Are We Rome?

by Cullen Murphy

  There are other camps. A group that might be called the “Augustinians,” led by the Christian scholar Richard Horsley, wonders if the pursuit of a Pax Americana diverges from the message of Jesus, much as Augustine, in The City of God, written shortly after the sack of Rome by Alaric and the Visigoths in 410 A.D., pointed to the incompatibility of earthly and heavenly ambitions. Horsley’s views clash with those of “Ambrosians” like the Reverend Jerry Falwell, who see the Pax Americana and the advance of evangelical Christianity as fundamentally inseparable—a throwback to the views on church and state of Ambrose, a Roman prefect and bishop of Milan in the fourth century A.D. “God has raised up America for the cause of world evangelization,” Falwell maintains. The idea that an American imperium is part of God’s plan was the message of the Christmas card sent out in 2003 by Vice President Dick Cheney and his wife, Lynne. It read: “And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?”

  And then there are the expansionists, an ironical group who foresee more of the same for America, only bigger and better. In a document that hovers between modest proposal and eccentric manifesto the aging French radical Régis Debray urges the annexation of Europe by America, creating a United States of the West as the only hope against the coming Islamist and Confucianist onslaught. “Who but America can take responsibility, at a reasonable cost, for the peace and unity of the civilized world?” Debray asks. “Do you suppose we would breathe easier under the iron rule of Islam? Or under the domination of China, if by some misfortune she became the only hyperpower?” Referring to an imperial Roman decree of 212 A.D. that extended citizenship to all free men in Rome’s provinces, Debray goes on, “I believe the time has come for a new Edict of Caracalla”—meaning American citizenship for Canadians and Mexicans, for Europeans, for Japanese, and for New Zealanders and Australians. (And if it’s not too much to ask, can we make sure to include the Caribbean?)

  The comparisons, often contradictory, go far beyond military power and global reach. The Roman analogy is cited with respect to the nation’s borders and the extent to which America has lost control of them, as Rome lost control of hers. It is cited both by people who see America in the grip of spiritual torpor and sybaritic excess (as Rome at times was) and by those who see it as ruled by moralizing religiosity and outright superstition (as Rome at times also was). It is cited by those who worry about an overweening nationalism and also by those who see an erosion of public spirit.

  Cock an ear: you’ll hear Rome-and-America analogies everywhere. “It’s the fall of Rome, my dear,” the food historian Barbara Haber told a reporter when asked about the spread of televised contests featuring gluttony and regurgitation, with their echoes of Roman overindulgence. (Never mind that the fabled vomitorium is a myth; the Latin word refers to passageways in amphitheaters that quickly “disgorged” crowds into the streets.) Senator Trent Lott, pushing for the passage of a pork-laden highway bill in 2005, summoned the shades of Rome to his aid. “Part of the reason that Rome eventually collapsed was that it stopped building and maintaining its roads,” he argued. “The day we stop investing in better and safer roads is the day we have just one more thing in common with Rome. And Rome fell.” In a speech from decades ago that continues to be widely reprinted, Clare Boothe Luce railed against America’s anything-goes “new morality” toward sex, conjuring the forlorn attempts of Augustus, Rome’s first emperor, to bolster the Roman family in the face of similar licentiousness. (“It was already too late,” Luce concluded darkly.) Most people are aware that the Roman Empire was eventually split into western and eastern halves, the one Latin-speaking and centered on Rome, the other Greek-speaking and centered on Constantinople. It’s probably only a matter of time before someone sees in this a foreshadowing of the emergence of Red and Blue America.

  The larger question still hangs in the air: Are we Rome? That question leads to others: Does the fate of Rome tell us anything useful about America’s present or America’s future? Must decline and fall lurk somewhere ahead? Can we learn from Rome’s mistakes? Take heart from Rome’s achievements? And by the way, what exactly was the fate of the Roman Empire? Why do historians lock horns over the question, Did Rome really fall?

