The dominator power of Empire breeds a hubris of invincibility that carries the seeds of self-destruction. It invites corruption, the rebellion of subjugated peoples, and environmental devastation. We can only speculate on what the people of the early Mesopotamian civilization 114might have accomplished if they had avoided falling under the sway of Empire, acted as stewards of Earth, renounced violence against one another, and focused their considerable intellectual, architectural, and creative energies on building on, rather than periodically obliterating, the accomplishments of their neighbors and forebears. If we fail to negotiate the transition to Earth Community in our time, future generations of humans may ponder the question of why we too were so blind.
EGYPT
Prior to the imperial rule of the pharaohs, the goddess Isis, giver and protector of life, ruled supreme in the Nile Valley. Somewhere around 3000 BCE, Menes united the people of the valley and established his capital at Memphis, near modern Cairo. Some historians believe that the development of the writing system known as hieroglyphics made this unification possible and that the need for a free flow of commerce up and down the Nile made it essential.
For a period of some nine hundred years, Egypt lived in peace and prosperity under a unified state based more on cooperative need than on exploitation. For a time Isis continued to rule, women enjoyed high legal status and social freedom, property passed through the female line, and abundant fertile land isolated between two deserts insulated the state from competition with its neighbors. During the course of a succession of pharaohs, however, Osiris, the husband of the goddess Isis, rose to prominence along with Re, the great sun god. Eventually, the Egyptians came to believe that Re gave immortality to the state and that the pharaoh was his living representative.
The deification of the pharaoh and a growing concern for the afterlife accompanied an increasing narcissism among Egypt’s rulers and the dedication of a growing share of available wealth to constructing pretentious monuments of self-glorification, such as the Great Pyramids, to facilitate the comfortable passage of deceased rulers into the afterlife. The unified state was unable to survive a series of crop failures due to climatic disaster and, beginning about 2200 BCE, Egypt fell into a period of banditry, chaotic competition between rival local nobles, and invasions by desert tribes.
There followed a relatively more democratic period of two hundred years (1990–1786 BCE), commonly referred to as Egypt’s golden age, 115during which order was restored by an alliance of farmers, merchants, officials, and artisans. The alliance kept the nobles in check, supported public works like irrigation and drainage that benefited the entire population, and ushered in a period of comparative social justice, intellectual achievement, and prosperity. Some scholars refer to it as history’s first democratic kingdom.10
An invasion by the Hyksos of western Asia provoked a two-hundred-year rebellion that gave rise to a strong national unity, the creation of a strong military force, and the installation of a new series of powerful pharaohs. By the time the Hyksos rulers were overthrown, however, the Egyptian culture of pacifism and isolation had been displaced by the Hyksos culture of aggressive imperialism and military expansion. Egypt reached out to establish its rule over a domain that came to extend from the Euphrates to the southern reaches of the Nile.
With a diversion of manpower to military operations on the front lines, there was a significant increase in the demand for slaves to provide labor for the domestic economy, creating ever deeper social divisions and a corruption of the ruling classes. This was the setting in which the Egyptians enslaved the Hebrews who lived in their midst. Think of it as an early version of the use of outsourcing and immigrant labor to depress domestic wages and force the working classes to an acceptance of military service as their major alternative to destitution.
Eventually the territory of the Egyptian Empire expanded beyond the ability of its rulers to manage. Constant revolts at the periphery, an inflow of wealth from conquered peoples, and a system of authority based solely on military power fueled corruption, weakened the national fiber, and left Egypt vulnerable to foreign invasion and rule. The Libyans invaded around 950 BCE, then the Nubians from the south, followed by the Assyrians, later by the Persians (525 BCE), and then the Greeks and Romans.
The corruption of the state that accompanied Egypt’s imperial expansion following its golden age carried over to the corruption of a priesthood increasingly consumed by its own greed. The ethical foundation of Egypt’s religion gave way to the commercialization of redemption in the afterlife, as magic charms sold by the religious establishment came to replace good deeds as the best guarantee of entrance into the kingdom of Re.11
Centuries later, the sale of indulgences by a corrupt Roman Church to ensure passage to heaven would provoke the rebellion of a dissident 116priest named Martin Luther. Still later, Calvinists would carry to North America a belief that only faith and tithing, not works, assured passage to the heavenly kingdom.
The Egyptian Empire exemplifies Empire’s pattern of expropriating and squandering its resources and life energy to construct monuments to the vanity of brutal rulers, support wars of conquest, and support the luxurious lifestyles of vain and corrupt political and religious elites. The cultures and institutions of life and partnership gave way to the cultures and institutions of domination and death. The specifics differed, but once established these patterns remained strikingly consistent among the empires that followed.
After Mesopotamia and Egypt, the next of history’s great empires was initiated by Cyrus the Great of Persia (Iran), who came to power in 559 BCE and by the time of his death had conquered and consolidated into his empire much of the territory that is now Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Turkey. In 529 BCE, his son Cambyses conquered all of Egypt and brought it under Persian rule.
