Are We Rome?

by Cullen Murphy

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The Eagle in the Mirror

  The Capitals

  The Legions

  The Fixers

  The Outsiders

  The Borders

  There Once Was a Great City

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2007 by Cullen Murphy

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Murphy, Cullen.

  Are we Rome? : the fall of an empire and the fate of America/ Cullen Murphy

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-618-74222-6

  ISBN-10: 0-618-74222-0

  1. United States—Civilization—Roman influences.

  2. National characteristics, American. 3. United States—

  Foreign relations. 4. United States—Territorial expansion.

  5. Imperialism. 6. Rome—History I. Title.

  EI169.1.M957 2007

  970.01—dc22 2006035717

  eISBN 978-0-547-52707-9

  v2.0216

  “Roman Wall Blues,” from Collected Poems by W H. Auden, copyright © 1976 by Edward Mendelson, William Meredith and Monroe K. Spears, Executors of the Estate of W H. Auden. Used by permission of Random House, Inc.

  To my friends and colleagues at

  The Atlantic Monthly,

  1985–2005

  Prologue

  The Eagle in the Mirror

  Urbs antiqua fuit. . . . Urbs antiqua ruit.

  There once was an ancient city. . . . The ancient city fell.

  —Virgil, The Aeneid

  IMAGINE THE SCENE: a summer day, late in the third century A.D., somewhere beyond Italy in the provinces of the Roman Empire, perhaps on the way to a city like Sirmium, south of the Danube, in what is now Serbia, where several roads converge—good Roman roads of iron slag and paving stone. The Roman road system is immense—more than 370 separate highways stretching some 53,000 miles all told, about the length of the U.S. interstate system. In these difficult final centuries of the imperium a Roman emperor travels constantly, and his progress makes for quite a spectacle. “The peasants raced to report what they had seen to the villages,” a contemporary remembers. “Fires were lit on the altars, incense thrown on, libations poured, victims slain.”

  The emperor here is perhaps Diocletian, a man of the hinterland, from Dalmatia, and wherever the emperor resides, so resides the imperial government, although Rome itself will long retain its symbolic character—will long be referred to as “the city” even by people five hundred miles away. Who is this Diocletian? No friend of the Christians; he is a “traditional Roman values” man, and his persecutions are intense. But he has restored Rome’s stability, at great cost, and in his travels he projects Rome’s power. Before the emperor’s arrival, advance men known as mensores would have been sent ahead to requisition supplies and arrange for security. If you have business with the imperial court, perhaps bearing a petition from your beleaguered city or a plea from your patrician family, and make your way toward the emperor’s encampment, you will encounter other supplicants like yourself. Some of them may have been following the emperor for weeks or months. You will also encounter a defensive ring a few miles outside your destination, and find the roads dense with military traffic; and as you draw closer, the character of the armed forces will change, from auxiliaries to legionaries to the imperial bodyguard, a force known as the protectores. The imperial eagle flutters on their standards.

  At last, in the center, you find the comitatus itself, the sprawling apparatus, several thousand strong, that encompasses not only the emperor’s household and its personnel—the eunuchs and secretaries, the slaves of every variety (the emperor may own 20,000 of them)—but also the ministries of government, the lawyers, the diplomats, the adjutants, the messengers, the interpreters, the intellectuals. And of course you also find the necessities of life and the luxuries, the rich food and drink. Gone is the simple camp fare of Trajan’s day, the bacon, cheese, and vinegar. A letter survives describing the table laid for just one Roman dignitary (and four companions) visiting Egypt—“ten white-head fowl, five domestic geese, fifty fowl; of game-birds, fifty geese, two hundred birds, one hundred pigeons”; multiply accordingly for the emperor and his household. And the ruler himself: How does he spend his time? Receiving petitions? Perhaps he remembers the famous story of one of his predecessors, Hadrian, who put off a pleading woman with the words “I do not have the leisure,” only to receive the reply “Then stop being emperor!” (Hadrian made time for the woman.) Consulting with his generals? Repairs to the Danube forts are an urgent necessity, given how many of the German tribes cross over every winter when the river freezes. Dictating letters and decrees? Maybe writing something in his own hand? An earlier emperor, Marcus Aurelius, composed part of his Meditations while on a military campaign along the northern frontier; Book One ends with the notation that it was written “among the Quadi,” the people he was fighting. Whoever the emperor may be, gathered around the august presence is the imperial government in microcosm, with its endless trunks full of documents; the wagons carrying the treasury and perhaps the mint itself; the blacksmiths and parchment makers; the musicians, courtesans, diviners, and buffoons; the people known as praegustatores, who taste the emperor’s food before he himself does; the people known as nomenclatores, whose job it is to call out the names of the emperor’s visitors, and who have given us the word nomenklatura, for the core group of bureaucrats and toadies who function within any nimbus of great power. All in all the comitatus is, in its way, the cluster of people who in our own time would be encompassed by the Washington e-mail designation “eop.gov.”