  If you’re looking for reasons to brush comparisons aside, it’s easy enough to find them. The two entities, Rome and America, are dissimilar in countless ways. It’s hard even to know what specific moments to compare: the American experiment is in its third century, and the Roman state in the West spanned more than a millennium, from the eighth century B.C. to the fifth century A.D. Over time, Rome and America molted more than once from their previous selves. But I’ll argue that some comparisons do hold up, though maybe not the ones that have been most in the public eye. Think less about decadence, less about military might, and more about how our two societies view the outside world, more about the slow decay of homegrown institutions. Think less about threats from unwelcome barbarians, and more about the healthy functioning of a multi-ethnic society. Think less about the ability of a superpower to influence everything on earth, and more about how everything on earth affects a superpower.

  I’ll argue further that the debate over Rome’s ultimate fate holds a key to thinking about our own. The status quo can’t be flash-frozen. A millennium hence America will be hard to recognize. It may not exist as a nation-state in the form it does now—or even exist at all. Will the transitions ahead be gradual and peaceful or abrupt and catastrophic? Will our descendants be living productive lives in a society better than the one we inhabit now? Whatever happens, will valuable aspects of America’s legacy weave through the fabric of civilizations to come? Will historians someday have reason to ask, Did America really fall?

  Comparative Anatomy

  FIRST, LET’S EASE one issue to the side. There are exceptions, but most historians who teach in colleges and universities are skeptical of trying to draw explicit “lessons” from history. No historical episode is precisely like any other, they point out, so no parallel can ever be exact. Too often, they say, people focus on a handful of similarities and ignore all the differences. Worst of all, history gets hijacked for ideological reasons, as when American officials cite the appeasement at Munich to get our armies marching, or the quagmire of Vietnam to keep our armies home. Even when people try to learn sensibly from the past, they may be deriving conclusions that have no relevant application: that’s what the charge “fighting the last war” is all about. In their book Thinking in Time the historians Richard Neustadt and Ernest May offer a dozen case studies, drawn from foreign affairs, of how history was inadvertently or cynically misapplied by American leaders—if historical thinking was engaged in at all. (They also wonder how Lyndon Johnson, struggling with Vietnam, would have reacted if his national security advisor had ever invoked the example of the Peloponnesian War; and they point out that the monarchs and ministers who led Europe into the carnage of World War I knew the Greek lessons through and through.) Given all this, many historians conclude, scholars have their hands full just trying to figure out what actually happened way back when, a task that in itself may be beyond our meager powers. The British historian A.J.P. Taylor used to say, “The only lesson of history is that there are no lessons of history.” You can almost visualize his regal verdict: Pollice verso—thumbs down!

  Of course, many people can’t believe their ears when they hear historians talk this way. Not long ago at the University of Chicago a panel of classicists held forth on why it’s a mistake to palpate the past for guidance in the present. They ran into opposition from an uncomprehending audience of well-educated non-academics, whose reaction can be summed up as “But, but . . . but how can you say that?” The public has long been schooled to think that being aware of history—and taking historical analogies into account—is actually the smart thing to do. The famous Santayana maxim about what happens to those who forget history is drilled into you by the sixth grade, and everyone who learns it is co
ndemned to repeat it. The Pentagon, taking this idea to heart in a literal-minded and almost endearing way, runs a Center for Army Lessons Learned, at Fort Leavenworth. It maintains a database called the Joint Universal Lessons Learned System. And then there’s the example of our own lives, the retort of Everyman: What’s the point of “experience,” that much-recommended quality, if you can’t, or shouldn’t, learn something from it?

  The scholars are right to be wary; in many ways the history of History is a saga of its misuse. At the same time, as some warn, to rule out any hope of lessons risks making history, especially classical history, into little more than a theme park. The commonsense approach is the one suggested by Carl Becker in a famous lecture to his fellow historians many decades ago: “Mr. Everyman is stronger than we are, and sooner or later we must adapt our knowledge to his necessities. Otherwise he will leave us to our own devices, leave us it may be to cultivate a species of dry professional arrogance growing out of the thin soil of antiquarian research.” Becker went on to caution that the whole historical enterprise is treacherous territory indeed: the past plays tricks on the present, and vice versa. But he wasn’t ready to throw in the towel.

