Are We Rome?

by Cullen Murphy

  A third parallel is something that can be lumped under the term “privatization,” which can often also mean “corruption.” Rome had trouble maintaining a distinction between public and private responsibilities—and between public and private resources. The line between these is never fixed, anywhere. But when it becomes too hazy, or fades altogether, central government becomes impossible to steer. It took a long time to happen, but the fraying connection between imperial will and concrete action is a big part of What Went Wrong in ancient Rome. America has in recent years embarked on a privatization binge like no other in its history, putting into private hands all manner of activities once thought to be public tasks: collecting the nation’s taxes, patrolling its streets, defending its borders. This may make sense in the short term—and sometimes, like Rome, we may have no choice in the matter. But how will the consequences play out over decades, or centuries? Badly, I believe.

  A fourth parallel has to do with the way Americans view the outside world—the flip side of their self-centeredness. Rome often disparaged the people beyond its frontiers, and generally underestimated their capabilities, even as it held an outsize opinion of its own superiority and power. America’s attitude is more complicated than Rome’s, and often more idealistic and well-meaning, but in many ways it’s strikingly similar, and it leads to the same preventable form of blindness: either we don’t see what’s coming at us, or we don’t see what we’re hurtling toward.

  And then, fifth, there is the question of borders. Historians in recent decades have invested much effort in the study of Rome’s frontiers, showing that the fringe of empire was less a fence and more a threshold—not so much a firm line fortified with “Keep Out” signs as a permeable zone of continual interaction, sometimes troublesome but normally peaceful and mutually advantageous. The borderlands could hardly have been anything else: this is always the dynamic when a rich and powerful civilization bumps up against a poor and less developed one. The dynamic can’t be argued with or neutralized, and yet Rome coped successfully with this reality for many centuries, assimilating newcomers by the millions: that’s the happy lesson. When historians describe life along the Rhine or the Danube frontier in Roman times, an American reader can’t help conjuring an image of another boundary zone: the one that includes the Rio Grande.

  Finally, sixth, comes the complexity parallel. Sprawling powers like Rome and America face a built-in problem. They inevitably become impossible to manage, because the very act of managing has unpredictable ripple effects, of global scale, which in turn become part of the environment that needs to be managed. The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr was writing about a newly predominant America, but his observation (made fifty years ago) applies equally to Rome: “The same strength which has extended our power beyond a continent has also . . . brought us into a vast web of history in which other wills, running in oblique or contrasting directions to our own, inevitably hinder or contradict what we most fervently desire.” The bigger the entity and the more things it touches, the more susceptible it is to forces beyond its control. Maintaining stability requires far more work than fomenting instability. Analysts of modern terrorism wring their hands over a version of the same dilemma: governments can win only by defending everywhere; terrorists can win by succeeding anywhere. The complexity problem may have no real solution other than Thoreau’s deceptively easy one: “simplify.”

  The example of Rome instills one more thing—not so much a lesson as a state of mind. It encourages an appreciation for the workings of time itself: patient, implacable, and very, very long. This state of mind can induce a form of resignation. (Isabel Archer, in The Portrait of a Lady, is drawn to Rome for just that reason: “In a world of ruins the ruin of her happiness seemed a less unnatural catastrophe.”) Or it can put you on high alert. Time achieves revolutions by invisible increments. Changes that seem inconsequential over a single lifetime can upend the social order over three or four. We don’t naturally think in these terms; we’re all hemmed in by our one-lifetime horizon. But Rome has a way of raising the vantage point, altering your perspective.

