There has always been a whiff of determinism about the Rome-and-America analogy, as if the fate of Rome foretold the fate of all future empires. Byron’s Childe Harold, contemplating the city’s ruins, captured a famous version of this outlook:
There is the moral of all human tales;
’Tis but the same rehearsal of the past,
First Freedom, and then Glory—when that fails,
Wealth, vice, corruption—barbarism at last.
But press it too far, or invoke it too literally, and the Rome-and-America analogy breaks down in strategic places. Rome accepted and bestrode its destiny. Americans don’t yet agree that an empire is what we’ve become, much less agree that we ought to be one. The political gulf between Rome and America is wide, morally and procedurally. America’s democratic form of government looks to us like a flawed and tarnished thing, and we lament its grave deficiencies. But it’s more adaptable, just, and robust than anything Rome came up with in a thousand years. Elections remain a check on power, a crude and clumsy but as yet sacred way to reorient the compass.
Our judicial apparatus at every level depends increasingly on the ability to pay large sums for lawyers—implicitly creating a two-tier system of justice, which gives us pause. But this system does not represent an official ideal; many Americans fight against it. Rome was explicit and unabashed about its official two-tier system: there was a small group of people called hon-estiores, the privileged elite, who enjoyed a presumption of integrity and were exempt from many judicial penalties, and from interrogation by torture; and then there was everyone else, the humiliores.
Americans are well aware of the nation’s worsening income inequality. The wages of ordinary working people have in recent years become detached from rising productivity and allowed to sink, in real terms, even as America’s piscinarii, the small group at the very top, see their share of the nation’s total wealth grow and grow, and their taxes shrink and shrink. But most Americans don’t want our society to be like this, and we remain at heart a middle-class nation; whereas Rome lacked what we would regard as a middle class, and the very tiny Roman elite accepted the chasm between themselves and everyone else as the divinely ordained natural order and an affirmation of their own virtue. Pliny the Younger observed, “Nothing is more unfair than equality.”
The public savagery of Rome would be a shock to Americans. Leave aside the gladiators and the carnage of the arena. Leave aside the practice of hanging the heads of executed public figures, including Cicero, from the Rostra in the Forum. In city and country the rich got their way in the manner of warlords and mafia dons, using retainers and “men of the arm” to beat and torture and kill; Ramsay MacMullen has written about the “predatory arrogance long latent in the pax Romana” and “an uncontested right to assert one’s superiority in offensive, often cruel, ways.” Americans lament but tolerate the impersonal, structural savagery of economic forces; they regret but accept the distant cruelty of war’s “collateral damage.” But Americans cannot imagine the routine interpersonal oppression that Romans knew and took for granted.
And then there is the enormity of slavery, which America eventually rejected but Rome never did. The distortions and habits of mind introduced by slavery make Rome an alien place. For centuries Rome ran on slaves the way America has run on oil, and wars often brought a significant increase in Rome’s energy supply. At a stroke the conquest of Epirus, across the Adriatic, in 167 B.C., brought 150,000 slaves to Rome; Caesar’s wars in Gaul, a century later, brought a million more. On the great estates, slaves vastly outnumbered free men; in Italy at the end of the republic, slaves may have made up half the total population. The revolt led by Spartacus showed what a terrifying threat these slaves represented, and Roman society was always mindful of the need to keep the bondsmen in bondage. The statutes were harsh. One law stipulated that if any slave killed his master, all the slaves in that household must be executed—this to discourage conspiracies and to give every slave a stake in the safety of his owner. In other words, the system as a whole was premised on mutual terror.
Could there ever be extenuating circumstances? Was Roman society secure enough to stay the law’s hand? Both Pliny and Tacitus tell the story of a prominent politician named L. Pedanius Secundus, who in 61 A.D. was killed by one of his slaves. It appeared to be an isolated incident—a private grievance, not a conspiracy—and the idea of exacting the full measure of punishment gave many Romans pause. Pedanius had been a very rich man; this one household was home to hundreds of slaves. But in the end the Senate decided to apply the letter of the law and to execute them all. Only the certainty of punishment could keep the slaves in check, it was argued. One senator explained: “It is true that, because of this, innocent people will be sacrificed; but every exemplary punishment always contains an element of injustice, which is carried out on individuals in the name of the utility of the entire people.”
America is far removed from the kind of society described here. Few Americans would have wanted to live in it, even if guaranteed a place at the pinnacle, with the wealth and status of a Symmachus or a Lucullus. Why, then, do we feel a tug of loss when contemplating Rome’s demise? The answer is not to be found in Gibbon, who regarded “the tranquil and prosperous state of the empire” in its golden age as the apogee of human happiness. Gibbon was a man of his times, blind to many things, and in any case this sort of sweeping historical assessment is out of fashion. I remember reading an interview some years ago with the editor of a series of books about the British Empire, who was asked whether he thought that the empire, on balance, had been a force for good or ill. He sputtered at the question, the impossibility of the calculation—you could almost feel a fine spray of expostulated sherry. No, the tug of loss doesn’t have to do with any grand cost-benefit analysis, or even a fleeting thought that we’d all be “better off” if the status quo had just gone on and on. What draws us now is something far more elemental and emotional: the brutal reminder of impermanence. That, and from time to time an anxious flicker of recognition—the eagle in the mirror—when catching sight of the characteristics that Rome and America share.
