decline and fall of the Roman Empire Archives

In case you’ve had the good fortune of having never heard of her, Camille Paglia is a professor at the University of Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and, at this point, effectively a professional right-wing provocateur. She claims to be a feminist, but yet she disagrees with all the basic tenets of feminism and spends most of her time bashing feminists and defending patriarchy.

Paglia has been making the rounds over the past few years promoting transphobia, declaring that the growing prevalence of people identifying as transgender—especially the number of people assigned male at birth identifying as trans women—is a sign of growing effeminacy and an indication that “western civilization” is on the brink of collapse. In support of these claims, she has invented her own elaborate pseudohistory that focuses to a large extent on ancient Greece and Rome.

Unfortunately, Paglia is widely regarded as a serious social critic, especially by men on the far right, meaning her false claims about ancient history have spread widely. When I published my article about transgender people in the ancient world a few months ago, I got a lot of people leaving comments about her claims. I don’t have time to debunk everything Paglia has said about ancient history, so, for the purposes of this article, I will be focusing on what she says in one viral YouTube video in particular.

People have a lot of theories about what caused the downfall of the Roman Empire. In particular, many American conservatives seem to really love talking about the parallels that supposedly exist between the current situation in the United States and the fall of the Roman Empire. Usually, they try to argue that we need to reject liberal ideas and return to good old-fashioned traditional values and that, if we do this, we will be able to save our empire from its impending doom.

Unfortunately, the people who make these comparisons generally know nothing at all about what really caused the fall of the Roman Empire. They basically just impute things they don’t like about our current situation and claim that these things are what led to the Roman Empire’s downfall. (They also invariably seem to forget that only the western portion of the Roman Empire fell in the fifth century AD; the eastern portion managed to survive for a thousand years after that until the conquest of the city of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453.)

Today, I’m going to talk about some things that definitely were not significant factors in the decline of the western Roman Empire, but that people—especially American conservatives—like to pretend were.

Category: decline and fall of the Roman Empire

No, Transgender People Are Not a Sign of Cultural Collapse

Things That Did Not Cause the Fall of the Roman Empire