The Course of Empire: Destruction (1836) – one of a series of five paintings by Thomas Cole (in public domain) and typically the painting used when someone wants to use a painting to depict the fall of Rome, albeit the series depicts an imaginary state or city

(1) DECLINE & FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE

The decline and fall of the Roman Empire – that “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, retreating to the breath of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear and naked shingles of the world”.

I don’t think it is overstating it to describe the decline and fall of the Roman Empire as the PTSD of western civilization. Europeans looked to the Roman Empire as their state or imperial model, with kingdoms or states purporting to succeed or revive it in one form or another thereafter.

Even now, the decline and fall of the Roman Empire informs much modern discourse about state failure – from Edward Gibbon onwards, “we have been obsessed with the fall: it has been valued as an archetype for every perceived decline, and, hence, as a symbol for our own fears”.

I would rank it in my top ten wars but for the lack of a definitive war – although my top ten entry for the Hunnic Wars comes closest – hence the special mention, albeit god-tier. And also as decline and fall, it involved the former as much as the latter. The Romans were consistently their own worst enemies – not just in their relentless civil wars but also in aspects of internal decline that were observed even as early as the second century – at its peak! – by contemporaries such as the historian Cassius Dio, who lamented the decline “from a kingdom of gold to one of rust and iron”.

But our interest here is its external fall or military defeats, most notoriously at the hands of barbarians at the gates – the Germanic tribes that swept over the empire in what history calls the Barbarian Invasions or Migration Period.

The empire was shocked to its core with the sack of Rome itself – twice, firstly by the Visigoths in 410, and secondly by the Vandals, who thereafter lent their name to wanton destruction, in 455. These sacks of Rome were still shocking even though the imperial capital had been moved to Ravenna in 402, such that the Roman Empire might more accurately be styled as the Ravennan Empire instead.

And there’s something about the Romans desperately trying to hold one line after another in that “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” that resonates with me. Indeed, any last stand or waning force often invokes the fall of the Roman Empire, both in history, and as we shall see, in fantasy or science fiction.

And there’s certainly plenty to choose from with the fall of the Roman Empire in the century from the disastrous defeat in the battle of Adrianople against the Goths in 378, which opened the floodgates to barbarians invading and setting up kingdoms within the Empire itself, varying between alliance with and opposition to the Empire, until the Germanic leader Odoacer decided it would be easier not to have a puppet emperor and deposed him instead in 476.

Of course, what history tends to forget is that the proverbial decline and fall of the Roman Empire was of the western Roman Empire – the eastern Roman Empire survived and even thrived for another millennium after the fall of the western empire. It even had a damn good shot at recovering the western half of the empire under Justinian and his legendary general Belisarius, before receding again, and it then ebbed and flowed, until its final decline over two centuries before its conquest by the rising Ottoman Empire in 1453. So there’s plenty to choose from there as well.

Indeed, the decline and fall of both western and eastern Roman Empires was invoked by Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings with Gondor – the eastern half of the Numenorean states that survived the fall of the western half Arnor. Of course, that would make Gondor correspond to the Byzantine Empire, increasingly focused on its capital city Minas Tirith corresponding to Constantinople making its last stand against Sauron – who would correspond to, ah, the Ottoman Turks?!

Anyway, the decline and fall of the Roman Empire – and the Great Migrations or Barbarian Invasions – might be considered to be on the scale of a world war, but is a little too piecemeal in space or time.

And one can argue we are still living in the decline of the Roman Empire. Or on our Third or Fourth Rome (or more), going by all the countries that have claimed the succession to the Roman Empire. Or the Empire never fell…according to P.K. Dick. Or something like that

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD TIER)