Are We Rome?

by Cullen Murphy

  The Romans arrived in Britain with Julius Caesar in 55 B.C., though the arrival constituted little more than what nowadays would be called a toe-touch. They arranged some treaties with local magnates, took some precautionary hostages, and then left, not returning until a century later, in 43 A.D., during the reign of Claudius. This time the Romans pushed north, and eventually, by the late 80s, had advanced well into Scotland. They built strings of camps and forts right up to the edge of the Highlands before falling back in the second century and defining a frontier farther south with the construction of Hadrian’s Wall. When artists conceive the building of the wall, they tend to portray a Roman legionary with a bullwhip supervising a chain gang of fur-clad native laborers—which is not the way it was done. The wall was designed, surveyed, and constructed by the Roman soldiers themselves. They did their own heavy lifting. One nineteenth-century calculation estimates that building the wall would have taken 10,000 men about two years to complete.

  It’s odd and a little sad to think of this work of military engineering as dividing Romans and Scots, two of the greatest engineering peoples of all time. Or so it seems to do: Hadrian’s Wall has the appearance of something built to repel the barbarian hordes. Like a pinhole in a space suit, you think, any breach would spell disaster. That impression is misleading. Hadrian’s Wall was not meant to be a Maginot Line or a Berlin Wall. It was built to mark a frontier, but it was also meant to be penetrated. Of course, its sheer size would have been awe-inspiring to the people beyond—in an era without aerial surveillance, the cold face of a high wall would be a forbidding sight—and it certainly would have deterred significant cross-border attacks. But the milecastles had fortified gateways expressly to make the wall permeable—to regulate cross-border traffic rather than to prevent it. Commerce moved in both directions, and Roman soldiers and traders were active in the territory to the north. At major crossing points in the wall, towns that would be home to both Roman newcomers and indigenous Britons—those Brittunculi—grew up symbiotically outside the military installations. You would have seen the same pattern, but more intensive, around the big bases on the Rhine and the Danube, like Cologne and Mainz and Regensburg.

  And you can see the pattern today in the cities and towns along the length of the U.S.-Mexico border, fed by human movement and international trade—although relative to Rome the scale is immense. The Roman Empire was not thickly settled; at its height the total population was no more than that of modern France, perhaps 50 or 60 million and skewed toward the East. By itself the urban agglomeration of modern El Paso–Juarez is three times the size of the ancient city of Rome. But you’ll find in El Paso, on the American side, the same imperial tension between separation and integration, between sepsis and symbiosis. The border, at that point a thin line of polluted river spanned by ugly modern bridges, is both a gash and a suture. Car and foot traffic at the several ports of entry is incessant. One way or another, Juarez, on the Mexican side, lives off America. America provides a market for the cocaine and marijuana going north. America is the source of the used cars and appliances heading south, and sold in yonke shops everywhere. More important, America operates the hundreds of maquiladoras in Juarez, assembly plants whose half million badly paid workers inhabit the city’s squalid colonia. In the center of Juarez the main commercial strips are lit by neon signs for dentists and optometrists, drawing American patients who find health care in their own country too expensive.

  The El Paso side of the border is home to Fort Bliss, an Army training center the size of Rhode Island, and once the staging ground for the campaign against Pancho Villa, in which my grandfather served as an aviator. The so-called Punitive Expedition of 1916–1917 was the kind of cross-border operation that a Roman commander like Germanicus would have understood (though it did not earn for General John J. Pershing, one of its leaders, the sobriquet “Mexicanus”). Fort Bliss is now a major deployment center for troops heading out to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, wars in the service of a far different notion of border defense. At the airport I noted some of the names on the desert cammies of soldiers in transit: Guttierez, Herrera, Corona. Many retired military personnel have settled around El Paso, forming coloniae of the Roman kind—veterans’ settlements, not squatter camps, with the aging legionaries entitled to praemia like cheap food and medical care. El Paso is also the site of the National Border Patrol Museum, whose gift shop sells tie tacks in the shape of handcuffs, and a book on failed desert crossings by illegal aliens, titled Dead in Their Tracks. The city is home to the El Paso Intelligence Center, which is intended to serve as America’s never-dormant brain in the fight against illegal drugs and immigration. From its base in El Paso the Drug Enforcement Administration sends frequent raiding parties into Juarez, at Mexico’s invitation. Unlike Julius Caesar, they do not burn down the bridges after them when they return.