Philip of Macedonia assumed the throne of a Greek-speaking territory north of Greece in 359 BCE and quickly built a professional army that conquered and consolidated its rule over the whole of Greece. When Philip was murdered, rule passed to his twenty-year-old son, Alexander, who put to death all potential rivals for the throne and went on to conquer and claim for Greece all the lands of the former Persian Empire.
Inspired by Alexander, an Indian adventurer named Chandragupta Maurya established the first Indian Empire in the late fourth century BCE, building a military force of 600,000 infantry, 30,000 cavalry, 9,000 elephants, and an army of spies supported by a land tax equal to one-fourth to one-half of the crops produced in the areas he controlled.12 An earlier urban civilization grounded in warfare and imperial rule had emerged in China in the second millennium BCE. There is also evidence of imperial civilizations in parts of Africa (first millennium CE) and in the Americas (first to second millennium CE), although the archaeological evidence relating to their social structures remains sketchy.
ROME
For the advocates of Empire, the Roman Empire is the defining symbol of the glorious benefits and accomplishments of imperial rule. For 117advocates of Earth Community, it is a defining symbol of Empire’s oppressive, destructive, life-denying corruption.13 When contemporary U.S. elitists evoke admiring references to Roman rule, it is instructive to have clearly in mind the reality behind the myth.
The Republic
Founded in 753 BCE, Rome was ruled initially by kings whose primary responsibility was to maintain order and military efficiency at a time when the various city-states of the Italian peninsula were engaged in nearly constant warfare against one another. The early Romans were a proud and aggressive people, and their rapidly growing population created a hunger for land. Operating on a concept much like that underlying the Italian fascism of World War II, the state was paramount, and the duty of the individual was to serve it.
Around 500 BCE, the Roman Senate, a deliberative body of little power comprising representatives of the aristocracy, asserted itself to found the Roman Republic. The Senate claimed for itself control over public funds and
the power to elect consuls, whose powers were much the same as those of the former kings but whom the Senate could depose.
The primary responsibility of a consul was to lead Rome’s armies in wars against neighboring cities. The Senate’s concern was to curb the most extreme abuses of arbitrary power, not to democratize power or secure the liberty of the individual.
The patricians ruled. The plebeians, small farmers, tradesmen, and even some wealthy families of recent foreign origin had no defined rights. Plebeians were required to serve in the military but excluded from holding office. In the absence of written laws, the patricians were free in judicial proceedings to interpret the rules to their own benefit.
Continuous war fed an increasingly martial spirit as Rome’s victories expanded the territory under its control. By 265 BCE, Rome had established its dominion over the entire Italian peninsula and turned its attention to contesting the control of Sicily by Carthage, a great maritime empire on the North African coast built on trade and the exploitation of North Africa’s resources. In 146 BCE, Rome launched an assault on Carthage. Following their victory, Roman soldiers went house to house slaughtering Carthaginian citizens, laid waste to this once magnificent city, sold fifty-five thousand survivors into slavery, and plowed salt into the soil to render it infertile and incapable of supporting 118human habitation. From there Rome went on to establish its dominion over all the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea, including most of Europe and the Middle East.14
In the days of the early Republic, most Romans were farmers; few engaged in trade or crafts. Conscripted to fight unending wars, many farmers were unable to tend their fields, fell into debt, and lost their farmland to creditors who consolidated it into large estates worked by slaves acquired through conquest. Creditors also had the right to sell the hapless debtors into slavery as a means of recovering their funds—an especially odious form of war profiteering at the expense of the conscripted that brings to mind contemporary reports of creditors foreclosing on the assets of U.S. soldiers unable to pay their debts while fighting in Iraq.
By 150 BCE, slaves filled the republic’s countryside, and its cities teemed with unemployed farmers dependent on state welfare and struggling to get by as best they could. At the end of the second century BCE, Italy’s slave population numbered about a million, “making Rome one of the most slave-based economies known to history.”15 The resulting social pressures played out in the Senate’s demand for further conquests to acquire new land on which to settle Roman citizens who had been displaced from lands and employment by creditors and slaves.
In Rome, an increasing flow of wealth and slaves from conquered territories undermined traditional authority and discipline among members of the aristocracy. Privileged and pampered, Rome’s ruling elite embraced extravagantly self-indulgent and wildly hedonistic lifestyles and devoted their civic energies to avoiding taxes and assuring the exemption of their children from military service.
Intrigue in the struggle for power within the ranks of the nobles was commonplace and included assassinations, the wholesale slaughter of political opponents, and even battles between the armies of competing Roman generals. Major slave revolts at times threatened the security of the state. Six thousand captives from one slave revolt that lasted two years and overran much of southern Italy were left crucified along a 150-mile stretch of road from Capua to Rome. Thousands of spectators gathered in the Colosseum and other amphitheaters to be entertained by the human slaughter of gladiatorial contests and human sacrifice to wild animals. Over time, what had once been a republic of farmers became a complex and differentiated society racked by intrigue, brutality, 119and rebellion and deeply divided between the rich, who became fewer and wealthier, and the destitute poor, who became more numerous and desperate.
