Why Rome Still Matters

TEL AVIV – Last year, a social-media trend featured women asking men how often they thought about the Roman Empire. The answer, it seemed, was “very”: many men claimed that the ancient empire crossed their minds weekly or even daily.

That did not surprise Mike Duncan, the host of the popular “History of Rome” podcast, and probably not Tom Holland, who has written multiple bestselling books on the topic. Mary Beard certainly understands the popular fascination, too. Her study of ancient Rome – together with her unpretentious style and brash charisma – has made her what one observer called “a national treasure, and easily the world’s most famous classicist.”

So, what is it about Rome that so resonates with modern audiences? As Beard explains, the Roman Republic forms the underpinnings of Western politics and culture. Moreover, it seems that the history of Rome is so multifaceted that its elements can be pulled apart, rearranged, and interpreted to fit any number of narratives or beliefs.

Rome was a key inspiration for modern liberal democracy. The thought and actions of America’s “founding fathers” were infused with Roman ideals, and the United States was presented as the new standard-bearer of republican liberty. But, in their own way, Italian Fascists – not least Mussolini – also attempted to “portray themselves as the rightful heirs of the Roman Empire.”

Rome is also the story of a democratic republic becoming an autocracy when it succumbs to popular frustration, political norms are trampled, and a widespread yearning for a “strongman” leader. Donald Trump’s detractors often liken him to Julius Caesar, pointing to his demagoguery, ruthless pursuit of power, and willingness to violate rules and norms. But his far-right followers often make the same comparison, seeking to portray him as some great imperial conqueror.

Trump’s followers also believe (erroneously) that it was immigration that brought down the Roman Empire. More broadly, far-right forces have suggested that ancient Rome laid the foundations for “white culture.” This helps to explain Princeton classicist Dan-el Padilla Peralta’s view that his discipline is inextricable from a white-imperialist mindset.

Beard challenges this mythology of whiteness, arguing in her 2016 book SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome that the story of the Roman Empire, which was necessarily ethnically diverse, is “the history of people of color.” In fact, the book concludes with Emperor Caracalla’s grant of citizenship to all the empire’s subjects. The old Roman aristocracy lost its privileges, because it had not shared them.

Similarly, the story of Rome has become a playground for patriarchal dreamers. Rome may have had its heroines, but they were typically the mothers and spouses of emperors. Ultimately, Rome was a fundamentally praetorian society that prized valor, honor, and masculinity, or virtus. At the same time, consensual homosexual sex was legal, so ancient Rome can be viewed as an early source of legitimacy for gay rights.

To Israelis, Rome is something else entirely: the story of the Roman Empire evokes the experience of exile, while also highlighting the potentially catastrophic repercussions of a failure to think realistically. Consider the revolt Simon bar Kokhba led against the Roman Empire beginning in 132 CE – the final escalation of the Jewish-Roman wars – which resulted in a horrendous defeat and the obliteration of Jewish life in Judea, whose name was permanently changed by Emperor Hadrian to Palestina.

And yet, as the late Head of Israeli Military Intelligence General Yehoshafat Harkabi, wrote in his seminal The Bar Kokhba Syndrome: Risk and Realism in International Relations, Bar Kokhba’s “irresponsible act of national suicide” instilled in Jews an “admiration for rebelliousness and heroism detached of responsibility for their consequences.” Fortunately, David Ben-Gurion, the founder of the modern State of Israel, had a different mindset: never defy a superpower or go to war without the support of one. Alas, the Jewish messianic zealots in Palestinian lands (renamed again as Judea and Samaria) are bent on repeating Bar Kokhba’s suicidal folly.

Rome is often invoked when describing American hegemony. Pax Romana – a kind of “golden age” of relative peace and prosperity, underpinned by a powerful empire – offered a model for the Pax Americana that emerged after World War II. Just as the struggle for a “common peace” among Greek city-states after the Peloponnesian War ultimately provided the ethical grounds for Rome to take control, relentless war in Europe eventually spurred the US to act as an external guarantor of security and order. Peace, it seems, is often incompatible with full political liberty.

But Pax Americana now appears to be waning – a trend that has invited much speculation about the impeding “fall” of the American “empire.” The groundwork for such speculation was laid in the eighteenth century, when the likes of Edward Gibbon and Montesquieu wrote about the fate of the Roman Empire. Yet the US still has much to learn to avoid its own decline and fall.

Perhaps the most important lesson is that even hegemons require a sense of measure. Rome suffered from what Gibbon described as the “natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness.” The US has been known similarly to lack appropriate humility, especially during its years of uncontested hegemony after the Cold War. It should take care to ensure that hubris does not become its downfall.

But, while historical comparisons can help to illuminate our understanding of the present and future, they offer no guarantees. Not even the so-called Thucydides Trap – the “inevitable” clash between an established hegemon (such as the US) and a rising power (such as China) – should be viewed as an iron law of history, if only because of the prohibitively high price of modern warfare.

This brings us to a key difference between the West today and Rome in its heyday: whereas the Romans expected the future to be a repeat of past glories, faith in progress and renewal is fundamental to the post-Enlightenment Western worldview. Armed with that faith, we can still apply history’s lessons and hope to avoid our forebears’ gravest mistakes.

Shlomo Ben-Ami, a former Israeli foreign minister, is Vice President of the Toledo International Center for Peace and the author of Prophets Without Honor: The 2000 Camp David Summit and the End of the Two-State Solution (Oxford University Press, 2022).

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2024.
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