Back then, as the rabbis first struggled to sum up Judaism without a Temple, in what became known as the Mishnah, they preached against the temptations of kingship and Rome. “Love work,” they said, “abhor taking high office and do not seek intimacy with the ruling power.” Today, the Mishnah’s essential portion, The Ethics of The Fathers, reads like an almost incantatory list of generations of exclusively religious Jewish leaders. Originally, it was shocking because of who it omits: the rabbis had written out of history not only King Herod, but the messianic political leaders of the three great revolts against Rome.

The truth is that when it comes to national leaders, Jews have precious few examples to go by, having not held their homeland for over 1,800 years. Which is why it is telling, in the final build up to the war on Tehran, that Benjamin Netanyahu spent time rediscovering those rulers whom the rabbis wished to forget. He has done this by reading a new book,  Jews vs. Rome: Two Centuries of Rebellion Against the World’s Mightiest Empire, by Professor Barry Strauss. “Well, we lost that one,” Netanyahu explained to a reporter about the work. “I think we have to win the next one.”

This is perhaps the most unintentionally revealing thing Bibi has ever said. As his war planning with Washington gathered pace, the Israeli Prime Minister was reading a book about a vast historic reversal — how, in the space of a single lifetime, Jewish royalty went from playing politics in Rome, as their people gathered privileges and respect in the imperial center, to watching helplessly as the legions burnt the Temple and carried off its Menorah, their nation marched into slavery, humiliation and exile. At its core, this is the story of King Herod and the failure of his heirs: how a combination of runaway fundamentalism and diplomatic failure doomed a highly successful people to the status of near outcasts.

You cannot understand King Herod — or the depths of Bibi’s mind — without looking again at a map of Rome. The empire in the east was different from that of the west: not the uniformly subjugated barbarian provinces of Gaul and Britannia, but a patchwork of wealthy, civilized statelets, client kingdoms and provinces. Judea was one of those kingdoms, home to the largest temple complex of the ancient world at Jerusalem. It was a city whose sanctuary was so gilded, writes the inescapable ancient historian Josephus, that in the morning it “cast a fiery light”; so white was its marble that from a distance the sanctuary looked like a mountain capped with snow.

This, moreover, was a city that had produced in the Torah a literary tradition its people believed rivaled that of the Greeks, a city whose diaspora was spread across the known world’s two empires — the Roman, stretching west to the pillars of Hercules, and the Parthian, stretching east to the Hindu Kush, each studded with Jewish trading communities paying their own tithe back to the Temple.

Strauss calls this Judea “in essence a Temple state”; it had become ungovernable by 63 BC, when its elites first appealed to Rome to adjudicate in a civil war within its failing Hasmonean monarchy. Twenty-three years later, after a period of chaos, the Roman Senate made their most promising local ally King of all Judea, then sent him back with military support to conquer his kingdom. His name was Herod.

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This king would become so hated in both the Jewish and the Christian tradition that his actual reign was blotted out. But reading Jews vs. Rome, it is easy to realize what Netanyahu might see in him. It is all about the emperor. Herod, after all, made himself a Roman politician and not just a Jewish one. To avoid the territorial designs of Cleopatra, he sought and won the support of Mark Antony. But after his patron’s demise at the hands of Octavian, known to history as Augustus, Herod had the skill to then become the first Roman emperor’s greatest loyalist.

To succeed in Roman politics, Herod Romanized himself, naming his grandson after Augustus’s favorite general Agrippa, and even becoming president of the Olympic Games. To emphasize his loyalty, he also Romanized his landscape, raising a new city called Caesarea, on the coast south of modern-day Haifa. All this would pay off, not just for him, but for his Rome-educated grandson Herod Agrippa I, who was such an impressive Roman politician that in the chaos that followed the murder of his friend Caligula he installed Claudius as emperor.

There is no way Herod’s precedent was not on Bibi’s mind as he read this book, in those months when he pursued Trump with the most outlandish flattery — a man he has named a settlement after; offered the nation’s highest honors to; and sought to speak to through every Fox and Friends or Hannity. All this as he shuns his own media at home. Bibi knows that his bilingual, Israeli-American political identity, in a country where few in its traditional political-military class speak flawless English, is the source of his power, his ability to play politics in Rome.

Because of how it ended, the very Roman power of the Herodian dynasty has been forgotten. First came Herod the Great, who renovated the Temple, but his large kingdom disintegrated almost immediately on his death. Revolts broke out everywhere against the backdrop of his sadistic divide-and-rule, culminating in the murder of his own sons. But what the empire gifted, it could also take away. The second, Romanized generation, such as Herod Antipas of Galilee who executed John the Baptist, were demoted into ruling mostly as lesser Roman-appointed “tetrarchs” or “ethnarchs” of scraps of their old kingdom.

50 years later, the now extensively Romanized third generation would enjoy a brief resurgence, when Herod the Great’s grandson Herod Agrippa I ruled as King of all Judea: but only for around three years. The fourth generation, such as Herod Agrippa II of Galilee, were demoted yet again to minor clients. They were the last to rule in the land of Israel. The Herodians’ once very real regional influence would leave no mark on history. The Jewish-Roman alliance was doomed.

This is where Strauss’s account becomes a study in failure. Successive generations of Herodians became more and more hated by their people for their Hellenized foreignness. By the end, the rulers could do nothing but hide from their subjects’ religious passions, let alone steer or hope to calm them. It meant nothing that Herod Agrippa II of Galilee ended up fighting on the same side as the Romans in the Great Revolt that began in 66 AD. Nor that his sister Berenice was the lover of General Titus. Maybe he saved Galilee, and she a few of the captives, from worse reprisals, but neither of them could save the Temple nor Judea. Their stewardship had failed. After this disaster, the dynasty continued, but not in Judea and not as Jews. King Herod’s descendants would rule as kings in Armenia and Cetis in Anatolia, or serve as Roman senators, magistrates, and even a consul or two. Yet they did all this firmly as pagans.

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Herod the Great’s heirs failed because they did not keep the zealots close enough to control them. And it is impossible, here, to read Strauss’s account and not see the signature of Bibi’s entire career: the zealots will be my zealots. For 30 years, Israel’s most American, most foreign of leaders has used fundamentalist rabbis and settlers as his auxiliaries and shields. This, in the end, is the political meaning of Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir. Of course, there is the cynicism, through which Netanyahu will do anything to stave off an election and avoid jail. But there is also a dark pessimism about the Jewish people that glues it all together, a sense that Netanyahu truly believes you cannot rule the Jews except when flanked by their zealots.

This was the Herodian legacy: Judea’s priests driven to hilltop villages in the Galilee, its princes pagans in the courts of Asia Minor. By the end of the Great Revolt in 70 AD, the Jews were now a people without a leadership, their temple and their monarchy in ruins. Incontinent, apocalyptic fanaticism spread like wildfire among the people. Two further revolts followed, in 115 AD and 135 AD. The result was what we would now call ethnic cleansing and genocide. Archaeological work in modern Israel has confirmed a scale of atrocity that shocked even Rome’s ancient historians. By the end of the first revolt, Titus’s slavery and butchery had reduced the population of Judea by a third. By the end of the third, by driving the Jews out of Judea and eradicating their settlements there, Hadrian had reduced it by as much as two thirds. During the second Trajan had, to quote the historian Appian, “utterly destroyed the Jewish people in Egypt”. Their doom, to a reader like Netanyahu, only confirms a conviction that the Diaspora is only safe if Israel succeeds.

In the space of a lifetime, the Jews had not only lost Jerusalem, their great spiritual city with all its treasures, but also Alexandria, their great diasporic port with all its wealth. The Jews were finished. Not as a nation, but as a great people in the ancient world. Their homeland was renamed Palestine — as the Greeks had long known it — to insult them. They were humiliatingly singled out by Rome to pay the fiscus Judaicus, a special tax to the emperor’s coffers and the city’s great temple of Jupiter, in lieu of the old tithe they had once so gladly paid their own temple. A vertiginous fall, in short, from privileges granted by Julius Caesar himself.

I don’t doubt that, reading Strauss’s book, Netanyahu imagines himself as Herod the Great: the only sound intercessor between Rome and the Jews. But there is another, unnerving reading, in which Netanyahu has got it all wrong. By betting everything on the House of Trump, is he not making the same mistake as the Herodians? From educating their children together to tying generations of friendships together, the House of Herod bet everything on the House of Augustus. But that didn’t work so well with the dynasties that came after: the cold military men of the Flavians and the Nerva-Antonines. After all,  dynasties could, and did, fall. What Judea needed, and so obviously lacked, were friends and allies across the Senate and the People of Rome.

Why the Temple was destroyed is one of the great aching questions of Judaism. In Jews vs. Rome, Strauss has attempted to answer it through politics. His own view is that disunity was key. The Jews were factionalized beyond belief, and broken into zealots and Hellenizers, fundamentalists and accommodationists, all at each other’s throats. Fractured like this, the people of Israel never stood a chance against the imperial legions.

And here too Bibi’s rule resembles that of King Herod — and not in a way that would please him. It’s not just the way he has got Trump to bully the Israeli President to grant him a pardon for his corruption trial, nor his benches of Knesset yes men and hate men. It’s also 30 years of stoking endless provocation and division. It’s the hate marches against Yitzhak Rabin, the anti-Arab rhetoric, his attempts to gut the Supreme Court, the relentless march to “baseless hatred”.

This odd phrase is what the Talmud uses to describe the political climate in ancient Israel when it seeks its own answer as to why the Temple was destroyed. And it is a term I recognize when I see Itamar Ben Gvir prancing in the Knesset with a bottle of champagne, celebrating a death penalty unique for Palestinians, as Bibi looks on and smiles.

Netanyahu thinks he is leading with the zealots close; but rather they are leading him. This is a mistake that Herod the Great did not make. Two millenniums later, it is clear that the King of Judea, in his decision to rebuild and glorify the Temple, understood, unlike most of his heirs, something fundamental about the passions of Judaism. In the soul of Israel, they are inescapable and volcanic. And a leader who seeks to be their ruler, must channel them, not follow them. Herod did so in the vast effort to rebuild the Temple. It is by its surviving Western Wall that we still pray. Netanyahu has done quite the opposite, governing by endless concessions to settler construction projects or draft-dodging Haredim. Their demands are pulling him ever closer to splitting the nation, and sparking the fury of Rome.

These are the limits to Bibi’s cynicism and pessimism. For it has no spiritual force to answer the prophetic warning of Gershom Scholem, the great scholar of Jewish mysticism. Scholem warned that on the far side of so much destruction and displacement, Israel would need to withstand its own impulses and not succumb to what he called “the messianic claim which has virtually been conjured up” — by returning to the land of our ancestors. After 1,800 years, we have abruptly picked up this uncannily familiar history of zealots, client-kings and emperors. And we need to learn from it, or pay the price, once again, for fundamentalism and baseless hatred.

