"Are We Rome?"

Hollowed out by arrogance, corruption and a bloated military, the greatest empire the world has ever known fell. Is America doomed to follow in its footsteps?

By Gary Kamiya

Read more: Books, Politics, Rome, Bush, Gary Kamiya, Reviews, Book reviews

June 7, 2007 | Comparing the present historical epoch to a past one is an excellent intellectual parlor game. It requires you to know enough about the two periods to assess their similarities and differences. It encourages a broad, synthetic analysis and a long view. And it defamiliarizes the present, forcing you to look with fresh eyes at cultural and political realities you had previously taken for granted. At its worst, it can become a mere display of superficial knowledge, in which facile analogies take the place of real engagement. But at its best, it can illuminate both periods, creating that simultaneous sense of recognition and mystery that the best history does.

Cullen Murphy's "Are We Rome?" is an example of the parlor game played at its best. Murphy, the former managing editor of the Atlantic Monthly, brings just the right combination of erudition, audacity and caution to this tricky undertaking. He isn't afraid to make informed generalizations about both contemporary America and an empire that ended more than 1,500 years ago, yet acknowledges the limits of such generalizations, and the areas where historical ignorance rules. He offers stimulating discussions of the similarities, both obvious and hidden, between America and Rome, but also points out that in profound ways their citizens would find each other utterly alien.

And wisely, he avoids trying to do too much. The words of the Greek poet Callimachus, "A big book is a big evil," may not be universally true, but they certainly apply to the genre Murphy is working in. Simply to acquire a working familiarity with the theories that have been advanced to explain the fall of the Roman empire -- Murphy notes that a German historian has listed 210 of them -- is a massive undertaking; to advance an original thesis is the work of decades; to compare Rome to America could occupy a Casaubon -- the pedant who searches in vain for a "Key to All Mythologies" in George Eliot's "Middlemarch" -- for several lifetimes. Mercifully, Murphy is no pedant. He wears his considerable knowledge lightly, avoids overdrawing his analogies and focuses in on a few areas where the comparisons are most illuminating -- and where we would do well to change our ways. You painlessly learn a lot about ancient Rome in this smart, briskly paced book, and a lot about contemporary America, too -- not all of the latter quite as painless.

The Rome-America comparison predates the American Revolution. In those days, Murphy notes, Americans were drawn to the Roman Republic, seeing in it a reflection of their own nascent republic. Today, for obvious reasons, it's the empire that grabs Americans' attention -- although no one can agree upon whether America really possesses an empire or not. The comparison, he notes, "serves as either a grim cautionary tale or an inspirational call to action." Those who are inspired include figures whom Murphy calls the "triumphalists," who "see America as at long last assuming its imperial responsibilities, bringing about a global Pax Americana like the Pax Romana at its most commanding, in the first two centuries A.D." In this camp are neoconservative pundits like Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, Max Boot and "the triumphalist-in-chief, trading jodhpurs for flight suit," George W. Bush. These figures unapologetically advocate that the U.S. dominate the world. Against them stand the "declinists," who believe that America is overstretched, that its "imperial need for secrecy, surveillance and social control, all in the name of national security, is corroding our republican institutions." The declinists include the likes of Chalmers Johnson and Paul Kennedy. There is also an in-between group, led by the historian Niall Ferguson, who argue that the U.S. should be an imperial power, but lacks the gumption.

Then there are those critics who see doom and gloom when they compare Rome to America. On the left, the urban planner Jane Jacobs saw the decline of family and community, bad science and the ascendance of economically based individualism as leading to a "post-Roman" dark age. On the right, the saber-rattling classicist Victor Davis Hanson attacks Americans as decadent, weak-willed and weak-kneed.

Murphy himself is no triumphalist. He might be called a moderate declinist. He argues that America, like Rome, is threatened by self-inflicted wounds -- in particular our mania for privatization, our fading belief in government and the ensuing decay of civic society, our vast and unsustainable military, our ignorance of the outside world and our short-sighted attitude toward immigration and assimilation.

These positions stamp Murphy as an old-school liberal, albeit hardly a knee-jerk one. Clearly aiming at the big historical picture and not wanting to get caught up in ephemeral political disputes, Murphy goes out of his way to avoid framing his argument in partisan terms. This is a laudable impulse, but Murphy's reluctance to take a deeper historical look at the Bush administration ends up feeling excessively cautious and constrains his argument. Bush's entire approach to governance epitomizes all the tendencies in modern American life that Murphy finds most dangerous. Yet Murphy never explores the important question of whether Bush's secretive, imperial presidency is a historical anomaly, a perfect storm created by the rare convergence of 9/11 and a rigid, ideologically driven president, or the shape of the American empire -- and emperors -- to come. This is an issue that bears directly on Murphy's thesis.

Are we Rome, or not? At a crude level, the parallels are striking. "Rome and America are the most powerful actors in their worlds, by many orders of magnitude," Murphy writes. "Their power includes both military might and the 'soft power' of language, culture, commerce, technology, and ideas." The two are comparable in physical size. Both are open societies, made up of newcomers and immigrants. Both are drawn to grand feats of engineering. ("Whenever I see the space shuttle, standing upright and inching slowly on its crawler toward the launching pad, I think back to the Rome of Hadrian's day, and the gargantuan statue of the Sun-God, as tall as the shuttle, being dragged into place by 24 elephants," Murphy writes.) Both Romans and Americans are extremely litigious, believe in private property, enjoy ritually humiliating public figures, have a love-hate relation with the nouveau riche, and see themselves as the chosen people.

Next page: Would Americans like the cruel, principled Romans?