  On the U.S.-Mexico border the long reach of Washington is always visible and in some ways formidable. And at the same time it seems shaky and tenuous, and strangely foreign.

  Where Do “We” Stop?

  THE NOTION OF A BORDER, like the thing itself, is meant to be a clarifying concept, at least in someone’s eyes. “A border,” says John Sayles, “is where you draw a line and say, ‘This is where I end and somebody else begins.’” But invoking the word often makes things less clear, more complex, harder to understand. What is meant by “border” anyway? Depending on the circumstances, it can refer to a political jurisdiction, or an economic boundary, or an ethnic or cultural or religious divide, or a psychological state—or (rarely) all of these things neatly conjoined, as in Eamon De Valera’s deluded vision for Ireland, or any fervent nationalist’s dream of Greater Blankistan. A border can be seen as temporary and fluid or fixed and immutable. Some things, like weather and climate, don’t respect borders at all. Others, like plants and animals and pollution and disease, mostly don’t respect borders, though sometimes, with a lot of effort, they can be encouraged to. Certain kinds of borders demarcate not the exterior but the interior, like the boundaries of class that the ancients knew so well, and that Americans are fast erecting.

  To say that the word “border” has no single fixed meaning or reality is not to say that borders are meaningless or unreal—only that they are complicated. Rome maintained its frontier during a time before global communications and electronic capital flows brought the idea of borders into the fourth, fifth, and nth dimensions; even so, Rome’s borders remain a subject of intense disagreement. America needs to concern itself with many kinds of borders—and incursions across them—that are totally new. Hadrian’s Wall would today have to be supplemented by Hadrian’s Firewall. At the moment, DNA marks a border for each of us that is mainly personal; but as biometrics are used to register identity and thus to define citizenship, it could someday mark a political border as well. DNA testing is already being used in immigration cases. Other borders are disappearing altogether: consider the transnational revolution represented by that ubiquitous street-corner shrine, the ATM machine. A global attack on computer encrypting systems, or the onset of mutations caused by genetic experiments, or the disappearance of fresh water from lakes and rivers, or the arrival in one place of industrial pollution generated somewhere else: these are all border issues in their way—border issues that Rome could not have conceived of. They are as disruptive and dangerous as any invasion by barbarian marauders.

  But Rome also faced some of the very same border issues America does. Rome’s economy may have been primitive, but for its time the empire was already a “globalized” place. Rome was no stranger to dislocations caused by worldwide market forces, or to the riotous and unpredictable interplay of ethnicities and cultures and religions. And when it comes to the physical aspects of borders—real human beings, and the real ways they make a living, and the real geography they inhabit and control (or would like to)—the dynamics haven’t changed fundamentally in two millennia. But there’s something of a surprise here. In popular shorthand the long
saga of Rome and the barbarians is typically held up as a case study in failure. That turns out to be a narrow view—not entirely true, and for an American, not a helpful perspective at all.

  The Roman imperial land boundary in a particular place was known as the limes—the plural is limites, as in “limits.” During the past half century experts have been gathering regularly for a Roman limes conference (or, in Teutonic scholarly idiom, a Limeskongresse) to thrash things out. These gatherings were started by the great archaeologist and historian Eric Birley, the father of Vindolanda’s Robin Birley. One scholar may reveal new archaeological findings based on aerial surveys of southern Algeria. Another may invoke Frederick Jackson Turner, looking at patterns of war and accommodation as Americans pushed their shifting frontier across a continent. Yet another may draw comparisons with ancient China, which had border problems of its own in the north (and put up another well-known wall).

