Are We Rome?

by Cullen Murphy

  Now stir large amounts of money into this system. It is not a great conceptual distance, Ste. Croix observes, to move from the idea of exercising suffragium because of an age-old sense of reciprocal duty to that of exercising it because doing so could be lucrative. And this, indeed, is where the future lies, the idea of quid pro quo eventually becoming so accepted and ingrained that emperors stop trying to halt the practice and instead seek to contain it by codifying it. Thus, in the fourth century, decrees are promulgated to ensure that the person seeking the quid actually delivers the quo. Before long, suffragium has changed its meaning once again. Now it refers not to the influence brought to bear but to the money being paid for it: “a gift, payment, or bribe.” By empire’s end, all public transactions require the payment of money, and the pursuit of money and personal advancement has become the purpose of all public jobs, which of course themselves cost money to acquire.

  Looking back at the story of suffragium, from ballot box to cash box, Ste. Croix composes this epitaph: “Here, in miniature, is the political history of Rome.”

  What’s in It for Me?

  IN TRUTH, THE ARC traced by suffragium is a carapace covering not just the political history of Rome but its social, military, and every other kind of history. It goes to the heart of a question that is starting to be asked in America, where some form of degenerative neuropolitical condition has left government responsive to particular interests but deaf to the popular will. The question is this: Where is the boundary between public good and private advantage, between “ours” and “mine”? From this question others follow. What happens when public and private interests are not aligned? Which outsiders, if any, should be allowed to put their hands on the machinery of government? How can governments exert collective power if the levers and winches and cogs lie increasingly outside public control?

  The phenomenon with which all these questions intersect was called the “privatization of power,” or sometimes just “privatization,” by Ramsay MacMullen in his important study Corruption and the Decline of Rome. MacMullen’s subject is “the diverting of governmental force, its misdirection.” In other words, how does it come about that the word and writ of a powerful central government lose all vector and force—like a car in which the steering wheel and accelerator pedal are suddenly connected to nothing at all? Serious challenges to any society can come from outside forces—environmental catastrophe, foreign invasion. Privatization is fundamentally an internal factor, though it has an impact on the ability to face external threats. MacMullen asked his question—How does power become powerless?—out of dissatisfaction with the many theories put forward to explain Rome’s gradual decline in the West. His answer is privatization—the deflection of public purpose by private interest. Such deflection of purpose occurs in any number of ways. It occurs whenever official positions are bought and sold. It occurs when people must pay before officials will act, and it occurs if payment also determines how they will act. And it can occur anytime public tasks (the collecting of taxes, the quartering of troops, the management of projects) are lodged in private hands, no matter how honest the intention or efficient the arrangement, because private and public interests tend to diverge over time. Privatization, whether legal or corrupt, is how the gears of government come to break. In Rome, the consequences were felt in every area of society.

  Let’s start with how the Roman system worked during the many centuries when it actually did. By modern standards there were not a great many officials or bureaucrats in Rome until late in the empire; the administration and well-being of the capital and all the other cities and towns depended on the talents and the largesse of the upper classes, and on the patronage networks they controlled. In the system’s idealized form, the elites and their clients constituted an interlocking force for cohesion. A memorable passage in Jerome Carcopino’s Daily Life in Ancient Rome describes what happened every morning soon after Romans woke up, when all around the city clients visited their patrons, and each was alert to the other’s needs. Does that famous early scene in The Godfather—the don’s audience with supplicants in his shuttered study as the wedding reception unfolds outside—capture some of this flavor? On those very rare mornings when I’ve found myself sipping $15 orange juice at the Four Seasons in Washington or New York, I’ve enjoyed imagining the breakfast convergences at tables all around me as an elite remnant of the old Roman dynamic. But to get Rome right you’d have to extend the scene to every suburban Hyatt, every neighborhood diner; you’d have to see these relationships governing every business transaction, every trip to the doctor’s office, every college application, not to mention the selection of your spouse, the fate of your litigation, the delivery of your newspaper. Each person had a place in the chain somewhere, and most people had more than one. Carcopino writes:

  From the parasite do-nothing up to the great aristocrat there was no man in Rome who did not feel himself bound to someone more powerful above him by the same obligations of respect, or, to use the technical term, the same obsequium, that bound the ex-slave to the master who had manumitted him. The patronus, for his part, was in honour bound to welcome his client to his house, to invite him from time to time to his table, to come to his assistance, and to make him gifts.

  Patrons and clients were stock targets of comedy and satire. The patron-client relationship was so pervasive that it helps illuminate not only Rome’s social architecture but also, frequently, its way of conducting foreign affairs. The term “client state” came into being for a reason. As Julius Caesar fought his way through Gaul, he brought tribal chieftains over to his side, and described their professions of loyalty to him—and thus to Rome—as those of clients to a patron. The relationships of the Bush family with various world leaders have often been essentially personal. The longtime Saudi ambassador to Washington, Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, spent so much time at Bush family gatherings that he came to be known as “Bandar Bush.”

