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Overview
The rise and fall of ancient Rome has been on American minds since the beginning of our republic. Depending on who’s doing the talking, the history of Rome serves as either a triumphal call to action—or a dire warning of imminent collapse.
In this “provocative and lively” book, Cullen Murphy points out that today we focus less on the Roman Republic than on the empire that took its place, and reveals a wide array of similarities between the two societies (The New York Times). Looking at the blinkered, insular culture of our capitals; the debilitating effect of bribery in public life; the paradoxical issue of borders; and the weakening of the body politic through various forms of privatization, Murphy persuasively argues that we most resemble Rome in the burgeoning corruption of our government and in our arrogant ignorance of the world outside—two things that must be changed if we are to avoid Rome’s fate.
“Are We Rome? is just about a perfect book. . . . I wish every politician would spend an evening with this book.” —James Fallows
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780547527079 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| Sales rank: | 879,262 |
| File size: | 515 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
THE CAPITALS
Where Republic Meets Empire
Remember, Roman, that it is yours to lead other people. It is your special gift.
— Virgil, The Aeneid
We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.
— former secretary of state Madeleine Albright
The empire of the Romans in the West, its origins tracing back more than a thousand years, drew its last breath in 476 A.D., when a barbarian army led by a warrior named Odoacer, half Hun and half Scirian, defeated an imperial army that his barbarians had only a few months earlier been a part of. Odoacer captured and killed the imperial commander. He entered the city of Ravenna, then serving as an imperial capital, and deposed a youngster named Romulus Augustus, who had reigned as emperor for little more than a year. Odoacer was scarcely less worthy of authority than many previous usurpers. He was in fact well schooled in the ways of Rome, and he was a Christian, as most Romans by then were. There was no social implosion after he seized power, no rape and pillage. Rome didn't "fall" the way Carthage had, six centuries earlier, when the Romans slaughtered the inhabitants and razed the city, or the way Berlin would, fifteen centuries later, blasted into rubble. Rome itself wasn't touched on this occasion, and throughout the former empire life went on, little different for most people in 477 from what it had been in 475. Many regions had been autonomous for years, under barbarian rulers who gave lip service to the titular emperor. In Italy the Roman bureaucracy continued to sputter along.
What changed was this: Odoacer was not recognized as legitimate by the eastern emperor, in Constantinople. There would never be another emperor of the West. The historical symmetry is almost too good to be true — that the last emperor's name, Romulus, should also be that of Rome's founder. (Imagine if the demise of America were to occur under a president named George.) But more than symbolism was at play. Odoacer understood full well that something had come to an end: he declared himself king of Italy, and sent the imperial regalia of the Western empire to Constantinople. The pretense of Western unity was abandoned. Europe would now become a continent of barbarian kingdoms — in embryo, the Europe of nation-states that exists today.
Thirteen centuries later, on a gloomy evening in 1764, gazing out from a perch on the Capitoline Hill, above the overgrown debris of central Rome, Edward Gibbon was seized with a sense of loss as he contemplated the collapse of a civilization. Monks sang vespers in a church nearby. Gibbon resolved at that moment to undertake the great project he would call The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. "I can neither forget nor express the strong emotions which agitated my mind as I first trod, with lofty step, the ruins of the Forum," he later wrote. A decade after this twilight epiphany Gibbon's restless pen evoked the collapse of the empire: "Odoacer was the first barbarian who reigned in Italy, over a people who had once asserted their just superiority above the rest of mankind.... The least unfortunate were those who submitted without a murmur to the power which it was impossible to resist." Gibbon's life was in many ways a sad and lonely one, but The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was recognized at once as a masterwork, its sonorous cadences enlivened with a dry and biting wit. He observes gratuitously of a monk named Antiochus, for instance, that "one hundred and twenty-nine homilies are still extant, if what no one reads may be said to be extant." Although his picture of the fall may be more cataclysmic than the immediate reality seems to have been, Gibbon established for people ever after that a page of history had been decisively turned. In the West, "decline and fall" has been a catchphrase and a source of anxiety ever since.