  The Victorian historian J. R. Seeley memorably declared that the British had acquired their empire “in a fit of absence of mind”—that is, through an unpremeditated cascade of opportunities and impulses, rather than some prior grand vision of what an empire should look like. Maybe all empires begin like that. The Romans, in any event, acquired their empire in much the same way, accruing territory in chunks large and small, sometimes for obvious strategic reasons, sometimes in response to the tactical urgencies of the moment, sometimes because of nothing more than a general’s or an emperor’s bid for acclaim. Glory was no small motive in imperial Rome. (It’s no small motive now, though in America it tends to dress in the plainer fabric of “legacy.”) According to Tacitus, the emperor Tiberius once urged his stepson, Germanicus, who was busy waging war in Germany, to “leave his brother . . . some chance of distinction”; the emperor’s biological son, Drusus, would be needing to earn triumphal laurels of his own, and “in the absence of enemies elsewhere” Germany offered the only opportunity.

  Whatever the motivations, by the middle of the second century A.D. the territorial form of the empire had achieved more or less its ripest fruition. Some boundaries—the ones marked by the ocean—were obvious and unyielding. Others were boundaries of choice, but were suggested and demarcated by geographic features like the Rhine and the Danube. These rivers could be bridged at will by the Romans—Trajan, on campaign, once built an arched span on twenty stone piers in the swift waters below the Iron Gates of the Danube—but crossed by anyone with a boat or when they froze. Still other boundaries, the ones that ran across formless tracts of land, heedless of natural barriers, and perhaps right through the domains of whole peoples and cultures, were simply decisions—decisions based on a variety of factors, and decisions that could be changed. Hadrian’s Wall didn’t have to be planted precisely where it was (and for a while the Romans maintained a different frontier line, the earthen Antonine Wall, a hundred miles to the north). The specific path of the line of ditches, ramparts, and forts that ran for 340 miles, roughly between Bonn and Regensburg, and plugged the gap between the Rhine and the Danube was not preordained; for one fifty-mile stretch the limes runs straight as a plumb line, up hills and down ravines and across rivers, as if the real point were to say to non-Roman peoples, “Think twice before you meddle with us, the Makers of Straight Lines!” In the deserts of North Africa the long boundaries, sometimes indicated by walls and trenches in the middle of nowhere, like the fossatum in Algeria and Tunisia, represent sheer acts of will. The Euphrates may have made sense as a border, and was sometimes used as such, but just as often it served as a highway beckoning to the rich lands beyond, as it had beckoned Alexander the Great. On numerous occasions proud Roman armies sallied across those parched Middle Eastern plains and into Mesopotamia; often, much smaller armies hobbled back. The target was generally Ctesiphon, the capital of the Parthian and Persian Empires, a few leagues south of modern Baghdad. Military transport planes supplying America’s own Mesopotamian war rattle Ctesiphon’s ruins every day as they fly into Rasheed Air Base.

  What did borders represent in the Roman mind? The answer from historians fifty or a hundred years ago might have invoked the grim specter of barbaricum, pure and simple, its warriors battering at the gates from every side, like Tolkien’s hideous orcs. The authors of the Cambridge Ancient History, written in the 1920s and 1930s, take this point of view: “All along the borders of the civilized world there stretched a belt of turbulent peoples who were ignorant of the restraining influence of civilization but were eager to gain for themselves the riches it had produced.” A few decades later, in the aftermath of World War II, as Cold War thinking settled heavily upon the West, another authority referred to the line between Rome and the barbarians as an “iron curtain” and spoke of the Rhine and Danube frontiers as representing a “moral barrier” beyond which (in Roman eyes) lived pestilential and scarcely human peoples. In dealings with them, the customary rules of civilized behavior hardly applied: “There was no Roman historian who did not narrate with complaisance how their armies burnt down the settlements and devastated the cornfields of the barbarians; they report wholesale merciless massacres without showing any moral scruples. And more than that. The Romans always had the intention—often avowedly—of completely eradicating entire populations.” Evidence of this outlook is not hard to find. The emperor Domitian, after wiping out one tribe in North Africa, observed coolly that he had “forbidden the Nasamones to exist.” Moral barrier or no, a world of difference separated Roman civilization and the cultures of the outside tribes.

