It was not the first time I had been in South Beach. An earlier visit to Florida had come about by happenstance. A chilly autumn in the mid-Nineties, and I was on a book tour through half a dozen northern cities — New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Minneapolis-St Paul, San Francisco — when a last-minute invitation came for me to do a public reading at the Miami Book Fair. I imagine someone important had canceled, and the cry went up, “Send Banville, he’ll go anywhere.”

I arrived in Miami late in the evening, befuddled by a combination of my chronic and incurable fear of flying, and the jorums of business-class bubbly — yes, it was tough, in those days — with which I had sought to quell my vertiginous terrors. The hotel, right on the front in South Beach, at first struck me as quaint, and then as downright shabby. It was a hot night, even for Miami, and there was no air conditioning in my room, except for an enormous wooden fan in the ceiling creakily circling directly above my bed; of course to me, spreadeagled sleepless beneath it, it looked like nothing so much as an airplane propeller.

When I questioned the person at reception about the down at heel appearance of the place, and the fact that few things in my room worked, I was loftily informed that the hotel had recently hired a hot-shot designer to “distress” the building back to how it had looked, and functioned, when it was built in the Thirties. The Grand Hotel Gimcrack, the manager himself assured me, was now one of the most fashionable destinations in this most fashionable of Floridian resorts.

Further assorted shocks were in store.

I had been woken that morning by the din of many persons vigorously at play outside; in fact, the racket had been going on all night but my exhaustion had deafened me to most of it. I rose shakily from my bed of pain, balancing on my forehead an invisible cutglass flute in which my hangover was busily fizzing, and stumbled to the window and drew open the slatted shutters, wincing against the thrumming sunlight and the harsh sea-glare.

Spread before me on street, on grass, on sand and in the blue-and-white breakers was a scene of carousal, in which everyone seemed to be about seven feet tall, as near to naked as they could be without inviting arrest, and perfectly, oh but perfectly, suntanned. All were moving, and all were making noise. This I had more or less expected — my sons when young never missed an episode of Miami Vice — but there was one spectacle that baffled me utterly.

Just across the street, beyond a low hedge, was a paved pathway upon which many marvelously youthful and, again, half-naked titans and titanesses were effortlessly, endlessly gliding back and forth, swooping and bending and elegantly pirouetting, without it seemed the slightest danger of collision or collapse. Because of the hedge I could see them only as far down as their taut calves and glistening shins. My God, I thought, they’ve had their feet removed and been fitted with wheels instead!

I had come from Ireland, where at the time the rollerblade was as yet unheard of.

II

The reading in which I was to participate took place in a large, airy and somehow reverberant pavilion, into which people would stroll and stop for a moment and then stroll out again, with what seemed to be either moody disdain or frustrated eagerness; the real action, at these events, is always elsewhere, on the next stage, in the next hall, or in that bar where the celebrities congregate though no one knows where it is.

The writer I was to read with had the previous day been named as that year’s winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. This was a small detail the PR people at my publishers had neglected to share with me. After the event, we two performers were led to a large, sunny courtyard and seated at a pair of small tables on which were piled many copies of our books, to be sold and signed.

Awaiting the Pulitzer winner was a queue of fluttering fans that stretched, as far as I could see, halfway up the spine of Florida. In my line there were three people. One was a scholar from the University of Miami who was writing something on my work, the second was the madman in the raincoat — there is always a madman in a raincoat, bearing urgent testimony along with a thick, much-thumbed and long pored-over manuscript — and the third a smiling, kindly fellow who leaned down at my ear and whispered that he was not going to buy my book, but he had thought to stop and say a few words to me, since I looked so lonely.

Afterwards, my scholar friend bought me a consolatory drink and walked me to my hotel. I was sure the back of my neck was still burning from embarrassment. We came out on to Ocean Drive, and passed by a fine old house, three-story, cream-painted, with balconies, and a mock-medieval front door studded with iron bolts, and luxuriant palms in giant pots flanking a decorative, wrought-iron gate.

“That’s Versace’s place,” my friend said. “Casa Casuarina.”

“Versace?” I said. “Versace who?”

My friend sighed.

“Gianni Versace,” he said. “Fashion designer. Which century are you living in?”

III

His name, and the name of the house, must have lodged in some dusty cubbyhole of my mind, for I was able immediately to retrieve them when, some years later, in 2001 or so, an American style magazine contacted me to ask if I would be interested in writing a piece on Casa Casuarina, in South Beach, Florida.

Why?

It has been bought by a local businessman, I was told. He’s going to transform it into a private club, or maybe a small hotel, and he wants to have an impression done of the place as it is, before the redesigners arrive.

“Why did Versace sell it?” I innocently asked.

A pause, and then:

“He was murdered, years ago. What planet are you living on?”

