Are We Rome?

by Cullen Murphy

  Historians may clash in the debate over Rome’s borders, but almost everyone now sees the imperial frontier not as a solid membrane but as a dynamic zone where the interactions of different cultures had transformative repercussions in a wide band on either side. To Americans, this is a very recognizable picture. It’s a lot like the picture that shows Mexican workers canning fish in Alaska, and retired Americans driving hundreds of miles to get false teeth in Juarez. It’s the picture Americans see as they watch manufacturing jobs heading south and drugs heading north. It’s the one that shows sales of salsa finally overtaking sales of ketchup, not just along our southern rim but nationwide. It’s a picture of the future unfolding before our eyes.

  The Onslaught That Wasn’t

  TRAVEL THE 6,000-MILE CIRCUIT of the Roman Empire, and in the borderlands beyond you would see hundreds of tribes that viewed themselves as distinct, even if the Romans, looking from inside out, lumped many of them together into a barbarian mass. But peering into the empire from anywhere on the outside, you really would see something remarkably uniform wherever you looked. This was the case even though the empire encompassed a wide variety of peoples, not all of whom knew their butter knives from their fish knives before coming under Roman rule. The empire’s cities, sometimes laid out by its legions, often had similar street plans. The fields, plotted by Roman surveyors, were of a recognizable size and shape. The roads were standard, and the very act of building one called new towns into existence, just as America’s railroads and interstates would one day do. The army was fitted out in standard fashion with standard equipment, whether in Jerusalem or Cordoba, Lepcis or Londinium; the legionaries all wore something akin to dog tags, like American GIs—and so did their horses. Even the statuary from place to place, thanks to ingenious techniques for replicating marble sculpture, was often exactly the same. At one time, it has been estimated, there were some 20,000 statues of Caesar Augustus publicly displayed around the empire, making the post-office photographs of American presidents seem pathetically unambitious by comparison. All of this was just the physical embodiment of a powerful underlying organizational and social dynamic, which made Rome the most irresistible force for assimilation the world had ever known.

  The frontier was a crucible. Two cultures, Roman and Other, were drawn together by trade: pottery, jewelry, salt, iron, and cloth going one way, from inside to outside; and cattle, horses, hides, food, slaves, and paid labor going the other way. Roman traders were active throughout barbaricum. Tacitus tells how, after a coup dislodged one barbarian chieftain, “traders out of the Roman provinces” were discovered cowering in his palace. (You’d find a lot of American businessmen in the same position after a coup in Kazakhstan or Georgia, or if the Green Zone in Baghdad ever fell.) Sometimes the people outside the empire had specialty items on offer. The tribes of the Caucasus were renowned for their stout, swift horses—exactly what the Romans needed when they developed heavily armored cavalry, modeled on that of the Parthians. (The frozen remains of sixty-nine ancient horses were discovered in the ice in the Altai Mountains a few decades ago, revealing the powerful legs and strongly developed shoulders that made them so desirable.) Map the places where Roman artifacts—jewelry, money, roof tiles—have been found in barbarian lands, and it’s like watching an injected dye highlight a vascular system: the dots cluster along the river valleys and ancient trading routes that lead away from the empire’s edge, strung out for fifty or a hundred miles and more, and then gradually thinning. German gets its word for “to buy,” kaufen, from the Latin cauponor, meaning “to trade,” and its many other borrowings illustrate the Roman contribution to tribal development: for instance, the words for “window” and “chimney” and “coin.” (Contributions in the other direction are not so vast; the only word left by the Visigoths to the Latinate language of Spain is the word for “executioner.”) The barbarians were fast learners. They adopted Roman farming and breeding techniques; you can tell from bones excavated beyond the limes that their cattle started getting larger, like Roman cattle. The impression that many people have of the Huns is of a frenetic race who lived in their saddles and suffered from a very hostile form of attention deficit disorder. But although personally uncouth, and an eater only of meat, Attila employed several Latin secretaries to conduct his correspondence. The one eyewitness account we have of a visit to Attila’s capital, its location now lost, describes the “baths” he had built there, with imported stone, in imitation of a typical Roman facility. (The Roman hostage who built it, thinking this would be his ticket home, was instead made to stay and run the establishment—shades of the unfortunate Tony Last in A Handful of Dust.) During times of war, Rome might clamp down on trade in strategic items like iron and whetstones (and profiteers would of course find ways to elude these export controls, as corporations do today), but for the most part people were free to come and go, and to trade, without notice or interference. In many places the Romans would try to channel commerce, by means of bridges and walls and dikes, and they were ever on the alert for movements of people en masse. But there weren’t tight border controls as we think of them. There weren’t passports.

