Alfredo Valenzuela I Sevilla, (EFE) that “the great hope of the Western world is its enormous baggage of culture.”
In the novel “The Twilight of Rome” (Espasa) Carlos de Miguel (Valladolid, 1974) addresses “a moment of change that, if it was not absolute decadence, was one of great transformations, which can be reminiscent of current times, in where for the first time in 600 years a new non-Western hegemonic power is emerging”.
“One of the things that can save us and lead us on the right path is that we come from the Enlightenment and from a great culture.” Despite which the author claims not to be optimistic. Because “Europe is capable of the greatest advances and the greatest atrocities.”
In the same way, he points out, the Eastern Roman Empire lasted until the fifteenth century, with the fall of Constantinople, and lasted two thousand years because it was based on great cultures, such as Greece, Persia, Mesopotamia and Egypt, and had more developed cities. and a more dynamic demographic than the Western Roman Empire.
The dominance of Christianity
Like the West now, the Roman Empire in the third century suffered a social and economic crisis and, above all, a change in values, “and Christianity became predominant because, in the face of pagan religion, it gave answers to the individual.”
“The Emperor Constantine had a political vision, of a transcendence that perhaps only Augustus had had before, and he was the first to bet on Christianity and take advantage of the dynamism of this new religion to benefit politically from the union of the altar and the throne, with which erected a kind of absolute monarchy that is supported by the popes and the bishops”.
With this “visionary” behavior, Constantine managed to extend the survival of Rome when it was already showing symptoms of a marked decline, which is what he has tried to reflect in his novel.
“Rome was no longer the important city it once was, but an outdated town. Far from where the most important political decisions were made, which was in other cities on the Italian peninsula, on the Rhine or on the Danube, where the courts of the emperors had moved; many large buildings and public works were already in ruins because there was no money to fix them”.
“The gates of the city and the roads were not the same as before and the sewers did not work so well; plagues and epidemics became constant throughout the third century, and it is believed that there were climatic changes that affected crops and caused famines.
The utility of history
To all these calamities was added “a debasement of the currency, which caused great inflation and turned the poor into a great mass, while slavery declined, which was no longer something normal, so that not even the landowners had of slaves in an economy that was already of the proto-feudal type.
After six years making a podcast of followers that he has described as faithful and understanding – “they know that I am a teacher and that I have a family”, comments the author with humor. Carlos De Miguel assures that his aspiration when making the leap to the novel has been “to be able to transfer to the real time, to take readers to a great historical theater”.
For which he has taken into account “what the clothes were like, the smells, what they ate and drank tasted like… and at the same time elaborate plots and characters that make us reflect on what that moment could have been”, and all through a novel ” nothing academic.”
When asked what he answers his students when they question the usefulness of knowing history, the author has not hesitated to answer: “It is very useful to know where we come from to avoid repeating certain things.” EFE