Are We Rome?

by Cullen Murphy

  For a long time Rome was able to organize the world according to its own convenience—until there came a point when doing so became difficult, and then impossible. The natural instinct is always to cling. In the late empire you see rich men like Symmachus trying to maintain the old habits and manners of Rome as if nothing had changed in two hundred years, or ever would. His modern editor comments, “We may say that Symmachus and his friends made a brave attempt, or we may say, in light of events, that they were blind.” Americans, reading that assessment, may summon to mind a map with a little red arrow and the legend “You are here.” Some would argue that it’s well within our power, and perhaps also our duty, to keep juggling all the key variables. In the realm of foreign policy alone this could mean trying to prevent (as one analyst has written) “the rise of militant anti-American Muslim fundamentalism in North Africa and the Middle East, a rearmed Germany in a chaotic Europe, a revitalized Russia, [and] a rearmed Japan in a scramble for power with China in a volatile East Asia.” That was a tall order even when those words were written—in 1998, before 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq added baffling new dimensions.

  But what if it’s not possible to control all the variables? What if Reinhold Niebuhr was right: the more powerful America becomes, the less control it exerts over its own destiny? In that case it would make sense to focus on the handful of big factors that are substantially within our control—and that contribute to social strength no matter what outside challenges we confront. The experience of Rome gives an indication of what some of those factors might be. We could take as our watchword the injunction of the Roman historian Titus Livius, better known to us as Livy. He explained that what makes a society strong is the well-being of its people—basic justice, basic opportunity, a modicum of spiritual reward—and the people’s conviction that “the system” is set up to produce it. As Livy wrote, “An empire remains powerful so long as its subjects rejoice in it.”

  So here’s the Titus Livius Hundred-Year Workout Plan:

  First, instill an appreciation of the wider world. Start teaching it round instead of flat. Immigration helps us here. The influx of foreign students does too. And so does—seriously—America’s entry, at last, into the world of soccer-playing countries. Colonial America defined itself as a nation as it advanced into an unknown interior; in a globalizing age the unknown world is as close to us as it was to any seventeenth-century settler. To drive home the idea that “we are not alone,” there is no substitute for fluency in another language. Every educated person in the Roman Empire spoke at least two languages, and so did the strivers among the, uh, immigrant hordes. Americans have their priorities backward. They worry needlessly about the second part: whether the immigrants will ever learn English. They should be worrying about the first part: whether the elites will ever speak anything else.

  Second, stop treating government as a necessary evil, and instead rely on it proudly for the big things it can do well. Privatization has its uses, and farming out government functions has its place—but the loss of civic engagement and loyalty across the board is a very real threat. The idea of doing for ourselves, of self-reliance, is part of the American myth; but letting government step in (to open the West, distribute land, nurture business, reduce poverty) is part of the American reality. The Social Security check every month, the safe drugs and highways, the guaranteed student loans, the health-care safety net in old age, the sandbags when the rivers flood—their inherent benefits aside, these things promote a sense of common alliance and mutual obligation that dwarf narrow considerations of “efficiency.” They serve as a counterforce to inequality and the widening divisions of income and class. Besides, government can be held accountable in ways that the private sector can’t. Yes, it takes some imagination to see how corrosive privatized government will prove to be many decades down the road—and that’s another thing: start thinking in centuries.

  Third, fortify the institutions that promote assimilation. “Empire-builders yearn for stability,” writes Charles Maier, “but what imperial systems find hard to stabilize is, precisely, their frontiers.” We can’t change how the world works, can’t change the laws of economics, can’t move Mexico somewhere else, can’t seal our border, and can’t turn other countries into Shangri-la so that their people will stay home. Arrayed against all this, on high ground, is America’s powerfully absorptive and transformative domestic culture. It’s more than a match for any challenge, and doesn’t need to be “run” by bureaucrats or told what to do. It just needs to be reinforced rather than undermined. In Massachusetts recently a debate broke out over whether the children of illegal aliens should be allowed to pay the low “in-state” rate at public colleges and universities. The answer should have been yes. The answer to public schools and public health services for immigrants should always be yes—these do more, with less, than any fence can accomplish. And yes should be the answer to a program of national service for all young people, which would revive the militia ethic of long ago. “We’re all in it together” is a spirit that Rome lost. Nothing says “uan naishion, indivisibol” like national service.

