Are We Rome?

by Cullen Murphy

  In America, then, as a practical matter, the workings of Washington encourage the idea that the world is small, that society is malleable, and that the capital’s stance is paramount. All things begin in the capital, the prime mover of all change. You see traces of this idea in everything from the War on Poverty, in the 1960s, to the Clinton health-insurance plan, in the 1990s. In foreign policy the idea makes itself felt as resistance to multilateral arrangements (such as the treaties to reduce atmospheric pollution and to ban land mines and antiballistic missiles) and as faith in unilateral action (such as pre-emptive war). Across the board it fosters the conviction that assertions of will can trump assessments of reality: the world is the way we say it is. Thus, in the most recent federal budget, $20 million has been set aside for an eventual “day of celebration” marking American victory in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  A Roman moment captures the spirit: in 476 A.D., not long after the last emperor was deposed and the empire in the West had come to an end, the Roman Senate ordered new coins to be struck. The coins bore the legend “Roma Invicta”—“Rome Unconquered.”

  2

  The Legions

  When Power Meets Reality

  Valens was overjoyed at the prospect of so many recruits. He reasoned that if the Goths were integrated into his army it would give him an overwhelming force.

  —Ammianus Marcellinus, Roman History

  I would go further and offer citizenship to anyone, anywhere on the planet, willing to serve a set term in the U.S. military.

  —the columnist Max Boot

  BAGRAM AIR BASE, in Afghanistan, is located on a sere plain beneath snowcapped spurs of the Hindu Kush, about thirty miles north of Kabul. Alexander the Great founded a city, Alexandria of the Caucasus, a few miles north of the air base. Even closer to it Alexander built several forts. Under other circumstances archaeologists would be busy here. In the past, Bagram has yielded glassware and bronzes from as far away as imperial Rome. Its carved ivories, looted from Afghanistan’s national museum during the country’s three decades of war, are prized items on the international black market. If archaeological work is not much in evidence these days, it is because the sites are overlaid with some of the world’s most extensive minefields, a legacy of the Russian occupation, from 1979 to 1988. There’s a strategic rationale for this acute level of military interest: Bagram lies on a stretch of the ancient Silk Road. It guards the southern approach to the Khawak Pass, a route through forbidding mountains traveled centuries ago by Tamerlane and Genghis Khan as they made their way south into India. Bagram was also a redoubt held by the Northern Alliance and its American advisers in 2001, and it was from there that they pushed toward Kabul to drive out the Taliban.

  Bagram today is an outpost of American, not Hellenic, civilization. Alexander’s city supported a population of some 4,000; Bagram Air Base supports a population of more than 5,000. The base perimeter, nine miles around, is ringed not with walls of stone or mud but with chain-link fencing and concertina wire and arrays of bright lights and electronic sensors. The Russians may have built the airfield runway and the control tower, but if you subtracted the particularities of view and climate you could be on almost any American military base in almost any part of the world. There are the same orderly rows of prefabricated dwellings; the same stacks of shipping containers; the same giant bladders of water and fuel. There is a mini–Main Street with American-style stores, and a small hospital offering some of the best medical care in Afghanistan. There is a precinct where the hundreds of civilian contractors live, doing the cooking and cleaning for the troops; and the checkpoint guarding and facility constructing; and, outside the perimeter, in greater Afghanistan, a lot of the nation building. In your spare time you can take college courses or watch satellite TV, and for $50 a month you can get Internet access. A dozen varieties of religious service are offered at a containerized facility, the Enduring Freedom Chapel, which comes stocked with prayer rugs and chalices and menorahs, and with sacred books covered in a camouflage pattern. The chapel is a shrine to America’s civil religion as well: naturalization ceremonies have been held here for American personnel in Afghanistan who were not citizens when they joined the armed forces, as increasing numbers of recruits are not. Well-meaning celebrities from the United States come and go: Robin Williams, Roger Clemens, Henry Rollins, Drew Carey, Al Franken, the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders. And then, of course, there is the war-fighting aspect of the air base—the fighter jets and helicopters, the shuttling transport planes, the bristling arsenal.