Hair matters to Suetonius — as it evidently would for his patrician Roman readers in the second century AD. Lives of the Caesars helped to make Julius Caesar history’s best-known exponent of the comb-over, “combing forward the thinning hair from the top of his head”, because advancing baldness “offered his detractors endless material for jokes”. As for the divine Augustus, his successor, Suetonius treats the story that he employed “various stylists simultaneously” while he read as proof that he disdained fancy hairdressing. Really? Vain Otho, in contrast, “wore a hairpiece so skilfully fitted that no one would ever have known he was going bald”.

The fine — or coarse — details of imperial coiffure have not passed into legend to the same degree as some of Suetonius’s other juicy titbits. More renowned are the scenes of the aged Tiberius having his genitals nibbled while swimming with his young male “minnows”; Nero singing (not fiddling) while Rome burned in the fires that he had himself started, or castrating his toyboy Sporus before marrying him “with all the traditional ceremonies (dowry and bridal veil included)”. Less gamey than such chunks of scuttlebutt, Suetonius’s hairpieces typify the way he writes. Intimate data that high-minded historians would scorn help him to build a full-length picture of each imperial figure. An emperor’s barnet sits, or maybe falls, on the visible borderline between personal habit and public image: a revealing site of individual choice but also — as those imperial slapheads ruefully understood — inexorable fate.

The writer who paid so much heed to hair respected testimony from barbers as much as from senators. As Holland notes in his new edition, Suetonius takes care to source all his stories, however outlandish and outrageous they may sound: “The methodology is careful, balanced, nuanced.” Some of the most striking moments arrive when he draws on evidence from his own home and family, citing his soldierly father and other relatives.

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The Lives of the Caesars spans the 12 rulers of Rome and its empire from the ascent of Julius Caesar (born 100 BC) to the assassination of Domitian in 96 AD. Suetonius probably completed the work in the late 120s, after the Emperor Hadrian had sacked its well-connected author from the job of correspondence secretary. For all its procedural scruples, The Lives nonetheless ranks as one of the first, greatest and most influential fusions of low scandal and high politics in the history of history.

Every breathless “unauthorised” biography of premiers and presidents that currently vies for media and bookstore space aims for the Suetonius touch: what Holland calls an “amalgam of lurid anecdotes” that enriches and extends a full-spectrum account not just of persons and policies, but of a state and a time. As its rocket fuel, or secret spice, this all-round portraiture rests on a targeted deployment of gossip.

Gossip, like the sexual activity it habitually evokes, is everywhere practised and everywhere condemned. Highbrow defences of its means and ends are very hard to find — although Patricia Meyer Spacks, a Yale professor of literature, has elegantly argued for its value. She observes that “for several centuries everyone has gossiped, and everyone has felt ashamed of doing so”. Make that “millennia”. In her 1985 study Gossip, she demonstrates that “few activities so nearly universal have been the object of such sustained and passionate attack”. Spacks warmly champions gossip, in life and in literature, as a “resource for the subordinated” — women above all — and a democratic creator of community: “Gossip emphasises what people hold in common, dwells on frailties, seeks the hidden rather than the manifest.” This charitable, even utopian, vision of gossip as the whispered revenge of the oppressed may fit small-scale traditional communities. Sadly, it hardly suits the partisan campaigns of toxic innuendo now practised by media giants and political enforcers.

Three decades ago, I could, had I so wished, flick past the gossip columns in the paper. Now I visit X to answer a direct message and can’t unsee (just one current example) the ludicrous claim that President Macron is married to a transgender person originally called Jean-Michel Trogneux. In reality, that’s Brigitte Macron’s brother. The siblings sued over this viral fantasy and, last September, won damages of €13,000 against the pair of internet muck-spreaders who began to circulate it in 2021: Amandine Roy and Natacha Rey. Yet algorithmic elves still shovel the manure around as busily as ever. Sought or unsought, hardcore scandal and outright “fake news” now splatter into every screen-facing mind.

The “transgender Brigitte Macron” meme obviously intends to ridicule the president and benefit his enemies. It harks back to the distinctly similar weaponizing of rumor — sexual and financial — via popular prints in the decades before the French Revolution. Think of Marie Antoinette: one of history’s most gossiped-against figures, by repute an adulterous lesbian spendthrift cheat responsible for ruining her nation; in reality a blundering naif guilty of almost none of the crimes and misdemeanors attached to her name. (The apocryphal “Let them eat cake” — Qu’ils mangent de la brioche — is attributed to a fictional princess in Rousseau’s Confessions, written in 1769.)

Gossip about the great always serves sectional interests. In Marie Antoinette’s case, it became an armor-piercing weapon of revolutionary war. For all his zest, bite and wit, Suetonius also spreads tales initially devised to favor one senatorial faction or another. And he plays on the same drives — curiosity, prurience, envy, schadenfreude — as his mass-media heirs. His enlistment of scurrilous anecdotes cuts imperial titans down to human size. He conjures up a community of readers in the know, united by what Spacks calls “the glamour and the power of secret knowledge”. Have you heard that a posh young blade called Valerius Catullus “boasted loudly” about screwing Gaius Caligula “as though he were a slave”, and of being “left exhausted by the demands he made in bed”? Well, you have now. Pass it on…

That frisson of complicity — half-exciting, half-demeaning — persists across the ages from the pages of The Lives to the latest squirt of online bile. And gossip, as Suetonius knew, contributes not just to the matter of history, but the making of history. Take the (reputed) sexual adventures of young Julius Caesar.

Ancient Rome, as everyone surely knows by now, had no concept of “homosexuality”. It did expect that high-status males should take their chosen pleasures actively. Top boys had to be, well, top boys. Right at the start of The Lives, we learn that Julius Caesar “was rumored” to have submitted to King Nicomedes of Bithynia’s sexual advances. This early surrender of power haunted Caesar as “a lingering scandal, and one serious enough to provide material for endless taunts”. In a droll paragraph, Suetonius primly asserts he “will not dwell” on tittle-tattle about the divine Julius as “queen of Bithynia”. Then of course he does exactly that, right down to the legionaries’ marching songs: “Caesar bent Gaul to his will; Nicomedes bent Caesar”, etc.

Yet Suetonius’s examples blend ridicule and affection. The soldiers evidently didn’t mind seeing their revolutionary dictator taken down a bit. That “lingering scandal” may have won as well as lost votes. Besides, what happens in Asia… Suetonius, a pioneer practitioner of gossip as history, also explores the ambiguous force of gossip in history.

Suetonius has a well-merited name for memorable vignettes of atrocities and debaucheries. However, much of his most piquant hearsay simply underlines the sheer fragility of the attempt to control Rome’s domains via the frail figure of a single princeps. Tortures and fornications aside, Suetonius’s cameos of hidden lives frequently arouse not loathing but compassion: as in his sketch of the always-chilly Augustus, muffled up against the winter cold with “four tunics, a thick toga, an undershirt, a woolen vest, and strips of cloth wrapped around his thighs and shins”. The sort of gossip transmitted here illuminates the vulnerability not only of a princeps but of the system he fronted. In this instance, malice and resentment — presumed to be gossip’s default setting — give way to something nearer sympathy.

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Gossip, in Suetonius’s hands, can turn a man into a monster, as when Nero kills his wife Poppaea by “kicking her in the stomach when she was pregnant and sick, after she had scolded him for coming home late from the chariot races”. As so often in The Lives, it’s that final clinching detail that pushes what might count as hostile spin from political foes into an unforgettably plausible vignette. Yet it can also humanize and complicate the princeps, especially when rival rumors push in contrary directions.

Holland believes that the perplexing contradictions of imperial portraiture of The Lives may stem from Suetonius’s dependence on both friendly and hostile sources for a single narrative. Whether the cause, this cross-grained gossip makes the man in full appear. The deep ambivalence towards “laughing stock”-turned-conqueror Claudius planted the seed of Graves’s peerless novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God. In Suetonius, what lingers are not the “cruel and bloodthirsty” stunts of Claudius or his “paranoid sense of suspicion” but backstairs memories of the family fool: the hapless scapegoat who had to make “an entire tour of the dining room” before someone would grudgingly find space, before being pelted with olive and date stones and lashed by some toff “with a rod or whip” — “just for the banter”.

Or look at Otho, one of the short-lived rulers of 69 AD, the “year of the four emperors”. Predictably, Suetonius tells us that Otho and Nero had been “in the habit of abusing each other sexually”, and that the former ran around the streets at night, picking fights with the “puny or drunk”. Later, however, he mentions that his father fought with Otho and found him a brave and decent commander with a “horror of civil war”. Confronted with one soldier’s self-sacrifice, Otho said that “I will no longer risk the lives of such men, who deserve so well.” When Nero, his protector, sent Poppaea to him for safekeeping, Otho genuinely fell in love with her. He barred his front door to Nero, who was left “alternately threatening and imploring him to no effect”.

Our digital dependency has made public gossip ubiquitous and inescapable save for hermits, Luddites and — paradoxically — the sort of well-staffed magnates and celebrities who become its subject. For the rest of us, however frugal our online habits, it forever spits in the face and lodges in the brain. Suetonius can come to our aid. An analyst of gossip as much as a connoisseur, he shows where it springs from, how it flows, and where it issues. If we can no longer stand haughtily aloof from rumors about authority and celebrity, at least we can learn to recognize their motives, means and effects. Entertaining and enlightening, The Lives may also equip readers with the tools to become more critical consumers of gossip about politics and power — better able to assess both their own impulses as receivers of rumor, and the aims of its diffusers. As always with historical gossip, the reader or listener has to judge. Who told this story? Who spread it? Who gains from it? Who suffers? Whose interests does it ultimately serve? Cui bono?

For instance: did the disguised Nero truly make the rounds of Rome’s cookshops in order to mug customers “as they made their way back from dinner”, or dump his victims’ corpses in a sewer, or break into taverns to loot them and then “auction off the spoils” back at his house? We will never know the nocturnal itineraries of the volatile tearaway born Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus. But we do know his solidly-grounded later notoriety for theft, plunder and confiscation — which these tales render as a kind of grotesque comic-strip. Many of Suetonius’s wilder anecdotes follow this formula. Don’t always take such gossip literally; but do take it seriously.

Because immigration played no small part in the demise of Rome. The period from the late-4th century to the mid-6th is frequently even termed “the Migration Period” or, in the more thunderous German, the Völkerwanderung. That long century was shaped the new ethnic groups that moved into the Empire from central and eastern Europe, spurred on by an initial exodus of population from the Eurasian steppe. The exact causes of this exodus — climate change, overpopulation, the building of the Great Wall of China — are ceaselessly debated by historians. But by 500 AD, with Anglo-Saxons north of the Channel, and Vandals, Franks, Goths further south, the vast majority of the ex-imperial landmass was ruled by newly arrived dynasts and warrior groupings.