The city of Washington, of course, also has a Capitoline Hill — Capitol Hill, named explicitly for its Roman forebear. The view to the west takes in a vast expanse of classical porticoes and marble monuments; gilded chariots and curtained litters would not seem out of place against this backdrop. Washington rose out of a malarial marsh on a river upstream from the coast, as Rome did. Its people, like the Romans, flee the sweltering city in August. The Romans cherished their myth of origin, the story of Romulus and Remus, and on the Palatine Hill you could be shown a thatched hut said to be the hut of Romulus — yes, the very one. Washington doesn't have anything quite like the hut of Romulus, but on Capitol Hill you can find sacred national touchstones of other kinds, such as the contents of Lincoln's pockets when he was assassinated. (They're in the Library of Congress.) Washington resembles Rome in many ways. The physical similarities are visible to anyone. The similarities of spirit are more salient. Materialistic cultures easily forget that "mental outlook" is not some limp and passive construct, of interest chiefly to anthropologists. Mental outlook can drive events and change the world, as the rise of militant Islam makes plain. Washington, too, has been animated by a special outlook. Long ago it was a notion of republican virtue that Romans of an early era would immediately have recognized. Today it's a strutting sense of self and mission that Romans of a later era would have recognized just as readily. Foreigners are well aware of this outlook, friends and enemies alike. It's a pungent quality — an internal characteristic that gives rise to outside counterforces.
The comparison with Rome has always been on the minds of leaders in America's capital. It was celebrated when Washington was no more than a street plan, and inspired what might be called the Bad Virgil school of patriotic verse. ("On broad Potowmac's bank then spring to birth, / Thou seat of empire and delight of earth!") In the settlement's early years there was a tributary of the Potomac called Goose Creek; its name was changed by an aspirational local planter to Tiber Creek. The Jefferson Memorial, off on the Potomac River's edge, is a diminutive version of the Pantheon. Union Station, just below the Capitol, was inspired by the Baths of Diocletian. The Washington Monument recalls the obelisks brought to Rome after the conquest of Egypt. Colonnaded government buildings stretch for miles.
I doubt I'm the only person who has trod, with lofty step, the sculpted gardens of the Capitol and been seized with a vision of how the city below might appear as a ruin. The Washington Monument — imagine it a millennium hence, a chipped and mottled spire, trussed with rusting braces. The stern pile of the Archives building, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington, the gothic National Cathedral on its distant hilltop, the turreted Smithsonian Castle on the Mall — they somehow invite you to see them as derelicts, rendered into darkly impish engravings by the hand of some future Piranesi. What calamity could bring the capital to this condition? Earthquake? Pestilence? Pride? The end of air conditioning?
What Went Wrong
A PAGE OF HISTORY may have been turned in 476 A.D., at least for literary purposes, but it's not easy to pinpoint the moment of Rome's fall — just as, one day, it may not be easy to pinpoint the moment of America's. In many ways, "Rome" had already fallen — had evolved into something different from what it once was, and not always through violence — well before it ceased to exist as a formal political entity. It had once been pagan and by the end was largely Christian. A proud army made up of Romans had long since turned into a paid army made up of barbarians. A republic sustained by flinty yeomen had become a precarious autocracy administered by grasping bureaucrats. At the same time, in very concrete ways Rome didn't fall for centuries, if at all. The eastern half of the empire, the richest and most populous part, centered on Constantinople, survived for nearly another thousand years. In the realms of culture and law and infrastructure and language, the Roman Empire has endured much longer. We still use its alphabet, exploit its literary genres, inhabit its cities, preserve its architectural styles, and follow its schedule of holidays. In many respects the Catholic Church survives as a graft on the empire's stump. "Non omnis moriar" ("I shall not wholly die"), the Roman poet Horace proclaimed in one of his most famous odes. He was referring to his work, but he could just as well have been referring to the legacy of his civilization.
