Image by Wayne Zheng.

It is not unusual to hear America’s talking heads—those oracles of the 24-hour news cycle and syndicated radio chatter—invoke the specter of Rome when diagnosing the current malaise of the United States. The comparison is now almost cliché: America, like Rome, is a mighty empire on the brink of collapse, ruined by moral decay, imperial overreach, and political corruption. What is perhaps more telling than this repetitive analogy is the fact that the first volume of Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was published in 1776, the same year that Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence and the American experiment was born in Philadelphia. From the outset, America has been haunted by Rome’s shadow, warned by prophets foreign and domestic that it too will one day fall.

The decline of Rome has been used to justify everything from military expansion to moral crusades, from welfare cuts to tax reforms. But amid the noise of comparisons, one of Rome’s sharpest critiques—delivered not by a statesman or historian, but by a satirical poet—has been largely ignored. In Satire X, Juvenal decries a citizenry that once chose consuls and generals but now hungers only for bread and circuses. It was not invading hordes or economic collapse that signaled the end of civic virtue, but a populace seduced into apathy by free grain and gladiatorial spectacle. That Americans so often cite........

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