Are We Rome?

by Cullen Murphy

  The decline of Rome came in many forms—in military power, in civil order, in eloquence, in philosophy, in architecture, in trade. Going back to those shipwrecks: they fall off sharply after 200 A.D., and after 400 drop to the levels of half a millennium earlier. It would be a thousand years before seaborne trade returned to the Augustan level. Infrastructure started to degrade: there came a point when full-length columns of colored marble, which literally held up the empire, could no longer be transported to Rome from Greece and Turkey and Egypt. Agricultural methods deteriorated: archaeology indicates that cattle were smaller in the early Middle Ages than they were at the empire’s prime. Although 476 has been accepted since Byzantine times as the moment of Rome’s demise, there’s an element of parlor game in the discussion. Maybe the end really came in 455, when the Vandals sacked Rome. Or maybe it came in 410, when the Visigoths sacked Rome. Or in 378, when a great Roman army was destroyed by barbarians at Adrianople. A racist theoretician in Nazi Germany discerned Rome’s “first step toward chaos” in a law passed in the fifth century B.C. permitting patricians, the highest social class, to marry plebeians, the lowest.

  “Let students of Rome’s decline imagine themselves as medical examiners who have been confronted with a corpse,” writes the classical historian Donald Kagan. “It is their duty first to establish the time of death and then the cause. It soon becomes apparent that the various historical practitioners who have examined the Roman remains have achieved remarkably little agreement on either question.” In 1980, a German historian set out to catalogue all the explanations for the fall of Rome ever proposed, which include degeneracy and deforestation, too much bureaucracy and too much Christianity. (He cited 210 theories in all.) The Romans themselves continually lamented the unhappy state of their society—as Americans compulsively do—even under circumstances that in retrospect were not all that bad. “Now we suffer the evils of a long peace. Luxury hatches terrors worse than wars.” That’s Juvenal, writing in the second century A.D., when the collapse of the Western empire lay more than three centuries ahead. Other writers were bizarrely sanguine, although trouble was just around the corner. “There will never be an end to the power of Rome,” wrote the court poet Claudian, shortly before the city’s sack by the Visigoths. Part of the problem of explaining “decline” is that, like “rise,” it doesn’t happen everywhere at the same rate or in the same way. Ronald Reagan declared the 1980s to be “morning again in America,” but dawn looked a lot different in Silicon Valley than it did in Youngstown.

  Still, looking at the range of explanations provides a montage of Rome’s condition. There is, to begin with, the growing number of incursions into the empire by non-Roman peoples—that is, by the barbarians. Rome had always been adept at assimilating newcomers; until the rise of America, it was history’s most successful multi-ethnic state. But the influx eventually became too much to handle, as the Huns, sweeping out from central Asia, drove more and more people south and west in front of them, and finally across the Rhine and the Danube and into the empire. Another explanation: perhaps the culprit was simply a hollowed out military, whose capacities were no longer up to the challenge of keeping the barbarians at bay. Related to this: Did a creeping pacifism come into play? (“We Christians defend the empire by praying for it,” wrote one early theologian.) Some historians blame economic stagnation for the fall of Rome, or corruption, or manpower shortages, or the exhaustion of the soil, or the depredations of plague, or the more generalized problem, in one view, that “too few producers supported too many idle mouths.” An implicitly eugenic argument points to the depletion of the elites by centuries of war and civil strife. You could look at the debilitating effects of a decline of civic spirit. Or at the rise in taxes, which took a greater toll on ordinary people than it did on the rich and influential, worsening an already invidious class divide. There was the impact of slavery, whose harmful consequences were moral and psychological as well as economic. And there was the chaos caused by the lack of a standard procedure for imperial succession, which was resolved frequently by civil war, crippling the government and weakening the empire’s defenses. “Decadence” has always been a popular explanation, though in Rome’s case the greatest decadence coincided with the greatest power. (Still, here’s Richard Nixon on the subject: “When the great civilizations of the past became prosperous, when they lost the will to go on living and make progress, they fell victims to decadence, which in the long run destroys a culture. The United States is now entering this phase.”) Some of the more preposterous theories explaining the fall of Rome happen also to be unforgettable. Everybody knows the one that credits lead poisoning from the pipes used in plumbing. Another explanation in this class: the onset of widespread impotence caused by hot water in the public baths.

  All told, decline-of-Rome explanations fall into two broad categories: either the empire killed itself (internal weaknesses) or it was killed by something else (external factors). Historians tilt one way or the other, but they also tend to cite the interplay of inside and outside forces rather than attributing Rome’s demise to a single simple cause. As in Murder on the Orient Express, all the prime suspects shared in the deed.

