2024-01-06 04:07:05
The world is changing. And the world was changing too when Hadrian ascended the imperial throne in 117. His predecessor, Trajan, had pushed the Roman borders to the ends of Eastern Europe. With the conquest of Dacia, a territory most of which corresponds to current Romania, enormous riches would once again reach Rome, other lands could be exploited, copious raw materials to be transformed and abundant manufactures that could be sold in this new market that was also inaugurated.
This is how, in short, the Roman economy worked, based on subjugating new territories militarily and politically, to seize their resources, give them value and enrich the Empire with all of this. A financial model with a slave productive base, cheap labor that required, like this economy, to replenish itself from the conquest of new territories. This allowed the Romans to maintain their high level of civilization, preserve their high state of well-being, continue with the luxurious life of a not inconsiderable percentage of the well-off population and pay (well paid, too) a professional army that could thus undertake new campaigns. military operations abroad and, therefore, feed back into the economic gears of the Empire.
But with the arrival of Hadrian, the economic system described began to show signs of weakness. Once the Empire had reached its peak, its limits had been stretched excessively and it was already very difficult to govern it in a unified and effective manner, not to mention the complexity of maintaining both external and internal security. It is obvious to understand that, if their defense was very complicated, the imperial armies had to begin to worry more about protecting themselves from enemies than attacking them.
If the Romans wanted to preserve their Empire, they should therefore act accordingly. And this was precisely what Hadrian opted for, a sovereign who, instead of starting a new campaign of conquest that would give impetus to his government and glorify his time on the throne, as had been usual to date, promoted a defensive policy. , in which all efforts were focused on strengthening the borders, fortifying advanced surveillance posts or even abandoning occupied areas of no strategic value.
Problems of yesterday and today
But, due to everything described in the previous paragraphs, from then on the Roman Empire had a serious problem. Without wars of conquest, the Roman economy could no longer sustain itself in the way it had done for the previous two centuries. The result would be catastrophic and thus he would rebel with the following emperors, although, yes, the Roman Empire would still take more than three centuries to fall definitively.
There is no doubt that, today, another economic model, classical capitalism, is coming to an end. That its main ‘flag bearer’, the United States, is foundering between its last two presidential administrations, those of Biden and Trump. Biden, representative of the classic American political archetype, on which the Democratic Party still bets, let’s call it the ‘attack model’, still tries to cling to the Imperialism on which it has always been based, with strict geopolitical control that allows him to maintain its economic model at all costs.
While, with the previous president, representative of a new model, let’s call it ‘defense model’, ‘neo-republican’ or ‘Trumpist’, undoubtedly also populist, the economy desperately tries to save itself, clinging to a fierce protectionism, today surprising closure of borders. In short, a last attempt to, using the same words as the former president himself, ‘make America great again’. In conclusion, Trump is concerned with ‘looking inward’, while Biden prefers to ‘look outward’. Thus we would effectively have ‘our contemporary Hadrian and Trajan’, respectively. And, with Trump’s hypothetical return to the US presidency, we would once again be witnessing ‘defensive’ politics as a desperate attempt to save his empire and prevent the fall of Capitalism.
But this does not seem to be the only parallel with the last stage of Antiquity. That same second century in which Hadrian had taken on the imperial crown, would not end without, in addition to the end of an economic model becoming established, epidemics and wars also began to become widespread, while the first signs of climate change, inflation did not stop growing and social inequalities increased every day. Don’t all these indicators of the ‘Roman Apocalypse’ remind us of what exactly is happening to us right now?
Without a doubt, in the second century the world was changing. Without a doubt, in the 21st century the World is changing. History, once again, repeats itself.
David Barreras Martínez, born in Paris in 1976, is a researcher in a spin-off of the Higher Council for Scientific Research, which he combines with his role as a historian. He has published works such as ‘Brief History of the Fall of the Roman Empire’ (2017) or ‘Charlemagne and Medieval Europe’, among others, with several publishers.
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