Victor Davis Hanson compares America’s current historical moment to the period surrounding the life of Christ, when the Roman Republic transformed into the Roman Empire, during an interview with Bradley Devlin of “The Daily Signal.” “I think we’re somewhere in that period between the Battle of Actium (31 BC) and the death of Octavian Augustus (14 AD),” Hanson said. “We’re in a transitional period where globalization is the modern equivalent of an empire, because it is-if you think about it-run by the United States.” “Everybody wears a suit and tie if they’re a diplomat, jeans are everywhere, everybody’s got a cell phone… Everybody emulates the United States. Every time I look at a Chinese airplane or a Chinese uniform, I just think that they stole it from us.” “So it’s kind of like what’s happening. But there’s still a sense inside the United States that we’re still operating under Republican principles; but there’s a doubt that these next generations are going to be able to continue that America,” he said.
BRADLEY DEVLIN, THE DAILY SIGNAL: You’re a historian, you are a classicist. When we look to antiquity, are there any examples of nations or cities that have experienced this type of rapid demographic change and made it out on the other side? I mean, I think we focus a lot on the negative cases, of course—but are there negative cases and positive cases of this?
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: If you look at what I’d call late Republic–early Imperial literature, it’s graphic, and there are about nine authors… You have Juvenile’s satires (60-70AD), Petronius’ Satyricon (60AD), Catullus (50AD), The Lives of the Twelve Caesars… and you get the impression that the Italian agrarian mindset/protocol/morality… is now globalized and diluted. The places Rome has occupied are wealthier: they’re more naturally wealthy in the east (they have more precious metals—silver, gold; more fertile land in the Nile Delta; etc.), so there’s a lot of money being made in this global system of trade that Rome created.
One of the things that’s happened is Rome has now grown from 300,000 to over a million, and the number of people who are Italian natives, given one million slaves came in from Gaul alone, the number of people who are Italian, and reflected in the literature is considered to be dwindling, eroding. You’ve got too many people from all over the world who are not on the same page as far as Latin knowledge. It’s that famous “rivers of blood” speech that’s in Virgil’s Aeneid: “We’ve got too many streams coming into the Roman River.” But there is a sense, at least, that money, money, money—globalized money.
Trimalchio is the kind of anti-hero of the Satyricon. He’s a buffoonish guy from somewhere in the east, with a Semitic name (we don’t know where), but he’s fabulously more wealthy than any Italian because he’s a master of international trade—shipping across the Mediterranean. He’s very gross, and the dinner is just… everything that today we consider shocking (or at least traditionalists do) is in that novel: transgenderism, transvestism, polymorpheous sex, fixations with bizarre food, dress, nudity—everything’s become a fetish. And that is the subtext of that work by an old Roman noble, Petronius, a brilliant satirist, is that Rome is now much wealthier, more advanced, more technologically sophisticated, but it comes at the price of morality. I mean, there’s pedophilia in it, there’s everything.
There’s also a Catullus’s “Attis” poem—it’s all about somebody who conducts a transgendered surgery, eunuch-castration, on himself… he’s cut his testicles off because he’s under the sway of this eastern Cybele cult to whom he’s been introduced; he’s in ecstasy, and then he wakes up at the end on the shore crying because he’s no longer a westerner.
But anyway, the literature from 40 BC to 100 AD talks about that transition. When you say there’s good and bad, it’s very clear there’s much more wealth, much more technology, much more leisure—but there’s also no moral restraint, no Italian rural code. That’s the elephant in the room when you read Virgil’s eclogs or the Italian agrarian code that won the battles against Carthage and created the empire—they’re all gone now, and people are effeminate.
