After the Revolution, sidestepping suggestions of kingship and returning to his beloved Mount Vernon, Washington was hailed as America’s Cincinnatus. Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus was a Roman of the mid fifth century B.C. who farmed a small plot of land across the Tiber from Rome. As the story goes, Rome was under assault by some neighboring tribes, its army surrounded and on the verge of annihilation. The Romans voted to empower a dictator to lead them out of crisis, and sent word to Cincinnatus, who put aside his plough and came to the city’s aid.
In two days he brought the Romans in sight of the combined armies; he formed his line of battle, and after reminding them what they were to fight for he led them onto the charge with such resistless impetuosity that he obtained a complete victory and gave, as it were, a new life to his country’s liberties. Soon as this great work was done, he took an affectionate leave of his gallant army and returned to cultivate his four acres.
That’s the conclusion of the Cincinnatus tale as recounted not by some Roman chronicler but by Parson Weems, whose best-selling Life of Washington was published soon after Washington’s death. In a work commissioned for the Capitol rotunda a few decades later, the sculptor Horatio Greenough produced a massive marble Washington in a classic Roman pose, seated, the toga draped to reveal a bare chest. With his left hand Washington offers his sword back to the people, as Cincinnatus might have done. This sculpture now dominates an entryway at the Smithsonian—it was so heavy that it had to be moved from the Capitol before it fell through the floor. The Cincinnatus reference is probably lost on most visitors: Washington looks like a man in a sauna, asking for a towel.
The Roman ideal ran deep in America for decades. People were so steeped in Cicero that up to the Civil War, the stock form of public presentation was the formal oration. As America began to spread across the continent, and to emerge as an economic power, worries only grew that the country was destined to repeat the Roman story of imperial temptation and humbling decline—worries captured in the painter Thomas Cole’s allegorical series The Course of Empire, produced in the 1830s. It’s not subtle. The series begins with an idyllic depiction of the state of nature, then portrays a moment of imperial sunshine in all its vainglorious fullness, and ends with a painting titled Desolation.
Not subtle—but not fantasy, either. It’s hardly a stretch to find modern relevance in the example of the Roman Republic, overwhelmed by the consequences of its own growing size and might, and by its perceived national-security needs. In 68 B.C. a pirate attack on Rome’s port of Ostia prompted the terrified Romans to cede far-reaching powers to one man, Pompey. There would be no turning back. The need to act boldly and react quickly; to ferret out enemy plans while keeping your own hidden; to show a public face of resolve, concealing doubt and dissent—in Rome, over time, all these mandates produced a change in character. They have done so in America, too. You could point to the expanding power of the presidency relative to the other two branches of government; or to restrictions on personal freedom in exchange for personal safety; or to a culture of secrecy; or to the pervasive influence of the military and the security apparatus. People concerned that America may drift away from a republic and toward a principate, as Rome did, took little comfort from the news, reported and confirmed in the summer of 2004, that the government was “reviewing a proposal” to postpone national elections in the event of some sort of terrorist attack; or from the recent Supreme Court ruling that the police may enter homes without knocking; or from the attorney general’s threat to use espionage laws to prosecute reporters for publishing leaks of classified information. Nor have their spirits been lifted by the inroads of a relatively new legal argument known as “unitary executive theory.” Among other things, it holds that each branch of the government—not just the Supreme Court—has the right to interpret the Constitution, and it asserts an unprecedented view of the extent of presidential power, including the power to make war without the consent of Congress.
This is not in fact just theory. One concrete result has been the president’s practice of appending a “signing statement” to legislation when it comes to him for signature, indicating his intention to enforce the legislation according to his own specific interpretation—if the legislation is enforced at all. Up through the year 2000 American presidents had collectively employed signing statements on about 600 occasions. In the six years since then, the president has added signing statements more than 750 times, on laws pertaining to such matters as the use of torture, whistle-blowing by government employees, the oversight provisions of the Patriot Act, and the obligation of the executive branch to provide Congress with certain kinds of information.
The Roman Empire’s penchant for official secrecy was remarked on by the historian Cassius Dio, who complained that because so much had been done behind closed doors, he couldn’t get access to materials he needed to write his narrative. He would not have been surprised by the dogged White House effort, which continues in the courts, to conceal the details of the administration’s early planning on energy policy and the names of those who participated in it. The Romans had nothing like the technological means that modern America has to create a true surveillance state, but the empire’s undercover operatives—the frumentarii (who turn up in the video game The Regia) and, later, the agentes in rebus—were diligent. In common parlance these operatives were known as the curiosi. The philosopher Epictetus, who was born in Rome and knew firsthand the dangers of thinking freely (he was sent into exile), presents a vignette of entrapment in one of his writings: “A soldier, dressed like a civilian, sits down by your side and begins to speak ill of Caesar, and then you, too, just as though you had received from him some guarantee of good faith in the fact that he began the abuse, tell likewise everything you think, and the next thing is—you are led off to prison in chains.” Our own curiosi have big ears. The National Security Agency, in a program known as Echelon, sifts tens of millions of telephone and data communications every day, searching for any of hundreds of words or phrases that may hint at terrorist activity. Some of them (“White House,” “mail bomb” “kill the president”) are self-explanatory; others (“Roswell,” “blowfish,” “Bill Gates”) may be counterintuitive. Another program, which bore the name Carnivore until someone started to worry, much too late, about the potential public-relations fallout, essentially conducts wiretaps on e-mail. More recently the national-security apparatus has begun wiretapping the international phone calls of thousands of Americans without legal oversight—on presidential orders, and despite the expressed will of Congress. It has also been collecting the telephone records of tens of millions more.