What’s an empire to do?
Fast Forward
FOR REASONS THAT REMAIN OBSCURE, the poet Ovid was sent into exile by the emperor Augustus in 8 A.D. Ovid blamed his fate, cryptically, on “a poem and a mistake,” and would say nothing more. He lived the last decade of his life on the shores of the Black Sea, pining for Rome. A long poetic work he wrote at this time is called Tristia—Sadness. It is intensely personal, and was probably intended to persuade Augustus to lift the sentence of exile. (He didn’t.) In Tristia, Ovid imagines the journey his poem will take on its way to Rome: “Little book, I don’t begrudge it; you’ll go the City without me, / Ay, to the place where your master isn’t permitted to go.” As described in Tristia, the book arrives in Rome, enters the Forum, travels down the Via Sacra and past the Temple of Vesta, makes a right, passes through the gate of the Palatine, goes up the hill, and stops before its final destination, the house of Augustus. Over the doorway hangs the famous oak-leaf crown, awarded to Augustus in perpetuity by the people of Rome.
I had Tristia on my mind as I made my own way not long ago down the Via Sacra, past the Temple of Vesta, and through the gate of the Palatine. I paid an entrance fee in euros—the first official common currency in Europe since the days of the Roman Empire—and went up the hill, spending an afternoon under the umbrella pines and among the ruins. The house of Augustus is still there, modest in size, surprisingly well preserved; on the second floor is the elegantly frescoed room he referred to as “Syracuse,” or his “workshop,” his cherished private space, its window overlooking the Temple of Apollo. The Domus Flavia, the palace complex built by those who came after him, sprawls nearby, in some places several levels deep, in others a masonry footprint open to the sky. An apse in one chamber was meant for the emperor’s throne; you can stand on the very spot—chew gum, use your cell phone—in this place that you
would have approached with humility and awe, maybe terror, in 100 A.D. Behind the apse lie the remains of a cloistered garden area, the peristyle. The mad emperor Domitian liked to walk here, and had its walls veneered with high-gloss marble so that he could see the reflection of any attacker. (It worked: he was stabbed to death someplace else.) Just beyond the peristyle is the state dining room, flanked by fountains, with a double floor that allowed heated air to circulate. The dining room leads to the family quarters, a private enclave set apart from the public areas.
The mental transference from Palatine to Washington comes all too easily. Here in the palace, the Praetorian Guard would have worn civilian clothes . . . as our Secret Service does. Looking south from the windows of his residence, an emperor would have seen what the American president, looking south, also sees: an obelisk, Rome’s in the Circus Maximus, Washington’s beyond the Ellipse. The president’s desk, set in the curve not of an apse but of an oval, is backed by his own lush peristyle, the Rose Garden. Wander the hallways of the Domus Flavia or the West Wing, and you come across libraries and briefing rooms and athletic facilities, and hideaways where the leader can be alone. The walls in both places display images of national mythology and civic religion. Marble busts of previous occupants observe from pedestals.
It will be a while, I hope, before tourists stroll among weeds poking up through the Map Room and the Oval Office, or pose before the scenic remaining columns of the South Portico. In Rome today you see leathery men in cheesy centurion’s garb posing with tourists in front of the ruins. I’m not sure I want to know what the Washington equivalent will be—Green Berets, maybe, or TV reporters, or special prosecutors.
But the thought of tourists posing brings back the question: Are we Rome? In a thousand specific ways, the answer is obviously no. In a handful of important ways, the answer is certainly yes. As societies, America and Rome are built on different premises. As people, Americans and Romans cherish different values. But Rome and America share certain dangerous traits—habits of mind and behavior. America and Rome also face similarly fraught circumstances, arising both from inside and from outside.
From the vantage point of the far future—that is, projecting ourselves ahead—I imagine it will be possible to visit America in its olden days using computerized “fly-through” programs like the ones that exist now for ancient Rome, though far more elaborate and detailed. You’ll be able to run the program forward and back—maybe watching the waters of the Potomac lap the South Lawn as sea levels rise, and then with a toggle watching the waters recede as time runs in the other direction. You’ll be able to observe economic and demographic variables play themselves out over decades and centuries—the average American eye turning brown and almond-shaped; North Dakota becoming the first state with two senators but no electorate; the advent of prenatal sex selection teaching the virtues of randomness, but too late. Going the other direction, you’ll be able to reverse-engineer “present-day” conditions, sorting out the tangle of social antecedents to determine what really caused what.
If you actually had such a program now, and could put early-twenty-first-century America into fast-forward, what would you see? Certain futures are all too plausible; we’ve made a start on each one of them.
