Decadence, Imperialism, and Decline from the Late Twentieth Century

Abstract

The purpose of this chapter is to bring my survey up through the late twentieth century to the present day. I point out that the warnings of these contemporary authors and commentators about the decline of the West strongly echo the bleak prognosticators of the first decades of the twentieth century. In doing so, they are reiterating Roman collapse as the pivotal and iconic precedent. The constant, universal myth of Rome’s decline and fall serves its function as a prime precedent and analogy. Such analyses of culture, mass culture, intellectual standards, and morals suggest that the present is a recreation of the past, with the same ruinous repetitions. In this chapter, I also compare these literary analyses with two very notable representations of the later empire—Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000) and Alejandro Amenábar’s Agora (2009).