Still, I am not immune to preoccupation with the Roman past. A Roman state of some sort lasted so long-well over a millennium-and changed so continuously that its history touches on any imaginable type of human occurrence, serves up parallels for any modern event, and provides contradictory answers to any question posed. The comparisons, of course, can be facile. How an 18th-Century Philosopher Helped Solve My Midlife Crisis Alison Gopnik “Sack Rome?” a barbarian wife says to her husband in an old New Yorker cartoon. And of course there are some Americans-including the January 6 attackers-who would find national collapse momentarily satisfying. Today, as ever, observers are on the alert for portents of the Last Days, and have been quick, like Cato, to hurl warnings. Half a century later, the narrative progression of The Course of Empire, Thomas Cole’s allegorical series of paintings, depicted the consequences of overweening ambition and national hubris. The Founders feared the stealthy creep of tyranny. Britain’s former American colonies, which declared their independence the year Gibbon’s first volume was published, have been especially troubled by the parallels they discerned. Amid all this came a New York Times report on the discovery and display of artifacts from the gardens of Caligula, an erratic and vengeful emperor, one of whose wives was named Milonia.Įver since Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the prospect of a Rome-inflected apocalypse has cast its chilling spell. As the nation reeled, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in the role of a magister militum addressing the legions, issued an unprecedented advisory that put the sitting ruler on notice, condemning “sedition and insurrection” and noting that the inauguration of a new ruler would proceed. Outside, a pandemic raged, recalling the waves of plague that periodically swept across the Roman empire. Headlines referred to the violent swarming of Capitol Hill as a “sack.”
Commentators who remembered Cicero invoked the senatorial Catiline conspiracy. The invaders occupied the Senate chamber, where Latin inscriptions crown the east and west doorways. Some of the attackers had painted their bodies, and one wore a horned helmet. Photographs of the Capitol’s debris-strewn marble portico might have been images from eons ago, at a plundered Temple of Jupiter. T he scenes at the Capitol on January 6 were remarkable for all sorts of reasons, but a distinctive fall-of-Rome flavor was one of them, and it was hard to miss. This article was published online on March 11, 2021. Illustration by Nicolás Ortega Joseph-Noël Sylvestre, The Sack of Rome in 410 by the Vandals (1890).
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