Wit & Attitude Quote by John Lothrop Motley

Motley frames history like agriculture: civilizations don’t just fall, they wear the ground out. “Soil” is Europe’s political and moral capacity; “long culture” makes empire sound less like brute conquest and more like a refined, self-consuming cultivation. The sting is in “exhausted” and “fallow.” Pagan Rome and its successors didn’t merely collapse; they depleted the very conditions that could sustain public life, leaving a landscape that can’t immediately regenerate.

As a 19th-century historian, Motley is writing with the period’s favorite metaphor: progress as organic growth, decadence as natural depletion. The phrasing carries a Protestant-tinged moral geology. “Pagan empires” isn’t a neutral descriptor; it implies that pre-Christian power, however brilliant, is ultimately sterile. The “still longer period” adds a bleak temporal judgment: the damage of empire is slow, and recovery is slower. That’s less an objective timeline than a narrative choice that justifies the so-called “dark” interlude after Rome as necessary dormancy rather than mere chaos.

The subtext is also political. Motley’s audience lived amid modern empires and industrial expansion; warning signs about over-cultivation would have landed. By making exhaustion the consequence of imperial “culture,” he suggests that sophistication can be complicit in decline: institutions, luxury, and administrative polish can grind down resilience. The sentence quietly absolves the later “rebirth” (Christian, medieval, or national) by casting it as nature’s cycle, not an accident of power. History becomes a field: conquest plants, prosperity harvests, decadence strips, and time waits for new seed.