If you were a Roman citizen around 200 BCE, you might have assumed that Rome was going to last forever.
At the time, Rome was the greatest republic in human history and its institutions had survived several invasions and all kinds of disasters. But Rome’s foundations started to weaken less than a century later, and by 27 BCE, the republic had collapsed. It then transformed into an empire, and even though the Roman state persisted, it was no longer a representative democracy.
The fall of the Roman Republic is both complicated and straightforward: The state became too big and chaotic; the influence of money and private interests corrupted public institutions; and social and economic inequalities became so stark that citizens lost faith in the system altogether and gradually fell into the arms of tyrants and demagogues.
All of that sounds very familiar, doesn’t it?
Edward Watts is a historian at the University of California San Diego and the author of two books on ancient Rome. One, from 2018, is called Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell Into Tyranny, and the other, from 2021, is The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome.
Mortal Republic is probably the best thing I’ve read on Rome’s history, both because it lays out what went wrong and why, and because it attempts to explain how the lessons of its decline might help save fledgling republics like the United States.
I invited Watts on The Gray Area to talk about those lessons and why he thinks the American republic is in danger of going the way of ancient Rome. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You told me several years ago that you thought America might be in the beginning stages of a similar decline as Rome. Where do you think we are in that process today?
I was much more optimistic in 2018 than I am now. What I saw in 2018 was a set of imbalances. I saw a primal scream by the American electorate that said, “We do not like what we’ve got.” And I saw hints that we might have violence injected into our political life. I had no idea that within two years that violence would take the form that it did and it would come so close to actually destroying the political system.
I was talking to a friend from Italy a couple of weeks ago about January 6, and he was like, “Oh, yeah, it’s a blip.” And I said, “Well, let’s game this out. They came very close to actually getting in there when the representatives were present in the chamber, it was something like 15 minutes between when the representatives left and when the rioters got in. What would happen if they actually had gotten in and seized some representatives or disrupted the vote?” And my friend said, “Well, they would call in the army.” Who would call in the army? Who is actually legitimately in charge at that point? Who does the army answer to?
This was the situation Rome found itself in. Once you break a system, there are no rules governing what happens and all of the institutions that depend on that system free-float. And I think we don’t appreciate how close we came to a moment where that was our government, or our lack of government. And in Rome that happened and it was profoundly devastating, hundreds of thousands of people died because of that. It’s not something that we should play with.
Both the Roman political system and our own system were designed to be slow-moving with the idea that change should happen ploddingly and deliberately. Do you think, in retrospect, that trade-off wasn’t worth it for Rome? That it was too hard and too convoluted and therefore incapable of being responsive enough to what was happening?
This is where the 2,000-year lifespan of the Roman state is so important. Over and over in Roman history, there are these moments where people step back and say, “What we have is broken.” But because you have leaders and because you have a tradition of adapting, most of the time Rome doesn’t blow up all of these traditions and systems it inherited. It tries to find ways to amend them and to adapt them and to create new ways to make them more responsive to the needs of its citizens.
The empire was built initially as a kind of Italian enterprise to extract stuff from all of these other places that it controlled. But by the early part of the third century [CE], every single free person in the Roman Empire was a citizen of the Roman state. And so this model of Italians extracting things from colonial subjects was gone. You couldn’t run an empire that way anymore because you have 6 million Italians and 60 million other Roman citizens. And so the third century was a process of trying to figure out how you remake a society that was originally devoted to sending resources into Italy and make it responsive to the needs of all of those people everywhere.
Would you say that adaptability, that expansion of the circle of citizenship, was the key to Rome’s survival for that long?
Yeah, and I think that’s a lesson we should take away from Rome. What Rome was able to do from its very earliest point, from the point when there were Roman kings, was to identify who could contribute to its society and find ways to empower people who were initially [on the] outside.
So some of the first Roman kings actually weren’t Roman. They were chosen because they were the best people for the job. The third-to-last king, Tarquinius Priscus, wasn’t even born in Rome. He actually grew up in a city in Etruria (present-day central Italy) and moved to Rome because it was a place where you were allowed to rise as high as your talents would permit. This society wouldn’t block you because you weren’t of the right background.