IV

Gianni Versace was one of the most successful, iconoclastic and outrageously talented fashion designers of the 20th century. He was born in 1946 in the south of Italy, in Reggio Calabria, a place he loved and was proud of. His mother was a dressmaker — aha! — and his sister was, and is, the redoubtable Donatella, his business partner. He was interested in ancient history, his birthplace being soaked in the stuff, but also he looked hard at the modern painters, Andy Warhol and his ilk, if Andy Warhol has an ilk.

Success came quickly, and before he knew it Gianni was hobnobbing with such figures as Elton John, Lady Diana, Naomi Campbell, Joan Collins. He designed and sold lots of womenswear, founded the Versace brand, which makes everything from, oh, I don’t know, frocks to fragrances, and worked on opera and film sets. He was flamboyantly gay, declared that he did not believe in good taste, and generally thumbed his nose at the wiseacres of the industry in which he was making trunkloads of money. Giorgio Armani is said to have said that while Armani dresses the wife, Versace dresses the mistress.

By the early 2000s all this was probably known to the entire world, but not to me. When I was asked to travel to Miami and write about his house, my first reaction was to laugh — I knew as much about houses as I do about fashion design — but after a moment or two I stopped laughing and said, yes, why not? An adventure is an adventure. And Casa Casuarina would turn out to be both a revelation and a delight. My time there was a sort of dreamwalk into another, gorgeous world which to my surprise touched on my own old rumpled world in unexpected ways.

V

This time I took the right gear with me. On my first, humiliating visit to South Beach I had only winter woolens to wear, and when I ventured outdoors in my tweed jacket and worsted trousers and slithered and slipped my way among those jostling, oilily bronzed Brobdingnagians, I felt like a cloth-moth in search of a shady crevice in which to lodge until the weather cooled. Now I was decked out in short-sleeved shirts and lightweight slacks and loafers. Not shorts, however; I draw the line at shorts; later, my wife and I often bemoaned the tragic legacy of the Covid lockdown: men in shorts.

The new owner of Casa Casuarina, Peter Loftin, who had made a lot of money in the telecom business, was a large, laconic fellow with the softly burnished skin and fair coloring that seems exclusive to successful American businessmen. He received me with old-fashioned Southern courtesy, and suggested that before he showed me the house we should stroll over to a nearby restaurant for lunch and a talk.

It was a good restaurant, and a good talk.

I expected directives as to how I should approach the “legacy” of Casa Casuarina, and so on, but not a bit of it. Peter was a gentleman, and assured me straight off that he had no intention of telling me what to write or how to write it. He had heard I was good at describing houses — from whom, I wonder? — and that was all he expected me to do: write about an old house. I felt like a character in a Henry James novel being charmed by a cultivated plutocrat of the American Gilded Age.

We sat on the restaurant terrace in the shade of a giant palm trees, one of the many such that stand about the city, murmuring to themselves and gently clattering their fronds. I spoke of Ireland, he spoke of America. Both countries were in a relatively calm state at the time — we had an IRA ceasefire in Northern Ireland, and the United States had that good ole boy Bill Clinton as president — and the conversation was discursive and easy. Life is like that, on occasion.

When we returned to Casa Casuarina there was clustered around the front steps a crowd of 20 or 30 rubber-neckers, bedecked with cameras and doing the things rubber-neckers do. I asked why they were there, and I caught Peter not giving me a pitying look.

“Didn’t you know?” he said. “That’s where he was shot, right there on those steps. There’s always a crowd.”

VI

The house was built in 1930, in a U-shape surrounding an elegant courtyard. The building itself has a slight suggestion of the Cote d’Azur in its Scott Fitzgerald days of ease and excess. At the front door Peter handed me over to his staff, professionals to a man, woman and maid. I was shown to my room, an airy birdcage with, yes, a wooden fan circling in the ceiling, but this one was for decorative purposes only. This was, so the major domo informed me, the only room in the house to boast a bath.

Madonna always stayed here, in the old days, the major d’ murmured, with a nostalgic little smile. She was fond of a bath.

I began to unpack, but I had that buzz in the blood I always get when I arrive in a foreign place; a stroll about the neighborhood would get rid of the jitters. The folk on the street were as they had been on my previous visit, loose-limbed, honey-hued and noisy. I followed Peter’s directions to the café where each morning Versace bought a newspaper and drank an espresso. I bought a newspaper, and drank an espresso.

Back at the house, I was told that I had been moved to another room, as the one I had been first assigned was not cool enough.

“Madonna’s favorite room is not cool enough?” I asked, with a stare.

Polite laughter. What was meant was that the air conditioning was not working properly.

“Oh, right,” I said grumpily; for I was disappointed, as who would not be?

In recompense, they put me in Gianni’s own room, where I would sleep in his bed, among his treasures — all of them at once garish and exquisite — and think how strange life is, and how strange the situations it lands us in sometimes.