  The uniformity from American base to American base is a function not just of military culture but of military spending. A single company, Kellogg Brown & Root, until recently a subsidiary of Halliburton, is responsible for most of the physical infrastructure and maintenance, and many of the services, and sometimes even the security, at America’s bases in Afghanistan and Iraq and the Balkans and elsewhere around the world. Another group, the Army and Air Force Exchange Service, operates more than a thousand fast-food restaurants on U.S. military bases worldwide. The Burger King outlet it runs out of a trailer at the Baghdad International Airport is one of the ten busiest Burger Kings in the world. The Exchange Service oversees department stores and movie theaters. It issues its own credit card, the Military Star Card, and since 9/11 it has absorbed the Star Card debt of any member of the armed forces killed in action. The Army and Air Force Exchange Service ensures that Baskin-Robbins and Mountain Dew, Levi’s and L’Oréal, will follow Old Glory wherever it goes.

  Robert D. Kaplan, an American correspondent who has been in and out of scores of American bases around the world over several decades, writes of a recent stay at Bagram:

  It takes so little to reproduce a material culture, I thought. HESCO barriers, a bit of cheap carpentry, rows of portable toilets, Armed Forces radio, two weight rooms with Sheryl Crow CDs playing in the background, and half a dozen chow halls serving fried chicken, collard greens, and Snapple and Gatorade—and boom! You’ve got the United States. Or at least a particular country-slash-southern-slash-working-class version of it.

  Or, to import this observation into another cultural context: it takes so little to reproduce a material culture—a bit of cheap jewelry, rows of stone toilets, mass-produced plates and bowls from southern Gaul, chow halls serving imported wine and olive oil, styluses and wax writing tablets for letters to friends and family bathhouses with heated floors, carved effigies and altars honoring the familiar gods from back home—and boom! You’ve got the Roman Empire. Or at least a particular north-of-Britain-slash-barbarian-auxiliary version of it.

  That is the thought I took away from Vindolanda, a Roman camp in Northumberland that archaeologists have been excavating for nearly seventy-five years. The landscape itself no longer has any sort of military feel, although the sonic signature of British Harrier jets, flying low in pairs from a base nearby sometimes breaks the silence. Vindolanda is otherwise a Constable painting, occupying a grassy hilltop with a panorama of rolling moors, craggy escarpments, and grazing cattle, and within easy reach of friendly pubs. Through it runs the Stanegate, the old Roman supply road that parallels the River Tyne across the neck of Britain. A weathered Roman mile marker stands nearby hard to miss. The emperor Hadrian surely noticed it; he spent time in this very spot, overseeing the construction of the wall, a little to the north, that bears his name. Vindolanda was initially fortified around 85 A.D., and it was occupied, more or less peacefully, for the next three centuries, until the Romans decamped from Britain altogether, pulling back their legions to deal with crises elsewhere. Vindolanda’s moats and ditches, which served as casual trash pits, have so far yielded more than 5,000 Roman boots and shoes, along with many other things—coins and jewelry, plates and bowls, hides and headgear, knives and armor. Today the excavations are presided over by Robin Birley, a bluff man with fists like oaken burls, who loves the work in part because he has no idea what will come out of the ground next (“except shoes”).

  Who was s
tationed at Vindolanda? For a time, mostly Bavarians and Tungrians—Latin-speaking auxiliaries of barbarian stock originally from what are now the Low Countries. These cohorts once guarded their native regions, but they had proved unreliable during the tumultuous “year of four emperors,” 69 A.D., a period of civil war, political assassination, and barbarian revolt that followed the suicide of Nero (and that, if nothing else, helps give some perspective to Bush v. Gore). Henceforward it became Roman policy not to station barbarian auxiliaries on their native soil. And so the Batavians and the Tungrians found themselves transferred to the north of Britain. Their bitter anthem could well have been some version of W. H. Auden’s “Roman Wall Blues”: “Over the heather the wet wind blows, / I’ve lice in my tunic and a cold in my nose.” The poem goes on: “The mist creeps over the hard grey stone, / My girl’s in Tungria; I sleep alone.”

