Are We Rome?

by Cullen Murphy

  Outsiders could come in other forms. There are existing alliances—such as, for instance, NATO. But NATO is a temperamental instrument, and the forces of its member nations are already stretched thin. To wage the war in Iraq, the United States cobbled together an ad hoc thirty-four-member Coalition of the Willing for both military and political purposes, but even those making significant commitments (Britain, Italy, Spain) were quickly under pressure to bring their forces home. Others, like Honduras, Moldova, and the Kingdom of Tonga, sent only token forces to begin with, and have completely withdrawn. The Kingdom of Morocco, a coalition member, sent no troops but made available 2,000 monkeys for the purpose of helping to find and detonate land mines. The Mongolians, who actually sacked Baghdad in 1258 A.D. but had not been back since, still have some 130 soldiers in Iraq.

  In every way the “outside” group that matters most to the military, by an order of magnitude, is actually its civilian work force. The true analogue of the “barbarization” of Rome’s armed forces is the “civilianization” of America’s. Yesterday’s Conan the Barbarian is today’s Conan the Contractor. Civilian contractors performing military chores number in the hundreds of thousands; America makes greater use of the so-called “privatized military industry” than any other nation. Some of these contractors supply low-end support services. Security at the U.S. Military Academy, at West Point, is provided by Alutiiq Security and Technology, a subsidiary of Wackenhut. (A guard at the gate told a recent visitor, “If you don’t want to take the physical you still get $20 an hour to stand here overnight. I figure, if a bomb goes off the $20 wasn’t worth it, but otherwise it’s a good deal.”) Other contractors could just as readily field entire armies. America’s military contract work force is just one component of an international industry: companies like MPRI, Airscan, Dyncorp, and Kellogg Brown & Root can variously deploy troops, build and run military bases, train guerrilla forces, conduct air surveillance, mount coups, stave off coups, and put back together the countries that wars have just destroyed (or at least try to). “Frankly, I’d like to see the government get out of the business of war altogether and leave the whole field to private industry”—Milo Minderbinder’s remark in Catch-22 was meant to be absurd, but it actually describes a military system that is coming into being.

  The Iraq War is the most privatized major conflict since the Renaissance: many tens of billions of dollars have already gone to private contractors involved in the invasion and the occupation. Centuries ago it was not unusual for monarchs and city-states to contract out much of their war-fighting business to professional mercenaries; the term condottieri, referring to men of this kind, comes from the Italian word for “contract.” The Swiss Guards standing decoratively with their halberds at the Vatican had their origin as mercenaries, which is what they still are. But contractors declined in importance with the rise of large standing armies. Now, in America, their influence is growing, fostered by recruitment problems and by the limits the Pentagon feels it must maintain, for political reasons, on the official size of the armed forces overall. On the books, some 150,000 U.S. military personnel are involved in the occupation of Iraq at any moment; that number excludes another 100,000 men and women from the private sector, hired directly or indirectly by the Pentagon or other government departments.

  They may be American . . . or British or Egyptian or South African. They advise on safety at Iraqi police recruiting stations. They operate prisons. They guard munitions depots. They provide security for individuals (including some American generals), for supply convoys, and for entire military bases, as well as for all the other contractors trying to build power plants and hospitals and schools. They are a highly visible presence in Iraq, speeding around in armored SUVs. Some of the security companies have an established pedigree. Others, like Triple Canopy, based in Chicago, which was founded by several Special Forces veterans soon after 9/11, are aggressive young start-ups. The first armored cars Triple Canopy deployed were Mercedes-Benz sedans whose previous users had been an assortment of rap stars and the sultan of Brunei.