  The third century was a period of deep crisis, with one bad emperor after another (the standard obituary: “killed by his own soldiers”) and continual barbarian pressures on the frontiers. The empire was rescued by Diocletian, a no-nonsense administrator who built up the legions and organized the state and its taxes around the need for security. He also created the system known as the tetrarchy, in which power was shared among two coemperors (East and West) and two subemperors-in-waiting, at a stroke mitigating the succession problem and providing enough leaders to command the various armies. From the late third century onward, emperors spent more and more time away with their legions, fending off trouble and settling in for years in sub-capitals like Trier and Sirmium. But Rome was still the leading city of the empire and still the home of the senatorial aristocracy. It still enjoyed extraordinary privileges, and it still extracted great wealth from the rest of the empire.

  The sack of the city by Alaric, in 410, was both a physical and a psychic blow. By arrangement the sack was an orderly and not especially bloody affair, its terms spelled out in advance. Alaric demanded all portable wealth, and when a member of the Roman legation asked what the Romans could keep, he replied, “Your lives.” Rome’s perimeter had not been breached by an enemy for eight hundred years. “The brightest light of the whole world is extinguished,” wrote Saint Jerome, the translator of the Bible, in faraway Jerusalem. Over time, wars and sieges took a toll on Rome’s water supply—the aqueducts were cut and repaired, then cut and repaired again. The most reliable aqueduct proved to be the Aqua Virgo, which ran mostly underground. You can see an excavated piece of it, and hear the rush of water, under an indie cinema in one of the narrow back streets near the Trevi Fountain. Rome’s dwindling population, maybe 80,000 in 600 A.D., withdrew from the fringes and began to cluster near the bend in the Tiber where the Aqua Virgo had its terminus, creating the maze of streets that gives today’s city center its medieval character. Rome is a good place to reflect, post-Katrina, on how the failure of infrastructure can shape a community for a thousand years.

  Well before its collapse, as skills declined and building materials became harder to get, Rome began to plunder itself for spolia, or “spoils,” in a way that would seem edgily postmodern if it had been driven by academic theory rather than bitter necessity. The fourth-century Arch of Constantine contains bits and pieces carved in the second century (as the painter Raphael pointed out). Builders of churches and palaces used ancient structures as quarries. The original St. Peter’s was supported by columns scavenged from Roman-era buildings; the Renaissance basilica that took its place used marble from the Colosseum. To bolster his claim to an imperial pedigree, Charlemagne imported architectural remains from Rome and Ravenna for his palace at Aachen, and even had some of the stonework fashioned to look like spolia from
Rome, because it had so much cachet. Meanwhile, in the old imperial capital, blocks of marble and statues by the thousands were burned for lime. A memory of the smoky place where this was done, below the Capitoline Hill, is preserved in the name Via delle Botteghe Oscure, the Street of the Dark Shops. Large tracts of the urban heartland were turned over to pasture, and livestock grazed where Caesars had walked. The process of reversion will not mystify anyone who has visited modern Detroit and noticed trees sprouting on the roofs and ledges of abandoned buildings, or seen how vacant downtown lots are being reclaimed by a hardscrabble urban agriculture.

  Such was the spectacle that presented itself to Gibbon on that day in 1764, as he sat looking out over what had once been the Forum and was now the Campo Vaccino, the Field of Cows. In a sentence sagging with judgment and resignation, Gibbon settled on no one cause for the empire’s collapse: “Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and, as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight.”

  A decade later, in 1775, as Gibbon prepared to “oppress the public” (as he put it) with the first volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the British Empire faced a crisis of its own when the thirteen American colonies united in rebellion. Gibbon had celebrated the vaunted freedoms of the Romans, and mourned their loss. He was a friend of Adam Smith, who would become the patron saint of America’s economic ideology, his face peering out from the neckties of capitalists. But Gibbon had no sympathy for the “criminal enterprize” of the American Revolution, and as a Tory member of Parliament he supported the campaign of military suppression. When he eventually changed his mind, it was on pragmatic grounds: “I shall scarcely give my consent to exhaust still farther the finest country in the World in the prosecution of a War, from whence no reasonable man entertains any hope of success. It is better to be humbled than ruined.” Gibbon never warmed to the rebellion. Visiting Paris during the war, he on one occasion was introduced to the ambassador from Britain’s American colonies, Benjamin Franklin. Gibbon was reportedly officious and distant; in a letter he stresses that the meeting was “by accident.” Sly, funny, self-confident in print, Gibbon in person was profoundly awkward. Franklin is said to have heightened his discomfort by offering to furnish Gibbon with some materials for his next book, about the decline and fall of the British Empire.

  America’s Turn

  GIBBON MAY HAVE had no place in his political cosmology for America, but America had a big place for Rome. An obsession with Roman antecedents could hardly have been helped, given the classical education all the Founding Fathers received. My window at the Boston Athenaeum, where I sit right now, looks out over a colonial graveyard, the Old Granary Burying Ground. Every literate person resting there would have known the fabled stories of Rome: the rape of the Sabine women; Horatio at the bridge; the sacred temple geese who gave the alarm and saved the Capitol; Caesar and Brutus on the Ides of March. These were as familiar to them as the D-Day landing or the march on Selma or the Watergate burglary or the convergence of Bill and Monica would be to Americans now.