This was deeply ingrained in what Roman society was, and I think that’s a lesson for us. You have to remain grounded in the things that make your country function, but you have to also acknowledge that there are people who may not have been born in a position of authority who have something to contribute. And if you’re going to make your society function in the long term, you have to find a way to bring them in, not just because it’s fair, but because they make your country better.
What’s interesting about Rome is that they experienced something like 150 years of political dysfunction and a brutal civil war before they finally scrapped the republic for an empire. That’s a long period of steady decline. Do you believe America has that much time to get its political affairs in order as a country?
Just in the last four years, we’ve had people try to storm Congress and two assassination attempts. It took Rome a really long time to get to the point where they were willing to do that. And the fact that we’re barely talking about those assassination attempts is stunning.
In Rome, there was a sort of creative tension that usually functioned well, but sometimes didn’t, between individuals who wanted to push change and systems that were designed to resist rapid change. In 27 BCE, Augustus figures out how to create a regime where he is the dominant figure for the rest of his life, but there are a couple of moments before that where individuals make choices that could have gone differently, but they have enough faith in the integrity of the system, and they have enough trust in the aesthetics of that system, that they do not go that far.
The moment that jumps out to me immediately is Sulla, who was a dictator. He won a civil war, he murders Roman citizens in a fashion that is totally contrary to what a Roman state is supposed to do, or what any state is supposed to do.
But Sulla fundamentally believed that a republic is important. He seized power and he occupied a position of authority as an autocrat for a couple of years and then gave the republic back because he believed that was important to do. He did not need to do that.
And I think that’s a moment where we should reflect on whether some of the people who could find themselves in a position similar to Sulla in the United States would make that same choice. Would they walk away after changing whatever they wanted to change? I don’t think so.
You once told me that people like Trump pop up in an old republic every generation or so, when things reach a certain point, and either the system reboots and gets back on the tracks or it goes the other way. I’m not really asking you to weigh in on the politics here, but I am asking you, as a historian, what you make of Trump as a symptom of deeper problems in the country.
This is where the tension between the system and the individual becomes so important because there are moments where republican systems are not working and an individual does seize the momentum and seize the opportunity to potentially refashion them in whatever way that person wants. They could do like Sulla or Caesar. Sulla seizes the republic, he kills a lot of people, but he turns it back, he restructures it. He believes in the republic.
Caesar also takes over the republic, and what he wants to do is create a republic that is truly a republic. Caesar, I think, deeply believed that there are certain aspects of the republican structure and of this idea of a citizen-held political community that he did not want to transgress, even if it would cost him his life. It was much more important to him to have a republic than it was to make himself safe. He made that choice knowing full well that it was a choice.
What I find alarming about Trump is I do not believe he cares whether this country is a republic or not. And so if he takes power and he has the ability to remake the state, he’s not going to remake it as a republic. He’ll remake it as whatever he decides he wants it to be, but he has no deep commitment to the idea of the republic, and that’s different from every Roman who takes power.
Of the many lessons we might draw from Rome’s collapse, what do you think is really worth reflecting on in this political moment?
I think the biggest point — and I’m afraid the ship has already sailed — is that violence should never be a part of politics. Once it’s there, it is very hard to make it go away without even more violence that ultimately neutralizes the people willing to do it. Violence has no part in a representative political system.
But I think the other thing that is really important for us to understand is that you cannot wait or hope that a single individual is going to fix the problems in a society or fix the problems in a political system. If you have a political system that has functioned reasonably well and has been adaptable over the course of decades or centuries, that’s a very valuable thing. It creates rules, it creates assumptions, it creates a state of play where everybody more or less knows when you do X, this is how the system is going to respond. If you destroy that, you have nothing. And if you destroy that because of an individual, you just have that individual.
Very occasionally, you will get an individual who creates something that maybe isn’t even better but is at least something. Most of the time the person who destroys does not have the capacity to create. And so you’re going to replace something that has governed just about every aspect of your civic and personal lives for your entire existence, and probably, in the United States, for the existence of 10 generations of your ancestors potentially. If you throw that away for an individual, you’re making a really significant bet. And if that individual is somebody that you don’t 100 percent trust is capable of creating something different, you are throwing away an incredibly valuable thing for nothing.
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