  The word “barbarians” is still used by modern historians writing about Rome—political correctness has a limited amount of retroactive influence—but more often you’ll see them using the names of particular groups; a few of them, like Whittaker, use a term familiar to Americans: “immigrants.” In this Roman context the word jumps out, conditioned as we are by historical perspectives two millennia in the making. The Sack of Rome by the Immigrants? And the word imperfectly describes the outsiders who continually moved into the empire, in freedom or in some form of servitude, as individuals or in groups, in the open or by infiltration, in peace or through force. Still, in the course of the fourth century alone, perhaps a million people came into the empire this way, through countless “undramatic adjustments,” as the historian Walter Goffart describes it, creating broad swaths of somewhat Romanized barbarians and somewhat barbarized Romans. By and large the barbarians came not to destroy what Rome had to offer but to get some of it for themselves, in the form of land, employment, power, status. First in the borderlands of empire and then farther inside, they were given jobs that Romans didn’t want or couldn’t fill, in the fields and the mines and the forts, including jobs as seasonal laborers. Then as now, the military was a transformative institution, the most important one of all, taking in rough-hewn raw material and turning out something a little more finished: the sort of person who might note on an epitaph that he was born a Frank and died a Roman centurion. It has been said of Kipling that the Roman soldiers in his stories resemble British subalterns in the Indian army. A bootstrapping Germanic graduate of a Latin as a Second Language program would have been more nearly the Roman norm. As time went on, the Roman military produced its own antecedent versions, many times over, of America’s General Ricardo Sanchez (the son of Mexican immigrants) and General Colin Powell (the son of Jamaican immigrants) and General Peter Pace, the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (the son of Italian immigrants).

  The more elite among the non-Romans—the aristocrats—passed into the Roman hierarchy with relative ease. You see it first, in the early days, with non-Italian men from conquered regions—from Gaul and Spain and Africa—showing up in the senatorial ranks in Rome. (They were greeted by old Romans with skepticism or snobbery, to be sure.) Arminius will always be remembered as the duplicitous architect of the Teutoburg Forest disaster, but his family also exemplifies how quickly barbarian nobility was absorbed into the Roman apparatus. His brother Flavus served in the Roman army, even after Teutoburg. His nephew Italicus actually lived in Rome. His brother-in-law Segestes remained with his tribe but was a Roman ally. A son of Segestes became a Roman priest in Cologne. The late-Roman period teems with prominent men of barbarian stock who capably supported the empire. Think of Stilicho, the son of a Vandal, who commanded armies for the emperor Theodosius and later served, in effect, as the regen
t for the emperor’s young son, Honorius. It was Stilicho who fought off or placated Alaric and the Visigoths, year after year. And it was only after palace intrigue brought about Stilicho’s downfall that the way was opened for Alaric’s devastating progress through Italy. Alaric himself had once served Rome as a commander of foederati, and no small part of his complaint against the Romans stemmed from their failure to promote him to a position he thought he deserved—one of real consequence in the imperial hierarchy, and with a Latin title to accompany it.