For instance, there’s the Fortress America scenario. As perceived threats to the country grow more insistent and varied, all of society increasingly bends toward a particular vision of homeland defense. We watch as local police forces, the educational system, even pop culture, bit by bit acquire a vaguely martial cast. Spending on domestic programs is diverted to national security. Economic life orients itself increasingly around the requirements of the military and the intelligence apparatus, and of our far-flung protectorates. Individual rights and freedoms take a back seat to the government’s need to know. Borders are hardened. Privacy becomes just a footnote in the history books (though not in the ones used in Texas). The executive branch is paramount, the other two branches having evolved into useless but still-detectable appendages, like a whale’s vestigial limbs. This would be Diocletian’s empire taken to some future American extreme.
Or there’s the City-State scenario, already emerging in many parts of the world. As the government in Washington becomes more and more unwieldy (and resented), and as its foreign policies drag the country into dangers that many of the country’s components would just as soon avoid, the great cities gradually assert themselves. Los Angeles, New York, Miami, Seattle, Chicago—these and a few other places, including Washington, are America’s prime source of wealth and creativity even now. They animate entire regions with their economic and intellectual power, and stamp those regions with their cultural character. Their leaders already do business with heads of state. They pursue domestic policies—on the environment, medical research, social issues—sharply at variance with those of Washington. As Richard Florida has pointed out, “If U.S. metropolitan areas were countries, they’d make up forty-seven of the biggest 100 economies in the world.” Now, on fast-forward, we see them becoming de facto city-states, emerging organically out of the nation’s moldering timber like the barbarian kingdoms of late antiquity. Of course, without the flywheel of Washington there is strife—over borders, resources, amenities. City-states compete even more ferociously than they used to for investment from abroad. Once, in a playful exercise, a friend took a map of the Northeast and drew what he thought should be the boundaries of the city-state centered on Manhattan, looping north to ensnare the Boston Symphony’s summer outpost at Tanglewood. Would that be a casus belli?
And then there’s what might be called the Boardroom scenario—the extension of corporate ownership to ever larger areas of ordinary life, not just in America but worldwide. The nation-state model of governance is only a few hundred years old. Why assume that it must be the last stage of political development? Why assume that America’s government won’t cede some or most of its social obligations to companies promising to “do it for us”? On fast-forward we see the rise of corporate feudalism on a global scale. The world’s biggest corporations are already powerful transnational actors in an era when many problems demand transnational management. And what has just been said of cities can also be said of corporations: in this case, of the world’s one hundred largest “economies,” half are not countries but private companies. Some of them command small armies, and quietly rule significant swaths of the planet. Others manufacture the weapons used by “real” countries, including America. A small number of companies produce all the oil and gas. A small number control the world’s freshwater resources. By means of privatization, big business is already acquiring—or being given, or being paid to take—much of the infrastructure of government. Social services may well be next. The capacity of corporations to do global harm is well established. They also have the capacity to do global good. Regardless, on fast-forward we watch them grow in relative power, untethered to any one sliver of national geography, but indisputable lords of the world’s water, its food, its information, its health, its energy, its transportation, its software, its music, its security, its violence.
You can posit many possible futures, some deeply problematic, some relatively benign. Whatever comes to pass, the sheer fact of America will weigh on the world for millennia. Like Rome, America is in some ways inextinguishable. What we can’t know is which characteristics will be extinguished and which won’t. But we do have a say in the outcome.
The Titus Livius Plan
IF IT WERE SOMEHOW LEFT to me to figure out what ought to be nurtured or extinguished (this is what happens when you stand in the emperor’s apse too long), I’d start by trying to understand, and to acknowledge, what we’re up against as a quasiempire in a turbulent century.
There is, to begin with, a psychological tendency that is nearly impossible to shed. The idea that you should preserve everything you already have, exactly the way it is, exerts a powerful grip, even when logic suggests that only adaptation can preserve what is essential or worthwhile. “He
rein lies one of the curses of empire,” writes the political scientist Eliot Cohen. “To let go never looks safe, and indeed rarely is.” It isn’t only Americans who wring their hands after “losing” what they consider to be strategic assets (fill in the blank: China, Vietnam, Iran, Iraq). Britain’s imperial devolution brought great bitterness. The emperor Nero was castigated because he “lost Armenia.” Even wise adjustments, at home and abroad, may be resisted.
Then there is a simple fact of life: the status quo never stays that way. Thucydides observed that empires start to decline when they cease to expand. You can’t read an account of Rome in the third, fourth, or fifth century, when expansion is over and emperors are trying desperately to hold things together, without marveling at the blizzard of variables in play. Every Roman action to address one urgent problem—military, diplomatic, economic, political—creates unintended new problems. The blood thinner causes hemorrhage; the coagulant causes stroke.
And from this comes, finally, an unhappy generalization: large systems are inherently unstable. There has been a lot of academic theorizing in recent years about the nature and course of empires. An insight that transcends most others has been expressed by many but was distilled into a few sentences by the economist Paul Ormerod in his book Why Most Things Fail: “Species, people, firms, governments are all complex entities that must survive in dynamic environments which evolve over time. Their ability to understand such environments is inherently limited. . . . These limits can no more be overcome by smarter analysis than we are able to break binding physical constraints, such as the speed of light.” Unfortunately, there is no pause button.
Are We Rome? Page 21