VII

I had foreseen vulgarity at Casa Casuarina, and I got it, in spades. However, it was not the kind or quality of the vulgar that my cultural short-sightedness had led me to expect. The Casa Casuarina was a masterpiece of interior design, and every inch of the place was stamped with the personal mark of one man. Versace’s genius, I saw right away, was to have aestheticized bad taste. Everything, from the ubiquitous and tiny stained-glass windows to the garden pool with its million pieces of blue mosaic — specially imported from Italy — should not have worked, but did, triumphantly. The place was beautiful despite.

The key to Versace’s success was nothing more, and nothing less, than absolute, rigid but always loving attention to detail.

For instance. I was walking across the courtyard one day when I thought to take notice at last of the rain ducts, half a dozen of which were set flush into the tiles at measured intervals. They were circular, four or five inches in diameter, and made of bronze. To examine one of them in detail I had to kneel down and lean forward at a sharp angle.

In the center of the little drain was set a figure I recognized at once as the Medusa head which was Versace’s trademark. It was a treasure in itself, the features perfectly molded, with heavy tresses and tragically lowered eyes and exquisitely sulky mouth. Had Versace expected people to get down on their knees, as I had — not a posture the beautiful people would favor — in order to see close-up this meticulously and marvelously made little objet? But that was the point: they were exquisite, they were there, and what matter if no one saw them up close?

I cannot remember how long I stayed at Casa Casuarina — a short week, I suppose — but in that time I came to know the place and, yes, to fall in love with it. Even the kitchen was a masterpiece of design, while the bathrooms, even the ones sans a Madonna tub, were chambers of grave quietude, such that a noble Roman would retire into when one of the more demented Caesars had ordered him to fall on his sword.

As a schoolboy Gianni Versace attended a liceo classico in Calabria, and studied Latin and Greek. He may not have completed the course — I see him as impatient, always impatient — but the lessons he learned there abided. As I got to know Casa Casuarina, as I came to be able to feel I was not staying but living there, I was reminded irresistibly of two of the most impressive, for me, of Italy’s ancient sites.

Everyone goes to Pompeii, a charnel house which should be bulldozed over, in the same way that the Colosseum in Rome, that vile abattoir, should be razed to the ground. But a little way to the north, in the city of Herculaneum, something precious endures; here are rooms decorated with murals, the paint as fresh as if it had been applied yesterday, that surely Versace knew, and emulated, whether consciously or by aesthetic osmosis.

And then there are the mosaics at Ravenna, that western outpost of Byzantium which was once the capital city of the Christian world. In the Basilica of San Vitale there is a mosaic portrait of the Empress Theodora, a very grand lady who is said, by Procopius in his Secret History, to have started out as a sexual athlete performing in the city’s Hippodrome, and went on to marry the God-tormented Emperor Justinian. Look at her. That’s a Versace gown she’s wearing, if ever I saw one.

On one of the nights when I was at the Casa, Peter held a grand party — there seemed to be lots of local grandees present, anyway — and at one point in the evening I found myself standing in the soft warm darkness on a high balcony and looking down upon the courtyard where the stately shenanigans were in progress. In a corner of the garden there stood — I wonder if it is still standing? — a pretty little pergola containing six open showers, handy for sea-bathers to wash off the salt, and, later in the evening, for post-orgy sluice-downs.

As I lingered there, I reminded myself that the Greeks and the ancient Romans painted their statues in the most garish of colors and decorated them with all manner of frivolous furbelows. The notion we have of the classical world, foisted on us by Winckelmann and other fossilized antiquarians, is a marmoreal fantasy. Athens and Rome were not marbled cities; rather, they had the aspect, and surely the atmosphere, of a Liberace concert. That was Versace’s genius, to remember and acknowledge that the Glory that was Rome was in fact vulgarity writ large. And the ancients gloried in it.

Consider a photograph, any photograph, of Gianni Versace when he was at the height of his wealth and fame. Look at that big square handsome head, the trim beard, those dark, ever-smiling eyes in the depths of which lurks a glint of terror, the terror of a man of vast talent who knows that he must depend for his fame and wealth on the denizens of café society, people at once cheap and fabulously famous, who might turn on you in a flash or, more devastatingly, turn away from you, towards the newest bright young acrobat prancing upon the sandy floor of the Hippodrome. Both Athens and Rome would have recognized him, and his genius.

He was only 50 when his nemesis, a “spree killer”, so it is said, stepped up behind him as he was entering the front gate of the Casa Casuarina and shot him through the skull at point-blank range. There was no motive for the killing, it seems — just part of the spree. One imagines an observer on some planet in the region of Cygnus X-1, say, whose tedious task it is to monitor our blandly pastel world, seeing, that day in the middle of July in 1997, at the edge of a finger of land pointing south from one of the northern continents, a shimmering spot of vividest color being suddenly extinguished.

Science for thee a NEWTON raised;
For thy renown a SHAKESPEARE blazed,
Lord of the drama’s sphere!
In different fields to equal praise
See History now thy GIBBON raise
To shine without a peer!