Then as now, legislatures seem to be the first to go. The Roman Senate remained a millionaire’s club and a source of public servants, but it atrophied as a true deliberative body. Foreign policy and war-making power became the sole province of the emperor and his amici, his closest advisers. Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution states: “The Congress shall have the power to declare war,” a power entrusted to the legislature because, as James Madison observed, the temptation to use force would otherwise “be too great for any one man.” A modern historian writes, “The debates in the convention, the later writings of delegates to that meeting, and speeches in the state conventions that voted on ratification of the Constitution leave no doubt that the president’s title and role as commander in chief gave him no powers that Congress could not define or limit.” The last time Congress authorized the use of force through a declaration of war was more than six decades ago, in the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Since then the United States has committed large numbers of troops to major combat operations on fourteen occasions, from Korea and Vietnam through Grenada, the Balkans, and two wars in Iraq, but no president has ever sought a true declaration of war. Power has shifted decisively toward the executive, as the executive understands. George W. Bush made the point this way: “I’m the commander—see, I don’t need to explain. . . . I don’t feel like I owe anybody a
n explanation.”
The Omphalos Syndrome
SOMETHING HAPPENS to imperial capitals, something psychological and, over time, corrosive and incapacitating. It happens when the conviction takes hold that the capital is the source and focal point of reality—that nothing is more important than what happens there, and that no ideas or perceptions are more important than those of its elites. This conviction saturated imperial Rome, as it saturates official Washington—it’s the most important trait the capitals share. The conviction is understandable, up to a point. When powerful states are in an expansive phase, the wishes and ideas of the rest of the world seem secondary, inconsequential. In the capital itself, this frame of mind may far outlast the circumstances that produced it, taking on a life of its own that everyone has an interest in perpetuating. It can prove impossible to eradicate fully. In Italy, manhole covers are still stamped with the letters that once appeared on imperial standards and marble monuments: SPQR, for Senatus Populusque Romanus—the Senate and the Roman People. Modern Russia can’t suppress the reflexes of the old Soviet empire, just as the Soviets couldn’t suppress the reflexes of imperial Russia. Britain no longer has much of an empire, but many institutions in London retain a noticeably imperial cast of mind. The spirit of the Raj is not absent from the tone of The Economist.
Rome labored under what has been called an “omphalos syndrome.” The omphalos, from the Greek word for “navel,” was a stone monument found in a number of ancient cities that supposedly marked the navel, or center, of the world. Rome’s own version, the marble Umbilicus Romae, stood prominently in the Forum, right next to the Rostra. The marble facing is now gone, but a circular brick pile remains, to which tourists pay no attention at all, unaware that the entrance to the underworld, to Hades, was once believed to be right there, under those very bricks. The term “omphalos syndrome” originated in the study of old maps, and describes the tendency of people who “believe themselves to be divinely appointed to the centre of the universe,” as one geographer explains, to place themselves in the middle of the maps they draw. The Romans weren’t shy about asserting this belief: they drove it home astutely by means of what today would be considered “branding.” In the Forum, in the very center of Rome, they erected not only the official Umbilicus but also, a few yards away a gilded column called the Golden Milestone, where all the empire’s roads symbolically converged. Augustus built a sundial the size of a football field in the Campus Martius, using an Egyptian obelisk to cast the shadow. It was dedicated, technically to a divinity—to the sun—but on the birthday of Augustus, September 23, the obelisk’s shadow pointed directly at the Altar of Peace, which celebrated the fruits of his rule. The message was unmistakable, one scholar concludes: “The whole universe now formed part of the new Augustan system.”
In the second century A.D., a young rhetorician named Aelius Aristides delivered an oration in the Athenaeum, in Rome, possibly in front of the emperor himself. Aristides was a panegyrist, a court littérateur whose job it was to extol people in power. It is an occupational category that still exists in Washington. (Think of Peggy Noonan on Reagan, Sidney Blumenthal on Clinton, Ron Kessler on Bush, Midge Decter on Rumsfeld.) The description of Rome offered by Aristides embodies the city’s self-satisfied outlook: “Here is brought from every land and sea all the crops of the seasons and each land, river, lake, as well as of the arts of the Greeks and the barbarians. . . . Whatever one does not see here is not a thing which has existed or exists.” The architect Vitruvius took up the same theme: “Surely then it was a divine intelligence which placed the city of Rome in so perfect and temperate a country, with the intention that she should win the right to rule the world.”
