Are We Focused on the Wrong Rome?

In April 2021, The Atlantic ran a long article by Cullen Murphy entitled “The Fall of Rome All Over Again?” Its subject was the purported similarities between the position of the United States today and the Roman Empire when it toppled. A year later, Salon published a piece called “8 striking parallels between the U.S. and the Roman Empire.” Then, this past October, Foreign Policy magazine offered its readers an extended analysis of the topic through a review of the new Peter Heather and John Rapley tome, Why Empires Fall: Rome, America and The West. These are merely the most prominent examples of the emergence of a new literary genre: the analogous study of the ancient Roman empire and the present-day United States.