Are We Rome?

by Cullen Murphy

  The forces at play here are powerful. Politicians can tweak the laws, but “policy” is a microclimate compared with the swirling vortex of the American economy and American culture. In Los Angeles and elsewhere, Spanish-language radio stations are going bilingual or shifting from Spanish to English, because that’s what the younger audience wants; 90 percent of Hispanic high school graduates prefer English to Spanish. There is a reason why Islamist cells are sprouting all over Europe among the Muslim underclass but have gained little traction in America. An expert on the subject, Robert Leiken, says, “If you ask a second-generation American Muslim, he will say, ‘I’m an American, and a Muslim.’ A second-generation Turk in Germany is still a Turk, and a French Moroccan doesn’t know what he is.” For second- and third-generation Asians and Hispanics, the rates of intermarriage with other groups in America now range above 30 percent. Population projections suggest that by 2050 one American in five will be of mixed racial ancestry. A professor at California State University says, “We don’t know how it will affect who our Miss America is twenty years from now, but it will.” Another analyst, who studies the “great immigrant portals” of Houston, New York, and Los Angeles, writes, “Among the people working there, concepts such as ‘ethnic solidarity,’ ‘people of color,’ or ‘cultural community’ generally count for less than basic principles such as ‘Does this sell?,’ ‘What’s my market?,’ and ultimately ‘How do I fit in?’” Reading those fragments from Vindolanda, I’m reminded of the printed cards passed out on the Mall in Washington in 2006, where thousands of Hispanic immigrants united to say these words:

  Ai pledch aliyens to di fleg

  Of di Yunaited Esteits of America

  An tu di republic for wich it estands

  Uan naishion, ander Gad

  Indivisibol

  Wit liberti and yostis

  For oll.

  When you step back and pose the civilizational question about Rome—On balance, who prevailed?—it’s not at all clear that the Romans were driven from the field. The religion of the Romans, Christianity, became the religion of the newcomers, and to this day the language of the Romans is, in a sense—mutatis mutandis—spoken by their descendants. The people in the Roman lands remained drinkers of wine. Their architectural designs and building techniques became standard. Their towns and cities are still inhabited, and their seasonal rituals, under different names, still celebrated. Their attention to law and to legal systems spoke powerfully to America’s own Founders, and Roman law remains foundational in Europe to this day. The notion embodied in imperial Rome—creating unity out of diversity—has been a grail of geopolitics ever since. The Roman Empire disappeared, of course, as a formal construct, but in other respects it did not entirely vanish. Indeed, how could it simply vanish, a thing so large and pervasive? Where would you put it? In a masterly and influential study published several decades ago the historian Peter Brown took up this very subject. Brown was born and educated in Ireland, and witnessed firsthand the withdrawal of imperial order from his native land—its withdrawal, yes, but also its retention and persistence, its stubborn influence, the deep taproot of its legacy. The experience left its mark on him as a historian of Rome. Yeats had written romantically of rebellion as having left Ireland “changed, changed utterly,” but Brown never warmed to the “changed utterly” school of historical thought. Years later, he conjured an expanse of time running from Marcus Aurelius, in the second century A.D., to Charlemagne, in the eighth, that he would call “late antiquity,” a period of both continuity and transition, and of great cultural vitality. He was able to describe this period, as he later reflected, “without invoking an intervening catastrophe and without pausing, for a moment, to pay lip service to the widespread notion of decay.”

  His deliberately provocative question, in the end, is really this: Did Rome ever fall?

  Epilogue

  There Once Was a Great City

  One thought alone preoccupied the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era.

  —J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians

  THE CITY OF RAVENNA grew out of the Adriatic marshes, as Venice one day would, rising on tufts of land and thousands of pilings. The city eventually became a major port, and a second base for Rome’s fleet. Julius Caesar gathered his forces at Ravenna as he prepared to cross the Rubicon. Because Ravenna—surrounded by wetlands—was so easy to defend, the capital of the Western empire was moved there from Rome by the emperor Honorius, early in the fifth century. The mosaics of Ravenna, created around this time, still draw people to the city. So does the resting place of Dante, who died near Ravenna while in exile from Florence. His body was never returned to his native city. The elegant tomb in Florence’s Church of Santa Croce is empty.