Rome began as a farming settlement on hilly portions of the eastern bank of the Tiber River. Tradition puts its founding at 753 B.C., and the Romans calculated the passage of years ab urbe condita — "from the founding of the city." The legendary origins of the Roman people go back even further, to the Trojan hero Aeneas, who with family and friends made his way to Italy after the fall of Troy. It's not easy to infer, even when tramping the most ancient parts of today's Rome, what the early settlement was like. Some musty nineteenth-century guidebooks are actually good at reconstructing the landscape — how steep and rugged the seven hills were, and how willows grew here and oak trees there, and where the ferries crossed the marshes, and how high the Tiber floods could rise. Several centuries as a monarchy gave way, in the sixth century B.C., to a republic, with a senate, consuls, and popular voting for some offices. The territory of Rome gradually expanded to encompass the rest of the Italian peninsula and outposts along the Mediterranean coast. With the conclusion of the Third Punic War against its great rival, Carthage, in northern Africa, in 146 B.C., Rome effectively controlled the Mediterranean world. It continued to grow in all directions, impelled by its military prowess, its administrative genius, and its compulsive sense of destiny.
The republic came to a de facto end in 31 B.C., after a century of social turmoil, constitutional crisis, and civil war. Vast Roman armies had thrown themselves against one another across the Mediterranean world. Emerging supreme from the carnage was Octavian, Julius Caesar's grandnephew, who in proto-Orwellian fashion symbolically "restored" the republic while in fact inaugurating the principate, a regime of one-person rule. The outward forms of republican government would be preserved in various ways right to the very end, a progressively meaningless nod to the past, but whatever the disavowals, Rome was now an imperial state. By the second century A.D., the all-powerful emperor ruled a domain that stretched from Scotland to the Sahara, from the Atlantic to the Euphrates. Durable roads linked major and minor cities, defining routes still used today. Seaborne traffic flourished. In the absence of reliable records, one indirect way to gauge the growth in maritime commerce is through underwater archaeology, measuring the change over time in the number of Mediterranean shipwrecks — analogous to tracking the advance of industrialization by the level of pollutants in arctic ice cores. A survey of Roman-era wrecks off the coasts of Italy, France, and Spain yields only about fifty from the period 400–200 B.C., but three times that many from the first two centuries A.D. Ancient Rome held more than a million people; no European city would come close to it in size until the London of Shakespeare's time. The walls that eventually surrounded Rome extend nearly thirteen miles. I once spent the better part of two days walking the entire circuit, noting where the nineteen roads had entered the city, and the eleven aqueducts, and thinking how formidable those walls, forty feet high, must have looked to Alaric and his Visigoths. Little wonder that Alaric cut a deal to get inside.
The decline of Rome came in many forms — in military power, in civil order, in eloquence, in philosophy, in architecture, in trade. Going back to those shipwrecks: they fall off sharply after 200 A.D., and after 400 drop to the levels of half a millennium earlier. It would be a thousand years before seaborne trade returned to the Augustan level. Infrastructure started to degrade: there came a point when full-length columns of colored marble, which literally held up the empire, could no longer be transported to Rome from Greece and Turkey and Egypt. Agricultural methods deteriorated: archaeology indicates that cattle were smaller in the early Middle Ages than they were at the empire's prime. Although 476 has been accepted since Byzantine times as the moment of Rome's demise, there's an element of parlor game in the discussion. Maybe the end really came in 455, when the Vandals sacked Rome. Or maybe it came in 410, when the Visigoths sacked Rome. Or in 378, when a great Roman army was destroyed by barbarians at Adrianople. A racist theoretician in Nazi Germany discerned Rome's "first step toward chaos" in a law passed in the fifth century B.C. permitting patricians, the highest social class, to marry plebeians, the lowest.
