Are We Rome?: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America
By Cullen Murphy
Houghton Mifflin, 262 pages, $24
Let me assure you right from the start (or ab initio as the Romans would have it) that “Are We Rome?” is a lucid, learned, witty and thought-provoking extended essay. It is well worth reading for pleasure, instruction and enlightenment.
As to the title question, the answer is an emphatic no. However tempting comparisons between the U.S. and the Roman Empire may be, they invariably depend on the sensibility and beliefs of the reader. The judgments of, say, Edward Gibbon, Karl Marx and Cullen Murphy, mutated by time and point of view, are inevitably different and probably incompatible. Even though Murphy, former managing editor of The Atlantic Monthly, uses the framework of the Roman Empire for his reflection on the state and future of our union, his book is really a combination of morality play, cautionary tale and enlightened plea for the enduring values of civic virtue.
Despite its follies, corruption, arrogance, despotism, elitism, moral degeneracy and egregious errors of judgment, the Roman Empire lasted anywhere from 500 to 1,500 years (depending on whether you count the Constantinople-based Eastern Empire). The U.S. as a dominant world power is hardly a century old. Based on the precedent of Rome, if we as a nation rigorously follow its path, we will experience a longer valedictory than Sarah Bernhardt’s retirement from the stage.
Murphy is enormously knowledgeable about the manners, customs, economy and politics of the middle and later Roman Empire (as one would expect from the writer for more than 25 years of the illustrious “Prince Valiant” comic strip.) It is clear from the text that Murphy’s interests aren’t just classical, but that he is a true Renaissance man.
For, example, I didn’t know that all the slaves in a Roman household would be executed if one of them killed his master for any reason. He cites the instance of a rich man of the 1st Century A.D. named Pedanius who owned hundreds of household slaves. A deranged servant murdered him. All the rest of his slaves were executed, presumably as an example to others who might harbor similar ideas. (The costs of this policy must have been enormous not only in human terms but in a significantly reduced patrimony for his heirs. Hundreds of highly trained, high-value household slaves would be worth hundreds of millions in today’s dollars.) “Are We Rome?” contains scores of such intriguing and instructive tidbits.
Murphy makes a hilarious, if frightening, gloss on George W. Bush and 3rd Century Emperor Diocletian and the magnificence and chutzpah of their imperial retinues. According to a recent New York Times article, Diocletian “was famous for feeding Christians to the lions.” In fairness to Diocletian, he did reform the chaotic legions, jump-start the faltering economy and create a brilliant new paradigm for governing the overextended empire. After Diocletian it lasted about another 1,200 years. A traditionalist, he was tough on Christians, but no tougher than his Christian successors were on the pagans. Most amazing of all, after 20 years as emperor, he voluntarily relinquished the purple and retired to his country villa to plant and nourish cabbages with his own hands. Some years later when asked to return to the purple, he peremptorily refused. Diocletian valued his cabbages more highly than the blandishments of imperial pomp and power. Doesn’t this man begin to sound more like the magisterial George Washington than the less-imposing George W.?
I must take issue with Murphy’s conflation of the two imperial capitals as the centers of the universe. While it may be true that Rome was the center of the known world, Washington, D.C., is hardly even the center of the U.S. Ephesus, the second-largest city in the empire, had a population of 500,000, less than half that of Rome. But New York, Chicago and Los Angeles are far larger than Washington and certainly surpass it as cultural, intellectual and economic hubs.
Murphy points to three Roman disasters as object lessons for the American military. His observations are acute, and his analysis seems strategically sound to a non-expert reader. But based on the timeline of the empire, I’m not convinced any of them signaled the imminent end of the Roman world (Western and Eastern).
For example, the first catastrophe, the Battle of Cannae in 216 B.C., in which Hannibal during the Second Punic War wiped out an entire Roman army, ultimately ended in his ignominious death and the obliteration of Carthage. When the chips were really down, the Romans put away the Social Register policy of putting marginally qualified patricians in charge and found a better general in Scipio Africanus.
The Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, in which three Roman legions were annihilated by German tribesmen in 9 A.D., while deeply embarrassing occurred in the reign of Augustus at the very apogee of empire. While the disturbing memory lived on, the substantive effects were transitory.
And although the Battle of Adrianople in 378 had more lasting impact on the course of empire, the borders of Rome remained undiminished for nearly 100 more years.
Murphy also makes much of the sacking of Rome by Alaric and the Visigoths in 410 A.D., a sure sign of the impending fall. It should be noted that this event occurred more than 450 years after Julius Caesar accepted the dictatorship. Washington was sacked and burnt by the British less than 25 years after its founding.
It also seems a stretch for Murphy to imply a lack of vibrant culture in imperial Rome (especially in the Augustan epoch) or Washington, D.C. Virgil, Horace, Ovid and Martial were great poets by any standard. Livy, Tacitus and Pliny were exceptional writers and thinkers. While Roman intellectual and artistic life expressed a heavy debt to Greece of both the Periclean and later Hellenistic periods, it developed its own unique outlook and sensibility. The same may be said of the U.S. in its descent and mutation from the older British literary tradition. As to whether the nation’s capital has any cultural history, Henry Adams, John Hay and their coterie speak for themselves.
Murphy comments that nothing important from Rome was lost in the Dark Ages. The indirect method of casting, originally developed by the Greeks but brought to perfection by the Romans, was an ancient prototype of mass production. This method permitted eating, drinking and funerary vessels and sculpture to be cast thinly without the necessity of labor-intensive drawing or hammering. The technique was lost with Rome and not rediscovered until the 17th Century.
At the conclusion of his diagnosis of the pathology of two great powers, Murphy recommends a regimen of national self-improvement for the U.S. In many essential respects it is similar to that offered in 1872 to Victorian Great Britain, at its height of empire, by Walter Bagehot, the editor of The Economist, in his book “Physics and Politics.” Bagehot called it “progress,” rather than Murphy’s term, “improvement.” It was a form of social Darwinism (lately regathering momentum), inspired by the then-debate in Great Britain as to how and if the course of empire could be maintained. Bagehot pointed out that the idea of progress (improvement) was unknown to the ancients. This, in fact, may be the biggest material difference between the U.S. and Rome.
Despite the allusions to Rome, most of Murphy’s self-help prescriptions fall into categories that define our current national debate over the optimal destiny of the U.S.:diversity, multiculturalism, big government versus little government, the size and function of the military Establishment, public service versus private self-enhancement and the balance between the public and private sectors. Murphy favors greater acceptance and understanding of other cultures; better assimilation of diverse ethnic and economic groups; and a government empowered to provide essential economic and social services to all races and classes. He makes a strong pitch for a highly efficient but compact professional military and for requiring young people to perform some form of national service before they enter the private sector.
Murphy’s prescription for the U.S. is thoughtful, humane and well-balanced. Not every reader will agree with it in total or in part. Nevertheless, his argument is cogent and presented in such an entertaining and informative way that your time reading and thinking about it will be well-spent.
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E. William Smethurst is a managing director of Byram Capital Management of Greenwich, Conn., and former president and chief investment officer of Schroder Capital Management of New York.