  Ravenna was also the scene of the Roman Empire’s final act—or, rather, its final act in the West. The figure regarded as the last in the long imperial line, Romulus Augustus, spent the few months of his reign in Ravenna, in 475–476 A.D. He was a boy of no more than thirteen or fourteen. Because he was so young, people gave the name Augustus a diminutive twist—“Augustulus,” the emperor was called: “Little Augustus.” And because he was both a puppet and a usurper, people also gave the name Romulus a pejorative cast—“Momyllus,” they said, or “Little Disgrace.” There was time enough in his reign to mint money, barely, although the young emperor’s name was so long that it was hard to fit onto coins. (The emperor of the East at the time, Zeno, did not have this problem.) A number of buildings still stand in Ravenna that date back to the time of Romulus Augustulus, or even earlier. The young ruler would certainly have known the octagonal baptistry, with its extraordinary ceiling mosaic depicting John the Baptist pouring water over the head of a naked and beardless Jesus. Looking up at it, you may wonder if the beardless boy-emperor, himself only recently elevated, saw in the image anything ironic or apt about his own circumstances. The sources do not indicate whether he was self-aware.

  The sources, in fact, indicate very little. Rome left behind a great deal of itself, in stone and metal and writing—more than any other ancient civilization—but it’s useful to remember how modest “a great deal” can be. In the library where I’ve been working, the Boston Athenaeum, you can find nearly every written word that survives from ancient Rome—history, literature, philosophy, inscriptions—and nearly every word published in English about Rome by anyone in the past three centuries. It’s mostly shelved in an adjunct vault of the library, five stories high, called “the Drum.” The aisles are narrow and the ceilings low, and there are no windows; it calls to mind a Roman columbarium, where cinerary urns were packed tightly in niches. My own calculation, extrapolating from the Drum, is that you could pack all the writing from a thousand years of Roman history, plus all the writing about those thousand years, into a cube about forty feet on a side—roughly the amount of space taken up by White House documents from just the three years of the Kennedy presidency. Ramsay MacMullen, with typically elegant understatement, has referred to “the extreme recalcitrance of the evidence.” A curiosity seeker looking to answer mundane questions about Rome can drill a lot of dry holes. The twenty or so “barracks emperors” each ruled the world for a few months or years in the mid third century, but often historians have to guess at their precise dates. We know that Nero, famous for playing the cithara while Rome burned, in fact cared deeply about his music and entered public competitions; he would lie on his back with weights on his chest to increase his lung capacity. But we don’t know basic details about the imperial government and budget during his reign. The surviving record about Rome is not only reticent but capricious. Imagine if America were to leave behind for historians the complete text of the Starr Report but only the 1947 volume of The Statistical Abstract of the United States.

  What we know about Romulus Augustulus is this: He was the son of a senior officer named Flavius Orestes, an aristocrat from the provinces, half Roman and half German. When Attila’s power was
at its peak, Orestes served the Hun as a secretary and a diplomat. It was a time when allegiances could shift rapidly. After the death of Attila, Orestes was appointed magister militum, or master of the Roman armies, by the Western emperor, Julius Nepos. The imperial armies in Italy by now consisted mostly of barbarians, and Orestes, with his German background, enjoyed a presumption of favor. Once in control of the military, Orestes deposed Julius Nepos and installed himself as the de facto head of government in Ravenna. He declared his son rather than himself to be the new emperor, perhaps because Romulus, with a fully Roman mother, might seem to have more of a claim. All went well until the German troops demanded that Orestes make good on a promise to give them land. He refused, and faced a revolt led by a senior officer named Odoacer. Orestes took refuge in what is now Pavia, but the city was captured, and he was taken away and beheaded. Odoacer then marched on Ravenna and deposed Romulus. The date was September 4, 476 A.D. What happened to Romulus? His life was spared, surprisingly. We know that he was exiled to the western coast of Italy—to Neapolis, today’s Naples. He seems to have left Ravenna with his mother, and no doubt with a large retinue, and he was even given a pension of 6,000 solidi a year—a great deal of money (according to one estimate, the equivalent of forty kilograms of gold). The most obvious route into exile would have been the Via Flaminia—roughly the path of the current Strada Statale 3—to Rome, and then the ancient Via Appia, already 700 years old, south to the vicinity of Naples.

