This morning I succumbed to yet another book. This time around it is Adrian Goldsworthy’s How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower.[1] This is the third book of his over the last few years, and the first two I enjoyed quite a bit. In the Introduction, he touches upon the key word in his subtitle. Namely, Rome is often associated with America, today’s superpower. Americans themselves appear to be obsessed with Rome. He sees few parallels, though. As he argues, perhaps the only connection is in “human nature”.[2] I very much agree with his assessment. My interest in Rome’s demise has little to do with America as such. Rather, I am interested in the demise of our entire civilization in the context of climate change, beginning with global warming and ending with the inevitable ice age. This is where human nature will come to the fore once again, I am quite convinced. The Dark Ages to follow will be quite different the second time around, no doubt, but many parallels will still pertain. After all, I am interested in the future and only the future.

Addendum (January 21, 2012)

As it turns out, I have already read the book I bought yesterday morning. In fact, I bought in 2009. It is Adrian Goldsworthy’s The Fall of the West: The Slow Death of the Roman Superpower, of course.[3] In the two editions, one British and another American, only the titles differ. Funny enough, I discovered my mistake only this morning, a full day too late. As I was reading the Epilogue, to which I fortunately hastened somewhat prematurely, the last line left me speechless, for it sounded very familiar. “You know,” Goldsworthy quotes an American student from Oxford, “people are kinda stoopid.”[4] As I discovered a moment later, I long copied this line together with the story that frames it into my Residua (“The Simplest of Morals,” November 24, 2009). Kinda stoopid? You betcha!

Footnotes

1. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2009.

2. Op. cit., p. 6.

3. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2009.

4. Op. cit., p. 423.