Imperial decadence

S on the visible decline and, in the most optimistic estimates, impending demise of the American empire often refer to the Roman Empire 2,000 years ago as a cautionary precedence. And the notorious emperors Nero and Caligula are occasionally compared with the incumbent US president. Those comparisons might not be ridiculous, but there is potentially a closer, albeit lesser known, analogue. Commodus became co-emperor in his early teens during the reign of his revered father, Marcus Aurelius — best known for his philosophical Meditations — and sole emperor for nearly 13 years from AD180. According to Edward Gibbon’s seminal work The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, “Nature had formed him of a weak, rather than a wicked, disposition. His simplicity and timidity rendered him the slave of his attendants, who gradually corrupted his mind. His cruelty, which at first obeyed the dictates of others, degenerated into habit, and at length became the ruling passion of his soul.” Coincidentally, the first volume of Gibbon’s treatise was published in 1776, the year America declared its independence from British rule. The 250th anniversary of that event will be celebrated in the coming months, most likely overlooking the indigenous genocide and slave trade that accompanied the birth of what was then a much smaller nation, subsequently expanded through decolonisation and conquest. There’s no such thing as an eternal empire. Gibbon describes Commodus as someone who “from his earliest infancy discovered an aversion to whatever was rational or liberal, and a fond attachment to the amusements of the populace”. These included “the sports of the circus and amphitheatre, the combats of gladiators, and the hunting of wild beasts”. The beasts were imported from as far away as Ethiopia and India. The emperor shot lions, ostriches, elephants and rhinoceroses with arrows from a safe perch in the arena, and when he personally entered gladiatorial contests his ill-equi