  That whole stretch of the Italian shore was vacationland for the Romans. Museum drawers are filled with ancient beach-town baubles of glass or clay: “Souvenir of Neapolis,” they might as well say, or “This Mule Climbed Mount Vesuvius.” Villas crowded the lush volcanic hillsides. Sluice gates brought the renewing sea into the teeming fishponds that each great estate would have; the truly rich were known as piscinarii, “the fishpond set.” In a seaside town called Baiae you can still pick your way, more or less alone, through the ruins of the emperor’s summer home, with its mosaic floors and its long terraces on four or five levels. Hadrian died somewhere on this hillside. Plutarch has described the estate of Lucullus, the general and statesman of the late republic, on the Bay of Naples—an estate supporting a way of life so opulent as to give rise to the term “Lucullan.” Gardens cascaded luxuriantly down to the sea. Offshore follies floated on the waves. The food and drink were renowned for their quality and plenitude, and were served not merely to impress others. Once, when Lucullus was dining alone, a servant prepared a simple meal for him, and was told by his master to go back and bring forth something more extravagant, as if there were guests: “Did you not know that tonight Lucullus is dining with Lucullus?”

  In some diminished condition the estate of Lucullus must have survived into the fifth century, because Romulus Augustulus apparently passed his days on part of it, on a headland jutting into the bay. A monastery would grow on the site, enshrining the bones of Saint Severinus; strong circumstantial evidence suggests that it was founded by Romulus and his mother. If this is the same “Romulus” to whom the Ostrogothic king Theodoric wrote a letter in 510, then Romulus Augustulus lived for a good long while after being run out of Ravenna. Odoacer was not so fortunate. His armies were defeated by that same Theodoric, in 493. Theodoric then invited Odoacer to a banquet—no hard feelings—and killed him with his own sword.

  Medieval fortifications now crown the Lucullan headland; the complex is called Castel dell’Ovo, the Castle of the Egg. Legend has it that the poet Virgil placed an egg in a secret room underneath the castle, and that if the egg is ever crushed, Naples will be destroyed. Looking at Naples today, it’s hard to deduce whether the egg has remained intact. The headland divides the tolerable tourist city to the north from the grittier seaport city to the south. But the breeze off the bay is fresh and constant. Even without vendors selling granita al limone it would have been a congenial spot in which to endure your exile, especially on 6,000 solidi a year and with Vesuvius quiet. For many Roman emperors, the end had been far less kind, and the breeze far more fleeting, and felt only on the back of the neck.

  Passing the Scepter

  WHETHER THE ROMAN EMPIRE came to an end in 476 or some other time hardly matters—at some point it came to an end. Is “fall” the right word to describe what happened to it? And is understanding what happened to it the right way to think about what may happen to America? When the communist system in Eastern Europe expired, in 1989, and the Soviet Union began to splinter apart, many observers warned of the imminent collapse of Soviet society. Others made the sensible point, since confirmed by events, that the Soviet organism was too massive, sprawling, and dense to undergo something as sudden or straightforward as “collapse.” It was the world’s biggest producer of oil and gas, of iron ore and steel. Its vast and growing underground economy showed that entrepreneurship was very much alive. Soviet Russia was, as one observer memorably put it at the time, “too big to fail” in any conventional sense, even if the chaos of unpredictable mutation might be its lot for decades.

