Rome has always been my central reference point for triangulating where we now stand, or fall, in history. With the ghastly misadventure in Iraq in 2003, George Bush obviously thought of himself as a latterday Caesar, even prematurely celebrating success with the hubristic “Mission Accomplished”, in no doubt unconscious imitation of Caesar’s “veni, vidi, vici”. Both Rome and the US have an eagle emblem, and a temptation to undermine democracy with dynastic ambition – Bush being the second of that name to attain the White House. Now it is occupied by a blithering idiot who calls to mind Gaius, more commonly known as Caligula who, as Robin Lane Fox writes, was also “vicious, impossibly egocentric and mad”. Caligula was the great nephew of the long-serving emperor Tiberius, who had talked vaguely of “restoring the Republic”, but once dynasties are established,  they hang on to power as tenaciously as today’s transnational titans protect their assets. (Remember billionaire Philip Green’s 50th birthday toga party with him dressed as Nero, serenaded by Rod Stewart.) Those of us keen on the past wish that those in power would learn from it, rather than repeat its mistakes. Before the pandemic caused a lockdown, archaeologists were making new finds in the Roman forum, including this two-and-a-half thousand year old sarcophagus, dedicated to the probably mythical co-founder of Rome, Romulus.

Meanwhile, works are under way for the President Trump Memorial Park on Hart Island, New York. Unclaimed victims of Covid-19’s bodies are being mass buried in trenches reminiscent of the Holocaust, a fitting tribute to the vacuous denials (and closure of Obama’s pandemic preparedness office) which have done so much to increase the death toll in America. (One wonders what excavators in two-and-a-half thousand years’ time, digital records long having disintegrated, will make of this, assuming it has not been covered with water.) Trump has regularly lied about his handling of the pandemic, like so much else, while using regular “coronavirus” press conferences as an election platform – “Did you know I was Number One on Facebook?”. While conspicuous for his mendacity throughout his presidency – only 32% of Americans think he tells the truth – this does not seem to dent his electoral prospects, despite his sole claim, to have reflated the economy, now lying in tatters. Whether or not he made his horse a consul, or slept with his sister, Caligula did have tortured to death a young actress, which led to his murder by a tribune four years into his reign.  Is it too much to hope that history can be repeated?

Back in the UK, Britain’s own pocket Caesar has survived his brush with Brutal disaster, thanks to the National Health Service his administration was on the point of discussing with American industry before the pandemic hit. If his subsequent tribute to his nurses is genuine, then he and his Health Secretary have both discovered empathy as a result of all this, infecting some with the optimism that he has had a Pauline conversion and Tory policies may be ameliorated.  A flexible compass is something he shares with Trump, having given the Eurosceptics their litany – while inventing stories as the Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent about enforcing straight bananas and other absurdities; then writing The Dream of Rome as a hymn to European aspiration; then backing Brexit as his best route to power. (In that very thin Rome book he writes of modern Europe taking the best of Rome, adding “It would be good to bring the Turks in, and unite the two halves of the Roman Empire”. One of the key scaremongering issues the Vote Leave campaign he led raised was the fear that Turkey would join the EU, causing 80 million Turks to come to Britain. In the election campaign, he denied ever having mentioned Turkey!)

Johnson has dropped the would-be classicist in favour of impersonating a born-again Churchill, though the lack of oratory and sense of purpose rather undermine the impression. If I had to nominate a century-old model for our Prime Minister, I would choose Bertie Wooster, P.G. Wodehouse’s intellectually challenged anti-hero. Wooster also went to Eton and Oxford (Churchill went to Harrow and Sandhurst), has questionable taste and an inflated view of his own abilities.  The question is: what has happened to his aide-de-camp Jeeves, nee Cummings, last seen weeks ago sprinting away from cameras in Downing Street to coronaviral isolation, his project – hammering, the NHS, the BBC and the civil service – hopefully on permanent hold? Having gifted the country an imperial-style court, with a cabinet exclusively composed of what even one Tory admitted are “nodding dogs”, the convalescent Wooster has left a hole where Churchill would have inserted leadership. Raab – the man who, on becoming Brexit secretary, admitted to not being aware how much British trade flowed through Dover – has the deputising role of Gussie Fink-Nottle.

What this vacuous government has reiterated just today is that its heart has not changed, it will persist with the Brexit deadline of December 31st, despite Brussels having confirmed no deal is now possible by then. So, the chance of re-growing the UK economy, which the government’s own forecasters say will have shrunk by 35% by then, will be jeopardised by falling back on WTO terms of trade. And the vaunted deal with a shrunken US economy is unlikely to make much difference, as their chlorinated chickens will have flown home to roost. Indeed, as mature commentators have been noting, the chaotic US handling of the pandemic has finally shredded America’s claim to moral and material leadership of the free world. Whether Trump is Caligula, declaring himself a god, or Nero, fiddling while Rome burned, he has not just presided over bringing the economy to its knees, but its imperial standard crashing to the ground, its eagle broken along with a hundred thousand lives.

What neither of these petty tyrants comprehend, nor have any competence to change, is that they are witnessing the end of an epoch, where the complacent capitalist assumptions of unstoppable growth, and the perennial false promises of ‘trickle-down economics’, are trounced by a microbe. There is a reckoning to be had, not just because these governments fell short, but because those who took the hit were the very people they demeaned, the essential workers rather than the profiteers, the immigrant doctor rather than the ignorant doyen of fashion. Just as ancient Rome fell, not through war but the complacent over-extension of the pax romana which could no longer fulfil its promises, current civilisation has been caught with its metaphorical trousers down, slothful through self-indulgence. As the Oxford historian Geoffrey de Sainte Croix wrote:

As I see it, the Roman political system facilitated a most intense and ultimately destructive economic exploitation of the great mass of people, whether slave or free, and it made radical reform impossible. The result was that the propertied class, the real men of wealth, who had deliberately created the system for their own benefit, drained the life-blood from their world and thus destroyed Greco-Roman civilisation over a large part of their empire.