Friends, Romans, Aliens
by Anders HoveMy attitudes toward Roman history mirror those of many Americans regarding history as a whole. Though my shelves have always been overloaded with history books, volumes on Rome have until recently been absent. In contemplating an upcoming summer trip to Italy, however, frankly I felt remorse at having neglected the Eternal City and the civilization to which it gave its name and character. A glance at the history section sufficed to remind me of the reason for my neglect, a reason that is partly stylistic. Book after book on Rome and its literary and political achievements is plastered with classical statuary, eroding columns, and empty amphitheaters. The esthetic and political feel of Rome is, to me, dominated by the inhaminity its history shares with Fascist Europe of the 1930s and 1940s. Romans were cruel. Their architectural and artistic endeavors were too often massive and idealized to the point of alienation. Their ruins - and I've visited them elsewhere in Europe - are antiseptic, lifeless, and deadly. And beyond this esthetic feeling, I've tried to leave the study of Rome to aging classicists who go about decrying the lack of education in Latin or foisting unwanted Western Civ classes on unwilling high schoolers and, even in this P.C. age, college freshmen.
But style is no justification for ignorance. It would be unfair to reduce Rome to its 1500s intrigues and Italian history to the wars of the Church and nations of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. True, all historical and political traditions do not run through Rome, or even through Greece. And after finding so many object lessons in statecraft, economics, and social organization in the history of another thousand-year state, Venice, I began to wonder if similar treasures weren't lurking in Rome's better-known rise and fall.
I could find only one volume that seemed to cover the entire history of Rome in all its aspects. The book is Caesar and Christ, by Will Durant, published in 1942. It is actually the third volume of Durant's complete overview of Western civilization, an oeuvre which took him and his wife over four decades of back-breaking scholarship to complete. The book stands on its own - its title is deceptive, since the topic is far broader than those two figures and their time. The book is a delight; and, approached with a relatively open mind, the subject offers many surprises, reinforcing some prejudices while overturning others.
Of Virgil's Aeneid, Durant writes: "Only the reader who has tried to write can guess the toil that made this narrative so smooth and adorned it with so many passages of sonorous melody that every second page cries out for quotation, and tempts the tongue." As Durant may have himself recognized, the same could be said for his own magnificent prose. It is still fresh, lively, and unpretensious four decades after this particular history was written. Indeed, except for two references to the trouble of his own times, and price conversions listed in 1940 dollars, there is no hint that these volumes weren't written in the present time. Durant's style is straightforward, and magnificently well-crafted. He starts without even a justification, trusting the reader to faithfully dive into Etruscan antiquities. The writing is so clear, so precise, so sparing: whereas today this book would be marketed as an Idiot's Guide to Roman History, with all the insulting graphics and call-outs such books entail. Durant's simplicity compliments and rewards reading, whereas today's tack would be to condescend to reader and subject alike.
Perhaps nowhere is Durant's simple, elegant eloquence more poignant than in his brief preface and epilogue, where he addresses questions almost exactly like those raised earlier in this column. Can we learn from history? And, if we would do so, should we approach history broadly, or from one particular aspect, such as politics or religion or art? Durant calls the broad approach "synthetic history" and he endorses it: "We shall learn more of the nature of man by watching his behavior through sixty centuries than by reading Plato and Aristotle, Spinoza and Kant," he writes, adding that both this approach and the more analytic one of separating out aspects of human life have their weaknesses. Durant devotes two eloquent paragraphs to justifying Roman history: "The study of antiquity is properly accounted worthless except as it may be made living drama, or illuminate our contemporary time. . . . There, in the struggle of Roman civilization against barbarism within and without, is our own struggle" - meaning World War II.
Touching though this might be, it's hard to draw parallels between Rome's monolithic, thousand-year existence and the brief Pax Americana which subsists today. Even the British Empire was fleeting by comparison. Perhaps it's better to overlook possible analogies or lessons and focus on Rome's particularism first.
Rome began its career on the world stage as a mixed-constitution state. It gradually gained an empire of colonies, and, with the Punic Wars, it gained hegenomy also. Gradually its state grew and changed in character. Charisma grew, checks and balances waned. Civil war, social war, and global war seemed to go hand-in-hand with the brutality of Rome's religion, its economy, and its political system. This is, of course, the view through the modern lens, but it seems safe to generalize to the extent of saying brutality promotes charisma and reduces the awe and stability afforded institutions, whereas civil society abhors both brutality and charisma while promoting routinization, at times to excess.
The official end of the Roman republic is usually dated to Julius Caesar's rise. Caesar was not the first Roman politician to rise above the laws - they were too flexible to make doing so difficult. But he rose above them permanently. This he accomplished through consummate political skill: he played off one class against another, one party against another, and fought valiantly to destroy every enemy, from Cato to Pompey to Cicero. He ruled relatively well - for a dictator. And Rome was to have many of those.