  But antagonism doesn’t define the whole relationship. Nor do the words “fixed” and “inviolate” capture the Roman notion of frontiers. Americans today are accustomed to thinking of physical borders as a static sort of artifact—not as unchanging as, say, the path of the equator, but more durable than the outlines of a congressional district in Texas. It’s because they’re durable—sacred—that the General Services Administration has enlisted prominent architects to build three dozen new border-station gateways, at a cost of up to $100 million apiece (and sent the designs to tour the country, in an exhibit called “Thresholds Along the Frontier”). In part this American view of borders reflects the limits of a blinkered human lifespan: change typically presents itself in nearly undetectable increments. It also reflects the relatively easy experience of America, once the transcontinental dictates of Manifest Destiny had been satisfied. Elsewhere in the world, territorial flux has in fact been the norm, and has been extreme. Half the world’s national boundaries are less than a century old. At any given moment three or four dozen boundary issues are in various states of violent or diplomatic dispute. Americans look at what we have and regard it as not only foreordained but almost “normal.”

  In its most simplistic form the debate over how Rome saw its borders breaks down into two camps, divided over the answer to the question, Why did the frontiers stop where they did? The more traditional camp holds that after centuries of expansion, when the notion of setting fixed borders was on no one’s mind, the Romans at last made a deliberate strategic choice to set limits in a specific way. At some point after the Teutoburg Forest disaster, Augustus wrote out instructions for his successor, in his own hand, it is reported—a kind of final testament, counseling Tiberius against further imperial adventures and “advising the restriction of the empire within its present frontiers.” Let’s not get greedy, he seems to have said; let’s consolidate and fortify and hold the perimeter—that job is going to be tough enough. One historian has called this Augustan injunction “the view of a weary and frightened old man whose fingers had been badly burned.” To American ears the warning recalls the farewell addresses of both George Washington (who cited the perils of “foreign entanglements”) and Dwight D. Eisenhower (who cited the perils of a “military-industrial complex”). It also resonates with the American view of what national borders should be: clear and fixed.

  A newer camp, represented by historians like C. R. Whittaker and Benjamin Isaac, agrees that defending some sort of perimeter was
important, obviously, but argues that the Romans had no fixed notion of where that perimeter should lie. And besides, their whole outlook would have resisted the idea of explicit limits: these are the “empire without end” people. Stone monuments have been found that marked the border between Roman provinces, and between districts inside the city of Rome, Whittaker observes, but none that announced the edge of the imperium itself, the equivalent of “You are now entering the Roman Empire. Please pillage safely.” There was no Pritzker Prize or traveling museum show for high-concept Roman border stations. In this newer camp’s view, borders were established in different places for different reasons. Sometimes the explanation might be ecological or logistical: any farther, and you couldn’t support or supply an army. Sometimes it might be political, hinging on events in Rome or diplomacy abroad. Whatever the case, fortifying a frontier—even building a wall—needn’t mean that Rome’s expansionist ambitions were at an end. There were Roman forts and settlements, and penetrating roads, north of Hadrian’s Wall, east of the Rhine, north of the Danube, and south of the African fossatum. As for the advice of Augustus: it is eloquent and instructive, and perhaps wise, but did it really set Rome’s course? Americans, after all, cite the warnings of Washington and Eisenhower with reverence, but honor them in the breach. Plenty of emperors after Augustus indulged in foreign adventurism, not behaving “defensively” in the least.

  Maybe the Romans wanted to have it both ways, as Americans do. America isn’t grasping for more territory; our substitute for territory—our version of imperium sine fine—is the ideology of democracy and free markets. Should we push them aggressively, even by means of pre-emptive war, hastening the world toward its destiny? Should we hold back, to conserve the tenuous gains we’ve made and let the impetus of history gradually have its way? Well, we don’t do either with any consistency. Mark Twain, anti-imperialist to the core, mocked America’s vacillation: “Shall we? That is, shall we go on conferring our Civilization upon the peoples that sit in darkness, or shall we give those poor things a rest?”