For some modern commentators, however — from Boris Johnson to Pat Buchanan — the history does not stop there, and there is an immediate modern parallel. If, they argue, the United States and its Western allies represent something like a new empire, it too is threatened with invasion by incoming migrant hordes. And they see these hordes most visibly in the vast migration of peoples currently taking place across America’s southern border with Mexico, and through the Mediterranean world from North Africa.

But, while the historical comparison between Rome and the West has an attractive simplicity, there are fundamental disanalogies. Rome’s economy was overwhelmingly agricultural, and steady-state. Its GDP could not increase in anything but the very long term, since the stock of good land was fixed and farming methods slow to improve. Therefore the establishment of the Western successor states necessitated the partial or sometimes total (as in southern Britain) confiscations of wealth-generating agricultural assets from their existing owners to support their new rulers. In other words, migrants did literally and materially displace the Romans.

In comparison, wealth generation in the West — which is neither steady-state nor agricultural — has become effectively dependent on flows of migrant labour. Since 1900, average family sizes have declined dramatically across the developed world: currently only Iceland and Israel are producing the canonical 2.1 average children per adult female for the current population to reproduce itself in the next generation. Everywhere else, birth rates are below this level and in some cases — particularly Germany, Hungary, and Japan — far below. Therefore, immigrants aren’t appropriating wealth from the West, but supplementing a shortfall in the productive workforce. Which is why every 1% increase in legal migrant numbers — and the overwhelming majority of migrants into the west do arrive legally — adds an average 2% to GDP in Western countries, and average unemployment rates have not increased despite all the recent population inflows.

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But, if we expand the discussion of modern migration to include its non-Western dimensions, a different comparison with Rome offers another, much more compelling parallel. Because the obsessive media coverage of Mexico and the Mediterranean refugee crises actually elides the most important modern migration story of them all. Apart from those arriving in the West, many times more people (countless millions in fact) have been on the move within the developing world. It is this new age of migration, the largest movement of people in the entirety of human history, which poses the real challenge to continued Western economic prosperity.

It began as a by-product of colonial-era economic development in the 19th century. As the rapidly industrialising West’s demand for raw materials from its colonial territories grew, as well as for foodstuffs for its expanding urban populations, new networks of connection grew up across the different empires: based on ports, internal river systems, and, eventually, railways. Former subsistence peasant producers across Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and South America found themselves sucked into these networks in ever-increasing numbers to provide the labour for new cash crops, raw material production, and to establish and run the transport networks.

The process only accelerated under the newly independent governments of ex-imperial territories in the years after 1945. Many devoted considerable resources to basic education, attempting to create homegrown industrial bases to fend off expensive imports from their former masters. And this sucked people in massive numbers from continental interiors to congregate in coastal cities such as Shenzhen, São Paolo, Lagos, and Mumbai. Once there, better healthcare and a plentiful food supply added exponential population growth into the mix.

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In economic terms, these import replacement strategies enjoyed only limited success, and largely failed after the oil price shocks of the Seventies. But what this astonishing flow of humanity did achieve was to put in place a ready-made labour force across different parts of the developing world for the Eighties, when Western countries lifted their long-standing capital controls. As the West deindustrialised, investment began flowing outwards to the developing world, where labour was so much cheaper, with the aim of returning Western corporations — and hence the West as a whole — to post-war levels of growth.  

This worked, for a time. But over subsequent decades, Western investment has combined with the emergence of new classes of indigenous entrepreneurs to generate a global shift in the geographical location of manufactured wealth production. Since 1947, for instance, the population of Bangalore has increased from 700,000 to about 14 million, the vast majority supported by manufacturing jobs, while India’s national literacy rate has risen from about 20% to 75%. Over the same period, by contrast, London’s population has stayed more or less the same and it has ceased to be a major manufacturing centre. This second Völkerwanderung had created such a cost-effective labour force that it proved overwhelmingly logical, as globalisation gathered momentum, to relocate a huge percentage of global industrial production away from the West’s old manufacturing centres to the teeming new coastal metropoles of the developing world.

The process is irreversible, and far from complete. Public attention focuses on China and the other Bric countries, but seven of the world’s 10 fastest-growing economies are now African. Kenya, for example, is still mostly famous for its tea and game reserves. But it currently enjoys an annual growth rate of over 7% and Nairobi has become a digital finance hub. And it is in examining the peripheries of the Western world’s old empires, that the comparison with Late Antiquity achieves a new resonance. Imperial systems first come into existence with the purpose of enriching the population at the imperial centre. But over the longer term, they unintentionally kickstart revolutionary processes of economic and hence socio-political change around their fringes, and eventually the emergence of new entities capable of challenging the Empire’s continued dominance.

In the Roman case, 400 years of sustained economic demand for foodstuffs and other raw materials from across the Rhine and the Danube generated a discernible agricultural revolution. By the end of it, barbarians could support themselves in large enough numbers to swarm in on the eve of the Empire’s collapse. Over the same time frame, diplomatic subsidies and the fostering of apparent allies simultaneously produced larger and more coherent political superstructures at the head of these populations. In the 5th century, therefore, the ancient Roman West was carved up by immigrant-warrior groups whose greater size and coherence were the direct result of centuries of coexistence with imperial power. And this is where our own real parallels with Roman history lie. The old global dominance of the modern West is now being challenged by new actors whose growing economic strength — the foundation of their emerging political clout — is the end result of development processes that were originally set in motion to further Western interests.

The outcome of Rome’s imperial lifecycle was always likely to be dismemberment. The outcome for the modern West need not be so catastrophic. There will be enormous political challenges: in Ukraine and the developing sabre rattling over Taiwan new actors are already testing the actual strength and moral resolve of the old Western Empire, and no doubt there are other tests to come. But the vast majority of the developing modern periphery is showing not the slightest desire (or indeed need) to invade the old imperial core in search of greater wealth.

There are other difficulties to overcome — not least pollution and climate change — but the stock of wealth-generating assets is not so limited, and, in principle, there can be sufficient economic growth to satisfy the rest of the world’s legitimate demands for a reasonable share of global GDP, while preserving plenty of wealth for the West. The outcome of the modern Volkerwanderung need not be so much the end the end of Empire, but a diffusion in the distribution of global wealth, Western hegemony fading with a whimper, not a bang.

Start the story at a different moment in time — 1948, say, when the grandparents of today’s Gazans were living in the area, now southern Israel, where Hamas terrorists committed their atrocities — and the crystalline certainties of the scenario above take on a different light.

But there are more than two options. We could begin our story much earlier than 1948, perhaps when the name Gaza was recorded for the first time: during the reign of the mighty, empire-building Thutmose III, 1,479–1,425 BC. By this time, Gaza had already been under the rule of the Pharaohs for several decades. The long view quickly reveals that contest is a constant in Gaza’s history. Wars surge up at intervals in great, seismic eruptions, before the territory settles into an equilibrium which in turn is shattered by another external invader.

Much of this turbulence can be attributed to Gaza’s strategic location. Hemmed in between the Mediterranean and the Sinai and Negev deserts, this coastal oasis has long been a desirable waypoint on the trade routes that criss-crossed the arid region. Both the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, in the 1st century BC, and the Arab geographer Al Muqaddasi in the 10th century AD, commented on its beauty and enviable location. Critically, as the last point before a desert crossing, it was also an essential stopping place for conquerors looking either east from Egypt or west from the Levant. All roads of conquest ran through Gaza.

Enter stage left, from the 12th century BC, among the most historically compelling of Gaza’s many occupiers: the pagan Philistines of Philistia, etymological forefathers of the Muslim Palestinians of Palestine. And here, as the Philistines came to blows with the Jewish tribes of the interior over access to the coast, arose the earliest signs of the conflict that continues 32 centuries later between the Palestinians and Israelis.

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This was the Gaza of the Bible, in which the Israelite warrior Samson was chosen by the Old Testament God to rescue Israel from the Philistines. Tricked by Delilah into revealing the secret of his strength, Samson was eventually undone, his eyes gouged out before he was imprisoned in Gaza and put to work turning a massive millstone around and around in an endless ordeal. But he had the bitter last laugh, as he pulled down the Philistine temple on himself and his persecutors, killing everyone.

This apocalyptic vision of going round and round in circles before wreaking death and mutually assured destruction endures as the defining narrative of Israel and Gaza. Old Testament smiting becomes 21st-century Israeli airstrikes and Palestinian rockets, the violence circular and never-ending.

Gaza has been completely destroyed and emptied of its inhabitants before. Alexander the Great besieged the city in 332 BC. When it refused to surrender, his forces stormed its defences, put its men to the sword, and sold its children into slavery. The Hasmonean siege in 96 BC was another orgy of slaughter and destruction, this time launched by the Jewish king Alexander Jannaeus, ruler of Judaea, to seize Gaza from the Greeks. After these explosions of violence, the transfer of Gaza to Roman rule in 63 BC was comparatively peaceful, but after Rome officially switched to Christianity in 380, and the Bishop Porphyrius became bishop of Gaza in 395, he led a mob to loot and sack a city which had remained traditionally hostile to the followers of Christ. The city’s pagan gods and temples were destroyed in a fundamentalist frenzy. Last Thursday, 17 centuries later, St Porphyrius got his comeuppance when an Israeli airstrike shattered the church, the oldest in Gaza, that bore his name.

For a time, Byzantine prosperity succeeded the Pax Romana, before wars with the Persians brought renewed strife. While these two elderly leviathans slugged it out, in surged a new, nimble and faith-filled force. Muslim Arabs conquered Gaza in 637, only five years after the Prophet Mohammed’s death; a flurry of Levantine cities, including Damascus and Jerusalem, were taken during the same campaign. In time, Gaza became a significant intellectual and commercial centre — before an Arab civil war in 796 ruined it altogether. That Muslim-on-Muslim conflict was just one among many early harbingers of the deep intra-Arab tension and disunity — Arabs call it fitna — which would bedevil Middle Eastern politics from the 20th century. But after the devastation of the Crusader conquests, Saladin restored Muslim pride and prosperity to Gaza, ushering in a long period of Mamluk and then Ottoman rule, which persisted until 1917.

But so many of these earlier wars and conquests seem like here-today-gone-tomorrow disturbances when compared with the devastation of today. Ancient disputes have, in the past century or so, sharpened into arguably the world’s most tragically intractable and bloody conflict, in which victims are aggressors and aggressors victims.

