Emperor Nero – the last of the Julio-Claudians – has become a shorthand for modern moral profligacy. When Donald Trump became the first man to be elected both US president and initiated into the WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) Hall of Fame, plenty recalled Nero’s equivalent taste for spectacle. The emperor’s lascivious reputation extends to the cartoon realm of flyover America, too. In one episode of The Simpsons Homer enjoys a debauched night in the Las Vegas hotel Nero’s Palace (a reference to the city’s real Caesar’s Palace).
The very American obsession with Rome’s virtues and values, its decline then fall, can be found at the US’s most significant national sites. At the 9/11 memorial in New York, a line from Virgil’s Aeneid, wrought in iron from the debris of the collapsed towers, spanning 60 feet: “No day shall erase you from the memory of time.” Moving, perhaps. But the symbolism is heavy-handed: the Twin Towers, once a monument to a unipolar world that no longer exists, barbarically destroyed and then rendered into words about the founding myth of Rome.
At its widest extent in AD 117, the Roman empire stretched from Iberia to Persia, Britain to Egypt. More impressive is that the concept lasted from the bloody battlefields of Cannae to the era of Paul Mescal blockbusters; from the marbled halls of the senate to Springfield. And here we sit in 2025 with an entire cottage industry dedicated to the empire’s eternal resonance.
The Fabians, who founded this magazine, derive their name from the general Fabius Cunctator. There is the exceedingly obvious vernacular of Washington DC (the Capitol from the Capitoline Hill, the Senate from, well…). JMW Turner painted the classical world, from the founding and destruction of Carthage to the torture of the consul Regulus. Francis Ford Coppola used Rome as the guiding metaphor for his lifelong project Megalopolis. Our legal language is packed with Latinate homage. OK! We get it! Ancient Rome dominates The Culture and the political realm. But why?
There are few answers in The Neverending Empire: The Infinite Impact of Ancient Rome by the Italian journalist Aldo Cazzullo. It holds your hands through the foundation of Rome, with excessive concern dedicated to the Aeneid, to the rise of the republic and the imperial period, then of Christianity and the splintering of the empire. It tells you that internal migration, an unmanageable reach and a kind of abstracted decadence contributed to its fall. The book – a catalogue of events, more accurately – makes good on one promise of its blurb: it offers plenty of proof that “the ancient Romans have inspired poets and artists”, that “they have dictated the rules of war, architecture, language and law” and that they have inspired “America’s democratic influence and digital revolution.” But the why and how are absent.
The Neverending Empire is translated from Cazzullo’s native Italian, and is his first book for an international audience. Unfortunately, it shows – from strange asides (“Virgil must have been a lovely man”) to banalities (“Just like a Roman emperor, the president of the United States exercises direct sovereignty over a vast territory, and makes pacts of various kinds with other countries”); confusing conclusions (“the figure of Atilius Regulus also belongs more to myth than history, which makes it all the more significant”) to outlandish statements (Christians weren’t the first people to want to change the world, “but they were the first to understand that, in order to change the world, one must first change man.”)
It may be unfair to claim that The Neverending Empire fails to answer the only question it poses: why does Rome wield this so-called infinite impact? An attempt comes on the penultimate page. “Whenever we utter the words of religion, politics and public life”, Cazzullo writes, “we are unknowingly paying tribute to Ancient Rome… a society crossed by great moral tensions, in which the ideal of universal government and lasting peace had taken root and is now destined to remain in the human heart.” It is both directionally true and unsatisfying. Yes, the systems we use – legal, political, linguistic – owe a debt to those that built Rome. But why Rome and not Greece? What of the Napoleonic era – of which we have fresher memories? And why not the successive dynasties of China, stories replete with their own treachery and decadence, decline and salvation?
Perhaps we can extract an answer from last year’s Megalopolis. Coppola’s film transcribed the story of Catiline – a Roman politician who tried to seize the reins of the republic from the conservative grandee Cicero – onto a futuristic New York. The film tried to warn via its conceit: modern America is as vulnerable to the throes of demagoguery and truculent conservatives as much as the Republic was. Meanwhile, a 2023 BBC documentary Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator somehow managed to be even more literal. As Shami Chakrabarti put it: “I think the Caesar story really is a wake-up call.”
I wonder if the culture calls on the same reference points simply because it has too few to hand: that this is all a product of lazy thinking and shallow historical knowledge. If so, Rome’s “infinite impact” becomes self-sustaining: Rome is engrained in the culture because, well, Rome is engrained in the culture. This narrow field of reference has everything to do with the trickle-down economics of elite education. Examination of the classics formed the basis of schooling for centuries, knowledge of Latin and Ancient Greek a requisite foundation for a so-called gentlemanly education. So Seamus Heaney, WB Yeats and VS Naipaul drew on the font in the 20th century, just as Locke did in the 17th. Even the contemporary politician Boris Johnson (a self-conscious philhellene more than acolyte of the republic) quotes from the Iliad. Elite cultural production has been forged by the classical world-view. And in turn, so has popular culture.
Perhaps the more pertinent (certainly the fresher) question is not how this all came to be, but whether the comparison is valuable at all. In 2016 as a Trump presidency loomed and the American liberal establishment collectively lost their minds, the New Yorker staffer Adam Gopnik found himself wandering around the Roman Forum. He reflected on the forces that collapsed the republic and its contemporary resonance. Trump, he contended, was “an honest to God demagogue of the classical model”. And though America is a different world from 63 BC Rome, fragility is what all republics have in common. His hand-wringing article concludes: “The lesson of the Roman Forum” is that everything “is more delicate than we can imagine.”
The Ancient historian Polybius, as he charts the 53 years it took for Rome to become a dominant world power (220-167 BC), contended that the only way to understand the “vicissitudes” of historical fortune is to recall “the calamities of others”. An idea rendered in modern parlance under the cliché: “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” It is a mode of thinking general to the Western canon. But what if the inverse could be true too? That dwelling obsessively on historical analogy becomes a deterministic exercise?
It is true that Rome lives in the contemporary imagination more vibrantly than any other society. But decline – meteoric rise and catastrophic fall – are encoded in the DNA of the place. To point to Rome and say, “They’re just like us,” is to say, directly, “And we are destined for that fate too” – almost as if we are willing it.
The Neverending Empire: The Infinite Impact of Ancient Rome
Aldo Cazzullo
HarperCollins, 320pp, £20
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This article appears in the 26 Feb 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Britain in Trump’s World