Unless you are a patriotic American or have studied their politics formally, the US Presidents are a pretty forgettable lot. The trick here is to try and look back on the American Empire from 2000 years in the future, just as we presently look back on the Romans. How will they look to us? Washington and Jefferson—Romulus and Remus? Lincoln doesn’t exist because the blacks still aren't freed. Caligula is there, perhaps, in the form of Teddy Roosevelt, the overgrown child who let it all get out of hand—although some might prefer Tricky Dicky in that role. Crassus and Eisenhower—great generals but nobody once they got the top job, and Calvin Coolidge is surely as hapless (and headless) as Pompey. Nero is in fact substantially upstaged by the monstrous Harry Truman, not only the bastard who first dropped an atomic bomb on human beings and the inspiration behind the McCarthyist witch hunts but also the mastermind behind the Arm’s Race.

But as female fortitude is commonly artificial, so it is seldom steady or consistent. The courage of Zenobia deserted her in the hour of her trial; she trembled at the angry clamours of the soldiers, who called aloud for her immediate execution, forgot the generous despair of Cleopatra, which she proposed as her model, and ignominiously purchased her life by the sacrifice of her fame and her friends. It was to her counsels, which governed the weakness of her sex, that she imputed the guilt of her obstinate resistance; it was on their heads that she directed the vengeance of the cruel Aurelian…
  Small wonder that feminists think little of Edward Gibbon since this is the way he describes one of the best female characters in history in his The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He only just admits that she directed one of the fiercest defences that the Roman legions ever experienced. And this:
  The emperor (Aurelian) presented Zenobia with an elegant villa at Tibur, about twenty miles from the capital; the Syrian Queen insensibly sunk into a Roman matron, her daughters married into noble families, and her race was not yet extinct in the fifth century.
He just doesn’t like her at all.
  Furthermore, he gives only slight mention to the German tribes regaining their independence, despite the fact that this defeat was the first actual diminishment of the empire—the first territory that it lost and never regained. This happened in 9AD, but Gibbon begins marking the decline at 98AD. It just doesn’t seem right.
  I have never read all of Gibbon. At least I don’t think I have. I have dipped into it at so many places for so many reasons and read patches here and there that I seem to have covered it all but it is hard to tell. All this happened in libraries. (The edition I have is the abridgement by D. M. Low which I find perfectly adequate for my purposes these days). I doubt that I will ever allow myself the indulgence of the whole thing. Anyway, I still duck in there at times, usually to answer cryptic crossword questions. 

  But I liked it better in the piecemeal way I read it. And I have a strong sense of the gradual decline, even without undertaking it the way Gibbon intended. So I think that’s fine.

  Still, it is a relief to know that everyone else is as confused about how and when and why the Roman Empire fell as I am. Gibbon places the event in 476 AD, which was when Odovacer forced Romulus Augustulus to abdicate, but really that was only the moment when the last noble Roman was in charge and a far more cultured and urbane barbarian took his place.   As early as 117, under Trajan, the empire reached its greatest extent and thereafter began to diminish, and plainly its cumbersome bureaucracy was a major cause. Lead plumbing is blamed for weakening the brains of the aristocracy, creating nutters like Commodus, who took over from Marcus Aurelius in 161, but it was the ravages of plague that crippled the armies in 166 forcing further concessions that were never regained. Diocletian divided the Empire into Eastern and Western halves in 285, where the Eastern half would blend into the Byzantium Empire and prevail for another 1000 years, still causing wars in the Balkans to this very day.

  The official persecution of the Christians did not begin until 249 (two hundred years after Nero) and in 313, Constantine became the first Christian emperor—the true beginning of Papal rule which extends to the present. Some commentators believe that Christian ethics made the dominance of the Roman legions untenable—you certain don’t hold rampaging marauders at bay by turning the other cheek. The 9th of August 378 is marked by military historians as the day after which Rome could no longer effectively defend itself, when German tribes crushed the Roman legions in the battle of Adrianople. Treaties held the Visgoths back until 410 when, under Alaric, they sacked Rome for the first time in 800 years. Attila swept through the remnants of the empire until 452, and Rome fell again to the Vandals in 455. Gibbon’s chosen moment came 21 years later.

  Still other historians (which Gibbon, by the way, wasn’t) reckon that the empire never fell at all, but just blended into the Middle Ages. The giant step, from the Sign of the Pagan to the Knights of the Round Table, from the fall of Rome to Camelot, in fact is spread over three hundred very unclear years. And some, of course, think it lives on under different names, like Ottoman and British and Nazi, and continues currently as the American Empire.