Nowadays, Decline and Fall suffers the misfortune of all great books: to be far more cited than read. “Do Byzantinists still read Gibbon?” the historian Mark Whittow once asked; “the straightforward answer is no”. Those who do still read Gibbon tend not to be specialists in his primary field of study, which has since adopted the label of Late Antiquity. Rather, Gibbon’s readers are Gibbon-scholars, their hands held through all six volumes of Decline and Fall by the late J.G.A. Pocock’s equally lengthy explication of them.

But few writers in the English language are so quotable. It is impossible to read anything about the Antonine Emperors without hearing that their reigns constituted the “period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous”, or even to glance at the Wikipedia page for the Battle of Tours without relishing the counterfactual that, had the Muslims won, “perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet”.

Does Decline and Fall hold up beyond these soundbites? Today’s historians tend to use it, if they use it at all, as a cheap punchbag. Perhaps the Antonines weren’t so great after all; perhaps the Battle of Tours wasn’t really a turning point in history. When such opinions are articulated, Gibbon is swiftly conscripted. There is scarcely a history of Byzantium in print that fails to set itself against Gibbon’s portrayal of the medieval Greeks holding “in their lifeless hands the riches of their fathers, without inheriting the spirit which had created and improved that sacred patrimony”. Bold attempts in recent years at reviving an unqualified Gibbonism have generally been poorly received.

Still, there are always intellectual continuities to be found. Peter Brown, perhaps the greatest living historian, is often seen as one of the great vanquishers of Gibbon from the study of Late Antiquity, rescuing the culture and characters from that “dark” historical period from Gibbon’s scorn. But the difference between them is more one of moral or aesthetic evaluation than substance. When Gibbon writes that “in the long period of twelve hundred years, which elapsed between the reign of Constantine and the reformation of Luther, the worship of saints and relics corrupted the pure and perfect simplicity of the Christian model”, Brown does not really disagree that such a shift did occur; he simply rejects that it was a “corruption”. What the Enlightened Gibbon saw as “ignorance” and “superstition” becomes in Brown’s hands, and in our more benignly secular age, “vibrancy” and “spirituality”.

Gibbon never denied that he infused his history with moral judgement. What mattered to him was that his moral judgements were products of his own original reflection, rather than pro forma expressions of Christian piety. Like many who we would now regard as popular historians, he had to cast off the straitjacket of academia. His 14 months as a student at Oxford were “the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life”: the university, he wrote in his Memoirs, was too “steeped in port and prejudice” to sustain serious, inventive scholarship. Oxford and Cambridge had been founded “in a dark age of false and barbarous science”; they could never escape their Gothic past, and were therefore fetters on the Enlightened mind. Both in his Memoirs and in Decline and Fall, Gibbon endorsed Adam Smith’s suggestion that university education would be improved if, instead of receiving a fixed stipend, lecturers were tipped by their students. The salaried professor, after all, made a mockery of the pursuit of learning for its own sake: Aristotle or Plato would never have “degenerated from the example of Socrates as to exchange knowledge for gold”. Perhaps it was not just his fervent anticlericalism, therefore, that so ruffled academic feathers.

His religious readers were especially irked by the infamous 15th and 16th chapters of Decline and Fall, which chart the growth of Christianity from an obscure Judaean sect to the state religion of the Roman Empire. It was not just that Gibbon, as is well known, drew a connecting line between the rise of Christianity and the decline of Rome; he also attracted controversy for his insistence that the Roman persecution of the Christians had been grossly exaggerated by Christian apologists. This was, he claimed, a “very natural mistake” of projection: “the ecclesiastical writers of the 4th or 5th centuries ascribed to the magistrates of Rome the same degree of implacable and unrelenting zeal which filled their own breasts against the heretics or the idolaters of their own times”.

This is but one of those passages from Gibbon which feel like they could have been written by Richard Dawkins. His writing drips with disdain for the “long night of superstition” that the church cast over Dark-Age Europe. Figures such as Constantine and St Augustine are treated with some ambivalence and distaste, while men such as Julian the Apostate — Constantine’s nephew, who tried in vain to restore the pagan religion — come out looking rather impressive. Such was the chilling effect of Christianity on the Western mind, according to Gibbon, that even the Renaissance, when it finally arrived, was in its earliest inklings something of a flaccid disappointment. Christianity also bred incessant metaphysical squabbling, which, as well as being intellectually stifling, was practically harmful. While the church was “distracted by the Nestorian and Monophysite sects”, for example, “Mahomet, with the sword in one hand and the Koran in the other, erected his throne on the ruins of Christianity and of Rome”.

More from this author

E.P. Thompson, Marxist rebel

By Samuel Rubinstein

What animates all of Decline and Fall is Gibbon’s deep love for learning. Time and again he criticises his historical subjects for abandoning intellectual pursuits for other, less worthy things, like luxury, superstition, and war. “I am not insensible of the benefits of elegant luxury”, he says: but would it not have been better if print, rather than silk, had traversed the trade routes from China to medieval Europe? He likewise castigates the Crusaders for pillaging relics from Constantinople instead of priceless Greek manuscripts. Finally, as he approaches the final scene of his historical narrative, the fall of Constantinople to the Turks, he laments that the invention of gunpowder was able to spread so much more rapidly than knowledge. “If we contrast the rapid progress of this mischievous discovery with the slow and laborious advances of reason, science, and the arts of peace, a philosopher, according to his temper, will laugh or weep at the folly of mankind.”