BRADLEY DEVLIN, THE DAILY SIGNAL: It is this era of Roman decadence that… to back up, it’s interesting that Mary Beard places the climax of Rome’s greatness at the expansion of Roman citizenship (essentially, too). We’re talking about that time period, and though Cicero teaches us that what is expedient is also morally right, from my reading of Roman history, it seems much more about expedience and standardization: Roman statesmen dealing with how to manage such a large empire. Modern readers pick up “SPQR” they read it as if Rome were some liberal, creedal nation with liberal values—but that wasn’t the case at all.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Emperor Caracalla, in 212 AD when the empire was broke, the declaration granted everyone residing on Roman lands citizenship—for tax purposes—so they could tax them and unlesh the tax collectors. But by then, the feeling in art and literature is there was no Republic anymore, it doesn’t have a lot to do with third- or second-century Roman life. And there’s no republic anymore, and the provinces—especially in the east—is where the money is. So when this thing splits apart in the 470s, it’s no accident the Byzantines will live for a thousand years: that’s where the money is, that’s where the science is taking place. But that’s also where the Romans are saying they have this word luxus — luxury and decadence.
And, it’s very similar to the United States, in the sense of there was this kind of agrarian American code that, you know, you see in movies of the 1930s and 40s; and now we’re sort of a globalized, powerful, wealthier—but people are less happy, or they don’t seem to reflect what the founders thought the country should be. It’s the same dichotomy.
BRADLEY DEVLIN, THE DAILY SIGNAL: Yeah, and that brings me to the next question, which is, you might subscribe to some sort of cycle of regimes that was often a focus of ancient writers—whether that’s Plato or Aristotle or later Greeks like Plutarch, who’s living in the Roman era. If we’re likening that first–second-century Roman Empire to what we see now in the United States, where do you think the United States is in this cycle of regimes? Is the age of the American Republic over, and it is the age of American empire? Has the age of empire really even begun?
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: No, I think we’re somewhere in that period between the Battle of Actium and the death of Octavian Augustus (31 BC–AD 14). We’re in a transitional period where globalization is the modern equivalent of an empire, because it is—if you think about it—run by the United States.
As far as the top six corporations in the world, I think five of them are American: Google, Apple, Nvidia, and then everybody wears a suit and tie if they’re a diplomat, jeans are everywhere; everybody’s got a cell phone. Silicon Valley is, for all of its problems, still the cutting edge as far as world technology. Everybody emulates the United States. Every time I look at a Chinese airplane or a Chinese uniform, I just think that they stole it from us.
So it’s kind of like what’s happening. But there’s still a sense inside the United States that we’re still operating under Republican principles; but there’s a doubt that these next generations are going to be able to continue that America. Because of this, there’s no civic education, and they’ve been brought up on globalism—you don’t judge people, you don’t… it’s this moral relativism.
There’s no problem, if you want 16 percent of your population foreign-born, then you have to have an immersion program of integration, assimilation, adop—adaptation. We don’t.
BRADLEY DEVLIN, THE DAILY SIGNAL: Yeah, and our version of that is, “Well, why don’t we just take the public school and make everybody speak Spanish,” rather than having good English tutors or English studies. I think it’s interesting that you mention a time of transition, because as we look to the world, as we look to foreign affairs, there’s a lot of talk about China, of course rising; there’s a lot of talk about multi-polarity. It’s interesting that this transitional period has come with rising sentiments of nationalism in the United States and other countries in Europe.
To be direct about it: is the unit of the nation-state fit for the challenges that the 21st century is going to pose? Because I think a lot of people think multipolarity—resurgence of nation-states, resurgence of national sovereignty—isn’t necessarily the case. You could be dealing with five, six, seven different regional empires or regional hegemonies that would still be defined as multipolar.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Yeah, I think we’re in a race between westernization, which is really globalization, and whether that’s going to make things uniform in the West’s interest, or whether it’s going to empower them technologically, financially, culturally. The indigenous or innate systems are still going to be very hostile to us; but they’re going to be very dangerous. So the Middle East or China will have weapons, they’ll have—and we saw that with COVID—they’ll have sophisticated technology that poses a threat to us; and we will think that because they have cell phones or they watch a podcast or they twerk or something, that they’re like us—and that’s not necessarily the truth.
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