This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as a Modern Cultural Myth Theodore, John Michael Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 02. Oct. 2021 The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as a Modern Cultural Myth JONATHAN THEODORE King’s College London Thesis Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of London Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries School of Arts and Humanities September 2014 1 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS It would be all too easy to spread the net of debt and gratitude as wide as possible, but I will keep this short and sincere. First and foremost I would like to thank my research supervisor Richard Howells, for his constant and invaluable guidance and assistance in drafting this thesis. He has been everything a research supervisor could be. I am also extremely grateful to Peter Heather for his kind thoughts on the thesis as it developed. Furthermore, I would like to thank both him and Brian Young for stimulating my interest in history and culture many years ago as an undergraduate. I would also like to thank my parents for their emotional support and all-round sensible advice on this project. Jonathan Theodore King’s College London, September 2014 2 ABSTRACT For this study, I am investigating the “decline and fall” of Rome, as represented in British and American culture and thought, from the late nineteenth through the early twenty-first centuries. It is my argument that the “decline and fall” of Rome is no straightforward historical fact, but a “myth” in the academic sense coined by Claude Lévi-Strauss, meaning not a “falsehood” but a complex social and ideological construct. It represents the fears of European and American thinkers as they confront the perceived instability and pitfalls of the civilization to which they belonged. The material I have gathered illustrates the value of the decline and fall as a spatiotemporal concept, rather than a historical event - even when most of its popular and intellectual representations characterises it as such. I am therefore inquiring into the ways in which writers, filmmakers and the media have conceptualized this “decline”; and the parallels they have drawn, deliberately or unconsciously, with their contemporary world. My work fits into a broader collection of studies examining the continuing impact of the Greco-Roman heritage on our cultural and ideological horizons. However, though the representation of antiquity is a fast-growing field of scholarly inquiry, the theme of this project has been little examined. I am critical of the standard model of the “sociology of representation” in history, which holds that such media is almost exclusively a vehicle to articulate contemporary concerns, and which omits the recurring role of deeper, underlying historical and cultural narratives. When I consider the “decline and fall,” it instead becomes apparent how the present is adapted to fit the enduring tropes of the past. 3 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................. 5 Representation and Myth; Hermeneutics and Historical Consciousness; Antiquity, Past and Present; Methodology CHAPTER ONE: HISTORIOGRAPHY, MYTH AND VISUAL CULTURE ...................... 30 The Fall of the Western Roman Empire and its Modern Historiography; The Decline and Fall as an Atypical Model of Myth; Myth as Interdisciplinary Study; Theories of Myth; Historiography, Myth and Literature; Historical “Consciousness” and Narrative; Classics and the Vernacular; Film and a Consciousness of Antiquity; Film, Mass Culture and Rome; Truth and Accuracy in Historical Cinema CHAPTER TWO: THE FALL OF ROME AND IDEAS OF DECLINE ............................ 122 The Tradition of Decline; Gibbon’s Decline and Fall; Gibbon and Concepts of Decadence CHAPTER THREE: ROMAN DECLINE AND THE WEST IN THE MODERN AGE ........ 155 Rome and Reflections on Twentieth Century Society; Roman Narratives and the Cold War; Mann, Hollywood and Historical “Truth”; The Fall and Contemporary Discourses of Empire CHAPTER FOUR: DECADENCE, IMPERIALISM AND DECLINE FROM THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY ..................................................................................... 201 Mass Culture and its Critics; Gladiator, Rome and America in 2000 AD; 9/11 and Critics of Empire; Cinema and the Decline and Fall in the New Millennium; Rome, Civilization and the Modern Age CONCLUSION .................................................................................................. 258 BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................ 265 4 INTRODUCTION Representation and Myth For this thesis, I am investigating the “decline and fall” of Rome, as perceived and imagined in aspects of British and American culture and thought, from the late nineteenth through the early twenty-first centuries. It is an interdisciplinary study of these representations and their cultural functions. I am inquiring into the ways in which writers,1 filmmakers and the media have conceptualized this “decline”; and the parallels they have drawn, deliberately or unconsciously, to their contemporary world. My work fits within a broader collection of studies examining the continuing impact of the Greco-Roman heritage on our present cultural and ideological horizons. However, though the representation of various areas of antiquity is a fast- growing field of scholarly inquiry, the theme of this project has been little examined in this context. By “representation” I refer to the ways in which material has been transmitted, rewritten, adapted and reimagined. The re-presentation of past eras in new cultural forms is a complex activity, one that is bound up in a much broader set of social and historical processes. The reception of classical and medieval culture has a rich and meaningful history of its own. These successive interpretations of the past can prove to be far removed from the events or ideas they describe. And yet one can never fully understand the history of the post-classical world without some 1 “Writers” referring to those of both popular and intellectual inclinations in their work, or agents of “high” and “low” culture as they might otherwise be described. 5 measure of direct reference to the ancient cultures against which it has never ceased to define itself, by varying methods and means. By looking through the prism of the sociology of representation, however, I can emphasise the subject’s value in a rather different light: as “illuminating textual manifestations of the mentalities of the societies from which they arose.”2 The standard model of the cultural “representation” of history theorises that these media are primarily a vehicle to articulate contemporary concerns. While this approach is at least partly correct, it sometimes misses out the recurring constancy in the value of older historical and cultural narratives, of which our topic in question is a prominent one. Expanding on this approach by incorporating such narratives and traditions helps us understand that the “decline and fall of Rome” is no simple unfiltered “fact”, but a “myth” in the academic sense coined by Claude Lévi-Strauss, meaning not a falsehood but a complex social and ideological construct.3 This is a predominantly secular mythology; though it incorporates a moral and eschatological dimension, one which is partly borne of its theological roots. It represents the fears of European and American thinkers as they confront the perceived instability and pitfalls of the civilization to which they belong. It is a paradigm with a currency stretching back hundreds of years, but which still finds a powerful and influential presence in its mediation through the era of celluloid and mass media. The material I will gather in this study illustrates the value of the decline and fall as a spatiotemporal concept, rather than a historical event - even when most of 2 Richard Howells, The Myth of the Titanic (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), p. 21. 3 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. Clair Jacobson (London: Penguin, 1968), pp. 203-6. 6 its popular and intellectual representations characterises and classify it as such. Divisions such as the “Middle