  The image most of us have of the various barbarian invasions probably comes from maps in textbooks showing the Roman Empire puffed out to its fullest, with menacing black arrows labeled “Ostrogoths,” “Visigoths,” “Vandals,” “Franks,” “Saxons,” and “Huns” arcing out of central Europe and puncturing the rest of the continent, a few lodging in Britain and Africa. The arrows are usually scored with little dates—378, 410, 455—showing the relentless advance. The maps bear a resemblance to diagrams of football plays; or, more striking, to maps of Wehrmacht operations in World War II—replace “Attila” and “Fritigern,” say, with “Rommel” and “Paulus.” Inevitably they convey the impression, as historians caution, that the invasions were happening all at once—were maybe even coordinated—or at least that they occurred in the course of some compressed period of time. The maps also convey a sense of unstoppable power: a swarm of ferocious barbarians racing across the northern European plain, followed by lights out. The imprint of such maps on common knowledge and popular culture is probably indelible. In a long reflection about the 1992 Los Angeles riots, which had exposed the city’s deep racial and ethnic animosities, the writer Jack Miles recalled a symptomatic conversation: “On the day after the first night of the riot, one of my colleagues said to me, as we left to hunt for a still-open restaurant, ‘When the barbarians sacked Rome in 410, the Romans thought it was the end of civilization. You smile—but what followed was the Dark Ages.’”

  The reality was more complicated. The invasions that occurred were costly in lives and treasure, and a threat to Rome’s political control. But they played out over a period of centuries, usually with time to recover in between; and in each case they affected specific places rather than the whole empire. Some cities were overrun and ravaged, but not as many as you might think. The documentary sources are often so unreliable that it’s not always clear when (or if ) certain incursions even happened, or how significant they were if they did. The historian John Drink-water maintains that emperors were not above picking fights and “demonizing the local barbarians” in order to prove their resolve, validate their regimes, and demonstrate that they were “doing a worthwhile job,” thereby solidifying a place in the history books. (This is hardly an obsolete dynamic: Theodore Roosevelt and Bill Clinton, as one commentator observes, “both wished out loud that they had had the chance to show their mettle during a national crisis on the level of a major war.”) The first round of invasions, in the third century, was eventually repulsed, through enormous military effort; the empire’s borders were restored and even slightly expanded. The second round, beginning late in the fourth century, would in the end be handled differently, with some barbarian groups permitted to settle permanently in specific territories under their own leaders. Roman chroniclers throw around some large numbers—“carelessly transmitted numerals,” C. R. Whittaker dryly observes—about the size of the invading armies, but the number of barbarians involved in each of these episodes was relatively modest; Whittaker cautions against the traditional rhetoric of “waves, floods, funeral pyres, and boiling pots,” or the image of “nations on the move.” Walter Goffart writes, “It would probably be wrong to estimate the size of any tribe in more than five figures, a trivial number in comparison to the millions of Roman provincials.” And that’s for the invading population as a whole; the actual fighting force in each instance might be no more than 5,000 to 15,000, and sometimes was fewer. Whittaker goes on to caution that the invasions should be seen not as if they were common-source disease vectors, single-minded and unremitting, but, rather, as individual events with individual contexts. Sometimes the barbarians were officially invited inside the empire; sometimes they were enlisted as allies by rebellious Roman generals; sometimes, as in Britain, the invaders came only after the Romans had left. The barbarians tended to be fragmented and fractious, their coalitions often falling apart in short order. If they acquired power, they typically wielded it as Romans would, through existing local institutions. They needed the Romans—needed the administrators, the churchmen, the local landed elite. When, after Constantine, Christianity effectively became the empire’s official religion, the barbarians proved quick to adopt it. At mass in the Pantheon in Rome one evening last year, I was surprised to hear the service conducted in German, for a church group from Bavaria, and I couldn’t help recalling (mea culpa) that the Visigoths were already Christian when they sacked Rome in 410 A.D.