Gibbon was more a laugher than a weeper. In devoting so much of his life to Decline and Fall, he wrote in his Memoirs, “my own amusement is my motive, and will be my reward”. History is “little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind”, and can therefore only be met with a wry and ironic smile; and since the decline and fall of the Roman Empire was “the greatest, perhaps, and most awful scene in the history of mankind”, it warranted the wriest and most ironical smile of all. There is, however, still room in his narrative for sincere moral feeling. At one point, for example, he describes the beheading of the Goth chieftain Radagaisus by the Romans in 406, an act of “cool and deliberate cruelty”. He adds in a footnote — the footnotes are often where the real gems are buried — that the contemporary Christian historian Orosius was “piously inhuman” for celebrating Radagaisus’s execution “without a symptom of compassion”. “The bloody actor is less detestable than the cool, unfeeling historian.” Gibbon’s demeanour was detached and ironic, but never “unfeeling”.

There are plenty of flowery and over-elaborated reasons for why you should read Gibbon. I do not wish to indulge in them. You should not read him because he holds the key to some eternal truth, nor because he tells us something vital about our own times — though well he might. You should not read him if you want a reliable historical account of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire; Gibbon, I hope, would be gratified by how far historical science has advanced in the 230 years since his death, and how much his own work has been improved upon. Rather, you should read Decline and Fall, all 4,000 pages of it, because it’s good fun. It is the historiographical equivalent of that other great artefact of 18th-century English wit, Tristram Shandy: both books, loquacious and digressive, are like being cornered by an oddball at a party who, it turns out, is witty and entertaining enough to get away with it. “Who can refute a sneer?” William Paley famously said of Decline and Fall: but there are worse expressions for the historian to wear than a sneer, and worse ways to spend the summer than in the company of Edward Gibbon.

That these stories are unlikely to be true is beside the point; Tiberius’s reputation has done wonders for the tourist trade here on Capri. The historians Suetonius and Tacitus started the rumours and, with the help of successive generations of sensationalists, established a tradition that was to persist for almost two millennia.

All of which serves as a reminder that reputations can be constructed and sustained on the flimsiest of foundations. Suetonius and Tacitus were writing almost a century after the emperor’s death, and many of their lurid stories were doubtless echoes of those circulated by his most spiteful enemies. Or perhaps it’s simply a matter of prurience. Who can deny that the more lascivious and outlandish acts of the Roman emperors are by far the most memorable? One thinks immediately of Caligula having sex with his siblings and appointing his horse as consul. Or Nero murdering his own mother, and taking a castrated slave for his bride, naming him after the wife he had kicked to death. For all their horror, who doesn’t feel cheated when such tales turn out to be false?

Our reputations are changelings: protean shades of other people’s imaginations. More often than not, they are birthed from a combination of uninformed prejudice and wishful thinking. And we should be in no doubt that in our online age, when lies are disseminated at lightning speed and casual defamation has become the activist’s principal strategy, reputations are harder to heal once tarnished.

I am tempted to feel pity for future historians. Quite how they will be expected to wade through endless reams of emails, texts, and other digital materials — an infinitude of conflicting narratives and individual “truths” — really is beyond me. At least when there is a dearth of primary sources it is possible to piggyback onto a firm conclusion. “Suetonius said…” has a satisfactory and definitive air, but only because there are so few of his contemporary voices available to contradict him.

As the culture war rumbles on, and I have found myself ostracised by former friends who now interpret even minor political disagreements as evidence of malevolence, I have learned that reputation is invariably a form of fiction. One such friend used to complain endlessly about a certain conservative commentator, asserting that he was a mendacious hatemonger whose every action was motivated by contempt for marginalised communities. These ideas were so frequently repeated in conversation, and confirmed by others within our circle, that I had no doubt they must be true. Imagine my confusion, then, when I eventually became well acquainted with this man, and found him to be both generous and empathetic. It’s like meeting Beelzebub and finding that he has been secretly baking cupcakes for the poor.

The same sense of bewilderment has struck me whenever I have happened upon bad-faith critics attempting to summarise my views. I have been variously described as “far-Right”, “bigoted”, “racist”, “sexist” and even “homophobic”. Of course, I would not expect total strangers to know my mind, but given that my actual opinions are freely available to anyone with a search engine, it does feel odd to be so wildly mischaracterised.