  Patronage spilled over into communal adornment; it was in fact inseparable from it. The Roman magnates competed with one another to endow the capital with improvements. Rome was a city with many wealthy patrons—indeed, many absurdly wealthy patrons. The class stratification of Roman society was extreme; by comparison, Victorian England might seem a laboratory of equality. Rome’s wealthiest class, the senatorial aristocracy, constituted by one estimate two thousandths of one percent of the population; then came the equestrian class, with perhaps a tenth of a percent. Collectively these people owned almost everything. Americans are well aware of the nation’s worsening income inequality, with those in the top one percent earning fifty times more a year than those in the bottom 20 percent. The latest data show the differential getting wider. But in the Roman Empire the gap between the few thousands who constituted the upper elite and everyone else was on the order of 5,000 or 10,000 to one. In the city of Rome the rich occupied sprawling estates, the sumptuous horti, which ringed the dense urban core—garden districts, some of them, to this day. The expectation in Rome, maintained over many centuries, was that affluent citizens, as individuals rather than as taxpayers, should provide for community needs. Did the city require another aqueduct? An emergency supply of wheat? A fountain? New roads? Baths? A stadium? A temple? Repairs to the walls? Some magnate would surely provide it—in return, implicitly, for a measure of public power, and of course for ample public recognition. Inscriptions on countless marble fragments attest to such generosity—an early version of “brought to you by . . .” You can’t sit drinking an espresso in front of the Pantheon without noticing that you have M. Agrippa (the name rendered in very big letters) to thank for the original building. The historian Cassius Dio describes how this same Agrippa in a single year repaired many of the public buildings in Rome, put statues in the public baths, distributed salt and olive oil to the masses, paid barbers to give everyone haircuts, and after cleaning out Rome’s great sewers sailed a small boat through their main channel, the Cloaca Maxima, and out into the Tiber.<
br />
  The private responsibilities of the wealthy extended to public spectacles in the arena. Take someone like Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, the prefect of Rome in the late fourth century, a man of real substance and vast resources (he owned three houses in Rome and twenty-eight houses elsewhere in Italy), and with an elevated, even oxygen-starved, sense of his own status (he once referred to the Roman aristocracy as “the better part of the human race”). Closer to our own era, Symmachus might have been an Averell Harriman or a Nelson Rockefeller. And yet you find him fretting in one of his letters about whether the African beasts the emperor has promised will arrive in time. Elsewhere he complains about the customs duties he must pay on imported bears, and about the problem posed by some crocodiles that are refusing to eat. In one letter Symmachus notes that twenty-nine Saxon captives being sent to him had strangled one another rather than face combat and death in the gladiatorial games, and goes on to wonder if perhaps this wasn’t a blessing: the slaughter of all twenty-nine at once might have pushed the boundaries of good taste—might have been, to use his word, a bit “gaudy.”

  On Rome’s edifice of private giving—whether with the seemliness of an Andrew Carnegie or the vulgarity of a Donald Trump—an empire was built. An ethic of philanthropy and public service spread from city to city throughout the empire. It was upheld in Rome by the senatorial aristocracy, and elsewhere mainly by the type of citizen who constituted the curial class—a group that included major property owners and professionals. These were people who tried to live upstanding lives according to the mores of the day, who controlled the bulk of the local wealth, and who assumed the burden of public office. Think of them, perhaps, as something like the provincial aristocracy in John O’Hara’s short stories and novels—the upper stratum of O’Hara’s fictional Gibbsville, evoked in one recent essay as follows: “A few families control the economic, political, social, and cultural life of their localities. Their sons may attend nearby prep schools and colleges, or they may go off to, say, Lawrenceville and Princeton, but most return to run the real-estate concerns, banks, law firms, factories, and mills that are at the center of the economy and from which their families derive power and prestige.”

  The Roman system was a remarkable contrivance. But it contained the seeds of its own destruction. For one thing, it fostered an expectation that “others” would always provide. If public amenities came into being through private munificence—and if these in turn served to enhance private glory—then why should the public pay for their upkeep? This way of doing business “did not work for the common benefit of the overall urban fabric,” writes one historian, much less nurture a sense of common purpose and shared obligation. I’ve seen the same mindset at work within my own state, Massachusetts, in hardscrabble mill towns whose philanthropic founding families have departed, where local taxpayers resist the idea that support of libraries and hospitals must now rest with the community as a whole. Moreover, even at its most uncorrupted, the patronage system was greased by small considerations: “It was a genial, oily, present-giving world,” Ramsay MacMullen observes. Pliny writes to a friend: “Thank you for those fieldfares, but being at Laurentum I can’t match them with anything from town, nor can I send you any fish as long as the weather is bad.” A man named Gemellus sends instructions to his son about how to coddle a certain official: “Send him an artaba of olives and some fish, as we want to make use of him.”

  Now gradually remove from all this any sense of public spirit or public obligation and replace it at every level of government—in the barracks, the courts, the city councils, the provincial prefectures—with an attitude of “What’s in it for me?” To see this transition in starkly American terms, first consider the idealistic sensibility—wise friends promoting wise friends in a noble venture—of a letter of recommendation written by Benjamin Franklin to George Washington in 1777, on a matter of public business:

  Sir,

  The Gentleman who will have the Honour of waiting upon you with this Letter is the Baron de Steuben . . . He goes to America with a true Zeal for our Cause, and a View of engaging in it and rendring it all the Service in his Power. He is recommended to us by two of the best Judges of military Merit in this Country.

