ This is a predominantly secular mythology; though it incorporates a moral and eschatological dimension, one which is partly borne of its theological roots. It represents the fears of European and US thinkers as they confront the perceived instability and pitfalls of the civilization to which they belong. It is a paradigm with a currency stretching back hundreds of years, but which still finds a powerful and influential presence in its mediation through the era of celluloid and mass media.

The material I gather in this study illustrates the value of the decline and fall as a spatiotemporal concept, rather than a historical event—even when most of its popular and intellectual representations characterizes and classify it as such. Divisions such as the “Middle Ages,” “Renaissance” and “Modernity” create value-laden demarcation lines out of the past; imposed epochs of time that can overlook the existence of “Modern” characteristics in the Middle Ages, and “Medieval” characteristics in more modern times. The invocation of such categories and processes provides powerful conceptual markers for other social and political narratives, and a cultural presence that continues to wield influence in contemporary times. In this light, the theme of the decline and fall of Rome functions as a conceptual invention, layered with the additional beliefs and purposes of successive generations. Indeed, contemporary historiography on Late Antiquity and the fall of the Western Roman Empire has challenged the strict historical veracity of this idea itself; namely the notion that, in any meaningful historical sense, we can talk seriously about a “fall” in the fifth century ad, much less the notion of a gradual decline in the centuries before that. The whole concept has little remaining value in strict historical, academic analysis of the fourth and fifth centuries. However, it functions as a meaningful narrative and myth that has been appropriated and reinvented by authors, knowingly or unconsciously, with a significance rendered particular and personal to their own time.

Using well-established theories of the sociology of representation, metahistory, and Straussian myth, I can illustrate the value of the decline and fall as a spatiotemporal concept, or historicizing paradigm. It has featured substantially, in overt or latent ways, in the popular culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In particular, it serves as a metaphor for the concerns cultural authors in Britain, Europe and the US have with the possibility of a similar “decline” in present times, and therefore functions as a vehicle for contemporary concerns and critiques. Despite a long-standing interest in the influence of ancient culture on the modern world, the archetype of the decline and fall of Rome in Western culture and thought has received little direct consideration. While there are many areas of academic writing that touch on the subject—for instance, a large body of literature analysing the representation of the classical world on film—very few have as their primary frame the specific thematic conception of the decline and fall. ⁴ Much of this omission can be explained by the fact that most scholarship on antiquity and its reception has been taken up by traditional classicists, whose academic background and consequent area of focus are on the depiction of what falls more strictly within the realm of “Classics”—outside of which exists the subject of the decline and fall of Rome. ⁵ This study is partly, therefore, a revision of existing attitudes—especially with respect to prominently discussed media, such as notable texts and films—and partly a focus on new material that is little studied. ⁶

The approach here contradicts somewhat the contention of the ancient historian Glen Bowersock, who in The Vanishing Paradigm of the Fall of Rome (1996) writes that, “The fall of Rome is no longer needed, and like the writing on a faded papyrus, it no longer speaks to us,” and that the purpose of the obsession with this fall has become to “deny its existence altogether.” ⁷ Instead, I can contend that not only has the decline and fall of Rome survived and persisted as a cultural and intellectual paradigm, but that it has acquired a prominent and particular relevance in the tradition of British and US political, cultural, and historical thought that compares the rise of Rome with one or both of these nations as the respective superpowers of their age.

This role as a regular component of discourse survives to the present day—enhanced, if anything, by the geopolitical developments since the turn of the twenty-first century. It is a myth as much about the present day, as it is about the ancient world; for an essential property of the decline and fall is that it possesses a universal significance, as a moral tale for the modern world. It appeals to deep-rooted anxieties about the structures of order that surround and support us.

A critical analysis of the forms, and the reception, of the decline and fall addresses a key notion; that myths, and their formulation in popular beliefs, act as an essential mediator in the making and remaking of historical consciousness. Following on from that idea, this book will demonstrate how these examples help challenge the still oft-held notion that, when it comes to the transmission of ideas about the classical past, popular culture exists in a largely distinct, even inferior, realm to the literary and intellectual world. Access to the classical or medieval imaginary is provided not only through academic histories, and canonical literature, but through the popular literature, cinema, and other media examined here. They exist within the same continuum of iconographic representation. I am outlining the form the decline and fall of Rome takes as a mythology, not only as a technical description of its structure, but because it can pervade all levels of public consciousness; from the scholarly and intellectual, to popular culture and the mass media. Myth should be recognized as myth, whether it comes from mass media or from their intellectual critics. Different media can carry the same message, encoded and translated using different tools. Representations of the decline and fall of Rome embrace a wide spectrum of cultural output, and possess common underlying themes. Uncovering them helps us to reconceptualize the relationship between mythic, historical, and fictional narratives. Through this approach, I can build on the ideas of Hayden White, particularly his Metahistory, to demonstrate the union of popular and elite texts as a broader expression of historical consciousness. ⁸ One can treat these different media as expressions of a singular myth.

Hermeneutics and Historical Consciousness

In this study I seek to answer the question: What, within our time-frame of the late nineteenth century to the present day, does the representation of the decline and fall of Rome tell us about the societies that produced these cultural texts? The fullest answer to this question requires a hermeneutic approach: an interpretative, textual analysis of a collection of films, books, and works of professional “history,” with some appropriate examples from the media. This combination of the vernacular and intellectual will demonstrate that, rather than being opposed to each other, they combine as components of a wider cultural discourse with that past that frames our relationship to it. A cross-comparative approach demonstrates that these texts betray intimate connections with one another; some overt and deliberate, and others wholly unintended, yet clear and evident upon close analysis.

A second and somewhat deeper question I hope to answer is: Are these representations of decline transient and unique to their specific period, or do they possess universal, archetypal qualities? Here a discussion of the theories of myth found, in particular, in the writings of Lévi-Strauss and Clifford Geertz, becomes very appropriate. ⁹ This book represents a historical study in which the object of historical inquiry here is shifted towards the historiography itself, or rather a cultural historiography, where academic or intellectual authorship interacts with a wider popular and cultural consciousness. Arguably it is this form of “historiography,” to slightly reposition the word, that plays a much greater role in the formation of common human thinking and learning, and more specifically for us, the mediation of historical ideas such as the “decline and fall” of Rome. This is precisely because it inhabits this whole array of widely experienced cultural artefacts—literature, art, film, scholarship, journalism, propaganda, stretching across what might traditionally be constituted as both “higher” and “lower” cultural forms. Artists and dramatists map out the mental structure and moral character of an age. Culture can get co-opted into political discourse. And, inevitably, these diverse representations constitute a blend of both the real and the imaginary. Just as popular re-presentations of events contain a value “truth” of their own, so historical writing is framed by its own subjectivities. Looking into this range of historical representation opens up not one but two avenues of inquiry—the study of contemporary society through the representation of the past, and, less overtly, the study of the modern transmission of historical consciousness; much or most of which occurs outside strict...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Historiography, Myth and Visual Culture
• 3. The Fall of Rome and Ideas of Decline
• 4. Roman Decline and the West in the Modern Age
• 5. Decadence, Imperialism, and Decline from the Late Twentieth Century
• 6. Conclusion
• Backmatter