  Fly Through

  I FIRST VISITED ROME at the age of twelve, some forty years ago, and have been back a dozen times. It is strange to think that the emperor Diocletian himself didn’t see Rome until he was in his mid-sixties, older than I am now—he was born elsewhere, always away on business, and didn’t visit the greatest city in the empire until celebrating the twentieth year of his reign. (And he didn’t like it, found it extravagant, crude, out of control: Las Vegas meets Blade Runner.) Nowadays it is possible to visit ancient Rome remotely, on computerized “fly-through” tours that allow you to zoom in to a three-dimensional reconstruction of the ancient Forum. The aim, eventually, is to render the city in full, layer by layer, archaeologically correct to the greatest imaginable degree. Here you are in, say, the third century A.D., on the Campus Martius, the Field of Mars, near the Mausoleum of Augustus, not far from the marble Ara Pacis, the Altar of Peace, the great monument to Augustan tranquillity. And now, a little to the east, here you are in the Forum of Trajan, above it the largest marketplace in the world—the Mall of Romanita, we’d call it today. And after that, outside the monumental city center, you wander among the six-story tenement buildings known as insulae, or “islands,” teeming and squalid and prone to fire, the ground floors everywhere crowded with shops. Press a key and the years peel away: you can see the city at the time of Marcus Aurelius, in the second century A.D., or, earlier, of Hadrian, or Augustus, or Julius Caesar, or Cato the Elder, or at the time of the kings, before the sixth century B.C. Watch the walls contract, the temples disappear, the imperial McMansions on the Palatine shrink into republican villas, and the villas into huts, until all that is left on the wooded hill is the legendary cave where Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, were suckled by a she-wolf.

  I remember the last day of my first trip to Rome, a trip undertaken in real time and space; I walked alone in the early morning with a sketchbook. The ancient paving stones of the Via Sacra were polished with wear, the sun already promising heat, the postcard sellers setting up their stalls like the guides and hawkers who catered to tourists in the very same spots two thousand years before. This was in the mid-1960s, before the thousands of cats that inhabited Rome’s ancient precincts had been removed, and the landscape was subtly animated by slurry pixels of feline movement.

  I made a drawing that morning, which I still have, of the three standing columns of the Temple of Castor, above the reflecting pool. I remember thinking as I worked, looking up occasionally at the ruined hillside of the Palatine in the near beyond, about the layer cake of happenstance connecting Then and Now. Years later, I came across the fantasy version of that schoolboy reverie: the comparison attempted by Sigmund Freud between the human psyche and the archaeology of Rome. “Historians tell us,” he begins, “that the oldest Rome was the Roma Quadrata, a fenced settlement on the Palatine. Then followed the phase of the Septimontium, a federation of the settlements on the different hills; after that came the city bounded by the Servian Wall; and later still, after all the transformations during the periods of the republic and the early Caesars, the city which the emperor Aurelian surrounded with his walls.” Now imagine, he goes on, that rather than each stage being obliterated by the next, they all somehow survive. Thus it would be possible to see not only the Colosseum in all its grandeur but also the lake in front of Nero’s palace, which it replaced. We could gaze simultaneously at today’s Castel Sant’Angelo, an imposing umber fortress, and at the bright marble tomb of Hadrian, crowned with a grove of trees, from which the fortress grew. Could our minds be something like that—a psychic device “in which nothing that has come into existence will have passed away, and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one”?

  Well, no, that magic doesn’t really work for the mechanics of the mind, Freud decided. But it does work for the way we accrue perceptions of history: as an exercise, we can se
t anything alongside anything else. If Rome and America can exist simultaneously, why not try to look at them that way?

  1

  The Capitals

  Where Republic Meets Empire

  Remember, Roman, that it is yours to lead other people. It is your special gift.

  —Virgil, The Aeneid

  We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.

  —former secretary of state Madeleine Albright

  THE EMPIRE of the Romans in the West, its origins tracing back more than a thousand years, drew its last breath in 476 A.D., when a barbarian army led by a warrior named Odoacer, half Hun and half Scirian, defeated an imperial army that his barbarians had only a few months earlier been a part of. Odoacer captured and killed the imperial commander. He entered the city of Ravenna, then serving as an imperial capital, and deposed a youngster named Romulus Augustus, who had reigned as emperor for little more than a year. Odoacer was scarcely less worthy of authority than many previous usurpers. He was in fact well schooled in the ways of Rome, and he was a Christian, as most Romans by then were. There was no social implosion after he seized power, no rape and pillage. Rome didn’t “fall” the way Carthage had, six centuries earlier, when the Romans slaughtered the inhabitants and razed the city, or the way Berlin would, fifteen centuries later, blasted into rubble. Rome itself wasn’t touched on this occasion, and throughout the former empire life went on, little different for most people in 477 from what it had been in 475. Many regions had been autonomous for years, under barbarian rulers who gave lip service to the titular emperor. In Italy the Roman bureaucracy continued to sputter along.

