If you have recently been on Elon Musk’s X, you may have noticed a steep rise in popularity of accounts that have taken an interest in Classical aesthetics and ideas. These so-called ‘statue profile accounts’ — named for their fondness of using images of classical busts of Roman and Greek philosophers as profile pictures — often perpetuate harmful and misguided beliefs about the course of Classical history, ideas that have been spreading for centuries.
One popular image depicts the four panels comprising Victorian painter Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire showing the decline and graphic destruction of the Roman empire. This is accompanied by the text “Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times” — a quote attributed to dystopian fiction author G. Michael Hopf. Many iterations of this format claim that we currently reside in this last stage, in a society suffering through the degeneration of men causing societal collapse — drawing parallels to the fall of the Roman Empire.
The narrative of weak, queer men being the progenitors of societal downfall does not hold as many parallels to history as right-wing proponents may have us believe.
Historians once blamed the fall of the Roman Empire on the ‘degenerate’ and ‘decadent’ nature of emperors based on writing during the terminal part of the Empire. Common targets are emperors such as Nero and Elagabalus. The latter was described in Roman and modern texts as indulgent, effeminate, and delusional in their desire to be referred to as a ‘lady’ instead of a ‘lord.’ Elagabalus was also described as seeking what we may now call a vaginoplasty from their physician and dressing up as the goddess Venus, the pinnacle of female beauty in the Roman world. European scholars considered this behaviour indicative of a more widespread cultural decline which saw material culture — particularly the famous bone white, masculine statues — become effeminate and weak.
As European colonial expansion increased, fear of an apocalyptic decline and collapse of empires rose. As Western explorers happened upon hitherto ‘unexplored’ lands, they discovered many spectacular ruins. The Mayan pyramids at Chichen Itza, Angkor Wat in Cambodia, Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka — wherever it was, it seemed to them that the remnants of great lost civilisations scattered the earth. These societies were seen to have followed a similar fate to Rome, where their culture and identity was completely eradicated and replaced by a new group of people in a Dark Age of intellectual regression, who would have to rebuild civilisation from the ground up. What is most disturbing is that these beliefs were particularly favoured by the Nazis who saw themselves as a culturally advanced society, like Rome, at risk of destruction by degenerates. They did not want to follow the same fate.
In reality, none of the ruins colonists encountered were ‘lost’ and none of these lands were ‘unexplored.’ For the examples listed above, climate played a big role in their abandonment. All of them were abandoned due to climatic fluctuations around what we call the “Little Ice Age,” which saw large scale failure of crops in massive low-density equatorial cities due to increasing intensity in monsoons and droughts. Indeed, the so-called ‘Late Antique Little Ice Age’ saw a cooling period during the terminal years of the Roman Empire negatively impacting harvests, a great detriment to its political system and a likely cause of subsequent geopolitical fragmentation.
In other words, the abandonment and ruin of a society’s spectacular civic structures does not indicate the destruction of culture. Social structures shift when they are no longer sustainable, such as in the face of climatic uncertainty.
We know that the descendants of those living around Angkor Wat moved south to Cambodia’s current capital of Phnom Penh, and the residents of Sri Lanka’s giant cities moved to the south of the island. Moreover, Rome’s ‘fall’ did not come about because it was destroyed by barbarians or its culture was ruined by ‘degenerates’ as Victorian historians claimed.
This has not stopped the right from blaming the supposed collapse of society on ‘degenerates.’ Armed with graphic imagery of the pristine, marble city of Rome being systematically torn apart by foreigners, right-wing proponents play on racist anxieties of invasion harkening back to the days of British imperial fragility. The strength and stoic character of men are thus the only means of saving a society in peril and the converse are those wielding the axes that tear down society.
As in the terminal Roman Empire, we are living in a period of climate change and political volatility. In times such as these it is only natural to want to look back into similar times in the past for guidance. The right does this by blaming concrete groups of people who exist today and can be used as targets for the fall of civilisation, based on loose connections in ancient texts (i.e. queer people, people of colour, disabled people etc.). But the reality is much more complex; empires, whether that be the Roman or the British, are not sustainable and their political structure always falls apart eventually. It is never the character of the people who is to blame, community and cultural resilience is what persists in the ‘ruins of society.’
