The Fall of Ozymandias. The Last Gasps of a Dying Empire

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1818 - (image by Dezgo.com)

All empires in history follow the same trajectory: glory, stasis, and collapse. They start their existence around agricultural or mineral resources that they use to create a powerful military force. Then, they grow by conquering their neighbors. And then, when the resources that created them run out, they collapse. This destiny is hastened by more negative factors that empires themselves create: bureaucracy, desertification, pollution, and more.

Depletion and pollution collaborate with each other to bring down the mighty imperial structure, and to bring it down fast. It is the essence of the “Seneca Effect,” according to the words of the Roman Philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca, who noted that “Increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid.” At some point, the King of Kings, Ozymandias, will find that his time has come, and nothing will be left of him except carvings on stones in the desert that proclaim his eternal glory.

But between the phases of growth and the collapse, there is a gray zone, a short-lived age in which the empire is still powerful enough to attempt new conquests. This imperial last hurrah may allow a few moments of glory for the once mighty armies, but these are just sparks of light in a trajectory that unavoidably moves toward darkness. Victories are worse than defeats when the time is running out: they only serve to dry out the remaining resources available and push the Empire faster to its final doom.

History never repeats itself exactly, but it rhymes.

There is much to be learned from history about our current situation, and in particular from the history of the Roman Empire. Here is a rewritten version of a post that I published on “Cassandra’s Legacy” in 2014.

Gold and the Beast

Roman soldiers bringing civilization to Dacia at the beginning of the 2nd century (from the Trajan column in Rome.) The scene shows Roman “auxilia” troops, recognizable by their round shields, bringing the severed heads of Dacian fighters as a homage to Emperor Trajan, on the left. The Emperor looks a little perplexed, but we have no indications that he ever discouraged this behavior. After all, the Romans were civilized by definition; only non-Romans could be Barbarians. 

The Roman Empire was a beast of prey. By the first century AD, it had conquered everything that could be conquered around the Mediterranean Sea, that the Romans called “Mare Nostrum,” “Our Sea.” But the Beast was still hungry.

And what a beast it was! Never before had the world seen such a force as the Roman legions. Their secret was not special weapons, not special tactics, or other tricks. It was just that the Romans had perfected the technology of coinage, and they could pay their troops with gold and silver coins. Still today, we use the term “soldier” from the name of an ancient Roman coin, the “solidus.” The backbone of the army, the legions, was formed of Roman citizens, but anyone could enlist in the auxilia, the supporting troops. His reward was simply money, and the auxilia swell the ranks of the Roman armies engaged in conquering the world. Gold was the blood, the lymph, and the nerves of the Beast.

The Roman gold came mainly from their mines in Spain. The more gold the mines could produce, the larger the Roman army could be. The larger the army, the mightier the Empire. It could attack its neighbors, conquer them, sack their gold, and turn the inhabitants into slaves. More slaves meant more miners, and more mines meant more gold. More gold, in turn, meant larger armies and, hence, more miners and more gold. The more the Beast ate, the bigger it grew. And the more it grew, the more food it needed.

But the times of growth could not last forever. By the 1st century AD, the Spanish gold mines started showing signs of depletion. At the same time, the Empire had reached practical limits to its size and, with that, to the amount of gold it could loot from its neighbors. Already in 44 BC, the legions were stopped at Carrhae in their attempt to expand in the rich East at the expense of the rival Parthian Empire. In Teutoburg, in 9 AD, a coalition of German tribes inflicted a crushing defeat on the legions, stopping forever the attempt of the Romans to control Eastern Europe. There were no other directions in which the empire could expand: in the West, it faced the ocean; in the South, the dry Sahara desert. The Beast was caged, and it risked to starve.

Not only the Roman Empire couldn't get any more gold, it couldn't even keep the gold it had. The Romans had a taste for expensive goods that they could not produce: silk from China, pearls from the Persian Gulf, perfumes from India, ivory from Africa, and much more. To purchase these goods, the Roman gold slowly made its way to the East through the winding Silk Road. It was a wound that was slowly bleeding the Beast to death.

With less and less gold available, there came a time of turmoil. Some of the conquered regions took arms against their Roman masters. In 66 AD, it was the Jewish revolt. The Romans crushed it but at an enormous cost. Nevertheless, the Empire had managed to loot from Palestine a considerable amount of desperately needed gold and silver. The Beast was eating itself, but, for a while, it was satiated.

The Empire was in a quandary: no gold meant no armies. And no armies meant no Empire. With the gold plundered in Palestine, the Empire could gain some time, but the problem remained: where to find more gold? The Romans turned their sight to Dacia, a country at the border of the northeastern regions of the Empire. The Dacians had gold mines of their own that they used to mint their own coins to pay their armies. The Beast was smelling food.

In the year 101 AD, a young and aggressive Roman Emperor, Trajan, invaded Dacia. It was a bold attempt that could have ended in disaster. But the gamble paid. After a hard struggle that lasted for five years, Dacia was conquered, its elites exterminated, and the land transformed into a Roman province. The Beast had made another kill.

But the new prey, Dacia, turned out not to be as nutritious as expected. There is no evidence of an important inflow of gold in the Roman economy after the conquest, and the debasing of the Roman currency continued unabated. The Dacian mines, apparently, couldn't match the wealth that the Spanish mines produced in their heydays. The Beast had become too huge to be fed just with crumbles.

In 113 AD, Emperor Trajan attempted another bold project: expanding in the East by attacking the Parthian Empire that ruled over central Asia. The Parthians were said to be fabulously rich, and they probably were, but they were also a large and powerful state. After some initial successes, the Romans had to stop, overwhelmed by the sheer size of the task. Asia was just too big for them to conquer. The Beast had found a prey too big to swallow.

After the death of Trajan in 117 AD, the new emperor, Hadrian, stopped all attempts to conquer new territories, a policy that all his successors kept. It was a wise decision that prevented the Empire from collapsing from the strain caused by Trajan’s conquests. But keeping the Empire together was possible only for a while. Gold continued to disappear slowly from the Roman territory to pay for expensive goods coming from Asia. There was no way to replace it. The Beast was to bleed to death, slowly and painfully.

The Western Roman Empire collapsed during the 3rd century AD. It never really recovered, even though it survived as a shadow of its former glory up to the 5th century AD. The Beast died, and nothing remained of it except ruins and inscriptions carved in stone.

The end of the Roman Empire didn’t mean the end of empires. New magnificent beasts of prey appeared in the world, all equipped with stupendous claws and teeth, all roaring their defiance to the universe. They grew, stalled, and then collapsed in ruin. It is an ongoing process, and we are now in the hectic phase of the desperate attempt to keep an empire going by means of new conquests. The Beast hasn’t yet seen the Seneca Cliff waiting for it.