  Or so it occurred to me one summer morning not long ago as my plane touched down in the rain at Shannon Airport, in the Republic of Ireland. The domain name “eop” stands for “Executive Office of the President”—that is, the White House and its extensions—and as it happened, the president of the United States had arrived in Ireland shortly before I did, for an eighteen-hour official visit. His two Air Force One jumbo jets were parked on the shiny tarmac, nose to nose. The presidential eagle, a descendant of Rome’s, glared from within the presidential seal, painted prominently near the front door of each fuselage. A defensive perimeter of concertina wire surrounded the two aircraft. Surface-to-air missiles backed it up. The perimeter was manned by American forces in battle fatigues, flown in for the occasion—just one element of the president’s U.S. security detail, a thousand strong. Other security personnel peered down from the rooftops of hangars and terminals, automatic weapons at the ready. Ringing the airport was a cordon of Scorpion tanks supplied by the Irish Republic. A traveling president, too, brings with him a government in microcosm. Air Force One can carry much of the presidential comitatus—cabinet members and courtiers and cooks, speech doctors and spin doctors. Provisioning has not been overlooked: the plane can serve meals for 2,000 people, the supplies bought anonymously at American supermarkets by undercover agents, the updated version of those praegustatores. And if there’s a medical emergency? An onboard operating room is stocked with blood of the president’s type; his personal physician is at hand. From the plane’s command center a president can launch and wage a nuclear war, or any other kind, for t
hat matter. The forward compartment is what passes for a throne room, containing the president’s leather armchair and his wraparound oak desk and his telephone with its twenty-eight encrypted lines.

  Off in the mist would be the Air Force cargo planes, which had brought helicopters, a dozen Secret Service SUVs, and the official presidential limousine (plus the official decoy limousine), its windows three inches thick and its doors so heavy with armor that gas-powered pistons must be used to help open them. Four U.S. naval vessels plied the Shannon River estuary nearby. Outside the airport the roads were jammed with Irish soldiers and police officers—6,000 in all, slightly more than an entire Roman legion—and on even the tiniest boreens security personnel with communications piglet tails trailing from their ears would emerge from hiding places in the bracken if a passing car, like mine, so much as slowed to avoid some sheep.

  Had this president of the United States, George W. Bush, been of a mind to compose his own Meditations on this visit, he could legitimately say that he wrote them “among the Alemanni, the Franci, the Celtae,” because he was here with the Germans, the French, the Irish, and a number of other tribes for a summit meeting with members of the European Union—a meeting, in other words, with the leaders of allied or subsidiary nations. Ireland, though not technically an American ally, often functions as a client state, and has allowed the United States to route hundreds of transport planes through Shannon Airport, bearing American troops bound for duty in Iraq and Muslim captives bound for interrogation in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. “You are aware of your role as a tributary,” a senior British minister has written of his encounters with American officials on occasions like this one (where he was present). “You come as a subordinate bearing goodwill and hoping to depart with a blessing on your endeavors.”

  The Empire That Won’t Go Away

  PRESIDENT AND EMPEROR, America and Rome—the comparison is by now so familiar, so natural, that you just can’t help yourself: it comes to mind unbidden, in the reflexive way that the behavior of chimps reminds you of the behavior of people. Is it really ourselves we see? Everyone gets it whenever a comparison of Rome and America is drawn—for instance, in offhand references to welfare and televised sports as “bread and circuses,” or to illegal immigrants as “barbarian hordes.” We all understand what’s meant by the thumbs-down sign—pollice verso, as the Romans would have said—and know the gladiatorial context from which it came. It’s almost compulsory to speak of political pollsters as latter-day versions of Rome’s oracles, the augurs and haruspices, who sought clues to national destiny by studying the flight of birds and the entrails of slaughtered sheep. When a reference is made to an “imperial presidency,” or to the president’s aides as a “Praetorian Guard,” or to the deployment abroad of “American legions,” no one quizzically raises an eyebrow and wonders what you could possibly be talking about. To American eyes, Rome is the eagle in the mirror.

  Popular culture, the national id, is saturated with references to the Roman Empire. Not long ago HBO and ABC each launched a fictionalized “swords-and-sandals” miniseries set in ancient Rome and centered on the first glimmerings of imperial destiny, as the venerable but creaky Roman Republic began to fall apart. Novels about Rome are reliable bestsellers. The Star Wars saga is in essence a Rome-and-America amalgam, about the last remnant of a dying republic holding out against the empire that would supplant it. Earlier films about Rome, such as The Robe and Quo Vadis?, Spartacus and Ben-Hur, were crowd-pleasing vehicles that carried implicit political messages against totalitarianism and McCarthyism. (In The Robe the emperor Tiberius shows his true colors as an anti-American when he describes the desire for human freedom as “the greatest madness of all.”) Liam Neeson, the villain of Batman Begins, cites Roman precedent to justify his destruction of Gotham: “The League of Shadows has been a check against human corruption for thousands of years,” he tells Bruce Wayne. “We sacked Rome. Loaded trade ships with plague rats.”