I am not alone in this. That false narratives can be more powerful than reality is, of course, the reason why our opponents so readily resort to distortions and smears. A colleague recently alerted me to one of the more bizarre hit pieces that has been written about me in an online magazine. The strategy was at least novel: the writer had contacted former students from my time as a teacher in order to trawl for unflattering anecdotes. According to one account, I had sent a pupil out of the classroom because he dared to disagree with me about the use of metaphorical language in Of Mice and Men.

But perhaps funnier than the story itself is that the author of this article was gulled into repeating it as though it could possibly be authentic. It is a reminder that reputations are often cultivated by those who must first suspend their critical faculties. This kind of nonsense is harmless enough, of course. It falls far short of defamation and, as RuPaul so neatly put it: “what other people think of me is none of my business.”

Suggested reading

The fantasy of Britain's liberal elite

By Kathleen Stock

For all that, more serious attacks on people’s reputations can be devastating. Three years ago, I lost a friend to cancer after he had been falsely accused of sexual assault. In his final days he told me that he had no doubt that the years of intense anxiety following the trial had exacerbated his illness. The source of his distress wasn’t even so much the initial accusation, which was easily disproved in court, but rather the gossip that continued to reverberate and the loved ones who no longer picked up the phone.

In the past, I have often made the mistake of assuming the worst of my detractors, simply because a scurrilous lie has seemed more appealing than a complicated truth. Few of us who have been dragged into the deranging ideological skirmishes of the past few years will have avoided making these mistakes, but these days I like to keep in mind Philip Roth’s remark in The Human Stain: “our understanding of people must always be at best slightly wrong.”

No doubt it is hopelessly optimistic to assume that this approach will become the default. Our brains are hardwired to take mental shortcuts — known as heuristics — and we are generally more willing to believe the worst of others than make the effort to consider that we may have been misinformed. Worse still, the inherent appeal of scandalous and titillating tales means they will be propagated at an accelerated rate, so that even outright lies can quickly become received wisdom. We tend to accept that there is “no smoke without fire”, when more often than not it’s just a few troublemakers with a dry ice machine.

So perhaps we ought to give Tiberius the benefit of the doubt. In that spirit, let us consider one of Suetonius’s more flattering accounts. While living on the island of Rhodes, Tiberius remarked that he ought to visit all the sick people in the town. His servants assumed that this was some kind of decree, and the local invalids were hastily summoned. Rather than turn them away, Tiberius took the time to speak to each one and apologise for the misunderstanding. This story may not satisfy our appetite for murder and depravity, but at least it might be true.

London, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles — these urban centres epitomised what Jean Gottman described in 1983 as “transactional cities”. Based on finance, high-end business and IT services, they were defined not by production and trade in physical goods, but by intangible products concocted in soaring office towers. For years, academic researchers, both on the Left and Right, envisioned a high-tech economic future dominated by dense urban areas. As The New York Times‘s Neil Irwin observed in 2018: “We’re living in a world where a small number of superstar companies choose to locate in a handful of superstar cities where they have the best chance of recruiting superstar employees.”

Yet even before the current downturn, the data defied the bravado. For decades, the ultra-tall towers that once symbolised urban greatness have been as anachronistic as the cathedrals of the Middle Ages. Office occupancy has been declining since the turn of the century, along with the construction of new space. In 2019, before the pandemic, construction was one-third the rate of 1985 and half that of 2000.

More serious still has been the movement of people. Migration to dense cities started to decline in 2015, when large metropolitan areas began to see an exodus to smaller locales. By 2022, rural areas were also gaining population at the expense of cities. The pandemic clearly accelerated this process, with a devastating rise in crime and lawlessness: notably in London, Paris, Washington, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia and Chicago. In some parts of Chicago and Philadelphia, young men now have a greater chance of being killed by firearms than an American soldier serving during the Afghanistan or Iraq wars.

The fading allure of the big city — further undermined by the post-pandemic shift to remote work in many sectors — is also taking place against the backdrop of an urban economy that has increasingly rewarded the few. Of course, some districts, such as the north side of Chicago, have experienced impressive growth, but they are often surrounded by others suffering from severe deterioration. And for all of gentrification’s wonders, almost a fifth of residents in the 50 largest US cities live below the poverty line.

Contrast this with the historic role of cities as engines of upward mobility. Even the addition last year of a few thousand migrants forced New York Mayor Eric Adams to declare a state of emergency; in other words, New York, a city largely built on the labour of newcomers, now seems too weak to house and employ a substantial number of immigrants. Amid this failure, perhaps it’s unsurprising that migrants and minorities are heading to America’s suburbs, sprawled sunbelt cities and smaller towns.

So what is the urban future? The answer lies less in the central business districts than the suburbs and exurbs. And this presents a nightmare for the traditional urbanist. In contrast to central business districts, suburban offices have fared far better while sprawled areas such as Tampa, Fort Lauderdale, Austin and Nashville have become the nation’s hottest office markets. With the large majority of major metropolitan area residents already outside the urban cores, the most enticing economic opportunities may lie in modern-day versions of Ebenezer Howard’s “garden cities”, such as Cinco Ranch outside Houston or New Albany near Columbus .