  The Roman Empire was also too big to fail, if by “fail” you mean “suddenly discontinue and disappear.” Its methods of agriculture, its patterns of trade, its cities and ports, its buildings and infrastructure, its modes of administration, its names for objects and places, its laws, its elites—to varying degrees in various places all of these things lived on, for longer or shorter periods, making the path forward an irregular transition rather than a catastrophic revolution. The historian Lynn White states simply, “There is, in fact, no proof that any important skills of the Greco-Roman world were lost during the Dark Ages even in the unenlightened West.” Rome dissolved unevenly into history, vanishing dramatically in only a few areas (first in Britain, from which imperial forces unilaterally withdrew at the beginning of the fifth century; and then, 200 years later, in the regions that came under the sway of Islam). In many ways, for good or ill, a version of Rome was carried forward into new eras and places by the Catholic Church—its language, many of its values, much of its administrative structure, some of its dress. You can still see Rome clearly in the Church’s organizational charts, from “pontifex” through “diocese.” Maybe someday the Mormon Church, the fastest-growing religion worldwide, will play a similar role, encapsulating and propagating a particular, canonical version of America—its middle-class striving, its family values, its missionary outlook. It’s not a far-fetched notion: Salt Lake City as the Vatican of the third millennium.

  The unraveling of Rome was undeniably a big political event: a great unity was irrevocably diminished; a great and wondrous order became a thing of the past. The Romans saw it happening slowly before their eyes, wrote about it, and openly debated the reasons for it—you will find no “declinists” more sour than Latin writers of the fourth and fifth centuries. They did not agree on the causes any more than modern specialists do. But ordinary life did not change suddenly in most places. One historian writes, “After the initial shock of barbarian incursions in the fifth century, the separate localities of the Roman Empire passed rather easily into barbarian hands. Landlords continued to manage their properties; peasants worked the land; and members of the imperial bureaucracy fulfilled their functions—only now in the service of barbarian tribes and chieftains rather than of Roman emperors.” A senate composed of aristocrats will continue to exist in Rome for more than a century after Rome’s fall. Yes, the archaeological record reveals a general subsidence in well-being over time. Pottery is less well made. Houses are more likely to be built of wood than of stone. Fewer villas boast mosaics and plumbing. The money economy contracts. Livestock lose weight. But for generation upon generation, in the aftermath of the empire as before it, life was for most people what it always is: a series of incremental adaptations that only the passage of centuries reveals to have been a radical departure, or to have been pointing in some clear new direction.

  The Romans had seen themselves as the successors of the Trojans and the Greeks—indeed, as the culminating e
mpire for all of time: “empire without end.” Of course, the example of Troy was also a sobering one. Virgil was speaking of Troy, not Rome, when he recalled the demise of a great city—“urbs antiqua ruit”—but the words cast a shadow of foreboding all the same. When the Roman Empire was truly gone, European rulers invoked Rome’s mystic authority for themselves—the “translation of empire,” as the process came to be called. Slavic peoples saw the imperium passing from Rome to Constantinople and thence to Moscow, which they called the “Third Rome.” Western Europeans traced the translatio imperii through the Holy Roman Empire and up to their own doorsteps. English imperialists at the height of the British Empire were full of talk about inheriting the Roman mantle, and when the mantle began to slip, they knew full well who would pick it up. Bishop Berkeley, writing in the mid nineteenth century, looked to America: “The world’s scepter passed from Persia to Greece, from Greece to Italy, from Italy to Great Britain, and from Great Britain the scepter is today departing. It is passing to ‘Greater Britain,’ to our mighty West, there to remain, for there is no further West.” (The city of Berkeley, in what was thought would be the “no further West” state of California, is named for this same bishop.) Charles Darwin joined in, giving the idea biological sanction. Endorsing a book that painted America as the culmination of history, Darwin wrote, “There is apparently much truth in the belief that the wonderful progress of the United States, as well as the character of the people, are the results of natural selection.” With the transfer of the imperium to America, the British found solace in comparing themselves to Rome’s more cultivated Greek antecedents, who never ceased looking down on the upstart that overwhelmed their civilization.