  Roman commentators had a standard bill of complaint against the barbarian forces in the military: Their training did not match that of the Romans. There were important issues of reliability and trust. They were hard to discipline. And inevitably, when Roman legions saw what the barbarian auxiliaries could get away with, their own standards began to slip. Training in full armor became a thing of the past, and the consequences for “readiness” cascaded downward from there. In the late fourth century the Roman military writer Vegetius described the real-world calamities that bad habits produced:

  But when, because of negligence and laziness, parade ground drills were abandoned, the customary armor began to seem heavy since the soldiers rarely ever wore it. Therefore they first asked the emperor to set aside the breastplates and mail and then the helmets. So our soldiers fought the Goths without any protection for chest and head and were often beaten by archers. Although there were many disasters, which led to the loss of great cities, no one tried to restore breastplates and helmets to the infantry.

  A recent study by the military analyst Andrew Krepinevich raises all the same concerns. Contractors operate outside military justice—they can’t be disciplined. They also operate under different rules of engagement (if any). Their pay and living conditions are far better than those of ordinary soldiers—bad for morale. They can quit whenever they want, and go work for somebody else. They sometimes need and deserve access to military information, which raises concerns: “The problem here, of course, is whether the intelligence will remain a secret,” Krepinevich writes. There’s no disputing, though, that these contract foederati are here to stay. The U.S. military cannot operate without them. But their services are for sale.

  In the spring of 2006 J. Cofer Black, a former counterterrorism chief at the Central Intelligence Agency and now the vice chairman of the private security firm Blackwater USA, addressed a meeting of the Special Operations Forces Exhibition and Conference, held in Amman, Jordan. Black in essence put his company at America’s (or someone’s) disposal as an army for hire. Manpower shortages will only get worse. National armies are sluggish. Their deployment is politically fraught. Why not a brigade-sized alternative, created by Blackwater and led by the former special-operations, intelligence, and law-enforcement personnel who constitute much of Blackwater’s professional pool?

  “It’s an intriguing, good idea from a practical standpoint, because we’re low-cost and fast,” Black explained. He went on, sounding the plaintive note one might have heard from Alaric: “The issue is, who’s going to let us play on their team?”

  3

  The Fixers

  When Public Good Meets Private Opportunity

  Four or five men get together, they think up some way to fool the emperor, and they inform him of whatever he must approve. . . . As Diocletian himself used to declare, an emperor—good, careful, the very best—is put up for sale.

  —Historia Augusta, c. early fourth century A.D.

  Corruption charges. Corruption? Corruption ain’t nothing more than government intrusion into market efficiencies in the form of regulation. That’s Milton Friedman. He got a goddamn Nobel prize. . . . Corruption is our protection. Corruption is what keeps us safe and warm. . . . Corruption is how we win.

  —the character Danny Dalton, in the movie Syriana

  THERE IS AN OLD medical museum in Rome not far from the Vatican, a place that Leonardo da Vinci and Martin Luther would have known, and a few years ago I was taken there by a friend. It’s up under the rafters of a fifteenth-century ospedale, and the creaky wooden cabinets hold unfriendly implements (surgical, obstetrical, juridical) going back to ancient times. In one dark corner I noticed a small display case, and under the glass, on faded, musty velvet, lay half of a human mandible and a fragment of human cranium. My friend leaned over to read the label, written in Italian in an elegant nineteenth-century hand. He looked up in surprise and said, “Pliny the Elder.” />
  I’d never really made the acquaintance of Pliny the Elder—the great naturalist who set out by ship to see the eruption of Vesuvius at close range, and succumbed to the fumes. His nephew was another story: I felt as if I’d known him for years. Pliny the Younger (c. 63–113 A.D.) was born during the reign of Nero and died during the reign of Trajan, and he left behind a collection of letters, hundreds of them, written in a style that glides easily across the centuries. He is alive on the page in a way that appeals to a high school Latinist weary of Virgil’s formal meter and Cicero’s love for the sound of his own voice. Combine the catholic tastes of a Montaigne, the political connections of a Galbraith, and the amiable grace of a George Plimpton, and throw in some of the fussiness of Felix Unger and the lordly self-esteem of Mr. Toad—and you have the letters of Pliny the Younger. Pliny’s life was enviable. He was born to wealth, and followed the sequential steps of the cursus honorum, the escalating series of offices a public man in Rome was expected to hold—in essence, the résumé of a George Bush the Elder up to 1980. The historians Tacitus and Suetonius were friends of his. Trajan, the emperor, was a correspondent. And in his letters Pliny writes about almost anything at all: the fate of his uncle at Vesuvius, his gardens and his villa, the careers of friends and enemies, reading poetry aloud, the death of a slave. Sent near the end of his life to be the emperor’s special envoy to Bithynia, a troubled province in the East, Pliny pesters Trajan all the time (lucky for us) about the most humdrum matters—imagine if MacArthur in Tokyo had felt he must check with Truman about where to billet some visiting British admiral, or whether to let the Japanese play baseball. Trajan almost always writes back with judicious advice and patient forbearance. Some might even hear mild amusement. Occasionally he tells Pliny to get a life.