These peripheral developments have long disgusted planners and environmentalists; Al Gore, for instance, has been waging a dogged war on “sprawl” since before the end of the last century. But in reality, they are not the carbon-crazed dystopias depicted by many urbanists. Far from being bedroom communities for commuters travelling to the city core, they are increasingly places with their own thriving town centres and cultural venues. By lending themselves to remote work and shorter commutes, they also prove ideal for energy efficiency and emissions reductions.

Despite their centuries-long dominance, traditional cities cannot compete with these areas. And if they are to have a decent future, they must move beyond their grandiosity and shift their focus to their greatest resource: strong neighbourhoods and the creative people who inhabit them. Downtowns may be fading everywhere, but neighbourhoods in places such Boston and even much of San Francisco have retained their streetwise vitality.

In New York, city leaders also realise that the era shaped by the office tower is coming to an end, and plan to convert many of them into housing. But this may be of only limited utility; according to one recent estimate, barely 20 million of the city’s 420 million square feet of office space is suitable for conversion, despite the wishes of the buildings’ desperate owners. At the same time, some are still pushing new large-scale office projects, even as big developers, such as Related and Vornado, pull out of massive developments and vacancy rates remain persistently high. In another less promising sign, both New York and Chicago plan to build large casinos — the kind of Hail Mary pass that has rarely delivered solid economic results.

But changing building patterns will not be enough. A successful neighbourhood strategy, based on real improvements for residents, also requires shifting away from the progressive agenda that has made so many cities unliveable: from bans on energy sources such natural gas and a refusal to crack down on crime to the usually miserable state of urban public education. Communities may still live in city neighbourhoods, but they need to have a reason to want to keep living there, particularly if they have children.

In the likely event that this proves too long-term a strategy, even under progressive rule, some cities — notably New York and London — could witness a resurgence shakily built on tourism. Even as residents flee or are priced out, they will continue to attract students, the childless young and, at least for now, the ultra-rich leisure class. But this is not a serious programme for recovering urban supremacy. These areas will become, a H.G. Wells predicted over a century ago, “places of concourse and rendezvous”, home largely to elites, their servants and the childless.

This may keep some cities from total decline, but they will play a very different role to that once celebrated by Jane Jacobs, the Godmother of Urban Studies, and other urban romantics. So while urban areas may resurge, they will no longer be the unmatched centres of population, economic power and innovation. The game has changed and cities, to survive, must learn to adjust. For if they don’t, the fate of Ancient Rome awaits.

For neoliberal ideologues such as Milton Friedman, who used the pencil fable to argue for opaque world-spanning supply chains, the beauty of such complex systems is not only that the consumer obtains his product at the lowest price possible, and that the producer can maximise his profits, “but even more to foster harmony and peace among the peoples of the world”. As the historian Quinn Slobodian noted in Globalists, his recent study of the first neoliberal theorists, such idealistic motivations were evident from the very start. Ignoring the fact that the globalised world of the late 19th century failed to prevent World War One, they believed that creating a giant interconnected market would make a repeat of such a cataclysm impossible.

They were wrong. Instead, the restructuring of the global economy into a large web vastly increases the risk of a total system collapse. Instead of one economy failing, a shock in one corner of the world can place great and sudden stress on economic and political systems thousands of miles away. A war in distant Taiwan can mean you’re no longer able to buy a new car; a drought on the other end of the world means empty shelves at home. 

As archaeologists and historians have increasingly begun to stress, our globalised world has seen two antecedents in the past: in the interconnected, hyper-specialised trading systems of the Bronze Age, and those of the Roman Empire at its height. When both buckled under a wave of unexpected shocks, the result was not decline or recession but total collapse, a process defined by the great theorist Joseph Tainter as “fundamentally a sudden, pronounced loss of an established level of sociopolitical complexity”. 

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This is, as Tainter observes, “a suddenly smaller, simpler, less stratified, and less socially differentiated” society, where “the flow of information drops, people trade and interact less” and “specialization decreases and there is less centralized control”.  This is not a Spenglerian moral fable of societal decline, but an inexorable process whereby growing complexity and sophistication bring with them a growing fragility: when a combination of shocks arrive, the entire society is suddenly forced to reorganise itself. It is not an extinction event or the end of the world: life goes on, just in a poorer, simpler fashion.

The great trading civilisations of the Bronze Age Mediterranean present just such an example. As the archaeologist Eric H. Cline notes in his recently reissued book 1177 BC, for more than two thousand years the great civilisations of Egypt, Western Asia and the Aegean had formed a single interconnected trading system, dependent on complex trading networks that “were open to instability the minute there was a change in one of the integral parts”.

When crisis struck, shortly after 1200 BC, it took down all the civilisations of the Bronze Age Mediterranean simultaneously. As Cline notes, “perhaps the inhabitants could have survived one disaster, such as an earthquake or a drought, but they could not survive the combined effects of earthquake, drought, and invaders all occurring in rapid succession”. A “domino effect” followed, in which, thanks to the globalised nature of their world,  “the disintegration of one civilisation led to the fall of the others”.