Lustick chose 1948 to begin his summary of the current conflict, but one could equally start a few decades earlier, with the British seizure of Palestine from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire in 1917. That moment ushered in a new iteration of a conflict that has arguably never ended. Energetically lobbied by the Zionist movement, which wanted a Jewish homeland, Britain made a fateful decision that year. London’s Balfour Declaration which — in the words of the writer Arthur Koestler “one nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third”— promised “a national home for the Jewish people” in the land the Biblical God had promised to Israel. Mass Jewish immigration followed, accelerated by the rise of the Nazis: around 250,000 Jews came to Mandate Palestine between 1929 and the outbreak of the Second World War.

Hounded out of Palestine by the Jewish Irgun and Stern Gang terrorists in 1947, the British were unable to deliver on the second principle of the declaration: that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”. Much — Palestinians would say everything — was then done by Israel to prejudice Palestinian rights. All-out conflict in 1948 led to triumph and statehood for Israel, and wholesale dispossession and disaster ­— the notorious nakba — for the Palestinians. Around 750,000 fled into exile or were expelled — mostly to the West Bank, controlled by Jordan, or Gaza, then in Egyptian hands. Prevented from either entering Egypt proper, which did not want to take in such enormous numbers, or returning to their homes in Israel, overnight they became stateless refugees.

In 1947, the UN’s partition plan, rejected by the Arabs, had proposed a Jewish state occupying 55% of the country. By 1949, Israel controlled 78% of Mandatory Palestine, leaving the Arabs occupying West Bank and Gaza, which together represented just 22% of the original territory.

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Our story of Gaza takes another tragic turn at this point. Following its victory in the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, Israel occupied Gaza, prefiguring a rise of Jewish settlements, illegal under international law, in the territory. Tensions escalated to the boiling point of the 1987 intifada, violent protests which killed more than 2,000 and which came to be emblematic — as Gaza itself has become — of Palestinian resistance. Further intifadas — killing more than 4,000 in the 2000s, and 273 in 2015–16 — surged out of the failure of the long-awaited 1993 Oslo accords to bring peace.

Meanwhile, into Gaza’s political arena stormed Hamas, making mincemeat of its secular rival Fatah. Hamas has no interest in politics or development. It clings to the dream of the destruction of Israel and has risen to power and prominence to become the face of Palestinian resistance in Gaza and beyond. As Ian Black writes in Enemies and Neighbours, a history of Israel and Palestine from 1917–2017, the Gaza Strip is “a permanent, festering — and often violent — reminder of the unresolved conflict between Arabs and Jews in the Holy Land”.

Bald statistics confirm the reality of its immiserated population. Of the 2.2 million Gazans, 68% are refugees. The poverty rate is 61%, unemployment over 46%. Over 73% of households receive humanitarian assistance, with more than 68% citing it as the main source of their income. This is what Palestinians mean when they talk about the daily violence of life under a blockade which has been in force since Hamas took power in 2007, leaving most Gazans shut in, their airspace and coastline controlled by Israel. There is no question of freedom or autonomy. This is fertile territory for resistance and hatred.

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And when Gazans consider the future, it’s hard to discern a ray of hope. They can hardly look to the occupied West Bank for a model settlement. Abandoning the armed struggle, recognising Israel and accepting 22% of historic Palestine has brought the West Bank Palestinians little in the way of dividends. Its 87-year-old “leader”, Mahmoud Abbas, head of the corrupt, enfeebled and incompetent Palestinian Authority, is known derisively in some Israeli circles as the mayor of Ramallah. Meanwhile, the two-state solution is dead and the extremists in power on both sides are dancing on its grave.

“Peace between Israel and Palestine can assume neither meaning nor substance except in Gaza, which will be both the foundation and the keystone,” wrote Jean-Pierre Filiu, Professor of Middle East Studies at Paris’s Sciences Po in 2012. A decade later, Gaza finds itself once again a cauldron of conflict. Khaled, a Palestinian friend, messages me. He fears the worst for this refuge of refugees. “For me, the unbearable human suffering experienced by Gaza is made worse by the real threat of a repeat of the historical traumatic displacement of Palestinians that Gaza embodies.”

Today, as Gaza crumbles beneath the relentless barrage of strikes, braced for another deadly invasion, a new story will begin. One can only hope, in the words of the late Lebanese poet Nadia Tuéni, writing about her beloved Beirut in 1986, that Gaza will survive: “Elle est mille fois morte, mille fois revécue.”

There are, of course, regional variations. The British, tied by geography to Europe’s fortunes, tend to favour the definitive fall of the Western empire in AD 476. The Americans, ever fearful of an over-mighty executive, linger on the collapse of senatorial authority in 49 BC. And it is also more than a journalistic trope, with the unacknowledged legislators of our world also playing the same game. Elon Musk recently suggested that today’s baby drought is analogous to the low birth rates of Julius Caesar’s dictatorship. Marc Andreessen has compared California to Rome circa AD 250. Joe Rogan, meanwhile, is beginning to suspect that all this gender business might have a worrying ancient precedent.

Such appeals to the past are only human. The fourth word in Virgil’s Aeneid is Troiam. This is the first fact that we learn about Aeneas: he is from Troy. Virgil does not even bother to tell us his hero’s name until the 92nd line. Doubtless, the poets of Ur and Hattusha had their own Troys. And perhaps the first men who placed one mud brick upon another sang of flooded valleys, choked caves and herds that no longer ran. But Rome has been our common loss since the early Middle Ages. As Virgil looked back to Priam, so we look back to Virgil. In 1951, it was perfectly natural for W. H. Auden to compare a dying Britain with a dead Rome: “Caesar’s double-bed is warm / As an unimportant clerk / Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK / On a pink official form…”

But journalists and billionaires do not work in a poetic register. They deal in facts and lucre. When they say that Britain or America is following imperium Romanum down the dusty track to oblivion, they seem to be speaking literally. This is not a mistake that Virgil would have made. It is all very well to evoke Rome as an elegiac warning. But if we believe that there are concrete lessons to learn from the Roman Empire’s decline and fall, then we will have to examine the mother of cities as she really was. The results are surprising.

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In AD 384, 400 years after Virgil composed his Aeneid, Quintus Aurelius Symmachus had a bridge problem. Symmachus was Urban Prefect of Rome, a role of huge responsibility. By the fourth century, the city of Rome was no longer the imperial capital of the western empire; it had been replaced in 286 by Mediolanum (modern Milan), which was a good deal closer to the empire’s febrile northern borders. But Rome remained the nation’s hearthstone. Her good governance was of the highest priority. The Urban Prefect dispensed justice, organised games, fed the mob and looked after the material fabric of the city. It was not an enviable position. One man had to keep the vast, turbulent metropolis ticking over with the minimum of rioting. Symmachus was well aware of the touchiness of the Roman pleb. His own father had been burned out of his house and chased from the city after making a catty remark of the “let them eat cake” variety during the wine shortage of 375.

The bridge problem went like this. Around 382, the emperor Gratian ordered that a new bridge be built across the Tiber. It soon became clear that construction was taking too long and costing too much. Two years later, as the project neared completion, one span collapsed. Such waste of public funds could not be ignored, and so an inquiry was launched. A specialist diver was engaged to examine the structure; he discovered that the job had been bodged. The engineers responsible for the project, Cyriades and Auxentius, were summoned to account for their failure. Each blamed the other, before Auxentius, who had been caught backfilling sections of the bridge with bales of hay, fled the city — pockets doubtless jingling with public gold.

On the face of it, this sounds like a very late Roman story: a nation once famous for its engineering prowess could no longer build a bridge across the Tiber without everything going horribly wrong. But I’m not sure that’s true. Problems arise all the time, and in themselves tell us very little about a society. What matters is the response to those problems. And Symmachus’s dispatches to the imperial court make it clear that his response was considered and comprehensive. The bridge was completed in the end, and stood for over 1,000 years until its demolition in 1484. Now think of 21st-century London: remember what happened the last time we tried to build a bridge across the Thames?

Peter Brown, in his excellent new autobiography Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History, identifies the kind of dogged, even cheerful resourcefulness exhibited by Symmachus as one of the hallmarks of the later Roman elite. Brown’s long historical education, which has taken him from Oxford to Berkeley to Princeton, began as a child in Forties Dublin. Born into a Protestant society unmoored by Irish independence, he observed “what it was like to face the end of empire on the ground — in the small world of the little big men of the provinces — and to do so with dignity and good nature”. Embattled but not embittered, Brown’s family taught him that “a lively and imaginative culture could coexist with constrained political and economic circumstances. It was, perhaps, a good start with which to approach the world of late antiquity…”

This is the lesson of Symmachus, who dealt uncomplainingly with his own constrained political circumstances. The governing class of his generation was under extraordinary pressure, and yet it managed to keep the show on the road, to hand its civilisation on to the next generation despite the dramatic changes wrought by increasing barbarian incursions and the transformations brought about by an insurgent Christianity. Gratian had ordered a bridge to be built and Symmachus was going to damn well see it done.

Indeed, spend a few hours reading his dispatches and you would agree that asking whether Britain is “declining like Rome” is nothing less than an insult to the Roman Empire. The city of Rome was sacked by the Visigoths in 410, by the Vandals in 455, and finally swallowed up by a new Gothic regime in 476. But while the legions held on the borders and the lawyers argued in the forum, while the tax revenues rolled into the treasury and the grain shipments cruised into Ostia, Symmachus and his friends do their duty to the patria. There had been crises before, after all, and Rome had always muddled through. It is only with the benefit of hindsight that men like Symmachus acquire the glamour of an endangered species.

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Even after the disaster of 476, there were still men around to keep the cogs turning. Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus held multiple public offices during the early sixth century. His masters were Ostrogothic kings, not emperors, and the capital was no longer at Mediolanum, but at Ravenna. None could doubt that the western Roman Empire was at an end, especially when compared to the eastern empire centred on Constantinople, which was about to flourish anew under the reign of Justinian. And yet, what do we find Cassiodorus doing? He did not waste his time on elegies for a lost world. He was far too busy for that sort of thing. Many of the city’s great buildings were falling into disrepair, so he decreed that Rome’s main brick depot be refitted with a view to manufacturing 25,000 new roof tiles every year. He chased the Governor of Lucania for his region’s taxes. He ensured that teachers of Rhetoric were properly paid. When a Goth settler seized the land of two Italians and reduced them to slavery, Cassiodorus was there to intervene.