  So again: Are we Rome? One way to answer the question is by assembling a crude ledger of comparisons. My own would start as follows: Leaving aside the knotty and partly semantic issue of what an empire is, and whether the United States truly is one, Rome and America are the most powerful actors in their worlds, by many orders of magnitude. Their power includes both military might and the “soft power” of language, culture, commerce, technology, and ideas. (Tacitus said of the seductive amenities brought to Britain by Rome, “The simple natives gave the name of ‘culture’ to this factor of their slavery.”) Rome and America are comparable in physical size—the Roman Empire and its Mediterranean lake would fit inside the three million square miles of the Lower Forty-eight states, though without a lot to spare. Both Rome and America created global structures—administrative, economic, military, cultural—that the rest of the world and their own citizens came to take for granted, as gravity and photosynthesis are taken for granted. Both are societies made up of many peoples—open to newcomers, willing to absorb the genes and lifestyles and gods of everyone else, and to grant citizenship to incoming tribes from all corners of the earth. And because of this, the identities of both change organically over time. Romans and Americans revel in engineering prowess and grandiosity. Whenever I see the space shuttle, standing upright and inching slowly on its crawler toward the launching pad, I think back to the Rome of Hadrian’s day, and the gargantuan statue of the Sun-God, as tall as the shuttle, being dragged into place by twenty-four elephants.

  Romans and Americans can’t get enough of laws and lawyers and lawsuits. They believe deeply in private property. They relish the ritual humiliation of public figures: Americans through comedy and satire, talk radio and Court TV; the Romans through vicious satire, to be sure, but also, during the republic, by means of the censoria nota, the public airing, name by name, of everything the great men of the time should be ashamed of. Romans and Americans accept enormous disparities of wealth, and allow the gap to widen. Ramsay MacMullen, one of the most prominent modern historians of Rome, has said that five centuries of imperial social evolution can be reduced to three words: “Fewer have more.” Both Romans and Americans treat the nouveaux riches with lacerating scorn, perhaps concealing hints of admiration. (Think of the character Trimalchio in the Satyricon of Petronius; and remember that Fitzgerald’s original title for The Great Gatsby was Trimalchio in West Egg.) Both see themselves as a chosen people, and both see their national character as exceptional. Both recover from colossal setbacks, and both endure periods of catastrophic leadership (though when it comes to murderous insanity, some of Rome’s emperors set the bar very high). Both Rome and America look back to an imagined nobler, simpler past, and both see the future in terms of Manifest Destiny. The Romans spoke of having been granted imperium sine fine—an empire without end. The American dollar bill uses Rome’s own language, and words derived from Virgil, to proclaim a novus ordo saeclorum—a new order of the ages. When the first President Bush, after communism’s fall, proclaimed the advent of a “new world order,” his new rhetoric was actually very old.

  But Rome in all its long history never left the Iron Age, whereas America in its short history has already leapt through the Industrial Age to the Information Age and the Biotech Age. Wealthy as it was, Rome lived close to the edge; many regions were one dry spell away from famine. America enjoys an economy of abundance, even surfeit; it must beware the diseases of overindulgence. Rome was always a slaveholding polity, with the profound moral and social retardation that this implies; America started out as a slaveholding polity and decisively cast slavery aside. Rome emerged out of a city-state and took centuries to fully let go of a city-state’s methods of governance; America from very early on began to administer itself as a continental power. Rome had no middle class as we understand the term, whereas for America the middle class is the core social fact—our ballast, our gyroscope, our compass. Rome had a powerful but tiny aristocracy and entrenched ideas about the social pecking order; even at its most democratic, Rome was not remotely as democratic as America at its least democratic, under a British monarch. In Roman eyes the best way to acquire wealth was the old-fashioned way, by inheriting it; the Romans looked down on entrepreneurship, which Americans hold in the highest esteem, and despised manual labor. Rome desired foreign colonies and protectorates and moved aggressively to acquire them; America with few exceptions prefers to extend its reach by other means. Rome was economically static; America is economically transformative. For all its engineering skills, Rome generated few original ideas in science or technology; America is a hothouse of innovation and creativity. Despite its deficiencies, as we may perceive them, Rome flourished as a durable culture for more than a thousand years, and acted as a great power for six centuries; whether America has that kind of staying power remains to be seen.