  For comparison, consider the more contemporary sentiments in e-mails written by a Washington lobbyist, also on a matter of public business: in this instance, mounting a political operation to reopen the Speaking Rock Casino, in Texas, in return for millions of dollars in fees and political contributions. The lobbyist, Jack Abramoff, explained to his clients, the Tigua Indian tribe:

  This political operation will result in a Majority of both federal chambers either becoming close friends of the tribe or fearing the tribe in a very short period of time. Simply put you need 218 friends in the U.S. House and 51 Senators on your side very quickly, and we will do that through both love and fear.

  Of course from time to time Zeal for the Cause might need to be topped off:

  Our friend . . . asked if you could help (as in cover) a Scotland golf trip for him and some staff (his committee chief of staff) for August. The trip will be quite expensive (we did this for another member—you know who 2 years ago). Let me know if you guys could do $50 K.

  This is the story MacMullen traces, as throughout the empire a lubricious glaze of venality came to coat every governmental surface. I don’t know how it would be phrased in Latin, but one of Jack Abramoff’s e-mails (“Da man! You iz da man! Do you hear me?! You da man!! How much $$ coming tomorrow? Did we get some more $$ in?”) captures some of the spirit of public service in the late empire. What accounts for the change? No one factor, MacMullen believes, but some combination of many: the sheer growth in the government’s administrative reach; as a result, the transformation of “public service” from the rotating duty of the curial class into a lifelong career for a larger group; the flight of the elite from public service anyway, because the demands could prove so onerous; the ambiguity of many laws, allowing money to sway judgments; the increasing severity of punishments, which people would pay anything to escape; and the generally poor communications, which among local officials abetted a sense of impunity ("What happens in Bithynia stays in Bithynia"). A bronze plaque was affixed to a public building in Timgad, in Numidia, a city built as a bastion against the Berbers, which literally provided a recommended price list for payments to ensure the prosecution and success of various kinds of litigation. We don’t have anything quite like that now, I suppose, but have you ever received a fundraising solicitation from one of the political parties, with degrees of access and other perquisites tied to specific contribution levels? Here’s the Republican contribution hierarchy for the 2004 elections, which I can’t help visualizing as a bronze plaque:

  $300,000

  SUPER RANGER

  $250,000

  REPUBLICAN REGENT

  $200,000

  RANGER

  $100,000

  PIONEER

  Time and again imperial decrees throughout the later empire attempt to put a stop to skimming, extortion, and the illicit use of office; or, failing that, to codify what may be permissible. But the emperors are standing athwart the tide, and the imperial pronouncements have a doomed, forlorn, ritual feel to them. Modern newspaper headlines like “Congress Votes New Curbs on Lobbyists” convey something of the same formulaic quality.

  How does the buying and selling of influence hollow out government? Some make the argument that whatever its moral shortcomings, the profit motive, including its corrupt dimension, is in fact an efficient economic mechanism—it’s nothing if not results-oriented. It gets things done. It’s how we win. But as MacMullen points out, for a government to be systemically effective on a national or an imperial scale, there needs to be a presumption that information is traveling accurately up and down the administrative chain of command, and that every link in the chain between a command and its execution is reliable and strong. “Orders have to be followed throughout the whole train of power that originates
in the imperial palace and reaches, at the end, to a hundred cobblers in the Bay-of-Naples area, a hundred peasant owners of ox-carts in Cappadocia,” MacMullen writes. “At every point of connection the original intent must be transmitted as it was received. Otherwise it will come to nothing.”

  Putting power into private hands—with or without some financial consideration—frequently ends up breaking that link. Making the exercise of power contingent on payment breaks the link by definition. In Rome’s case, one of the functions that suffered most acutely from corruption was national security. Consider the story of the citizens of Lepcis, in what is now Libya, and their treatment at the hands of a man named Count Romanus, the military commander of northern Africa. The episode, cited by MacMullen, is recounted at length by both Ammianus Marcellinus and Edward Gibbon. It demonstrates how seemingly self-contained instances of venality can have unpredictable ramifications that do enormous harm.

  In the year 363 A.D. the residents of Lepcis—one of a cluster of three cities in northern Libya that gave rise to the ancient collective name Tripoli, which of course we still use—found themselves under assault by Berber tribesmen, who ravaged the countryside and took away hostages. The Lepcitanians looked to Count Romanus for relief; he was, after all, the emperor’s man on the scene. “His abilities were not inadequate to his station,” Gibbon remarks of the count, but unfortunately, “sordid interest was the sole motive of his conduct.” He regarded his government office as a license to pursue personal objectives, and so when he arrived at Lepcis he demanded payment—4,000 camels, to begin with—before he would consent to hunt down the Berbers. Lepcis refused, Romanus withdrew, and the attacks continued.