Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic

from the works of three Roman historians, Livy, Tacitus, and Suetonius. Nonetheless, Rome still inspires utterly contradictory interpretations, providing a classical backdrop for clashing contemporary political projects.

Three contemporary books illustrate the differences of opinion about the Roman Republic’s end that are alive and flourishing today. The British classicist Anthony Everitt’s Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome’s Greatest Politician is a worthy example of what might be thought of as Western historical orthodoxy: the view that Julius Caesar was a military populist, the leader of the mob against entrenched representatives of the constitutional order, and a tyrant. In this analysis, Cicero, a senator and consul, acted selflessly to try to preserve constitutional government against implacable forces of corruption and the abuse of military power. “During his childhood and youth,” Everitt writes, “Cicero had watched with horror as Rome set about dismantling itself. If he had a mission as an adult, it was to recall the Republic to order.”³

Everitt’s Cicero reminds one of the remarkable career of Senator Robert Byrd, who first took the oath of office on January 7, 1959. While his state has profited from his powerful position in Washington—a great many public buildings in West Virginia are named “Byrd”—he has also tirelessly tried to educate his colleagues about the concept of a “republic” and why, when working properly, it is a bulwark of democracy.

In contrast, author Michael Parenti denigrates Cicero and other constitutionalists. Parenti portrays Caesar as a cross between Juan Peron and Franklin Delano Roosevelt—a ruthless populist. In his book The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People’s History of Ancient Rome, Parenti stresses the class warfare that dominated much of Roman life. His hero is Caesar, a man who came from a well-established family but nonetheless devoted himself to the common man and was murdered in the Senate by a conspiracy of blue bloods. “Caesar seems not to have comprehended that in the conflict between haves and have-nots, the haves are really have-it-alls,” writes Parenti. “The Roman aristocrats lambasted the palest reforms as the worst kind of thievery, the beginning of a calamitous revolutionary leveling, necessitating extreme countermeasures. And they presented their violent retaliation not as an ugly class expediency but as an honorable act on behalf of republican liberty.”⁴ Parenti is repelled by what Cicero later wrote to Brutus, the leader of Caesar’s killers on the Ides of March, 44 BC: “That memorable almost God-like deed of yours is proof against all criticisms; indeed it can never be adequately praised.”⁵

Parenti’s book is not just a paean to Caesar but also a polemic against establishmentarian history. “In the one-sided record that is called history,” he contends, “it has been a long-standing practice to damn popular agitation as the work of riffraff and demagogues.”⁶ He is scandalized that in Gibbon, for example, there is “not a word ... about an empire built upon sacked towns, shattered armies, slaughtered villagers, raped women, enslaved prisoners, plundered lands, burned crops, and mercilessly overtaxed populations.”⁷ Parenti accepts that “democracy, a wonderful invention by the people of history to defend themselves from the power of the wealthy, took tenuous root in ancient Rome,” but he warns that “when their class interests were at stake, the senators had no trouble choosing political dictatorship over the most anemic traces of popular rule and egalitarian economic reform.”⁸

Tom Holland, a leading BBC radio personality who has written highly acclaimed adaptations of Herodotus’s Histories and Virgil’s Aeneid, has produced Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic. Though he comments that “the comparison of Rome to the modern-day United States has become something of a cliche,” he draws a picture of the late Republic that seems a model of the modern United States with its flamboyant excesses of wealth, bad taste, and arrogance, as well as its impulse toward militarism. His social history of republican decadence, highlighting a puerile Roman vision of politics and war, sounds very much like the second Bush administration and the shop-until- you-drop world of American consumerism.

“Celebrity chefs had long been regarded as a particularly pernicious symptom of decadence,” Holland observes. Quoting from Livy’s History of Rome, Holland explains that “back in the virtuous, homespun days of the early Republic, so historians liked to claim, the cook ‘had been the least valuable of slaves,’ but no sooner had the Romans come into contact with the fleshpots of the East than ‘he began to be highly prized, and what had been a mere function instead came to be regarded as high art.’ In a city awash with new money and with no tradition of big spending, cookery had rapidly become an all-consuming craze. Not only cooks but ever more exotic ingredients had been brought into Rome on a ceaseless flood of gold. To those who upheld the traditional values of the Republic, this mania threatened a ruin that was as much moral as financial.”⁹ Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

On empire building, Holland notes, “The Romans killed to inspire terror, not in a savage frenzy but as the disciplined components of a fighting machine.” After the worst Roman defeat of all time—the Carthaginian general Hannibal’s adroit use of his cavalry to destroy eight legions at Cannae in 216 BC—they adopted the same strategy that the United States turned to after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Never again, the Romans swore, would they tolerate the rise of a Mediterranean power like Carthage, “capable of threatening their own survival. Rather than risk that, they felt themselves perfectly justified in launching a preemptive strike against any opponent who appeared to be growing too uppity.”¹⁰

In 1992, when he was the Pentagon’s undersecretary for policy, Paul Wolfowitz enunciated a similar strategy, which he and his colleagues began implementing in 2001 after Bush appointed him undersecretary of defense. According to Patrick E. Tyler, writing in the New York Times, “The Defense Department asserts that America’s political and military mission in the post-Cold War era will be to ensure that no rival superpower is allowed to emerge in Western Europe, Asia, or the territory of the former Soviet Union.... The new [Wolfowitz] draft sketches a world in which there is one dominant military power whose leaders ‘must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.’ “¹¹ In 2002, this vision was officially embedded in the National Security Strategy of the United States, a key policy document. The goal of such megalomanic visions came to be called by the Romans a Pax Romana and by American pundits a Pax Americana.¹²

After the great Roman general Pompey’s conquests in Asia Minor (66-62 BC), including his storming of Jerusalem in 63, “What had once been a toehold in the east was now to be a great tract of provinces. Beyond them was to stretch an even broader crescent of client states. All were to be docile and obedient, and all were to pay a regular tribute. This, henceforward, was what the pax Romana was to mean.”¹³ Holland concludes that, ultimately, “Corruption in the Republic threatened to putrefy the world.”¹⁴ The American record has been comparable: the Bush administration waged preventive war against Iraq, “putrefied” that country through incompetence and massive corruption, and in the process produced global revulsion against the United States— similar to the “world of enemies” that eventually overwhelmed the Roman Empire.¹⁵

Even after two millennia there is little agreement on which of the multitude of comparisons Rome evokes are the most important, but perhaps the one most relevant to present-day America concerns how empire and its inescapable companion, militarism, subtly and insidiously erode the foundations of a republic. The United States took many of its key political principles from its ancient predecessor. Separation of powers, checks and balances, government in accordance with constitutional law, a toleration of slavery, fixed terms in office, the presidential “veto” (Latin for “I forbid”)—all of these ideas were influenced by Roman precedents. John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams often read Cicero and both spoke of him as a personal inspiration. The architects of the new American capital were so taken with Rome that they even named the now filled-in creek that flowed where the Mall is today the “Tiber River.”¹⁶ Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, in writing the Federalist Papers to argue for the ratification of the Constitution, signed their articles with the pseudonym “Publius Valerius Publicola”—who was the third consul of the Roman Republic and the first to personify its values. Yet, as Holland notes, “By the first century BC, there was only one free city left, and that was Rome herself. And then