READING OVID AND HIS IDEAS OF EMPIRE FROM THE SUBCONTINENT

To first-year undergraduate students, Ovid was the primer to literature’s paradox. Writing, they learnt, did not merely uphold authority; it exposed its fragility. Writers, we realised, were not necessarily heroes. And for this reason, reading was never just reading. It was a relentless force

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Nothing intimates the slow unravelling of the Roman empire quite like Jean-Paul Laurens’ portrait of Honorius Flavius — the boy emperor consumed by a world too big for him. Titled ‘The Late Empire: Honorius’ (1880), the painting captures the throne’s fragility and the boy who barely fills it. His face is young, untouched by experience, but his eyes already hold the heavy certainty of impending ruin. The feet swaying above the marble are as unsteady as his hold on power. The sword in his hand is more a prop than a weapon, and no amount of silk or gold can camouflage the looming collapse. Laurens wasn’t just painting the past. He was warning his own time. No empire, he seemed to say, is too big to fail.

The rise and fall of empire

A century before Laurens, across the Channel, Edward Gibbon had already chronicled the fall of Rome in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1788), attributing its demise to moral decay and barbarian invasions. He mourned the slow unravelling of an empire that had deemed itself eternal. Laurens merely painted what was already written. Both artist and historian engaged with Greco-Roman antiquity not merely as a subject of study but as a legacy crucial to Europe’s preoccupation with its racial genealogy. However, even as they traced their lineage to its grandeur, they cast its decline as a warning to their own time. They aimed not merely to inherit Rome’s legacy but also to reshape history itself, declaring in the process, the tenacity of their empire.