  What is remarkable about Vindolanda is that it is not remarkable at all—it precisely resembles the Roman bases that exist by the hundreds all over the empire. The fortified playing-card shape is the same, and the interior street pattern, and the orderly rows of barracks, and the types of amenities, and the variety of imported goods. Fly over the Syrian Desert when the sun is low, or along the Dead Sea, or across the emptiness of Libya and Tunisia, and you will get a sense from the bas-relief rectangles—on the edge of a deep wadi, in the cup of a high valley, on the flat of a lunar plain—of the vast extent of Rome’s military apparatus, and of its cookie-cutter infrastructure. For the sake of morale at these lonely outposts, performers were brought in from afar to amuse the troops; even Trajan, not remembered as a soft touch, imported actors from Rome to entertain the legions in Syria. Courier services linked the bases to one another, and to the empire’s cities and towns. The messages exchanged have hardly changed in 2,000 years.

  We know this for sure because of Vindolanda. A chance conjunction of British climate and Roman building methods created anaerobic conditions deep below the surface at the site, preserving many items that would otherwise have decomposed. Cloth has been pulled from the muck still bearing the clavus, the broad purple stripe of the Roman aristocracy, an ancient version of the red power tie. Most important by far have been the well over a thousand delicate bits of writing, scrawled in ink on fragments of paper or etched on thin wooden tablets coated with wax. Some of them contain details (such as personal names) that are obviously specific to a particular time: “Octavius to his brother Candidus, greetings.” Many offer specifics about life on an imperial frontier: “Nails for boots, number 100” and “As for the 100 pounds of sinew from Marinus—I will settle up” and “I ask you . . . to grant me leave.” In one fragment a Latin epithet—“Brittunculi”—displays the figure of speech known as the contemptuous diminutive, revealing a certain Roman disrespect toward the locals: “pathetic little Brits” gets the idea across. But much of the Vindolanda writing—letters received, or drafts of letters later recopied and sent—is ageless, indistinguishable from e-mail sent home by American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  Here’s a jumbled selection from U.S. military e-mail traffic and the Vindolanda fragments: “I am surprised that you have not written anything back to me for such a long time.” “I am beginning to wonder if you are mad at me or what?” “Be good for Grandma. Daddy loves you and will see you soon.” “Send me some cash as soon as possible.” “Still no hope in sight on when we will get the hell out of here, so I will continue to cross my fingers and do the Goat Dance.” “While I am writing this to you, I am making the bed warm.” “I have sent you pairs of socks, two pairs of sandals, and two sets of underwear.” “For the celebration of my birthday, I ask you warmly to come to us.” “Well, on that happy note: happy birthday to you.”

  The Grand Tour

  NO COMPARISON involving Rome and America receives more attention or is more frequently invoked than the military comparison. America’s “seemingly imperial power,” in the words of the Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye, “is more dominant perhaps than any other since the Roman Empire.” Once, when visiting American forces on the front lines of the Cold War, in the forests of old Germania, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan—not a “seemingly” or “perhaps” kind of fellow—couldn’t help himself: “This is the stuff of Roman legions!” he exclaimed. And in a certain brute sense the comparison has something going for it: Rome and America are both big dogs. The Romans dominated most of the world they knew about, the oikumene (though not all of it); the Roman Empire is the only entity in history that ever controlled the entire Mediterranean coastline. For its part, the United States not only has no military rival; its level of annual spending on the military is equivalent to that of the next fifteen or so countries combined, and its stated ambition is to achieve “full-spectrum dominance.” We’re the number 1 economic power in the world, and we provide a security umbrella for the number 2 power (Japan) and the number 3 power (Germany). With alliances spanning the continents and a navy patrolling the seas, America shoulders some of the defense responsibility for billions of people. It’s a prodigious undertaking.