Myth of the Roman Peace
The Roman Empire is often celebrated for what is referred to as the Pax Romana, or the Roman peace—a period of more than two hundred years extending from the beginning of the rule of Augustus Caesar (27 BCE to 14 CE) to the death of Emperor Marcus Aurelius in 180. The British would later claim the Pax Romana as a model for their own empire, as would the neoconservative militarists who have held key foreign- and military-policy positions during the U.S. administration of George W. Bush and who openly advocated the imposition on the world of a Pax Americana. There was no naval battle during these two hundred years in the portion of the world ruled by Rome, but otherwise the Pax Romana was scarcely peaceful.
Augustus Caesar began his rule by sending out unsuccessful military expeditions to conquer Ethiopia and Arabia. He was more successful in conquering the territories of what are now Switzerland, Austria, Bulgaria, and Germany to the Elbe.16 Tiberius (14–37) ended his reign in a paranoid fit of random and ferocious torture and executions, including those of his own generals and members of the Senate. Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (37–41), known more infamously as Caligula, was legendary for his cruelty, extravagance, debauchery, and despotism, and is generally considered to have been clinically insane. He executed his own military commanders and closest supporters and confiscated the estates of nobles to support his lavish lifestyle.
Emperor Claudius (41–54), who was the target of numerous rebellions and assassination attempts, added Britain to the Empire by invasion in 43, conquered additional territories in North Africa and Asia Minor, and for a time expelled Jews from Rome. Nero (54–68) was infamous for his personal debauchery, extravagance, persecution of Christians, and the execution of his mother and first wife. Similar patterns prevailed through the reigns of Vespasian (69–79), Titus (79–81), and Domitian (81–96).17 All of this and more occurred during the much celebrated Pax Romana. Overall, it is a curious idea of peace.
Only during the latter part of the Pax Romana, during the rule of 120what historians refer to as the “Five Good Emperors” (96 to 180), might the Roman Empire be considered by any reasonable standard a model of peace and good governance. Nerva (96–98), the first among the five, recognized the limitations of his own son and introduced the practice by which he and his successors chose and adopted a young man designated to be the successor emperor, rather than trust to the luck of heredity. Thus it was that through five administrations each emperor took it upon himself to select and groom as his successor one of the empire’s most worthy and talented men.
Nerva was followed by Trajan (98–117), Hadrian (117–38), Antoninus Pius (138–61), and Marcus Aurelius (161–80). Compared to those who went before them they were paragons of wisdom, virtue, sanity, and humble benevolence, responsible for many positive accomplishments in administration, infrastructure, justice, and the well-being of the poor. They also treated the Senate with a degree of respect. Each one, however, ruled as dictator. Rebellions, conquests, palace intrigues, and executions continued, but with diminished frequency and less gratuitous brutality. Expansion of the empire slowed, and greater attention was paid to good governance and the maintenance of relatively stable boundaries.
The line of appointed succession worked reasonably well until Marcus Aurelius failed to recognize that his natural son Commodus (180–92) was a vicious incompetent and named him successor. Commodus proved a throwback to Nero and Caligula, and his brutal rule, which ended when he was strangled in a palace coup, marked the beginning of the decline of the Roman Empire. Hunger and disease became endemic. By 284, the empire was on the brink of ruin.18
For all its violence and excess, the Roman Empire did make positive contributions to human progress. To administer its vast territories, it developed modern systems of codified law and rule-based administrative systems. It pioneered high-speed transportation in service to commerce, agriculture, and military movement that served as models for those who followed. It also made important contributions to city planning and infrastructure—particularly with regard to plumbing, sewage disposal, dams, and aqueducts that set new standards for public sanitation.
Those who put forward the Roman Empire as a model for world peace and governance,
however, are on weak ground. Its accomplishments came at a cost in lives, liberty, and corruption that is arguably unsurpassed in the human experience. Its more positive accomplishments 121were largely confined to the good luck of an eighty-four-year reign by five strong emperors of sound mind who offered a brief respite from hundreds of years of rule by the brutal and the deranged.
Historic Irony
One of history’s most ironic twists occurred during the period of Rome’s decline when Emperor Constantine (312–37) became a Christian, gave Christianity his official support, and built Christian churches throughout the empire. The empire whose soldiers had crucified a Hebrew prophet named Jesus as an enemy of the state thus embraced him as its own.
During his life, Jesus had renounced violence, preached unconditional love, sided with the poor and oppressed, and taught his followers to live by values antithetical to the way of Empire. By advocating a life of active nonparticipation in Empire’s corruption of the soul, he presented a practical moral challenge to Empire’s established secular and religious order.
Following his execution by order of Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of the province of Judea, Jesus’s disciples carried forward his message, and with time the numbers of Jesus’s followers grew, although prior to Constantine’s conversion they were never sufficiently numerous to present a serious threat to Roman authority. Subsequently, a corrupt Church of Rome would replace the corrupt institutions of Rome’s secular empire as the primary institutional force for European unification.
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