Cicero watched Caesar's rise and commented on it: "Plato says that from the exaggerated license which people call liberty, tyrants spring up as from a root . . . and that at last such liberty reduces a nation to slavery." At the time, this was hyperbole. Extracted and left as a verdict on Rome's republican institutions, it challenges us still. Does liberty engender tyranny? Hamilton and Madison undoubtedly looked at Rome and answered yes: hence the Federalist mantra that first you must govern, then enable the people to govern themselves.
Of course, the fall of the republic was only the beginning of the Roman drama. Scores of authors have made excellent meat of the panoply of emperors that held the West in awe for over 200 years after Caesar. Suetonius told of their failings. Shakespeare of their loves and hatreds. Some, like Nero and Commodus, ruled terribly. Others, like Vespasian, Aurelius, and Septimius Severus accomplished more for their constituencies than any democracy could have hoped to deliver. None ruled for very long, and most died of unnatural causes.
The collapse of any great civilization gives rise to the question of why it fell. The answer, I think, must always be both complicated and equivocal. Rome fell many times. The Republic fell. The state institutions then eroded and collapsed, replaced by personal rules and cults of personality associated with the bad emperors. The state religion and associated morals collapsed, not because of Christianity, but because of the pantheistic cosmopolitanism of the pre-Christian Romans. They were tolerant, and tolerance made them licentious. Whether you call it epicurianism or hedonism, the Romans simply indulged themselves.
It's interesting to reflect on the theories of decline advocated by the Romans themselves. They noticed how the birthrate had declined and immigration into Italy made to supply the population with young blood. Emperors like Augustus decried the decline of the state religion, and before that time other statesmen such as Cato the Elder damned the arrival of Greek doctors with their various philosophies of live and learning. All of these theories traded on the notion that such new arrivals ate away at the legitimacy of the state. But how could that be, given that they hardly conflicted with the state's goals?
It seems more reasonable to believe that the institutions were killed off by histrionic forces rather than moral ones. To put it another way, in Roman times even more than today people made history. And there's no denying that individual people unmade Rome.
One of the greatest undoers was Aurelius, who split the empire in two simply as a gracious and selfless favor to a friend. It set a bad precedent, and led to the weakening of the empire's defense. Diocletian took a wrong step when, to combat inflation, he introduced a managed economy which Durant calls communist. Diocletian also saw fit to give up the ghost to the barbarians north of the Danube, making peace with them and inviting them to rule territories within the empire's former realm. Not only did giving an inch lead the hordes to take many a mile, but it also gave away Rome's economic backbone: the gold mines of Eastern Europe, which had subsidized Roman lassitude for so many decades.
In Durant's account, the greatest act of self-destruction ever undertaken by the Romans was the Punic Wars. In laying waste Carthage, then plowing that city under, and distributing its lands to Roman capitalists, the Romans laid the basis for a leisure society unlike any the world has seen ever since. In just a few years the Roman empire was transformed from a society of artisans and politicians to one of imperialists and slaves. The huge tracts of land were most profitable as cattle ranches run by mobs of slaves. The former farmers thronged to the cities, where they demanded and received a dole. Thus a landless, tradeless mob was created - one that was ever ready to lend itself to the cause of revolution, in whatever name. That mob killed the Republic which fed it, and it killed many an emperor after that.
One of the disadvantages of drawing any conclusions from this experience for the present day is that one follows in bad footsteps. Karl Marx expropriated the Roman words for his theory of class warfare, and nobody writing today would want to follow his errors. Marx's failure, though, was a simple one: he believed in determinism - that is, he believed that his theory of history was not based on external variables that might or might not obtain, but on endogenous factors that were bound to bring about the changes he envisioned. He was wrong. So let's go back and look at those variables.
The first variable is the distribution of resources in society. Our present society allows this distribution to be determined partly by the market and partly by the state. Radical shifts in the distribution of resources have been rare. Shifts like the one seen in Punic times would be unheard of - or so one might think. A second variable - perhaps an intermediate one - is class warfare and class identity. These have been on the wane lately, and that seems a good thing. More mobility and more hope mean stronger institutions, one would hypothesize from the Roman experience. And this seems reasonable on its face.
A third variable lies in the structure of the economy. Does wealth arise through work, innovation, and trade - or through extractions from distant empires, extensive farming and mining, or thievery? Toil is a habit, and can be sustained over the long run. Rome and other civilizations seem to suggest that kleptocracy is not sustainable.
A final variable I would add is the legitimacy of the state institutions, as displayed by participation, actual power, and support for their continuation among the people and leadership. Whether Rome's institutions suffered because of religion, immigration, or hedonism I can't say. In our own time immense wealth and growth seem to be leading more people to disdain democratic institutions as a whole rather than individual parties and leaders and ideas in particular - but every generation fears that its values are in decline, and there is no good way to measure whether such is actually the case. The question is whether institutions have legitimacy.
Ultimately, Rome's fall is scarier than Venice's. Here we have a global power whose legislature was packed with men each one of whom was said to have the intellectual qualities of a king. Yet this society lost the race against barbarianism. Its institutions did not last. Its power, its economy, its wealth lasted longer, but the Roman experience became instantly more barbarian - more nasty, brutish, and short - with the collapse of the Republic, and it would only grow worse with time.