  As individuals, Romans were proud, arrogant, principled, cruel, and vulgar; Americans are idealistic, friendly, heedless, aggressive, and sentimental (but, yes, often vulgar, too). I’m not sure that Americans, cast suddenly back in time, would ever warm to second-century Rome, the way they might to Samuel Johnson’s London. In their mental maps, their intellectual orientations, their default values, Romans and Americans are further apart than most people suspect. Romans were as bawdy as Americans are repressed. Roman notions of personal honor and disgrace, and the behavior appropriate to each, have no real counterpart in America; Roman officials would unhesitatingly commit suicide in situations that wouldn’t make Americans even sit down with Barbara Walters (much less consider resigning). On basic matters such as gender roles and the equality of all people, Romans and Americans would behold one another with disbelief and distaste. The fully furnished frame of mind of a modern American differs hugely from that of a colonial American at the time of Bunker Hill, and even more from that of a settler in Jamestown; the distance between the modern American mind and the ancient Roman one is hard to bridge. If the past is another country, then Rome is another planet. And yet, that planet colonized the one we inhabit now.

  Six Parallels

  ROME WILL ALWAYS speak across the centuries, and it is too large a thing not to be heard. Like the Bible or the works of Shakespeare, the history of Rome encompasses the whole of the human condition: every motivation, every behavior, every virtue, every vice, every outcome, every moral. And like the Bible and Shakespeare, what Rome has to say is shaped by the listeners in any age.

  What is Rome saying to us today? In the pages ahead I’ll focus on a half dozen issues for which the example of Rome provides parallels of direct relevance for America. This isn’t meant to be a capsule history of the Roman Empire; any number of important subjects, such as religious belief, economic policy, and palace politics, come up only in passing. And it’s not meant to highlight every point of contrast between Rome
and America; the emphasis is on comparisons that compel attention because there’s something to them. Some of the parallels have to do with how Rome and America function on the inside; others have to do with outside pressures and constraints. The parallels aren’t fixed in place, and they don’t point to an inescapable future. Taken as they are, though, they trace a path that leads to foreseeable consequences—a path, after all, that Rome has already been down.

  One parallel involves the way Americans see America; and, more to the point, the way the tiny, elite subset of Americans who live in the nation’s capital see America—and see Washington itself. Rome prized its status as the city around which the world revolved. Official Washington shares that Ptolemaic outlook. Unfortunately, it’s not a self-fulfilling prophecy—just a faulty premise. And it leads to an exaggerated sense of Washington’s weight in the world: an exaggerated sense of its importance in the eyes of others, and of its ability to act alone. Washington led the fight against some of the twentieth century’s most dangerous “-isms.” Solipsism is one it missed.

  Another parallel concerns military power. This is the subject that comes most often to mind when Rome and America are compared. All that empire talk! Rome and America aren’t carbon copies or fraternal twins, in either their approach to power or the tools at their disposal. Amid all the differences, though, two large common problems stand out. One is cultural and social: the widening divide between military society and civilian society. The other is demographic: the shortage of manpower. For a variety of reasons, Rome and America both start to run short of the people they need to sustain their militaries, and both have to find new recruits wherever they can. Rome turned to the barbarians for help: not a good long-run solution, history would suggest. America is increasingly turning to its own outside sources—not the Visigothi and the Ostrogothae but the Halliburtoni and the Wackenhuti. Also not a good long-run solution.