  Fourth, take some weight off the military. National service will help, at the margins. But if America enjoys the kind of economic vitality it hopes for, we’re never going to attract enough qualified people into an all-volunteer military to perform all the global tasks we have in mind (and continue to dream up). No one wants to pay for an army of that size anyway. The alternative is to look at the demand side rather than the supply side, eliminating some of the things we need an army for. Rome, in the end, didn’t have this option. As Edward Luttwak writes, it turned itself into a state whose entire purpose was military, and “ruthlessly extracted the food, fodder, clothing, arms, and money needed for imperial defense from an empire which became one vast logistic base.” America is still free to make choices. It can let regional powers shoulder more of the burden. One unilateral decision above all would buy a lot of breathing room, and ought to be made regardless: to adopt a long-range energy policy, based as much as possible on renewable resources, allowing us to pull away, eventually, from military oversight of the entire Middle East. This may be a hundred-year project, but again, a society with pretensions to staying power thinks in those terms. Rome wasn’t built in a day.

  Whatever its specific fortunes, America will evolve into something very different from what it evolved out of, as the future will see more clearly than we can. For myself, I hope Americans manage to keep—and export—their egalitarianism, their entrepreneurship, and their exuberant impulse to associate in civic groups; and maybe manage to lose some of their hyper-individualism and their moralizing messianic streak. Looking ahead, I’m not sure America possesses one quality that Rome had in abundance: the stubborn urge, the absolute need, to persevere—to prevail at all costs in any undertaking, whatever the moral and human price might be.

  But America does possess one quality that Rome didn’t have at all. Rome’s elites were deeply satisfied with their lot, their station, their state of mind. Their motto might have been “Nihil potest ultra”—a phrase from Cicero that Madison Avenue would render as “It doesn’t get any better than this.” Americans would glare in disbelief at Rome’s self-satisfaction. Striving to make life “better than this,” for ourselves and for others, for people living now and for those to come, is part of our social compact. Americans maintain a deep faith in the promise of invention and reinvention; they do not fear these things. Rome’s economy was the same at the beginning as it was at the end: agrarian, Iron Age, preindustrial. America has lived through more social transformation in a few centuries than Rome did in a millennium. In less than two hundred years America has experienced the end of slavery, the leap from a farm to a high-tech economy, and an influx of alien newcomers whose presence, in percentage terms, is greater in size and proportion than the barbarian influx into Roman lands. We don’t live in Mr. Jefferson’s republic anymore, or in Mr. Lincoln’s, or even in Mr. Eisenhower’s. In
America as in Rome, especially in disordered times, there is always the threat of cynicism. “We have long since lost the true name for things,” Cato once lamented. But ask the question “What do you have faith in?” and ordinary Americans will give an answer that even the most privileged of Romans would not have: that improvement is possible. Improvement, in fact, is the point. The genius of America may be that it has built “the fall of Rome” into its very makeup: it is very consciously a constant work in progress, designed to accommodate and build on revolutionary change. Rome dissolved into history, successfully but only once. America has done so again and again.

  Are we Rome? In important ways we just might be. In important ways we’re clearly making some of the same mistakes. But the antidote is everywhere. The antidote is being American.

  Acknowledgments

  Ancient Rome is a vast, complicated, and slippery subject, and obviously so is modern America; even trained professionals approach with wary respect. I am deeply grateful to the many scholars and experts—on Rome and other topics—who offered advice and criticism, and words of encouragement and caution. They include C. R. Whittaker, at Cambridge University; Robin Birley and Barbara Birley, at the Vindolanda Trust, in Northumberland; Geoffrey S. Nathan, at the University of New South Wales; Ramsay MacMullen, at Yale University; Renate Kurzmann, at University College, Dublin; Cynthia Damon, Frederick Griffiths, and Anthony Marx, at Amherst College; Karen Barkey, at Columbia University; Shawn Graham, at the University of Manitoba; Stephen Fuller, at George Mason University; Charles Moskos, at Northwestern University; Gail Kern Paster, at the Folger Shakespeare Library; and Lawrence Korb, at the Center for American Progress. Conversations with many others in recent years influenced some of the thinking in this book, even before I decided to write it; I would mention in particular Richard Brookhiser, the biographer of George Washington and of Gouvernor Morris; Frederic Cheyette, at Amherst College; Francis Fukuyama, at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies; Samuel Huntington, at Harvard University; the late Michael Kelly, of The Atlantic Monthly; Michael Lind, at the New America Foundation; Charles Maier, at Harvard University; Jack Miles, at the Getty Research Institute; Thomas E. Ricks, at the Washington Post; Michael Sandel, at Harvard University; Joseph Stiglitz, at Columbia University; and Alan Wolfe, at Boston College.