This is not to minimise the impact of Rome’s collapse. As Bryan Ward-Perkins has shown, the post-Roman West was a bit of a dump. Timber supplanted dressed stone, flagged floors gave way to beaten earth. Coinage vanished. Cows shrank. Honorific statuary disappeared, as did indoor plumbing. The Roman ceramics industry, which had pumped out vast numbers of high-quality, wheel-thrown vessels for centuries, ground to a halt. Britain’s decline was among the most dramatic. In one moving passage, Ward-Perkins draws attention to a small object excavated at the Sutton Hoo ship burial. This famous site, which yielded intricate gold jewellery and elaborate ceremonial armour, also contained a small pottery bottle. Even the humblest Roman family would have regarded such an item as an unremarkable piece of household clutter. In seventh-century Britain, that small bottle sat naturally among the exquisite grave goods of a celebrated man.

And this is revealing. When our journalists and billionaires ask whether Britain or America is “declining like Rome”, they are really thinking about the grim realities of the early Middle Ages — a time of deprivation rather than plenty. And perhaps they are right to do so. However terrible life was in the post-Roman West, it was nothing like as bad as a similar rupture would be today. Most of us lack both the land and the knowledge to grow our own food. The support structures provided by extended family networks and stable local communities — the mortar of the pre-industrial world — have been fatally weakened. Many people rely upon regular medical intervention simply to stay alive. Our most basic goods are imported from the other side of the planet, as is the fuel required to power the machines that make contemporary life possible. Above all, centuries of peace have left us ill-equipped for the return of a society in which war is commonplace and might makes right. A fourth-century Roman would regard modern Britons as laughably weak, ignorant and dependent.

If Rome’s fall still resonates today, it is only because we know so little about the subject. Popular images of Roman decadence — Caligula drinking pearls dissolved in vinegar; Nero’s Golden House — are largely drawn from the first century, when the empire was at its height. Later emperors had no time for such diversions. They were an overworked and harassed bunch who often died violent deaths, but they often got the job done. In a sense, to ask whether the modern West is “declining like Rome” is to ask whether we are governed by people with the grit of Symmachus and the tenacity of Cassiodorus. One might as well compare a woollen toga to a polyester T-shirt.

Like the United States during the Second World War, Rome in the course of the Punic Wars became an empire. The First and Second Punic Wars saw Roman power established over Sicily, Sardinia and a good part of Spain — all former areas of Carthaginian influence. Rome also gradually extended its sway over greater Greece and Numidia, the latter coinciding with modern Algeria, to the west of Carthage on the North African coast.

Again, somewhat like the United States, imperialism helped lead to a dramatic increase in wealth in Rome itself, as a class of nouveau riche in the capital benefited from war booty, overseas trade, money lending and the like, according to the late British classicist S. A. Handford. Eventually, the Roman legions would evolve from a mass conscription military to a more professional, volunteer fighting force in order to regulate the vast territories under its influence as an imperial behemoth. The rough parallel with the development of the United States as a great power is hard to ignore, given how Washington itself has developed into a money-culture of well-heeled think tanks and flashy lobbyists, even as the mass conscription army that fought Second World War and Vietnam has morphed into a highly professional volunteer force of working-class youth, culturally divorced from the well-bred policy nomenklatura in the capital.

But the comparison becomes especially eerie when one considers that following the Punic Wars and Rome’s becoming an empire, it immersed itself in small wars against tribes and other chieftains that brought little glory and much political complications to Rome, and were a factor in its gradual decline. Of course, that is the common fate of empire, since to influence large and varied regions of the Earth naturally requires military as well as economic and political involvement. In the oft-quoted words of the mid-20th century American theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr:

“The same strength which has extended our power beyond a continent has also interwoven our destiny with the destiny of many peoples and brought us into a vast web of history in which other wills, running in oblique or contrasting directions to our own, inevitably hinder or contradict what we most fervently desire.”

The young Winston Churchill was reading into the worst nightmare of Niebuhr’s and America’s imperial future when, in 1897, he described Afghanistan in The Story of the Malakand Field Force: “a roadless, broken and underdeveloped country; an absence of any strategic points; a well-armed enemy with great mobility and modern rifles, who adopts guerrilla tactics. The result… [is] that the troops can march anywhere, and do anything, except catch the enemy….

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“The impractical”, the young Churchill wisely continues, “may wonder why we, a people who fill some considerable place in the world, should mix in the petty intrigues of…border chieftains”. Some, whom Churchill calls “bad and nervous sailors”, would simply cut and run, even though that would be impossible under the circumstances, whereas others call for “full steam ahead”, that is, a dramatic increase in military resources until the frontier valleys “are as safe and civilized as Hyde Park”. But, as Churchill intimates, there are usually neither the troops nor the money nor the will to do any such thing. Therefore, “the inevitable alternative” is a system of “gradual advance, of political intrigue among the tribes, of subsidies and small expeditions”.

Subsidies and small expeditions? Now we are at a point of concision that defines the ancient Roman imperial past and the modern American one. Arguably the signature Roman imperial expedition, which vexed Rome and contributed to much political turmoil in the capital, was the so-called Jugurthine War, which lasted for seven years near the end of the second century BC. We owe our account of it to Sallust, who was born a few decades later in the first century BC, a time when this war fought by the Romans in Numidia against its king, Jugurtha, was still recent and presumably hotly debated. The geopolitics of the Jugurthine War were straightforward. Numidia, to the west of Carthage, had been an ally of Rome and their common hostility to Carthage had cemented their alliance. Yet, following Rome’s destruction of Carthage, Numidia suddenly no longer required Roman protection. That set the context for Numidia’s efforts at erasing Roman influence from its sprawling and difficult geography.

Jugurtha was a brilliant and devious king who fought against his adopted siblings over the spoils of Numidia, and bribed his way to victory time after time by his intrigues with Rome. He corrupted Rome and concomitantly gained power in Numidia. At first he was Rome’s ally. Then he became Rome’s enemy. By the time the Roman power structure realised he had to be destroyed it was too late to avoid a major war in a faraway territory. Sallust describes the war as “a hard-fought and bloody contest in which victories alternated with defeats”. The struggle, he goes on, “played havoc with all our institutions… For Jugurtha was so crafty, so well acquainted with the country, and so experienced in warfare, that one never knew what was the most deadly — his presence or his absence, his offers of peace or his threats of hostilities.”

There are shades of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, and Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in Jugurtha, in terms of the unconventional threat posed to Rome and the United States. In some cases the imperial power was ultimately victorious, as was Rome against Jugurtha; in some cases not. But the overall effect over time was to subtly and not so subtly weaken the empire.

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An analogue from British imperial history was in Waziristan of the Thirties and Forties, when British troops tried and failed to capture the Faqir of Ipi, a radical cleric who, because of his narrow tribal base, appealed to pan-Islamic ideals in the struggle against colonial occupiers. The Faqir, or holy man, whose real name was Mirza Ali Khan, hid out for years in the caves straddling the Afghanistan and Pakistan border, inspiring his troops with sermons on religious war. Despite British aerial bombardment, the Faqir died a natural death in 1960.

Churchill’s comments ring loudly here. A great power cannot often cut and run, nor can it achieve total victory in these small wars. Britain, whose days as a great empire are over, no longer faces this dilemma. But the United States surely does. America is not a country like Sweden or Belgium. It would be simple if it were. Instead, it is, to repeat, a great power. Despite Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States cannot merely withdraw from the developing world, whose very size, political and cultural variety, and general instability guarantees that Washington will regularly face wrenching choices about how to proceed.

The problem is compounded by the nature of the foreign policy establishment in Washington, often disparaged as the “Blob”, because it often thinks according to a single, well-rehearsed mindset. The Blob wants to do great things in this world, because its heroes — those it particularly wants to emulate — were “present at the creation”, as the saying goes. I refer to the American inventors of the post-war order: men such as George Kennan, John McCloy, Averell Harriman, Dean Acheson and so on. The alliance structure that these men built would eventually, over the course of the decades, win the Cold War. The Blob wants to do something similar: create a new and long-lasting American order.

The difficulty with this grand ambition is that the United States is not the country it was in the Fifties. During that period, America was the only major industrial power in the world whose infrastructure was not severely damaged by the Second World War. This gave the United States a comparative advantage that would last for decades. Back then, it completely dominated the world economy. Its robust middle class underwrote a great navy. It was a real nation-state with a military draft. This was long before the American middle class divided into an upper-middle global elite and a lower-middle trending toward poverty. Moreover, this middle class had just gone to war in Europe and the Pacific, and was consequently understanding of rebuilding Europe and Japan. And the foreign policy elite that guided America, the elite that was “present at the creation”, had themselves just gone through the Second World War, holding key positions. They had a comprehension of the world and the tragic choices involved that the American elite of today often lacks.

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There is a pattern in all of this: great power wars strengthen a nation and relatively smaller expeditionary wars dissipate it. In our age, a small war means a professional military in fierce combat and a nation at the shopping mall, oblivious to what is going on overseas. When the population at home cannot relate to the fighting overseas, it is probably best if possible not to do it.

The question becomes: can great power conflict over Ukraine and Taiwan rejuvenate America, as it did after 1945? In that way, America would avoid the fate of Rome. Possibly. Of course, there is no mass conscription military anymore and President Joe Biden — despite all the military aid he has been sending — has wisely not committed American troops to the defence of Ukraine. Nevertheless, the national interest in defending Ukraine and Taiwan is clearly much more obvious than toppling an Iraqi dictator or staying militarily engaged in Afghanistan for two decades.

And yet, the Biden Administration is going beyond merely defending Ukraine and Taiwan with arms shipments. It is actually demanding that all countries in the world become democracies, something that the great secretaries of state of the late-Cold War Era, Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, and James Baker III, never would have done. Those diplomats were more interested in reconciliations than with issuing ultimatums. Issuing ideological ultimatums is a sign of decadence, that befits a country that is splitting at the seams politically and with an out-of-control national debt.

The Jugurthine War helped presage the end of the Roman Republic. Will America recover from the stain of its Middle East adventures? It’s an open question. Yet, great power rivalry that will likely continue for years, by engaging the whole society and economy, may change America in unpredictable ways, possibly leading to more political and social cohesion. Meanwhile, possessing a memory of Rome and what it went through can only help.

There are other myths about Christmas, this time Biblical ones. We read in the New Testament that Mary and Joseph had to leave their native town of Nazareth and travel to Bethlehem, which is where Jesus was born. They did so because a Roman census of the population required that all citizens should return to their birthplaces in order to be counted. Since Joseph, Jesus’s father came from Bethlehem, this was where the couple ended up, with Mary on the verge of giving birth to her baby.

Having everyone return to their birthplaces seems a mighty odd way of holding a census. Why not just count them on the spot? Such a project would have gridlocked the Roman Empire from end to end, since the census is said to have involved the imperial world as a whole. The upheaval would have been spectacular — so much so that we would almost certainly know about it from non-religious sources. But we don’t; no ancient historian records it. And this is almost certainly because it didn’t happen. The census is probably a narrative device for getting Jesus born in Bethlehem. Bethlehem was King David’s city, and prophecy foretold that the Messiah would come from there. It would be embarrassing for him to hail from a scruffy little place called Nazareth in the benighted rural region of Galilee. It would be like nominating someone from Barnsley as President of the Universe. (To avoid a deluge of threatening letters, I should add that Barnsley is a brilliant place to live.)