  If there was a tipping point, a factor that made the barbarians a fatally destabilizing force within the Western empire, it was not so much their sheer numbers as the manner in which some of them were eventually let in—a manner that made their absorption far less likely. The migration of the Huns from central Asia pushed other groups into the empire along a broad front on two important occasions, first in 376 and then in 406, and the Romans permitted some of these groups to stay and settle in designated regions, under their own leaders and with their own active armies. This was a major break with long-standing policy. What was the rationale for allowing these autonomous enclaves of foederati? The Romans seem to have been strong enough to fight them off. Popular impressions to the contrary, as Whittaker points out, except for Adrianople “no major defeat was suffered by the Roman army anywhere in the Roman world between 350 and 500.” It could simply be, as another historian observes, that “concessions to barbarians were safer than the domestic risks of efficient defense.” Safer, for instance, than demanding more money and men from unaffected areas that were already drained of both. Safer, perhaps, than handing victories to generals who might then harbor designs on the purple.

  Whatever the impetus or the benefits, this policy eventually brought on a crisis. It meant giving up the revenues from wherever barbarians settled in Gaul, Spain, and Africa. And it brought into the empire significant new blocs that were neither one thing nor the other, neither outright barbarians nor integrated Romans but some sort of second-class citizen—some sort of limbo entity. They had armies, though, which made them players in the empire’s already contentious politics, to a degree that gave imperial succession and imperial governance the character of a chaotic charade. Eventually the autonomous regions would devolve into de facto kingdoms, seeing no need to maintain the pretense of participation in some hollow imperial enterprise. A well-known summing up by Walter Goffart both exaggerates and makes a telling point: “What we call the Fall of the Western Roman Empire was an imaginative experiment that got a little out of hand.”

  Many Borders, and None

  ONE LESSON OF ROME’S FRONTIERS is that borders aren’t as simple as a line in the sand, or in the bog, even when you want them to be; they weren’t then, and they surely aren’t now. (Even the Rhine isn’t what it used to be: environmentalists lament that the river has been invaded by barbarian hordes in the form of alien species of crabs and salmon.) Any sprawling state has a variety of borders—and not all of them lie in exactly the same place. There may be a political frontier for administrative purposes, but the economic and cultural frontiers can stretch far beyond it, as is the case with Britain; or, alternatively, they may not extend convincingly from the center to the outer borders at all, as is the case with Russia. The demographic frontier may wind in and out of political frontiers, as in the Balkans, or consist of an archipelago of population islands, as in Palestine. In diverse societies the religious frontiers may be impossible to map in any conventional way, but they constitute serious flashpoints nonetheless. Disease frontiers may exist in the form of millio
ns of thin pieces of latex. When a political border runs between societies that are at vastly different stages of development and are vastly unequal in terms of wealth and power—as between Rome and barbaricum, or between the United States and Mexico—the attempt to enforce separation is an unnatural act: the economic dynamic pushes the relationship the other way, toward intimacy, no matter how loudly either partner cries “No!”

  A study was conducted some years ago in which respondents were given blank outlines of the continental United States and asked to delineate the boundary of the region known as the Midwest. The responses were all over the map, with minimalists drawing a core crescent centered on the Rust Belt, and maximalists indicating an expanse stretching from the Appalachians to the Rockies. So where, exactly, on our mental maps are the various external boundaries of America?

  In cultural terms, of course, these boundaries are virtually nonexistent. Rome’s culture was transported up river valleys and along other trading routes, but Roman influence had its limits. America’s cultural output, in terms of entertainment alone, is available in high volume to anybody with a satellite dish or an Internet connection, a radio or a movie ticket. Everyone has a story. In Ravenna not long ago I emerged from the Basilica of San Vitale, a place of subdued mosaic splendor built under the Ostrogoths, and on the street outside encountered a shriveled old woman draped entirely in black watching Bob Newhart reruns on a TV in her lap. A friend told me once about entering a mud hut in the middle of the Sahara Desert and seeing The Cosby Show flickering in the background. America, in turn, is infinitely porous, open to invasive influences. There are still a few countries (North Korea literally, France symbolically) that try to maintain an old-fashioned regime of cultural integrity, but in a globalized world, cultural borders are hard to police.