  What changed was this: Odoacer was not recognized as legitimate by the eastern emperor, in Constantinople. There would never be another emperor of the West. The historical symmetry is almost too good to be true—that the last emperor’s name, Romulus, should also be that of Rome’s founder. (Imagine if the demise of America were to occur under a president named George.) But more than symbolism was at play. Odoacer understood full well that something had come to an end: he declared himself king of Italy, and sent the imperial regalia of the Western empire to Constantinople. The pretense of Western unity was abandoned. Europe would now become a continent of barbarian kingdoms—in embryo, the Europe of nation-states that exists today.

  Thirteen centuries later, on a gloomy evening in 1764, gazing out from a perch on the Capitoline Hill, above the overgrown debris of central Rome, Edward Gibbon was seized with a sense of loss as he contemplated the collapse of a civilization. Monks sang vespers in a church nearby. Gibbon resolved at that moment to undertake the great project he would call The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. “I can neither forget nor express the strong emotions which agitated my mind as I first trod, with lofty step, the ruins of the Forum,” he later wrote. A decade after this twilight epiphany Gibbon’s restless pen evoked the collapse of the empire: “Odoacer was the first barbarian who reigned in Italy, over a people who had once asserted their just superiority above the rest of mankind. . . . The least unfortunate were those who submitted without a murmur to the power which it was impossible to resist.” Gibbon’s life was in many ways a sad and lonely one, but The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was recognized at once as a masterwork, its sonorous cadences enlivened with a dry and biting wit. He observes gratuitously of a monk named Antiochus, for instance, that “one hundred and twenty-nine homilies are still extant, if what no one reads may be said to be extant.” Although his picture of the fall may be more cataclysmic than the immediate reality seems to have been, Gibbon established for people ever after that a page of history had been decisively turned. In the West, “decline and fall” has been a catchphrase and a source of anxiety ever since.

  The city of Washington, of course, also has a Capitoline Hill—Capitol Hill, named explicitly for its Roman forebear. The view to the west takes in a vast expanse of classical porticoes and marble monuments; gilded chariots and curtained litters would not seem out of place against this backdrop. Washington rose out of a malarial marsh on a river upstream from the coast, as Rome did. Its people, like the Romans, flee the sweltering city in August. The Romans cherished their myth of origin, the story of Romulus and Remus, and on the Palatine Hill you could be shown a thatched hut said to be the hut of Romulus—yes, the very one. Washington doesn’t have anything quite like the hut of Romulus, but on Capitol Hill you can find sacred national touchstones of other kinds, such as the contents of Lincoln’s pockets when he was assassinated. (They’re in the Library of Congress.) Washington resembles Rome in many ways. The physical similarities are visible to anyone. The similarities of spirit are more salient. Materialistic cultures easily forget that “mental outlook” is not some limp and passive construct, of interest chiefly to anthropologists. Mental outlook can drive events and change the world, as the rise of militant Islam makes plain. Washington, too, has been animated by a special outlook. Long ago it was a notion of republican virtue that Romans of an early era would immediately have recognized. Today it’s a strutting sense of self and mission that Romans of a later era would have recognized just as readily. Foreigners are well aware of this outlook, friends and enemies alike. It’s a pungent quality—an internal characteristic that gives rise to outside counterforces.

  The comparison with Rome has always been on the minds of leaders in America’s capital. It was celebrated when Washington was no more than a street plan, and inspired what might be called the Bad Virgil school of patriotic verse. (“On broad Potowmac’s bank then spring to birth, / Thou seat of empire and delight of earth!”) In the settlement’s early years there was a tributary of the Potomac called Goose Creek; its name was changed by an aspirational local planter to Tiber Creek. The Jefferson Memorial, off on the Potomac River’s edge, is a diminutive version of the Pantheon. Union Station, just below the Capitol, was inspired by the Baths of Diocletian. The Washington Monument recalls the obelisks brought to Rome after the conquest of Egypt. Colonnaded government buildings stretch for miles.