Rome, like Washington, was an economically pointless metropolis, a vast importer and consumer of an empire’s riches rather than a producer of anything except words and administration (and the pungent cartloads of garbage that left the city every night). The downstream consequences of Rome’s gargantuan appetites can be visualized, literally, even today. Take the basic need for building materials. Augustus would claim that he had found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble, and the boast was not an idle one. But underneath that marble, and alongside it, mountains of brick remained. Rome’s tenement houses, the insulae, were faced with brick, and so were the city walls and sewers and aqueducts. The brick was distinctive—square and thin, red-ochre in color. You recognize it everywhere in the ruins of the city, and if you come across it anywhere in the world, whether in York or Paris or Jerusalem, it always means one thing: Rome was here. The brick and lime for the city of Rome had to be baked and kilned, which required massive quantities of charcoal, which in turn required trees. A single burn of a limestone kiln could consume a thousand donkey loads of wood. The forests around Rome were felled, and then the forests beyond those forests. Ground cover gone, the soil washed from the hillsides and into the rivers. At the mouth of the Tiber, the shoreline pushed outward as accretions of soil built up over the centuries. The docks at Ostia had to constantly be extended to remain adjacent to the water, a process clearly visible now in aerial photographs. As the empire came to an end, so did the effort to keep ahead of nature. The original docks are now a mile from the sea, trapped in dry land, separated from shore by striations of silt.
The biggest component of the city’s prodigious intake was something called the annona, an in-kind tax levied by Rome on everyplace else, and collected in the form of grain, which was used to provide free bread for most of Rome’s inhabitants. At its peak the annona amounted to 10 million sacks of grain a year. The shipment of the annona from Spain, Egypt, and northern Africa to the docks at the Tiber’s mouth, and then by barge up the river to Rome, was never-ending, like tanker traffic in the Persian Gulf. Any serious interruption could mean urban unrest to the point of violence. When conspirators wanted to bring down Cleander, the hated chief minister of the equally hated emperor Commodus, they manipulated grain supplies, causing shortages that led to riots. (Commodus “commanded that the head of Cleander should be thrown out to the people,” Gibbon writes. “The desired spectacle instantly appeased the tumult.”) Eventually the annona was expanded beyond grain to include olive oil and wine. The smashed amphorae these liquids came in were tossed in a dump near the Tiber wharves, creating a hill known today as Monte Testaccio, a hundred feet high. Warehouses the size of basilicas existed at every stage of the distribution system, and so, too, did opportunities for pilfering and corruption. If you think of the annona as tax revenue, which it was, then the revenue not only accomplished its stated purpose of feeding the city; it also supported large swaths of private-sector activity, from shipping to baking to crime. Some of this activity was encouraged with tax breaks and even grants of citizenship. There was great wealth to be had off government contracts. You can still see today, near the Porta Maggiore, in Rome, the huge marble tomb, in the shape of an old-fashioned bread oven, of a freedman named Marcus Vergilius Eurysaces, who is described by an inscription as “baker, contractor, public servant.” So large was the work force required for the baking of bread that people convicted of certain minor crimes were sentenced to hard labor in Rome’s bakeries. As the empire began to contract, the annona remained the essential lifeline, preserved at all costs. By the fifth century A.D., only the link with North Africa remained unbroken. When Alaric laid siege to Rome, one of his first acts was to send his warriors to seize the docks at Ostia.
To see yourself at the center of everything requires a sense of what “everything” is—a geographic sense, in other words. Americans take such a thing for granted, aware as we are of the location of every place on earth. You can tap into the Global Positioning System with a cell phone. In Roman times geographic knowledge was primitive, though its political uses were not. The Romans called themselves “masters of the oikumene”—“masters of the known world”—long before they were able to depict the known world in any reliable way. But once they could, they erected large public maps showing Rome in the lit
eral center, where it obviously had to be. The Roman Empire’s vascular system was its network of roads. At regular points along every roadway in Italy marble markers announced to travelers the distance to the center of the world: to Rome. A monument in the capital schematically depicted the deployments of the imperial legions, arrayed in a circle centered on the capital—a precursor, in stone, of the blinking electronic displays of “readiness” in the Pentagon’s situation room. Rome’s sense of status and privilege would survive long after Roman emperors stopped living there—and, indeed, long after the empire was gone. It survives to this day in the idea of Rome as the Eternal City, and very literally in an ancient pronouncement that occurs every Easter, when the pope from his balcony in the Vatican delivers a homily that begins with the words of address “Urbi et orbi—“To the city and to the world.”
Rome displayed the attributes of any great capital with more hubris than humility: the overweening self-regard, the presumption that it knew better than others, the surprising ignorance about foreign cultures, the languid arrogance, the competitive displays of wealth—all captured in the writings of Suetonius and Plutarch and Juvenal and others. The city’s appetite for the wealth of the conquered knew few limits: as its rule spread to one place after another, a steady traffic in artwork made its way to the center. On occasion Roman grandees would obtain classical sculptures from Greece but replace the heads with their own; think of Rodin’s leonine Balzac with the head of a Newt Gingrich or a Joseph Biden. All of this coexisted with a rhetoric of high-mindedness about the duties and burdens of leadership—Rome’s “special gift.” And the fact is, the rhetoric reflected an undeniable reality: Rome held up its end.
Are We Rome? Page 5