Every generation seems to have its own attitudes to those Romans. Post-war films like Spartacus tended to cast British actors as Roman imperialists, with heroic Kirk Douglas fighting for freedom against the cruel Laurence Olivier. Today Americans are more likely to be marching in the legions as in The Eagle. Goodies or baddies? The famous ambivalence of Monty Python in asking, ‘What have the Romans ever done for us?’ seems as pointed as ever. In one account, the Romans followed the Greeks in teaching the world to be civilised. And while the Roman Empire was won by the sword, its makers also gave us the modern ideal of Republican liberty, and inspired the Renaissance as well as establishing the Roman Catholic Church. Popular history today, however, tends to emphasise the dark side of the Empire: the Romans were arch-militarist Caesars and oppressive exploiters, and either unfeeling moralists or depraved Caligulas.

Perhaps this view is simply realistic. All those aqueducts were built on the backs of slave labour, after all. Contemporary historians are quick to reject the classic account by Gibbon of a decline and fall of the Roman Empire. How can the end of all that brutality have led to a ‘dark ages’? The Goths and Vandals – let alone the dreaded Hun – may have been ‘barbarians’, but surely they represented some form of improvement on Empire? Weren’t they peaceful farmers really, once they had found somewhere to settle, and wasn’t small-hold farming a huge step forward from the vast slave estates of Italy? Where once we read of a decline and fall, we are more likely now to hear talk of ‘transformation’ and ‘accommodation’: in effect what was decline can now be seen as an ongoing, unstoppable, progress of history towards our own time.

Is it so mistaken, however, to pass moral judgements on history and to talk of decline? To recognise that our achievements, our civilisation, can be destroyed? That a once-admirable Roman Empire may indeed have become morally, intellectually and spiritually exhausted leading to its destruction and the loss for many centuries of its knowledge, its material comforts and the Pax Romana? That when confidence in the values and powers of one’s own society starts to go – replaced by fear of the future – then it can all go downhill very quickly? As Kenneth Clark put it, talking of those who said they preferred barbarism to so-called civilisation, ‘I doubt if they have given it a long enough trial… no books, no light after dark, no hope’. Do we owe it to the Romans, and maybe ourselves, to give a second glance to their credentials to being civilised?