  Many friends and colleagues read versions of the manuscript, in whole or in part. For their comments and their time I am grateful to Graydon Carter, Paul Elie, James Fallows, David Friend, Robert D. Kaplan, Corby Kummer, Wayne Lawson, Toby Lester, Bernard-Henri Levy, Raphael Sagalyn, Eric Schlosser, Benjamin Schwarz, Martha Spaulding, Scott Stossel, Charles Trueheart, Robert Vare, and William Whitworth.

  Much of the writing of this book was done at the Boston Athenaeum, on Beacon Hill. Richard Wendorf, the director; John Lannon, the deputy director; and the staff as a whole of that extraordinary library were of enormous help in countless ways. A number of people have assisted with research, most notably Emerson Hilton, and also Chris Berdik, Bessmarie Moll, Molly Finnegan, and Alyssa Rosenberg. The photographer Julian Cardona was my Virgil and companion in Ciudad Juarez, and I received guidance in Rome from Gerald O’Collins, S.J., of the Gregorian University, and Mario Marazitti, of the Community of San Egidio. Anton Mueller, at Houghton Mifflin, has been a sharp and patient counselor.

  My wife, Anna Marie, has as usual been the shrewdest and most indefatigable editor of all.

  Notes

  PROLOGUE: THE EAGLE IN THE MIRROR

  1 “Urbs antiqua fuit”: Virgil, Aeneid,1.12; 2.363.

  road system is immense: Von Hagen, Roads That Led to Rome, p. 274; Adkins and Adkins, Handbook to Life in Ancient Rome, p. 172; Federal Highway Administration, U.S. Department of Transportation.

  “peasants raced to report”: The panegyrist Mamertinus, quoted in Williams, Diocletian and the Roman Recovery, p. 57.

  will long be referred to: Lancon, Rome in Late Antiquity, pp. xii-xiii; Favro, Urban Image of Augustan Rome, pp. 116–117.

  2 the emperor’s encampment: Jones, Later Roman Empire, pp. 366–373, 636–640; Ferrill, Fall of the Roman Empire, p. 42.

  20,000 of them: Carcopino, Daily Life, p. 70.

  ministries of government: For details concerning a typical imperial entourage, see Jones, Later Roman Empire, pp. 366–373; Millar, Emperor in the Roman World, pp. 28–40.

  bacon, cheese, and vinegar: Aelius Spartianus, “Hadrian,” in Magie, trans., Scriptores Historiae Augustae, p. 31.

  A letter survives: Casson, Travel in the Ancient World, p. 199.

  the famous story: Danziger and Purcell, Hadrian’s Empire, p. 135.

  3 Repairs to the Danube forts: Williams, Diocletian and the Roman Recovery, p. 51.

  “among the Quadi”: Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 1.18.

  clustered around: Carcopino, Daily Life, pp. 70–71; Jones, Later Roman Empire, pp. 366–373.

  eighteen-hour official visit: For security and other details of the presidential trip to Ireland, see Elisabeth Bumiller, “Bush Gets Chilly Reception on Eve of Meeting in Ireland,” New York Times, June 26, 2004; Patrick Logue, “A Vision in Armour Plate,” Irish Times, June 23, 2004; Angelique Chrisafis, “Irish Batten Down Hatches for Bush,” The Guardian, June 25, 2004; Alison Hardie, “Irish Create a ‘Ring of Steel’ for Bush Visit,” The Scotsman, June 26, 2004.

  4 Air Force One can carry: Walsh, Air Force One, pp. 15–38; G. Robert Hillman, “Presidential Flight of Fancy,” Dallas Morning News, February 20, 2005.

  5 allowed the United States: Dan Bilefsky, “14 European Nations Actively Aided CIA Renditions, Report Asserts,” International Herald Tribune, June 8, 2006.

  a senior British minister: Patten, Cousins and Strangers, p. 26.

  6 miniseries set in ancient Rome: Alessandra Stanley, “HBO’s Roman Holiday,” New York Times, August 21, 2005; Nancy Franklin, “When in Rome,” The New Yorker, July 4, 2005.

  Novels about Rome: Allan Massie, “Return of the Roman,” Prospect, November 2006.