  Rome as a point of reference is not exactly new. Americans have been casting eyes back to ancient Rome since before the Revolution. Today, though, the focus is not mainly on the Roman Republic (as it was two centuries ago, when America was itself emerging as a republic) but as much or more on the empire that took the republic’s place. The focus is also as much on the decline and fall of Rome as on its rise and zenith. Depending on who is doing the talking, Rome serves as either a grim cautionary tale or an inspirational call to action. Albert Schweitzer once observed that people setting out to write a life of Jesus all end up looking at their own reflections, as if gazing into the water of a well. In a similar way, those who explore the example of Rome tend to discover that it somehow resonates with their own concerns. I won’t pretend to be an exception.

  Obviously, the emergence of America as the world’s sole superpower, and the troubles it has encountered in that role, explain much of the revival of the Roman Empire in the American imagination. An assortment of “triumphalists” (not their term, of course) see America as at long last assuming its imperial responsibilities, bringing about a global Pax Americana like the Pax Romana of Rome at its most commanding, in the first two centuries A.D. Some form of this idea has been around for decades, and it is here to stay. America’s difficulties in Iraq (and in Afghanistan, Iran, Lebanon, North Korea, and elsewhere) are seen as a bump or a challenge—the inevitable price of global leadership—not as a dead end. Charles Krauthammer, the pontifex maximus of this outlook, has written: “America is no mere international citizen. It is the dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since Rome. America is in a position to reshape norms, alter expectations, and create new realities. How? By unapologetic and implacable demonstrations of will.” William Kristol, the editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, ascends to the purple with fewer words: “If people want to say we’re an imperial power, fine.” The neoconservative writer Max Boot, arguing that America must become the successor empire to Britain (which once saw itself as the successor empire to Rome), has called for “the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets.” The triumphalist-in-chief, trading jodhpurs for flight suit, is of course George W. Bush. He has stated that arms races by other nations are “pointless,” because American power is now and will forever be kept “beyond challenge” and capable of striking “at a moment’s notice in any dark corner of the world.”

  “Declinists” (also not their term) see this same incipient American empire as dangerously overcommitted abroad and rusted out at home, like Rome in its last two centuries. The historian and columnist Chalmers Johnson, who disparages President Bush as a “boy-emperor,” writes in a recent book: “Roman imperial sorrows mounted up over hundreds of years. Ours are likely to arrive with the speed of FedEx.” In this view, part of the problem is “imperial overstretch,” to use the historian Paul Kennedy’s well-known term—our military and globalist ambitions exceed our capacity to pay for them. Another part of the problem is moral and political: empires destroy liberty—always have, always will. Today, the declinists say, the executive branch’s imperial need for secrecy, surveillance, and social control, all in the name of national security, is corroding our republican institutions.

  Somewhere between the declinists and the triumphalists are those, like the historian Niall Ferguson, in Colossus, who argue that at any given moment some great power needs to step up and perform the world’s various imperial chores—and that the United States is the only one currently available. “Unlike most European critics of the United States,” Ferguson writes, “I believe the world needs an effective liberal empire and that the United States is the best candidate for the job.” But America, he goes on, is an “empire in denial.” It lacks the will and the staying power, the skill and the desire, to shoulder an imperial role. The dispossessed second sons of England’s landed gentry and a raft of ambitious and opportunity-starved Scots and Irish lit out for the colonies and there spent their lives governing t
he British Empire, a sprawling red mass on the maps. America’s best and brightest, in contrast, “aspire not to govern Mesopotamia but to manage MTV; not to rule the Hejaz but to run a hedge fund.” The problem here, in other words, is “imperial understretch.”

  The Rome debate has its outright Jeremiahs, its prophets of doom. The social analyst and urban planner Jane Jacobs, in a spirited and hortatory book called Dark Age Ahead, published shortly before her death at the age of ninety, all but consigns Western civilization to a new “post-Roman” era of medieval chaos and woe, brought on by the collapse of strong families, the perversion of science, and the oppressive distortion of the government’s taxing power. She sees a lethal dynamic at work: “The collapse of one sustaining cultural institution enfeebles others. . . . With each collapse, still further ruin becomes more likely.”

  The rot-from-within camp has a conservative flank, too. The classicist and military historian Victor Davis Hanson, sounding like an old Roman, bemoans the American elite’s self-absorption, moral relativism, and lack of will. “The anti-Americans often invoke Rome as a warning and as a model, both of our imperialism and of our foreordained collapse,” Hanson writes. But, he argues, Rome’s situation was more parlous in 220 B.C. (when it faced the challenge of Carthage) than in 400 A.D. (when it faced the barbarians): “The difference over six centuries, the dissimilarity that led to the end, was a result not of imperial overstretch on the outside but something happening within that was not unlike what we ourselves are now witnessing. Earlier Romans knew what it was to be Roman, why it was at least better than the alternative, and why their culture had to be defended. Later in ignorance they forgot what they knew, in pride mocked who they were, and in consequence disappeared.”