August 21st, 2007
Pop romanizing
Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America, by Cullen Murphy (Houghton Mifflin, 272 pp., $24)
IN the last decade, and especially after 9/11, it has become popular once again to compare the United States to ancient Rome. The pop analogies almost always appear in the pessimistic context of an American colossus betraying its origins and ideals–and, like Rome, facing the deserved end of its empire.
Those on the left warn about America’s hard imperial hand on the “Other” abroad. Meanwhile, our contemporary conservative elder Catos lament the corruption of the old, small, agrarian republic into an empire. Both predict–almost gleefully, and sometimes in apocalyptic terms–American “exhaustion,” “decline,” or something similar to a Roman “fall.”
Of course, there are a number of similarities between the two superpowers, ancient and modern. Both were practical, inclusive societies that rapidly incorporated foreigners. They alike unexpectedly achieved global stature and influence–at first through astounding feats of arms in filling the vacuum of eroding empires (the end of the Hellenistic East in the 2nd century B.C. was perhaps analogous to the postwar breakup of the British Empire).
Soon each upstart nation won further adherents by an insidiously efficient way of doing things, based on merit rather than mere class, that offered material prosperity to millions not to be found through local indigenous cultures. Likewise, brilliant Roman and American writers have left thoughtful observations about the ironies–and pathologies–of their seemingly unstoppable societies that changed the world abroad and, in the process, their once-traditional citizenry within.
But for any valid comparison, some basic ground rules of this old game of “America as Rome” are to be followed. First, keep in mind that the idea of a monolithic “Rome” is a sort of construct–reflecting 700 years of Italian republican government, followed by another half-millennium of imperial Mediterranean rule. What “Rome,” then, do we of infant nations evoke? Is Rome to be the rather small, agrarian republic trying to stop Carthage in the first Punic war? Or Edward Gibbon’s 2nd-century A.D. hundred years of bliss? Or the chaos of a perennially tottering empire yet another 200 years later?
Second, recognize that Roman literature, usually written by disaffected elites, is as consistently reactionary as it is moralistic in nature. Juvenal, Livy, Petronius, Sallust, the younger Seneca, Suetonius, and Tacitus, all knee-deep in the luxury of their times, all nevertheless deplored the supposed decadence of their respective eras. They can be fine witnesses to Roman decline and the corrosive effects of luxus, but their pessimistic–and often hypocritical–genre of “things going to hell in a hand basket” needs to be weighed carefully against concomitant evidence from mute numismatics, epigraphy, and archeology that reflect a booming culture often at odds with what the cynical said about it.
For the once-great families, it might have been a seminal moment to see respected Roman matrons increasingly covered with blood and dust in the first row of the amphitheater, oohing and aahing the abs of the gladiators. But most in North Africa or Eastern Europe–who with Romanization at last had clean water and habeas corpus–could not have cared less. Petronius (Nero’s own arbiter elegantiae) saw the crass nouveau-riche upstarts as proof of imperial decadence. But some of the novelist’s gauche characters, like the Jewish buffoon Trimalchio and the rag-collector Echion, are more likely welcome evidence that millions by the 1st century A.D. were succeeding in a global system increasingly based on merit, not class–anathema to Petronius’s old Italian upper crust.
Third, there should be an up-front recognition that common Rome/America comparisons, from Oswald Spengler’s to Pat Buchanan’s, are rarely meant to be laudatory. Instead, they are admonitory in nature, warning that the “bread and circuses” of the United States, too, will–and should–soon end. Key is the superficiality that both Romans and Americans were somehow malevolent, forgetting that in comparison with the alternatives of the times, most of the “Other” voted with their feet to get within the imperial borders by any means at their disposal.
Cullen Murphy (editor at large at Vanity Fair and co-author of Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage) does not draw extensively from the evidence of the ancient world, other than selected quotes in translation from the usual grim Roman moralists. That paucity of ancient evidence is buttressed on the modern side by a plethora of references to contemporary culture. So evocation of everything from Abu Ghraib, the Green Zone, Halliburton (but of course), and Blackwater USA to Ahmed Chalabi, Ken Lay, and the Cheneys is used to hammer home the preordained point that our selfish right-wing elites have become like Suetonius’s vulgar Julio-Claudians in devouring public resources, eroding our freedoms, and ruining our name and influence abroad. But even the non-classicist will finally bristle at such simplicity, replete as it is with references to the movies Spartacus and Gladiator and the video game Rome: Total War.