The collapse of Roman civilisation, a product of an overextended, underfinanced empire weakened by internal feuding among its political elites, presents another apposite example. As the archaeologist Bryan Ward-Perkins emphasised in his 2005 book The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilisation, the most remarkable aspect of Roman civilisation, archaeologically speaking, was the ability of even the poorest members of society to afford cheap and high-quality consumer goods, enabled by immense specialisation in production and an interconnected trading network that spanned the entire empire.  

Yet after Rome collapsed, such goods were only available for the very richest members of society. In the production of ceramics, the use of coinage and the construction of stone buildings, the Western half of the empire suddenly sank back to a level of societal complexity lower than in Iron Age prehistory, not returning to a Roman level of sophistication until the later Middle Ages. And indeed, as Ward-Perkins warns, the Roman economy’s complexity was the precise reason its collapse was so total: “economic complexity made mass-produced goods available, but it also made people dependent on specialists or semi-specialists — sometimes working hundreds of miles away — for many of their material needs.” While this worked well in times of stability, it precipitated collapse when trade routes were disrupted.

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Like Friedman, or Biden, Ward-Perkins observes that today “we are wholly dependent for our needs on thousands, indeed hundreds of thousands, of other people spread around the globe, each doing their own little thing”. Yet he draws a very different conclusion about the desirability of this situation, noting that now “we would be quite incapable of meeting our needs locally, even in an emergency”. 

Yet of course, even as they were living through its early stages, the Romans were unaware their society was collapsing. Yes, goods were harder to come by, infrastructure was increasingly degraded, urban life was increasingly unsettled, economic growth was only a memory, and new religions boomed as people tried to make sense of their declining prospects. But even still, the military failures on the empire’s eastern fringes barely impacted life in the imperial centre. For some people, great profits could still be made: for most, things went on much as before, though with a lower standard of living with each passing year. No doubt, things will improve soon, Romans told themselves: this is only a temporary blip.

The theorist of collapse John Michael Greer dates the beginning of the collapse of our own society in the economic crisis of the mid-1970s, which drove deindustrialisation in both the United States and Britain and initiated the erosion of state capacity in search of ever-harder to accumulate profits, hoarded by oligarchs even as it destroyed the tax base. This is the process of what Greer terms “catabolic collapse” — “the stairstep sequence of decline” where decades of crisis are followed by decades of seeming improvement, though the underlying society is left weaker and less resilient before the next crisis hits: “rinse and repeat, and you’ve got the process that turned the Forum of imperial Rome into an early medieval sheep pasture.” 

This gloomy view accords well with the Marxist theorist Wolfgang Streeck’s 2016 analysis that the post-1970s crisis of capitalism, accelerated by the 2008 financial crash, has led us into a period of civilisational entropy and decay. For him, we experience “life in the shadow of uncertainty, always at risk of being upset by surprise events and unpredictable disturbances and dependent on individuals’ resourcefulness, skillful improvisation, and good luck”. It is a period where the state can no longer guarantee its citizens order or security, where “deep changes will occur” in an unpredictable fashion, and where every last effort to squeeze profit out of a collapsing system further undermines the social structure.

For Streeck, this interregnum is a time when personal wealth dwindles and financial insecurity becomes the norm. Indeed, as Streeck observes, it is a period where “as growth declines and risks increase, the struggle for survival will become more intense”. It offers “rich opportunities to oligarchs and warlords while imposing uncertainty and insecurity on all others, in some ways like the long interregnum that began in the fifth century CE and is now called the Dark Age”. It is not a vision of hell, or of the kind of apocalypse fantasised by Hollywood, but simply of a degraded version of the present: a world closer to the modern Global South than our recent past. It is not necessarily a sudden cataclysm, but a process that will take decades, perhaps even centuries, to fully reveal itself.

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Neither Rome nor the civilisations of the Bronze Age Mediterranean were brought down by one single cause. It took the combination of climate change, elite rivalry, military disaster and migratory pressures, combined with the extreme fragility engendered by economic specialisation and tightly-knit international trading networks, to ensure that when collapse came, it was total. As Ward-Perkins warns, Rome’s system of complex supply chains “worked very well in stable times, but it rendered consumers extremely vulnerable if for any reason the networks of production and distribution were disrupted”.

The belated efforts of governments across the world to secure fragile supply chains and enhance food security are the refutation, in action, of the fable of the pencil. As Tainter notes, “the whole concern with collapse and self-sufficiency may itself be a significant social indicator” of decline. A focused effort on domestic resilience is, after all, in itself evidence of reduced civilisational complexity: as trade routes wither and consumption begins to drop, we should strive to ensure that we are heading towards a controlled descent and not a sudden, cataclysmic crash. The imperial centre may not hold, but our lives must go on.