There is another anomaly here, however, since Jesus wasn’t really the Messiah at all, even if you believe that he was the Son of God. In Jewish tradition, the Messiah is a secular figure rather than a sacred one — a mighty warrior who would lead the Jewish people to victory over their enemies. The job description doesn’t fit Jesus at all, and on no occasion in the gospels does he unambiguously acknowledge the title (or, for that matter, the title of Son of God). His entry into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey looks like a satirical parody of a triumphal royal procession. He spurns what St John calls “the powers of this world”, meaning among other things the dominant political set-up, and is brought to his death by them. Politically speaking, he is a failure, executed by the imperial state and deserted by his comrades. So maybe Mary and Joseph’s winter journey to Bethlehem wasn’t necessary after all.

As even Richard Dawkins is aware, Jesus was born in a stable because the Bethlehem lodging places were full. Perhaps in honour of this occasion, hotel accommodation at Christmas continues to be scarce. Not long after his birth the child is visited by three kings, or so popular belief has it. In fact, the New Testament doesn’t mention how many of them there were, and in any case they weren’t kings at all. They were Magi: magicians, sorcerers, fortune tellers, the kind of charlatans whom rulers used to hire to bedazzle the common people with their conjuring tricks. They were also astrologers, enemies of human freedom who maintained that everything was predestined by cosmic forces, and who peered into the future in order to reassure their sovereign that his power would continue to flourish for years to come.

Why should such unsavoury characters come to visit a new-born child, the offspring of a couple of nobodies? The clue may lie in the gifts they brought with them, which were probably not gifts at all but tools of their esoteric trade. What they are probably doing is not laying down presents at the baby’s feet but surrendering the tokens of their power. The scene, in the words, may be allegorical, as the old regime of fear, awe and superstition gives way to a new world of freedom and friendship. This is how T.S. Eliot sees the matter in his poem, “Journey of the Magi”:

…this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

Also present at the birth are a group of shepherds and a choir of angels. The angels signify infinity, while the humble shepherds are of the earth. The angels are countless, the people are counted and the shepherds don’t count.

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To be humble, however, counts for a lot, at least for the New Testament. During her pregnancy, Mary pays a visit to her cousin Elizabeth, who is also pregnant. Neither woman is an image of conventional domesticity: Mary and the child she is carrying aren’t dependent on what the gospels call “the will of man”, which is to say that this mother-to-be is a virgin, and Elizabeth is beyond conventional child-bearing age. When she sees Mary, we are told that the child in her womb leaps for joy. He won’t, however, be joyful all that long.

The man he grows up to become is known to history as John the Baptist, who will be beheaded by King Herod, while Mary’s child will be executed by the occupying imperial power. Neither man has much time for the family, a set-up of which Jesus is consistently critical. When informed that his family wish to see him while he is preaching, he tells them brusquely to wait. His mission takes precedence over domestic ties. He has come not to unite families, he announces, but to divide them. John seems to have no kinsfolk at all, hanging out in the desert on a diet of locusts and honey like a refugee from Woodstock. Both men are vagrant, celibate, without home, property, profession or — as it turns out — much of a future.

Mary’s encounter with Elizabeth is staged by St. Luke (we have no idea whether it actually took place), and is one of the most astonishing scenes in the New Testament. In a sisterly dialogue, Mary bursts out in response to Elizabeth’s greeting with a passage from the Hebrew Scriptures. Perhaps she sings and dances as she does so; God, she declares, “has brought down the mighty from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away”.

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As an obscure young woman from nowhere in particular, Mary is comparing her own elevation to the status of mother of Jesus to the raising up of the poor. She is making a political point out of her pregnancy. Some scholars even claim that the words which Luke puts in her mouth are part of a Zealot chant, the Zealots being underground revolutionaries who were eventually to strike against Rome with calamitous results. Whether or not Mary’s cry is Zealot-inspired, it is almost a platitude of the Hebrew Scriptures: you will know Yahweh for who he is when you see the downtrodden coming to power. The only authentic power is one which is born of weakness.

The poor in the Bible are sometimes called the anawim, the scraps and leavings of the earth; and in an extraordinary gesture, Luke is here turning Mary into a sign of them. As a symbol of the powerless, no woman could be more powerful. Women as a whole belonged to the dumped and discarded in first-century Israel, and Mary becomes a representative of them by being raised up to freedom and dignity. The other prominent Mary in the gospels is Mary Magdalen, who despite the fact that she may well have been a prostitute is allotted the privilege of being among the first to discover that Jesus’s tomb is empty. Her testimony to the fact is officially worthless, since women were not recognised at the time as valid witnesses.

It’s all a long way from mince pies and paper hats. Still, there’s something to be said for the turkey and the trimmings. What we have retained from Mary’s jubilant chant, however dimly and distortedly, is the fact that Christmas is about rejoicing. In the depths of the dead season, new life begins to stir, and from the most unexpected of quarters. If the best we can do to recall that spirit is the gift of a new pair of socks, well, that’s the modern world for you.

But it was also rather timely; in the past weeks, Classics has endured quite a hammering. At the beginning of the month, Dan-el Padilla Peralta — a Dominican-born, New York-raised professor of Classics at Princeton — gave an explosive interview to the New York Times Magazine in which he expressed his desire to do away with “Classics” as a term and “explode the canon”, on the basis of it being appropriated by xenophobes and white-supremacists. For Padilla, it’s an endemic problem: “The production of whiteness turns on closer examination to reside in the very marrows of Classics.”

What does this mean in practice? For Walter Scheidel, a professor of Classics at Stanford University who was also interviewed for the NYTM piece, we should simply get “get rid of” Classics altogether: “I don’t think it should exist as an academic field”. Which may seem like an odd thing for a Classicist to say, but it’s a view that’s becoming increasingly widespread, and even institutionalised. Already, some departments in the US have embedded Classics within courses such as “Ancient Mediterranean Studies”. (Such rethinks are, of course, unlikely to be a universal solution; Gormley, for one, is particularly upset about the British Museum’s supposed fixation with the Mediterranean.)

Tensions over the value and ethics of studying Classics have been simmering for some years. Indeed, it is hard to think of another subject that has required its devotees to defend their field of study with such frequency. We’re told that it’s the study of useless “dead languages”; that it’s the preserve of public schoolboys, such as our Pericles-loving Prime Minister; even worse, that it needs to burn because it’s an inspiration for far-Right extremists in the US.

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The latest battle over Classics is a culmination of all the above. The fact that it remains a relatively marginal and unstudied subject in the educational system has made it an easy target in today’s culture wars. It means, for example, that Classics can be dismissed as simply the “history of Greece and Rome” — even though North Africa, Asia Minor, Gaul, the Russian steppe and many other territories also form part of it.

This cognitive blindness is made all the more peculiar when you consider how broadminded and enquiring Herodotus, Tacitus and many ancient historians could be about their fellow citizens. Although they were mostly interested in questions of national identity, when they did write on matters such as skin colour, they tended to do so with more curiosity than judgement, attempting — albeit mostly without success — to explain difference through factors such as climate and geography.

This meant that for Herodotus, the Ethiopians were dark-skinned on account of their proximity to the sun, while the inhabitants of colder territories were paler as they were further away from it. For Tacitus, the climate of Germany was such as to render its people naturally resistant to cold and hunger. It’s all nonsense, of course. But as Padilla himself has conceded, the Greeks and Romans “would have not really understood our racial categories”. One could be a Roman regardless of where you originated or what you looked like.

More importantly, these sources constitute the classicist’s raw materials; they are what lie at the heart of Classics as a field. Why is it, then, that in the debate that is now raging over the future of the subject and its right to exist, they barely get a look in? One would have thought that the actual texts and archaeological finds used by classicists today would be the first things to be considered in any reappraisal of the subject.

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Those who wish to banish Classics instead emphasise what has been done with these sources. They point to entitled Grand Tourists trundling over the ancient sites and pocketing things at will; to the likes of Winckelmann, the German art historian who idealised the whiteness of ancient statues despite the fact that they were once painted in bright hues; to the tendency of today’s far-Right to draw upon Classical imagery. Meanwhile, under the Third Reich the writings of Plato and others were mined and distorted so that they would appear to endorse Nazi eugenics.

But such a history of Classics, one which highlights only the ways the discipline has been used to incite racism and prejudice, is strikingly selective. Indeed, if the main argument against Classics resides, as it appears to, in its development as a discipline and reception in the modern world — more than in the ancient material itself — then the other side of this journey ought to be told, too. For example, it would be easier to refute claims of Classics’s Eurocentrism if attention were paid to things such the transmission of texts; if it wasn’t for the scholars of places such as Baghdad in the eighth and ninth centuries, who painstakingly translated and copied ancient manuscripts, the corpus of literature studied by classicists today would be considerably poorer.

More importantly, for every account of the abuse of classical material, there is another of inspiration. Take the growth in recent decades of “Classical Reception”, a relatively new field through which classicists engage with ancient material through the lens of more contemporary writers and artists. This specialism has helped to broaden the horizon of Classics by revealing some of the positive or at least enriching ways antiquity has permeated the modern world. The works of writers who have drawn legitimately and powerfully on ancient sources — whether it’s William Shakespeare, the St Lucian poet Derek Walcott or Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka – surely form a more meaningful aspect of the story of Classics than the misquotations extremists upload to online forum. Even Antony Gormley’s engagement with the classical tradition has inspired a number of academic papers in this area.

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If anything, the abuse of Classics ought to be used as an argument for saving it. For the alternative, abandoning it, would be to hand it over to those very groups Padilla and others identify as ransacking it. The field does not deserve to be razed because of the way it has been tended in certain quarters. If a study of Classics teaches us anything, it is how much easier it is to knock down than rebuild. As the so-called Liberators of Rome discovered to their regret, assassinating Julius Caesar, rather than what came after, was the easy part. Demolish Classics — and then what?

No one is denying that aspects of the ancient world and its reception are ugly — this is true of all cultures and periods — but that is no reason to abandon Classics itself. There is no call to study the ancient material through the eyes of Nazis. The arguments of Winckelmann can be read to be disregarded. The so-called Classics of white supremacist organisations such as Identity Evropa can be disregarded — they do not deserve the airtime.

