Smarty Pants From The American Scholar

Living in the United States during the Covid-19 pandemic feels like watching the sun go down on a crumbling empire. The world’s wealthiest country has experienced more deaths and suffered a greater economic shock than any of its peers. Staggering levels of unemployment and eviction are looming, not to mention a potentially chaotic November election. We can’t help but think back to our 2017 interview with classicist Kyle Harper, who in his book, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, advanced a new theory about why and how the empire fell … under circumstances alarmingly similar to our own. Though the decline of Rome has been a favored subject of armchair theorists for as long as there have been armchairs, Harper's hypothesis points to many of the same problems we're wrestling with today.Go beyond the episode:Kyle Harper’s The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an EmpireRead an excerpt from the book on how the Huns laid waste to the Eternal CityHow we can learn