  Amid all this variety of correspondence one kind of letter stands out: the patronage letter, seeking help or a job or a break for some member of Pliny’s extended personal network. Many of these are addressed directly to the emperor. Pliny requests a praetorship (a public office) for a man named Attius Sura, “now that there is a vacancy”; he urges the granting of a petition to build new public baths at Prusa, because the existing ones are “old and dilapidated”; he notes the burning down of the Elder Citizens Club in Nicomedia, and asks permission to form a company of firemen; he urges a military promotion for the son of an army friend; he seeks permission for his wife, because of a death in the family, to travel using the facilities of the cursus publicus, the imperial post, with its system of carriages and way stations normally reserved for official business; and he intercedes for athletes in the Triumphal Games, who wonder if they can receive their prize money right after winning, instead of having to wait until the formal celebration when they return to their native towns.

  Here’s a letter to the emperor on behalf of a “resident alien” physician who had come to Pliny’s aid:

  When I was seriously ill last year, Sir, and in some danger for my life, I called in a medical therapist whose care and attentiveness I cannot adequately reward without the help of your kind interest in the man. I pray you therefore to grant him Roman citizenship.

  Here is another letter to Trajan, seeking to confirm a promise that had been made but was left unfulfilled by the previous emperor, Nerva:

  Your kindness, noble emperor, of which I have full personal experience, encourages me to venture to ask you to extend it to my friends, among whom Voconius Romanus has the highest claim. He has been my friend from our early years when we were at school together, and for this reason I petitioned your deified father, the late Emperor, to raise him to the dignity of senatorial rank.

  Pliny was hardly alone in such exertions. A notable proportion of the surviving correspondence of any prominent Roman consists of letters of recommendation and letters that bestow favors or ask for favors in return. The very term “letters of recommendation”—litterae commendaticiae—comes from Cicero, who in one of his works even pulls together a collection of his own for use by others as models. (Given the creeping fulsomeness that tends to infect such letters, an all too familiar arms race of half-truth and embellishment, Cicero also used a secret code with one of his correspondents to indicate when he was just doing his duty and when he really meant it.) All these kinds of letters exemplify the networks of patronage that held Roman society together, from top to bottom, from the margins to the core, starting in the city-state’s very earliest days and running through the empire’s very last and beyond. The wheeling and dealing, the back-scratching, the logrolling, the influence peddling—at every level of the Roman social scale they’re at once intense and routine.

