The empire of the Romans in the West, its origins tracing back more than a thousand years, drew its last breath in 476 A.D., when a barbarian army led by a warrior named Odoacer, half Hun and half Scirian, defeated an imperial army that his barbarians had only a few months earlier been a part of. Odoacer captured and killed the imperial commander. He entered the city of Ravenna, then serving as an imperial capital, and deposed a youngster named Romulus Augustus, who had reigned as emperor for little more than a year. Odoacer was scarcely less worthy of authority than many previous usurpers. He was in fact well schooled in the ways of Rome, and he was a Christian, as most Romans by then were. There was no social implosion after he seized power, no rape and pillage. Rome didn't "fall" the way Carthage had, six centuries earlier, when the Romans slaughtered the inhabitants and razed the city, or the way Berlin would, fifteen centuries later, blasted into rubble. Rome itself wasn't touched on this occasion, and throughout the former empire life went on, little different for most people in 477 from what it had been in 475. Many regions had been autonomous for years, under barbarian rulers who gave lip service to the titular emperor. In Italy the Roman bureaucracy continued to sputter along.
What changed was this: Odoacer was not recognized as legitimate by the eastern emperor, in Constantinople. There would never be another emperor of the West. The historical symmetry is almost too good to be true — that the last emperor's name, Romulus, should also be that of Rome's founder. (Imagine if the demise of America were to occur under a president named George.) But more than symbolism was at play. Odoacer understood full well that something had come to an end: he declared himself king of Italy, and sent the imperial regalia of the Western empire to Constantinople. The pretense of Western unity was abandoned. Europe would now become a continent of barbarian kingdoms — in embryo, the Europe of nation-states that exists today.
Thirteen centuries later, on a gloomy evening in 1764, gazing out from a perch on the Capitoline Hill, above the overgrown debris of central Rome, Edward Gibbon was seized with a sense of loss as he contemplated the collapse of a civilization. Monks sang vespers in a church nearby. Gibbon resolved at that moment to undertake the great project he would call The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. "I can neither forget nor express the strong emotions which agitated my mind as I first trod, with lofty step, the ruins of the Forum," he later wrote. A decade after this twilight epiphany Gibbon's restless pen evoked the collapse of the empire: "Odoacer was the first barbarian who reigned in Italy, over a people who had once asserted their just superiority above the rest of mankind. . . . The least unfortunate were those who submitted without a murmur to the power which it was impossible to resist." Gibbon's life was in many ways a sad and lonely one, but The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was recognized at once as a masterwork, its sonorous cadences enlivened with a dry and biting wit. He observes gratuitously of a monk named Antiochus, for instance, that "one hundred and twenty-nine homilies are still extant, if what no one reads may be said to be extant." Although his picture of the fall may be more cataclysmic than the immediate reality seems to have been, Gibbon established for people ever after that a page of history had been decisively turned. In the West, "decline and fall" has been a catchphrase and a source of anxiety ever since.
The city of Washington, of course, also has a Capitoline Hill — Capitol Hill, named explicitly for its Roman forebear. The view to the west takes in a vast expanse of classical porticoes and marble monuments; gilded chariots and curtained litters would not seem out of place against this backdrop. Washington rose out of a malarial marsh on a river upstream from the coast, as Rome did. Its people, like the Romans, flee the sweltering city in August. The Romans cherished their myth of origin, the story of Romulus and Remus, and on the Palatine Hill you could be shown a thatched hut said to be the hut of Romulus — yes, the very one. Washington doesn't have anything quite like the hut of Romulus, but on Capitol Hill you can find sacred national touchstones of other kinds, such as the contents of Lincoln's pockets when he was assassinated. (They're in the Library of Congress.) Washington resembles Rome in many ways. The physical similarities are visible to anyone. The similarities of spirit are more salient. Materialistic cultures easily forget that "mental outlook" is not some limp and passive construct, of interest chiefly to anthropologists. Mental outlook can drive events and change the world, as the rise of militant Islam makes plain. Washington, too, has been animated by a special outlook. Long ago it was a notion of republican virtue that Romans of an early era would immediately have recognized. Today it's a strutting sense of self and mission that Romans of a later era would have recognized just as readily. Foreigners are well aware of this outlook, friends and enemies alike. It's a pungent quality — an internal characteristic that gives rise to outside counterforces.
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