What Rome Can Teach Us Today
Ancient lessons
for modern politics
Mary Beard has
written a kind of history as irony that makes comparisons between Roman and
modern politics inevitable. Her
book SPQR is a translation of Roman history into the English of today and offers
insights into not only Rome's history but also the challenges of the present.
Romans – they’re just
like us
Beard does not need to reference today's U.S. Congress to
make readers appreciate the subservience of a Roman senator who, when
asked to vote on a matter in an open ballot by the emperor Tiberius, responded,
“Could you tell me in
what order you will cast
your vote, Caesar? If you go first I shall
have something to follow. If you go
last of all, I fear I might find
myself inadvertently on the wrong
side.” The anecdote can't help but make one
think of the servility of some
members of the U.S. Congress to powerful special interests such as the National
Rifle Association.
We even hear echoes of the frequent denunciation of so-called
political correctness by today's conservatives in comments made by
Cato the Younger in 63 bc, “Long ago we lost the
real names of things,” Cato warned. “Giving
away other people's money is called ‘generosity’. Flagrant misbehavior is called ‘courage’. We've reached the tipping point and it's killing our
country.”
Beard begins SPQR in 63 bc, with Cicero—an Obama-like political outsider (he was the first in his family to achieve high
office and was born in the provinces) with an Obama-like gift for rhetoric.
That was the year Cicero took office as
consul of Rome—a
political position that resembled the U.S. presidency— and then discovered a terrorist plot to
assassinate him and his co-consul and
burn down the city. Relying on the word of informers, Cicero arrested a group
of young men who admitted their involvement in the conspiracy. But despite the
arrests, Rome was gripped by panic: no one knew how far the conspiracy
extended, and its leader, Catiline, managed
to slip away and joined his paramilitary supporters in Tuscany. The Senate met
to discuss its options; the debate is what Rome greatest historian, Sallust, has later made the centerpiece of his account of the episode. “In the
case of other offences” thundered Cato
the Younger, in the same speech in
which he denounced his contemporaries’ tendency toward euphemism, "you can proceed against them
after they have been committed; with this, unless you make sure it doesn't
happen, there's no point appealing to the laws after it's happened. Once a city has been taken, nothing is left to the vanquished.” The thing
to do, Cato suggested, was to
execute the plotters immediately; that was the best way for Rome to project
strength and persuade the other conspirators
to give up and go home. The problem with Cato's idea, however, was that it was illegal.
If his argument nonetheless sounds
familiar, that's because
it is. Days before the
first anniversary of 9/11, Condoleezza
Rice, then the national security adviser to U.S. President George W.
Bush, appeared on television to sell
the idea of invading
Saddam Hussein's Iraq, “The problem here,” she mused on cnn, “is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly [Saddam] can acquire
nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”
Just like Cato's, her implication was clear: speedy
preemptive action was the only
way to prevent an irreparable catastrophe.
Like the Roman Republic did, the United States governs overseas
territories through republican institutions; like Rome, as e pluribus unum, the Latin
motto on the U.S. dollar bill, suggests, Washington
prefers national unity to imperial
diversity, encouraging assimilation by choice. Such features are relatively
uncommon in world
history, and it is even more unusual to
find them in a single country. From this point of view, the United States is more like
republican Rome than it is like many of the past century's authoritarian states.
Like the contemporary United States, Rome
was made up of a culturally and ethnically diverse population, and like some
Americans today, some prominent Romans doubted the loyalty of certain minority
groups. In the year 111, for
instance, Pliny the Younger, then the governor of Bithynia, a Roman province in northwestern Anatolia,
encountered the adherents of a strange and relatively new religion called
Christianity, then still illegal
under Roman law. Pliny felt bound to subject the
Christians to loyalty trials, and he wrote a letter to the emperor Trajan
asking whether the ad hoc procedures he had adopted, among them making use of
an anonymously provided list of alleged local Christians, were acceptable. The
emperor's reply was
remarkable. The Christians “must
not be hunted out,” he wrote. “If they are brought before your court
and the case against them is proved, they must be punished…. But anonymous
lists must not have any place in the court proceedings. That would set a terrible
precedent. It's un-Roman.” Despite Rome's official intolerance of Christianity, Trajan's lesson
is worth remembering: strong state values can be invoked to avoid setting
particularly disastrous precedents in the treatment of marginalized minority groups.
And the emperor Theodosius’ decree of ad 380, which required all Roman
subjects to believe in the Christian Trinity and led inevitably to the persecution
of religious dissidents, should remind us to be wary of politicians who seek
to prohibit the expression of an unpopular belief or mandate the acceptance of
a popular one.
There is plenty to learn from the
Romans—if we have the courage to entertain the possibility. Viewed in this
light, SPQR is a broad introduction to the best thousand years of Roman
history that proves why, as Beard writes on its first page, “Rome is important”—and
reminds us why it is particularly important now.
Adapted from the review by Michael Fontaine in Foreign Affairs, March/April 2016
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