  Meet Marcus Cornelius Fronto, orator and advocate, grammarian and flatterer, a native of North Africa who achieved renown and wealth in Rome and became magister imperatorum, a teacher of the future emperors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus. He was the consummate courtier, a florid writer, and something of a pedant, who loved dredging up obscure words in a William F. Buckley–esque way. His correspondents included not only Marcus and Lucius but also their adoptive father, Antoninus Pius, the reigning emperor. That his letters (along with some replies) survive at all is a happy accident. They were collected into a codex in late antiquity, but the pages were torn from the book and reused by monks, who wrote over them to record the acts of the Council of Chalcedon, in 451. These palimpsest pages weren’t discovered until the nineteenth century. Fronto’s letters offer glimpses of daily life in the imperial palace—Marcus Aurelius playing with his toddlers, for instance: “I have seen your little chicks, and a more welcome sight I shall never in my life see, so like in features to you that nothing can be more like than the likeness” (a charming vignette, as the editor of Fronto’s letters points out, until you remember that one of the little chicks will turn into that vile rooster, the emperor Commodus). Fronto comes across by and large as a warm-hearted fellow. And we frequently see him in the role of patronus: taking the children of provincial friends into his home; introducing them around and advancing their careers; and interceding with judges to vouch for the character of clients whose cases are pending.

  Usually he writes with a literary flourish, as in a letter to an influential friend on behalf of a young man named Volumnius:

  If you love me, accord to Volumnius so much respect and opportunity of gaining your friendship, for very dear friends have enlisted my sympathy for him. Therefore I would ask you to welcome him with such kindly friendship as the great Achilles wished to show, when he bid the son of Menoetius mix the wine stronger.

  And here, two centuries later, is the rhetorician Libanius, a native of Antioch and a supremely cultured sophist: friend of the emperor Julian, mentor of the historian Ammianus Marcellinus, author of a self-absorbed and sometimes self-pitying autobiography, and a man intensely loyal to a wide circle of associates. Some 1,500 of his letters survive, many of them interventions in his role as patron. Here he asks a powerful governor to come to the aid of a man Libanius hardly knows, but who is a member of the family of his esteemed teacher Zenobius.

  The bearer, his relative and namesake, was appointed justice of the peace, and although he has taken especial care of the city, he has been attacked and ejected from his post . . . My request is that the unjustified usurper should himself be justifiably ejected, so that I may do my duty by my dead teacher.

  The relationships built through the Roman system of patronage were the basic foundations of power. Like a lattice they formed a support structure for all of society, broad and hierarchical. Patronage linked the members of the tiny elite to one another, and the large mass of the powerless to people at the apex. Over time, however, the system would go horribly wrong, its central strength—that all-pervading nature—becoming its most dangerous characteristic. The change came when money entered the picture in a significant way, and these countless transactions began to come at a price. Libanius, a gifted manipulator of the patronage system, would in one of his letters cynically liken the men around the emperor to “that cloud of Zeus
from which he rained down gold.” Tainted by venality, patronage mutated from an instrument of cohesion into one of corrosion.

  The slow evolutionary spiral can be seen in the history of a single Latin term. A little more than fifty years ago the Oxford historian Geoffrey de Ste. Croix, a radical thinker and formidable classicist, decided to take a close look at the change in connotation over five centuries of the Latin word suffragium, which originally meant “voting tablet” or “ballot.” That change, he concluded, illustrated a change in something fundamental about the character of Roman society and its “inner political evolution.”

  What was the change? The original meaning went back to the days of the Roman Republic, which had possessed modest elements of actual democracy. The citizens of Rome, by means of the suffragium, could exercise their influence on some kinds of decisions, such as electing people to certain offices. In practice, the great men of Rome controlled large blocs of votes, corresponding to their patronage networks. Over time Rome’s republican forms of government calcified into empty ritual or withered away entirely. Suffragium meaning “ballot” no longer served any real political function. But the web of patrons and clients was still the Roman system’s substructure, and in this context suffragium came to mean the pressure that could be exerted on one’s behalf by a powerful man, whether to obtain a job or to influence a court case or to secure a contract. To ask a patron for this form of intervention and to exert suffragium on behalf of a client would have been a routine social interaction, and in its pure form no money would be expected to change hands. This is the relationship you see in the letters from Pliny and the others. (You see it, too, when Christianity begins to take on the characteristics of its Roman environment: suffragium comes to be the word used when believers, seeking salvation after death, describe how they ask the saints to intercede in their behalf.)