For some reason I’ve been feeling the urge to write too much the past couple of days. I just put out a monster piece on trade war, but still have another itch to scratch, this time about Roman history, with relevance to current events.

OK, that should be a red flag right there. Anyone claiming to see modern lessons in ancient history, especially Roman history, should be considered a hack until proved innocent. Brad DeLong is rightly scathing about Niall Ferguson, who is now regurgitating the plots of Cecil B. DeMille movies as if it were scholarship, declaring that luxury and orgies brought down the Roman Republic. Silly man: doesn’t he know that it was bad statistics, that the true rate of inflation was ten percent?

But I find myself thinking, not about the fall of the Republic, but about the Pax Romana that came after — the two-plus centuries of stability that followed Augustus. Believe it or not, I think that era does have some lessons for us; this may be a sign of mental infirmity, but I’m gonna let it all hang out.

Not long ago, I would have said that very little about the Roman Empire was relevant to anything modern. It may have fascinated early modern Europeans like Edward Gibbon, but in the end it was a pre-industrial society, incredibly poor by modern standards, and sharing few modern values. True, the Roman Empire was bigger than most pre-industrial empires, and lasted a lot longer. But was it really different in any important way from, say, Assyria?