  Earlier films about Rome: William Fitzgerald, “Oppositions, Anxieties, and Ambiguities in the Toga Movie,” in Joshel, Malamud, and McGuire, eds., Imperial Projections, pp. 23–49.

  cites Roman precedent: Nolan and Goyer, Batman Begins, p. 121.

  looking at their own reflections: Albert Schweitzer, Quest of the Historical Jesus, p. 4.

  7 “no mere international citizen”: Charles Krauthammer, “The Bush Doctrine,” Time, March 5, 2001.

  “If people want to say”: Quoted in James Atlas, “Leo-Cons: A Classicist’s Legacy: New Empire Builders,” New York Times (“Week in Review”), May 4, 2003.

  “jodhpurs and pith helmets”: Max Boot, “The Case for an American Empire,” Weekly Standard, October 15, 2001.

  “pointless . . . beyond challenge”: George W Bush, graduation speech at the United States Military Academy, June 1, 2002.

  “sorrows mounted up”: Johnson, Sorrows of Empire, p. 285.

  8 “imperial overstretch”: Kennedy, Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, pp. 514–521.

  “empire in denial”: Ferguson, Colossus, pp. 6–7, 28–29, 204, 301.

  “imperial understretch”: Joseph S. Nye, “U.S. Power and Strategy After Iraq,” Foreign Affairs, July–August 2003.

  9 lethal dynamic at work: Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead, pp. 23–24.

  “The anti-Americans often invoke”: Victor Davis Hanson, “I Love Iraq, Bomb Texas,” Commentary, December 2002.

  diverges from the message of Jesus: Horsley, Jesus and Empire, p. 6.

  “God has raised up”: Vinz, Pulpit Politics, p. 181.

  Christmas card sent out: Associated Press, “Cheney Dodges Question of U.S. as Empire,” January 24, 2004.

  10 “Who but America”: Debray, Empire 2.0, pp. 34–35

  spread of televised contests: Pauline Arrillaga, “Meet the Champions of Chow,” Ottawa Citizen, July 3, 2004.

  11 refers to the passageways: See “vomitorium,” Oxford English Dictionary.


  pork-laden highway bill: Senator Trent Lott, “Rome’s Roads,” U.S. Federal News, May 13, 2005.

  a speech from decades ago: Clare Boothe Luce, “Is the New Morality Destroying America?” Human Life Review, Summer 1978.

  13 a dozen case studies: Neustadt and May, Thinking in Time, pp. 233–234.

  “The only lesson”: Quoted in Paul Johnson, “Where Hubris Came From,” New York Times Book Review, October 23, 2005.

  maintains a database: Eliot A. Cohen, “The Historical Mind and Military Strategy,” Orbis, Fall 2005.

  14 little more than a theme park: Habinek and Schiesaro, eds., Roman Cultural Revolution, p. 33.

  in a famous lecture: Carl Becker, “Everyman His Own Historian,” American Historical Review 37, no. 2 (1932), pp. 221–236.

  “The simple natives”: Tacitus, Agricola, 21.

  15 gargantuan statue: John R. Patterson, “The City of Rome: From Republic to Empire,” Journal of Roman Studies 82 (1992), pp. 186–215.

  “Fewer have more”: MacMullen, Roman Social Relations, p. 38.

  words derived from Virgil: Virgil, Eclogues, 4.5.

  17 fully furnished frame of mind: See, for instance, Gross, Minutemen and Their World, and Tillyard, Elizabethan World Picture.

  20 “The same strength”: Niebuhr, Irony of American History, p. 74.

  21 “In a world of ruins”: James, Portrait of a Lady, pp. 530–531.

  Analysts of modern terrorism: Fred Kaplan, “Fighting Insurgents, by the Book,” Washington Post, July 9, 2006.

  Diocletian himself didn’t see Rome: Williams, Diocletian and the Roman Recovery, pp. 187–188.

  possible to visit Rome remotely: A reconstruction of portions of central Rome during antiquity can be found at two Web sites at the University of California at Los Angeles: www.cvrlab.org/projects/real_time/realtime_projects.html#ROME and dlib.etc.ucla.edu:8080/projects/Forum. See also Lisa Guernsey, “Soaring Through Ancient Rome, Virtually,” Chronicle of Higher Education, July 22, 2005, which describes efforts by Bernard Frischer, now at the University of Virginia, to make virtual fly-throughs of Rome more comprehensive, sophisticated, and accessible.