Edward Watts is the Alkiviadis Vassiliadis Endowed Chair in Byzantine History at UC San Diego, and is the author of six books about Roman and Byzantine History, most recently Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny (Basic Books, 2018), offers a narrative history of the last three centuries of the Roman Republic. In the summer of 2021, he will publish Rome’s Eternal Decline and Fall: The History of a Dangerous Idea (Oxford University Press, 2021), a book that traces the 2200 year history of claims about Roman decline and the victims they created. His work has also been featured in Time, Vox, Smithsonian, Zocalo, and the San Diego Union Tribune.