  The educated elite of the thirteen colonies were steeped in the Roman code of virtus. In this code there was little room for qualities that today hold pride of place in America. The Founders did not cherish therapeutic notions of self-actualization or self-esteem or “the real me.” What mattered was adherence to duty as expressed in outward behavior. The very first Gilbert Stuart portrait of Washington, the so-called Athenaeum portrait, was for a time on display downstairs from where I work. The gaze Washington offers, painted from life, captures no interior spark; it’s a serene mask of obligation. In Rome, virtus was inextricably bound up with the ideology of Rome’s greatness. Here is the Roman legend as one historian sums it up: “A simple, hardy race of peasants, long uncontaminated by the seductive arts and manners of Greece, they held fast to their rustic virtues: sanctity of family life, sobriety of conduct and demeanour, a stern sense of discipline. . . . In consequence of these virtues the Romans achieved their mission, divinely inspired, to rule the world.” These were seen to be the values of Rome especially in its republican days, and they were the values the Founding Fathers believed Americans at their best embodied. They’re still the values we look back on wistfully.

  The Roman who epitomized republican ideals was Marcus Porcius Cato, or Cato the Younger (95–46 B.C.), the great-grandson of the Cato who had urged his countrymen toward the Third Punic War with the declaration “Carthago delenda est!”—“Carthage must be destroyed!” Cato the Younger was a senator known for eccentric habits, grim austerity, and humorless rectitude—combine Mahatma Gandhi, John the Baptist, and Ralph Nader. He often went about in nothing more than a toga, without shoes or an undergarment. His relations with women were erratic and unhappy. He drank heavily when alone, though his public demeanor was abstemious and his lifestyle bereft of luxury. Cato was not a contented fellow, and was more admired than liked. But his stubborn adherence to Roman virtues and republican principles had no equal. Cato and Julius Caesar were bitter enemies, and Cato tirelessly warned his fellow Romans of Caesar’s designs on power. When Caesar eventually triumphed, Cato sought to commit suicide by stabbing himself. He was discovered, and the wounds were bound up, but Cato ripped off the bandages and bled to death; he did not want to give Caesar the satisfaction of sparing his life.

  Cato’s stand against tyranny echoed down the ages. One of the most popular plays in eighteenth-century America was Joseph Addison’s Cato: A Tragedy in Five Acts. Today it is nearly unreadable, unrelenting in its uplift and cloying in its nobility, but its tidy verses once spoke as powerfully to Americans as Arthur Miller’s The Crucible does now. Its influence is stamped indelibly on the rhetoric of the Revolution. Nathan Hale’s “I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country” is, in essence, a line from Addison’s Cato. So is Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death.”

  Rome set not just a moral example but a practical one. The Founding Fathers had overthrown a great empire, and now they looked to preimperial Rome for republican political models—in particular for ideas about “checks and balances” that could help preserve that form of government. Cicero had written, “I consider the most effective constitution to be that which is a reasonably blended combination of three forms—kingship, aristocracy, and democracy.” Rome’s republican government vested these functions in its two consuls, who shared executive power and could serve for only a year; in a senate, made up of the highborn, who served for life; and in the populus, the people, who could vote on certain matters. This regime promised a government, Cicero thought, with “an equilibrium like a well-trimmed boat.” The checks and balances were taken to such an extreme that if both consuls were leading troops in battle, each took charge on alternate days (a pushmi-pullyu procedure that proved fatal at the Battle of Cannae). Roman precedents were invoked time and again as the drafters framed America’s new Constitution. Some of them, of course, were sobering: everyone was aware that Cicero’s well-trimmed boat had eventually foundered. Benjamin Franklin’s famous remark, when asked as he emerged from Independence Hall what kind of government America now had—“A republic, if you can keep it”—represented a cautionary reference to the unhappy fate of Rome. That, at any rate, is how his listeners at the time would have heard it.

  George Washington was the epitome of America’s Roman ideal. He was unyielding in his embrace of public virtue, supplementing Roman standards of behavior with the famous “Rules of Civility” written out in his own hand in a schoolboy copybook. (“Every action done in company ought to be done with some sign of respect to those that are present.” “When a man does all he can, though it succeed not well, blame not him that did it.”) The Romans were obsessed with surveying, an understandable preoccupation for a people expanding into three continents; Washington’s first career was as a surveyor—his country was expanding too. Washingt
on knew his Roman history: an invoice survives for an order from an English dealer of “A Groupe of Aeneas carrying his father out of Troy, neatly finished and bronzed with copper, three pounds, three shillings”—a sculpture of Rome’s founding legend for the mantelpiece of America’s own founder. At Valley Forge, Washington ordered up a production of Addison’s Cato for his frostbitten army, and attended the performance himself.