Boris Johnson and the Dream of Rome on BBC2 ended in nightmare: that, in Boris’s view, only when the EU has the equivalent of an emperor can it hope to emulate the achievements of the Roman empire in uniting disparate peoples under a single banner. But since it will never have an emperor, is the whole project not doomed?
Very probably. There is, however, a tiny spark of hope, which can be glimpsed when one reflects on what happened after the Roman empire in the West collapsed in the 5th century ad. Apart from pockets of civilisation surviving among the elites, the answer is, broadly, an extended dark age, most clearly observed in the rapid decline in the standards of living in the West that archaeology records during the 5th–7th centuries ad. The point is that the whole structure of the Roman economic world, connecting Scotland with Tunisia, Syria with Newcastle upon Tyne, collapsed with Rome’s political demise.
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