  I doubt I’m the only person who has trod, with lofty step, the sculpted gardens of the Capitol and been seized with a vision of how the city below might appear as a ruin. The Washington Monument—imagine it a millennium hence, a chipped and mottled spire, trussed with rusting braces. The stern pile of the Archives building, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington, the gothic National Cathedral on its distant hilltop, the turreted Smithsonian Castle on the Mall—they somehow invite you to see them as derelicts, rendered into darkly impish engravings by the hand of some future Piranesi. What calamity could bring the capital to this condition? Earthquake? Pestilence? Pride? The end of air conditioning?

  What Went Wrong

  A PAGE OF HISTORY may have been turned in 476 A.D., at least for literary purposes, but it’s not easy to pinpoint the moment of Rome’s fall—just as, one day, it may not be easy to pinpoint the moment of America’s. In many ways, “Rome” had already fallen—had evolved into something different from what it once was, and not always through violence—well before it ceased to exist as a formal political entity. It had once been pagan and by the end was largely Christian. A proud army made up of Romans had long since turned into a paid army made up of barbarians. A republic sustained by flinty yeomen had become a precarious autocracy administered by grasping bureaucrats. At the same time, in very concrete ways Rome didn’t fall for centuries, if at all. The eastern half of the empire, the richest and most populous part, centered on Constantinople, survived for nearly another thousand years. In the realms of culture and law and infrastructure and language, the Roman Empire has endured much longer. We still use its alphabet, exploit its literary genres, inhabit its cities, preserve its architectural styles, and follow its schedule of holidays. In many respects the Catholic Church survives as a graft on the empire’s stump. “Non omnis moriar” (“I shall not wholly die”), the Roman poet Horace proclaimed in one of his most famous odes. He was referring to his work, but he could
just as well have been referring to the legacy of his civilization.

  Rome began as a farming settlement on hilly portions of the eastern bank of the Tiber River. Tradition puts its founding at 753 B.C., and the Romans calculated the passage of years ab urbe condita—“from the founding of the city.” The legendary origins of the Roman people go back even further, to the Trojan hero Aeneas, who with family and friends made his way to Italy after the fall of Troy. It’s not easy to infer, even when tramping the most ancient parts of today’s Rome, what the early settlement was like. Some musty nineteenth-century guidebooks are actually good at reconstructing the landscape—how steep and rugged the seven hills were, and how willows grew here and oak trees there, and where the ferries crossed the marshes, and how high the Tiber floods could rise. Several centuries as a monarchy gave way, in the sixth century B.C., to a republic, with a senate, consuls, and popular voting for some offices. The territory of Rome gradually expanded to encompass the rest of the Italian peninsula and outposts along the Mediterranean coast. With the conclusion of the Third Punic War against its great rival, Carthage, in northern Africa, in 146 B.C., Rome effectively controlled the Mediterranean world. It continued to grow in all directions, impelled by its military prowess, its administrative genius, and its compulsive sense of destiny.

  The republic came to a de facto end in 31 B.C., after a century of social turmoil, constitutional crisis, and civil war. Vast Roman armies had thrown themselves against one another across the Mediterranean world. Emerging supreme from the carnage was Octavian, Julius Caesar’s grandnephew, who in proto-Orwellian fashion symbolically “restored” the republic while in fact inaugurating the principate, a regime of one-person rule. The outward forms of republican government would be preserved in various ways right to the very end, a progressively meaningless nod to the past, but whatever the disavowals, Rome was now an imperial state. By the second century A.D., the all-powerful emperor ruled a domain that stretched from Scotland to the Sahara, from the Atlantic to the Euphrates. Durable roads linked major and minor cities, defining routes still used today. Seaborne traffic flourished. In the absence of reliable records, one indirect way to gauge the growth in maritime commerce is through underwater archaeology, measuring the change over time in the number of Mediterranean shipwrecks—analogous to tracking the advance of industrialization by the level of pollutants in arctic ice cores. A survey of Roman-era wrecks off the coasts of Italy, France, and Spain yields only about fifty from the period 400–200 B.C., but three times that many from the first two centuries A.D. Ancient Rome held more than a million people; no European city would come close to it in size until the London of Shakespeare’s time. The walls that eventually surrounded Rome extend nearly thirteen miles. I once spent the better part of two days walking the entire circuit, noting where the nineteen roads had entered the city, and the eleven aqueducts, and thinking how formidable those walls, forty feet high, must have looked to Alaric and his Visigoths. Little wonder that Alaric cut a deal to get inside.