"Let students of Rome's decline imagine themselves as medical examiners who have been confronted with a corpse," writes the classical historian Donald Kagan. "It is their duty first to establish the time of death and then the cause. It soon becomes apparent that the various historical practitioners who have examined the Roman remains have achieved remarkably little agreement on either question." In 1980, a German historian set out to catalogue all the explanations for the fall of Rome ever proposed, which include degeneracy and deforestation, too much bureaucracy and too much Christianity. (He cited 210 theories in all.) The Romans themselves continually lamented the unhappy state of their society — as Americans compulsively do — even under circumstances that in retrospect were not all that bad. "Now we suffer the evils of a long peace. Luxury hatches terrors worse than wars." That's Juvenal, writing in the second century A.D., when the collapse of the Western empire lay more than three centuries ahead. Other writers were bizarrely sanguine, although trouble was just around the corner. "There will never be an end to the power of Rome," wrote the court poet Claudian, shortly before the city's sack by the Visigoths. Part of the problem of explaining "decline" is that, like "rise," it doesn't happen everywhere at the same rate or in the same way. Ronald Reagan declared the 1980s to be "morning again in America," but dawn looked a lot different in Silicon Valley than it did in Youngstown.
Still, looking at the range of explanations provides a montage of Rome's condition. There is, to begin with, the growing number of incursions into the empire by non-Roman peoples — that is, by the barbarians. Rome had always been adept at assimilating newcomers; until the rise of America, it was history's most successful multi-ethnic state. But the influx eventually became too much to handle, as the Huns, sweeping out from central Asia, drove more and more people south and west in front of them, and finally across the Rhine and the Danube and into the empire. Another explanation: perhaps the culprit was simply a hollowed out military, whose capacities were no longer up to the challenge of keeping the barbarians at bay. Related to this: Did a creeping pacifism come into play? ("We Christians defend the empire by praying for it," wrote one early theologian.) Some historians blame economic stagnation for the fall of Rome, or corruption, or manpower shortages, or the exhaustion of the soil, or the depredations of plague, or the more generalized problem, in one view, that "too few producers supported too many idle mouths." An implicitly eugenic argument points to the depletion of the elites by centuries of war and civil strife. You could look at the debilitating effects of a decline of civic spirit. Or at the rise in taxes, which took a greater toll on ordinary people than it did on the rich and influential, worsening an already invidious class divide. There was the impact of slavery, whose harmful consequences were moral and psychological as well as economic. And there was the chaos caused by the lack of a standard procedure for imperial succession, which was resolved frequently by civil war, crippling the government and weakening the empire's defenses. "Decadence" has always been a popular explanation, though in Rome's case the greatest decadence coincided with the greatest power. (Still, here's Richard Nixon on the subject: "When the great civilizations of the past became prosperous, when they lost the will to go on living and make progress, they fell victims to decadence, which in the long run destroys a culture. The United States is now entering this phase.") Some of the more preposterous theories explaining the fall of Rome happen also to be unforgettable. Everybody knows the one that credits lead poisoning from the pipes used in plumbing. Another explanation in this class: the onset of widespread impotence caused by hot water in the public baths.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Are We Rome?"
by .
Copyright © 2007 Cullen Murphy.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
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Table of Contents
Prologue: The Eagle in the Mirror / 11 : The Capitals / 24 Where Republic Meets Empire
2: The Legions / 59 When Power Meets Reality
3 : The Fixers / 91 When Public Good Meets Private Opportunity
4: The Outsiders / 121 When People Like Us Meet People Like Them
5: The Borders / 152 Where the Present Meets the Future
Epilogue: There Once Was a Great City / 185 Acknowledgments 207 Notes 209 Bibliography 251
What People are Saying About This
"Are We Rome? is just about a perfect book . . . I wish every politician would spend an evening with this book."—James Fallows, international correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly
"Elegant, learned, and graceful . . . this is a disturbing book brimming with hope."—E.J. Dionne Jr., syndicated columnist, and author of Why Americans Hate Politics
"Cullen Murphy has written a book of remarkable richness . . . brisk, learned, and highly entertaining."—Samantha Power, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Problem From Hell
"This is a lovely book . . . It may be the most important thing written about the U.S. government in many years."—Thomas E. Ricks, author of Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, and military correspondent for The Washington Post
"Cullen Murphy gives a thoughtful, entertaining look around."—Richard Brookhiser, author of What Would the Founders Do?