  What happens if you can’t keep it up? The pressures come from more than one direction. There is the sheer managerial challenge of policing whatever you conceive to be “the world.” It’s difficult when, like Rome, you don’t have modern communications and transport—but in some ways just as difficult when you do, given that your enemies may also have these technologies. For both Rome and America, the nature of the perceived security threat keeps changing. Is it from outside powers of considerable might and sophistication (the Persian Empire, the Third Reich)? Is it from internal rebellions? The tribes on your borders? Religious zealots? International terrorists? Your own generals? Meanwhile, keeping vast armies permanently in the field demands an enormous outlay of treasure. The domestic budget of imperial Rome was a meager thing by comparison with that of modern America, with its array of entitlements and services, but Rome often had to squeeze its people hard to extract the money it needed for national security, and it continually devalued its currency to make ends meet. (Deficit spending as we know it did not yet exist.) America achieves the same result by borrowing trillions of dollars, going ever more deeply into debt while trying not to worry about the many serious national needs it’s simply ignoring. There’s one military resource that not even an emperor can just conjure into existence, however: flesh-and-blood human beings. Manpower shortages become a big problem for both Rome and America—and both arrive at the same unsatisfactory solution.

  A few years ago, I had a chance to spend some time visiting a dozen or so of America’s major military installations: among them, the naval base at Coronado Island, in San Diego; the Marine Corps base at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina; the Army Ranger School at Fort Bragg, also in North Carolina; and the Air Force facility in Colorado Springs known as the U.S. Space Command, which oversees America’s high frontier. I was flown onto and off an aircraft carrier, and in a clearing amid scrub pines watched with night-vision goggles as paratroopers by the hundreds floated down like green jellyfish in a murky sea. It was all designed to leave a lasting impression—and it did. The Romans obviously had no air force, much less a praefectura caeli, a space command, to move satellites around, but a tour of its military facilities would have seemed remarkably similar and no less astonishing. The tour might have started with the great naval base at Misenum, north of Naples, where the main portion of the Roman fleet was based; sections of the ancient complex remain visible under the wisteria and honeysuckle in what is today partly a beach town and partly still a zona militare. Perhaps the next stop would have been the Castra Peregrinorum, in Rome, whose foundations lie underneath what is now the elegant little church of San Stefano Rotondo. This was the headquarters of the frumentarii, the military agents who originally managed the all-important grain supply, and who gradually came to serve as the emperor’s couriers and as his eyes and ears—his snoops, often his hit men. (The name, which means “purveyors of grain,” must have come to seem like a biz
arre euphemism, the way using “youth services” for “jail” does today.) Where next? Maybe to one of the imperial stud farms in Spain or Thrace or Cappadocia. The tens of thousands of horses required by the Roman cavalry had to be bred and trained, taught to wheel and turn, to jump and swim. Next: a tour of the fabricae—the artillery factory at Augustodunum, say, or the arrow factory at Concordia, or the bow factory at Ticinum, or the shield factory at Marcianopolis, or maybe the factories for cavalry armor at Antioch and Nicomedia. The Romans didn’t have Henry Ford–style mass production, but they did have factories and they did have a military-industrial complex. Three dozen of these fabricae were located strategically throughout the empire to provide the legions with armaments; some of them were general suppliers of swords and shields. Others were far more specialized: the Colt Industries and Lockheed Martin and Point Blank Body Armor of their day.

  There are a host of differences between the American and the Roman fighting forces. In terms of technology, for instance, America enjoys a huge advantage over any enemy—too great to be quantifiable, and far greater than Rome usually possessed. Rome generally had a qualitative upper hand, though sometimes, as against Parthia’s heavily armored cavalry, the fabled cataphracts, it was at a disadvantage. But two great similarities stand out.