The current climate, in which individuals cherry-pick classical quotations to their own ends, ought to be a summons to the original sources that form the heart of Classics. They ought to provide the impetus to return to Classics’ roots, to read old texts anew with our own eyes, to look at art that crossed the globe knowing no borders, to read legitimate engagements with the classical past, to think for ourselves. As Heraclitus wrote: “our eyes are more accurate witnesses than our ears”. So let’s not be afraid of using them.

What do you think of when you read the word “decadent”? Liza Minnelli showing her stocking tops while fascism looms in the shadows? Gatsby laying out his shirts to reclaim Daisy’s love? Julia Flyte’s gift from her rich lover, a tortoise whose shell bore her initials in diamonds? Or was it best embodied by notorious porn purveyor Larry Flynt, who died this week?

Merriam-Webster defines it both as “appealing to self-indulgence — a rich and decadent dessert” and “marked by decay or decline  — an increasingly decadent society.” In other words, it is considered either good or bad depending on your point of view. Not many words take in both the fall of the Roman Empire and a chocolate ganache.

Its meaning has, of course, changed over the years. Certainly things seem to have moved on since the late 19th century, when writers and artists favouring outré subjects became known as the Decadent Movement. As always there was a sizeable gulf between the French and the English; they had the deadly serious Joris-Karl Huysmans, we had the savage amusements of Oscar Wilde.

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A magazine, Le Decadent, was founded in 1886 to bring order to their principles, but even then your average self-obsessed, opium-eating onanist wasn’t exactly a team player. A lot of it was little more than a Perve’s Charter. But the Decadents shrewdly saw that hedonism could be dignified with a backbeat of tragedy, and portrayed their excesses as a sane reaction to a mad world. As Baudelaire put it: “Be Drunken, Always. That is the point; nothing else matters… Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry or with virtue, as you please. But be drunken.” With virtue? Yeah, right.

With the twentieth century, the alibis for acting out ramped up as we entered the Age Of Excuses. The barbarism of the First World War was widely accepted as the trigger for the Roaring Twenties, and by the 1950s psychology had found a deep-seated reason for every last bit of bad behaviour.

Then rock and roll came — and the genie was truly out of the bottle. Girls had always hung around entertainers, but never like this. Not so much starry-eyed fans as scalp-hungry maenads, the groupies of the 1960s and 70s cut a swathe through the equally wanton rock stars of the age.

Many of them found their El Dorado in David Bowie, a rock star who seemed to exude decadence with each breath. Could that explain why he was allowed to have sex with underage girls and watch his popularity soar, while other men in his position would have been pilloried?

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Perhaps it was simply because he didn’t seem to be enjoying it that much. His decadent behaviour was soundtracked by the splendid output of his cocaine-zombie soul-in-torment period; if he’d acted that way during his “Laughing Gnome” days, he’d have been bang to rights. But played smartly, the decadent card is enough to make people feel sorry for the most egregious of rogues. “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” William Blake wrote. “You never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough.”

But what about those times when it doesn’t lead to a “palace of wisdom”? Today’s decadents seem far more likely to end up in a shack on a cliff edge. “It’s just so lonely at the top,” squeals every showbiz biography ever written, from Charlie Chaplin to the Chuckle Brothers. And judging from the publicity for his Stories I Only Tell My Friends, the actor Rob Lowe seems unlikely to be striking out in a new direction. Lowe had it all: fame, success, teenage girls and even Princess Stephanie of Monaco. But that’s all fine — he just wasn’t happy.

No doubt Marilyn Manson — currently the centre of a huge storm concerning his sexual behaviour — will attempt to go down this more-in-sorry-than-in-salaciousness route if he ever follows up his 1998 autobiography The Long Hard Road Out Of Hell. Perhaps he’ll try to persuade us that he only behaved unpleasantly towards women because he was sad, rather than bad. (Though, while obviously feeling sorry for his partners, one does wonder what they expected from entering into a relationship with a self-confessed Satanist. Foot-rubs and rom-coms?)

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The whole saga reminds me of the English dandy and decadent Sebastian Horsley, with whom a prostitute friend of mine fell in love, having been wooed by his assurances that the relationship between hooker and client was the purest possible. He called himself an artist and the prostitutes his muses — but as he produced very little art, it appears the only thing these muses inspired him to do was to go with more prostitutes. When my friend found out that she was one of many, she was (amusingly) outraged.

But Manson and Horsley both surely illustrate something sobering about decadence: that as you get older, you really need to get over it. A jaded palate appears to make the Decadent “up the ante”, and thus turn from something merely silly into something potentially sinister. Surely, for example, we can all agree that sexually bullying the handicapped is never a good look? Yet Horsley ended up in a foreign brothel having sex with a prostitute who literally had no limbs, while Manson once boasted of urinating on a deaf fan. (Having heard his music, it’s a wonder they all weren’t.)

Still, if you know when to get off, there’s nothing wrong with youthful day-trips to Decadence. It’s one of those things, like love bites and Maoism, which you can indulge in when young and pretty, but look rather sad trying to sustain into middle age. Worst of all, it can make you profoundly boring. Its 19th-century adherents went on to embrace everything from Catholicism to anarchy. I started volunteering in a charity shop.

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Is that really so surprising, though? Not when you consider that the same waywardness which leads lost souls to decadence will eventually lead them out again — unless pleasure has destroyed them before they get the chance to break free. Because while pleasure, whether induced by pornography or cocaine, appears at first to open up a new world, hold it a beat too long and it ends up shrinking that new realm until you become not a Decadent but a lab rat, scurrying about in your own personal sewer searching for the next lever to pull.

When this happens, people begin to ceaselessly lie to themselves about their behaviour in order to continue it. And perhaps there’s a psychological reason for this: being wicked is always going to seem a lot more attractive than being weak. In every branch of the arts, for example, wicked people are glamourised, whereas the weak are portrayed as deserving nothing but contempt. This often leads to self-deception, as the Decadent insists that the source of their chosen indulgence — be it drugs or porn — is magically free of the misery and broken lives which litter its production.

By any standards, one of the most decadent people who ever lived was the Roman Emperor Heliogabalus, a cross-dressing, sex-mad tyrant who ruled between the ages of 14 and 18. The Praetorian Guard, however, were not impressed and he ended up headless and floating in the Tiber. And we all know what happened to the Roman Empire; brought down, in part, by a religion rooted in humility and self-denial — the very opposite of decadence. One can only imagine what will suddenly spring up to wash away the dirt of today’s Augean Stables. But whatever it is, no doubt we’ll pose for selfies while society burns.

But their non-historicity being the case, what’s the point of writing about them?

If history teaches us anything it’s that we should expect the unexpected. But history, unlike the news, is something that’s already happened. Historians, unlike journalists, see events in the rearview mirror. As a result, they’re rather prone to deterministic explanations. For instance, there’s the Whig view of history with its narratives of ever-increasing freedom. Marxists, meanwhile, situate historical events within an overarching process of class struggle. Indeed, from millenarians to environmentalists to the friends and foes of the Anglosphere, everyone’s trying to bend the arc of history.

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They can’t all be right, but they can all be wrong. That’s not just because of the dodgy interpretations they put on historical events, but also the significance they attach to them. Even if a particular development is accurately interpreted, it doesn’t lend much credence to your favoured narrative if it could have easily gone another way. 

Just because we can be certain that something did happen it doesn’t mean that it had to happen. And that’s why alt history is so valuable. If we accept that the past could have followed a different path, then perhaps we won’t be quite so blasé about the future.

The historian E.H. Carr was was not a fan of alt history:

“…one can always play a parlour game with the might-have-beens of history. But they have nothing to do with determinism; for the determinist will only reply that, for these things to have happened, the causes would also have had to be different. Nor have they anything to do with history.”

Of course, being a Marxist, he would say that, wouldn’t he? An ideologically-trammelled thought process is pre-determined by where it starts from. The same, however, cannot be said for what happens outside our heads. That’s why Carr’s contemporary, Hugh Trevor-Roper, believed that one can’t fully understand a period of history without considering all the other ways it might have turned out.

For instance, why didn’t the Roman Empire conquer the German lands beyond the Rhine? A determinist might reach for some geographical explanation — the territory was inhospitable and the locals scary. And yet similar obstacles didn’t stop the the Romans from assimilating Britannia, so why not Germania too?

Well, because three Roman legions were wiped out at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, that’s why — and there was nothing pre-determined about that catastrophe. It required the mother of all ambushes, made possible by the extreme cunning of the German chieftain Arminius and the extreme gullibility of the Roman commander Varus. It could easily not have happened – and thus, untraumatised by such an unexpected and total defeat, the Romans might have extended the northern frontier to the Elbe or beyond.

What would a Romanised Germania have meant for the rest of history? It’s impossible to say, but we can imagine an unRomanised Gaul. The existence of France (and the French language) as we know it today depends on the fact that, two thousand years ago, the Romans conquered Gaul, but not Germania. Had things gone differently, French (and therefore British and therefore American) history would have developed along a very different path.

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What this example also tells us is just how much of history depends on the character, abilities and decisions of particular individuals (contrast the ruthless brilliance of Julius Caesar in the case of Gaul with the trusting foolishness of Varus in the case of Germania). There’s something called the great man theory of history. It’s was a 19th Century idea and deeply unfashionable today, but while the individuals who change the course of history aren’t necessarily ‘great’ or, indeed, men — there’s no doubting their existence.

They don’t have to be heroes or villains. In fact, they don’t have to have much authority of any kind. Their impact doesn’t even have to be the result of a deliberate decision. They just have to do the right (wrong) thing in the right (wrong) place at the right (wrong) time. For instance, someone, somewhere, did something that introduced the Covid-19 virus to the human population. Whether that was eating a bowl of bat soup or dropping a test tube in a laboratory we’ll probably never know; but whatever it was, it made all the difference. 

That’s why we can’t leave alt history to the historians alone. While some of them might see merit in exploring counterfactuals, their commitment to academic rigour acts as a constraint upon their speculations. Quite right too, but there’s also a case for letting our imaginations run riot — and for that we need story-tellers.

*

The Plot Against America, is a critically acclaimed TV adaptation of Philip Roth’s novel of the same name. The point of divergence from our actual history comes when the isolationist Charles Lindbergh becomes President in 1940. It’s a warning that no country is immune to tyranny. 

The rise to power of a populist celebrity has obvious contemporary resonances. Too obvious, perhaps. In drawing parallels we shouldn’t overlook differences. I also have my doubts about alt history as wish-fulfilment. Curtis Sittenfeld had a best-seller this year with her novel Rodham — which re-imagines Hillary Clinton’s life and career if she had never married Bill. Amazingly, it turns out that she does better (in politics) without him — which, for a politician so inept in real life that she lost an election to Donald Trump, is stretching credulity.

Another example of alt history as political therapy is Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me (2019). The novel’s setting is 1980s London. But in this version of history, Alan Turing has survived the homophobic persecution of 1950s and, as a result, the progress of technology has been greatly accelerated – with dramatic consequences. For instance, the Argentinians have AI-enhanced Exocet missiles and therefore win the Falklands War. Margaret Thatcher is thus defeated at the next election — by, er, Tony Benn. (Imagine an alt history in which a left-wing writer manages to portray our first female Prime Minister without humiliating her.)

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McEwen also supposes that Turing would have created an artificial, but conscious, mind — and, furthermore, one housed within an artificial, but lifelike, human body. It’s true that Turing and his colleagues really did think that artificial intelligence was within reach; but, genius though he was, he turned out to be colossally wrong about that. A more insightful novel might have explored how — or if — he would have realised his error.

For an ‘alt technology’ novel that does convince, I’d recommend Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005). This one’s set in a late 20th century England where medical science has taken a different and disturbing turn. Individuals are cloned and their ‘offspring’ — in effect, their twin siblings — raised in secluded institutions. Eventually, in young adulthood, the clones make a series of compulsory ‘donations’ — the basis of medical treatment for their ‘models’. Just how science and society developed in this direction, we’re never really told. Ishiguro keeps most of the details from us — and what he does reveal comes slowly. In this way, the readers’ experience parallels that of the clones, whose story this is.

In its mannered intimacy, Ishiguro’s prose creates a world as confined and claustrophobic as that imposed upon the protagonists, but without ever hiding the entire universe contained within each and every human being. And thus we’re lead gently by the hand to the story’s devastating conclusion.

Ishiguro’s minimalist approach is one way to do alt history — the other is to go all out and show us events unfolding on an epic scale. Instead of describing one small corner of the altered world, we get the panoramic view. Indeed, we might see the consequences of a point of divergence playing out over decades or even centuries. I’ve previously written about Pavane by Keith Roberts in which the Catholic Church defeats the Reformation and goes on to deliberately slow down the pace of technological change — with justification, perhaps.

The Man in the High Castle by Philip K Dick is set in a world in which the Germany and Japan win the Second World War and divide America between them. But more than that, the author shows us parallel realities. There is, for instance, a story within the story — a banned book in which the Allies won the war — except not as they did in our timeline.

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Then there’s the master of the maximalist approach — Harry Turtledove. In his novel How Few Remain (1997) a missing message from General Lee is recovered by the Confederacy (instead of falling into Union hands, as it did in reality). From that small change, the author develops — in lavish detail — a timeline that extends into the 1940s. It’s not just that the South wins the Civil War, but that the two sides (the Confederate States and the rump United States) go on to fight the First and Second World Wars on America soil. By the end of eleventh novel in the series, the North nukes the South and America is finally reunified, sort of.  

*

Fully fictional alt history can therefore go where scholarly investigation can’t. While there’s merit in examining the immediate consequences of a counterfactual, there’s only so far a serious historian can take the speculation. Once you get into second or third order effects, the mounting uncertainties overwhelm academic credibility. The novelist, though, can keep going — perhaps into the far future. 

This allows us to ask an important question, which is whether the underlying forces of history would eventually reassert themselves. Even if certain details were changed, with short-term consequences, would the world end up in much the same place over the longer-term? For the historical determinist the answer is yes. If ‘great men’ like Julius Caesar or Martin Luther had died in infancy, there’d have been other Caesars, other Luthers. As for wars, some of them could have gone the other way, but for how long would that truly matter? Consider the Wars of the Roses, for instance. How many of us today know — or care — which side won?

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But at this point we need to let science intrude upon the humanities. Chaos theory, for instance, teaches us that tiny differences in starting conditions can create hugely different outcomes. It’s a phenomenon known as the butterfly effect — so-called because, conceivably, the flap of butterfly’s wings on one side of the world could lead to a hurricane on the other. If that seems far fetched, then think about the comet that wiped out the dinosaurs. With the slightest change to its starting trajectory, it would have missed Earth and human history wouldn’t have happened at all. 

The determinists, therefore, have missed something rather big. While the passage of time may erase some events, others are magnified.

A Sound of Thunder is a short story by Ray Bradbury. It’s a sci-fi scenario in which big game hunters travel back in time to shoot dinosaurs. The trip organisers are very careful about not altering the past. For instance, the only animals that get shot are ones that were about to die anyway. Furthermore, the time travellers are told to stick to a special raised platform, so that  they don’t even leave footprints behind. But then on one trip, a hunter panics — he steps off the platform and crushes an insect. When he gets back home, he finds that his carelessness has changed the course history — and not for the better. A fascistic presidential candidate who was all set to lose the election is now the winner. Oops.

That crushed insect, by the way, was a butterfly. 

*

This then is what I think alt history teaches us about real history: not that it is without pattern or meaning, but that it is fragile.

The things that we may regard as progress or count as our achievements, hang by a thread — a sequence of events, anyone of which could have turned out differently.

That’s worth bearing in mind as we congratulate ourselves on our comforts and liberties. That they were gained at all was not inevitable — and nor is their survival.

Whether or not one sees the hand of providence at work in human history, we should never take what we’ve got for granted.

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The demands on its leaders, though, were immense. Huge challenges had to be met: internal rivalries; migratory pressures; revolts by the left-behind. Confronted by these issues, it was hardly surprising that leaders in the continental heartlands of Europe should have wearied of one crisis in particular: Brexit.

Their initial hopes that it might be reversed had been dashed. Increasingly, rather than fight it, they had come to accept it as a fait accompli. In AD452, writing in Marseille, a chronicler duly recorded it as a simple statement of fact that the island was “lost to the Romans”.

A detailed account of how Britain came to leave the Roman Empire is impossible. The written sources are brief and fragmentary; the evidence from archaeology hotly contested. Only the dimmest outline of the story can be distinguished, silhouetted against the general murk. One thing, though, is clear: the narrative is one of gathering chaos. “Fertile in rebels,” St Jerome called Britain: a breeding-ground of dissent.

In 383, an ambitious warlord had stripped the island of its garrisons, crossed the Channel, and ruled as emperor in Gaul for five years. Then, in 406, the remnants of the field army in Britain backed and murdered two new usurpers in quick succession. In 407, a third pretender, the self-proclaimed Constantine III, left for Gaul. There he succeeded in obliging the offical ruler of the Roman West, a pallid and decidedly low-energy emperor by the name of Honorius, to recognise him as his partner in the purple.

Meanwhile, back in a Britain denuded of its defences, pirates from across the North Sea had begun to raid its shores. Accordingly, in 409, the Britons took up arms themselves.

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A century later, writing in distant Constantinople, a historian named Zosimus spelt out what this had meant in practice. The Britons, he recorded, “were obliged to throw off Roman rule, and live independently. No longer were they subject to Roman laws.”

Unsurprisingly – the study of the period being what it is – these brief comments by Zosimus raise almost as many questions as they answer. Who precisely had the Britons been rebelling against? It is possible that it was specifically Constantine III, and that the British rebellion had been, not a rejection of Roman rule, but the precise opposite: a display of loyalty to the legitimate emperor.

Evidence for this is to be found in a letter that Honorius may have sent to the Britons in 410, authorising them – while he was distracted by barbarian invasions and his on-going rivalry with Constantine – “to take defensive measures on their own behalf”. It is certainly the case that elements within the British elite continued to identify with Rome for decades to come. Writing to officials on the continent, they would describe their representations as “the groans of the Britons”.

Such despair was only to be expected. Britain had long been a part of the imperial system. Over the course of four centuries, its upper classes had been marinaded in classical culture, its economy woven inextricably into the continental single market, and its sense of its place in the world founded on its identity as a Roman province. For many among the British elite, then, the prospect of being abandoned by the imperial authorities was a horrifying one. It was a leap into the dark.

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By Roger Scruton

And yet there were many in Britain, perhaps, willing to make just such a leap. It is notable that in 411, when Constantine III was defeated and his head sent to Honorius, Britain was not restored to imperial rule. If there were many in the province who identified strongly with Roman order, then it is likely that there were many as well who deeply resented it.

Out in the fields no one studied Virgil. The peasantry had always had good cause to resent the exactions of the imperial tax-collectors. Increasingly, though, as Britain was stripped of its garrisons, and both internal and external security went into freefall, it seems that many among the ruling classes as well began to feel that they were getting no return on their taxes.

In Britain – more, perhaps, than anywhere else in the empire – loyalty to Rome co-existed with a sense of alienation from its rule. No matter how assiduously a British aristocrat might take baths or invest in central heating, he was almost certain to be viewed on the continent as a redneck. Centuries after the absorption of Britain into the Roman empire, the very notion of a civilised Briton was still capable of generating hilarity. “There’s no such thing,” one poet in fourth century Gaul had sneered.

To Roman geographers, Britain had always ranked as a place of mystery: for to lie beyond the bounds of the Ocean was to lie beyond the bounds of the civilised world. The crisis of 409 demonstrated just how ruinously the ambivalences of Britain’s status within the Roman empire had been metastasising.

The Brexit of the fifth century AD was a hard Brexit indeed. With the severing of the sinews that for so long had bound it to the imperial bureaucracy and economy, the society of the erstwhile province endured a cataclysmic implosion. Cities were abandoned to squatters; coinage vanished from circulation; the richest and most fertile portions of the island began to be carved up by barbarian warlords. Nowhere else in the Roman world was there collapse on quite this scale.

Further reading

Can our politics survive Brexit?

By James Kirkup

The process of transformation that would see the province of Britannia emerge, over the course of five centuries, to become the kingdom of England was far more total than anything experienced in Italy or Gaul. So alien, indeed, did the stone roads and towering walls of the vanished imperial order appear to the Anglo-Saxons to seem “orthanc enta geweorc”: “the cunning work of giants”.

Look into the mirror of the first Brexit, and a sombre parody can be found there of the country’s current agony. Lurking behind the nightmares of Leavers is a dread of the Brussels bureaucracy as the agents of an overweening imperium, impatient to reduce Britain to the status of a province; lurking behind those of Remainers is the vision of a once prosperous part of a European union reduced by its departure to rubble and weeds.

The story of Britain’s exit from the Roman empire might seem, then, to offer nothing but the grimmest of lessons. The dilemma with which geography has always confronted us – too close to continental Europe to separate ourselves from it, too peripheral ever to be at its heart – is not going away, after all, no matter how the current imbroglio may end up resolved.

Yet if the events of the fifth century offer warnings, so also do they offer reassurance. The European Union is not the Roman Empire; a no-deal Brexit will not lead to the total de-monetisation of our economy. Bad though things may seem now, they have been infinitely worse in the past.

Small comfort it may be, but to look back at Britain in the fifth century, when social and economic chaos was total, and long established bases of power and authority were collapsing all around, is to appreciate just what a crisis can truly be.