The Score: Rome 1,500, U.S. 200

By Stefan Kanfer

Americans have been so busy celebrating their anniversary that a historic event of equal significance has gone unmarked. This summer commemorates the birth of one great state and the death of another. Fifteen hundred years ago, on Aug. 28, A.D. 476, Romulus Augustulus, the last Emperor of the West, abandoned his throne to Odoacer, a leader of Germanic tribes. Thus did the Roman Empire fall.

Or did it? Observing the self-congratulatory excesses of Bicentennial America, some pop historians have found the empire's obituary a bit premature. Edward Gibbon's celebrated attribution of Rome's fall to "the triumph of barbarism and religion" has been supplanted by a more trenchant aphorism. "The decline of Rome," wrote Gibbon, "was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness."

That solemn judgment echoes through the works of several modern historical theorists, who point like hour hands to the parallel decline of the modern West. Oswald Spengler believed that the historical cycle--both Roman and industrial--ends in megalopolis, where man coheres "unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter of fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful ..." Arnold Toynbee, in his monumental A Study of History, charted Rome and America through similar cycles of triumph, disintegration and collapse; like the empire of Augustus and Tiberius, imperial America could end in "a schism in the soul."

Other lesser observers have made blatant comparisons. In 1968 The New Republic editorially linked the assassinations of Gaius and Tiberius Gracchus, two reforming fraternal politicians of Rome who lived more than a century before Christ, with the murders of John and Robert Kennedy. At a background briefing for press executives a year before Watergate, Richard Nixon spoke of the "great civilizations of the past, subject to the decadence that eventually destroys the civilization." Nixon went on to speculate that "the U.S. is now reaching that period." Although he agrees with Nixon on hardly any other subject, Novelist Gore Vidal--a latter-day Juvenal whose patrician life-style is as celebrated in Rome as in New York--finds that in America, "Caesars are converging on the forum. There are storm warnings ahead."

These tocsins resound in French Journalist Amaury de Riencourt's recent The American Empire, which envisions an Americanization of the world comparable to what Rome achieved when the Mediterranean bordered the known universe. Leaders of government and multinational business are the coming Caesars. U.S. foreign policy, however well intentioned, is an imperial thrust at Europe, Asia and Africa. "Roman citizenship," De Riencourt explains, "was eventually granted to all men dwelling within the borders of the empire. Today, as the unacknowledged American empire strives to find its shape and its limits, the same ecumenical dream is beginning to haunt the lands of Western civilization."

Zenith of Vice. "The fashion is now to dwell on the deadly analogies between the Roman world and our own," wrote Herbert Muller in The Uses of the Past, "in the suspicion that history may repeat itself after all." At first glance, some of those analogies seem not merely intriguing but obvious. Historian Michael Grant divides his The Fall of the Roman Empire into six broad categories: "The Failure of the Army," "The Gulfs Between the Classes," "The Credibility Gap," "The Partnerships That Failed," "The Groups That Opted Out" and "The Undermining Effort." The echoes of the Old World and this one are chilling. In the final days of the empire, military catastrophe drained the national morale and the public treasury. Inflation grew rampant; unemployment burgeoned and citizens complained about inequities in the imperial tax structure. Complained Salvian, a 5th century presbyter at Marseille: "Taxation, however harsh and brutal, would be less severe if all shared equally in the common lot. But the situation is made more shameful and disastrous by the fact that we all do not bear the burden together."

The consequence, observes Grant, was that thousands of disaffected peasants and slaves went underground. "These guerrilla groups," he reasons, were "the equivalents of today's dropout terrorists, likewise thrown up and thrown out by social systems they find unacceptable." Corruption infected a swollen bureaucracy and licentiousness became the ordure of the day. "We are arrived at the zenith of vice," boomed Juvenal, "and posterity will never be able to surpass us." Perhaps not, but it seems to be making a vigorous effort. The massage salons of American towns are versions of Petronian ritual; Penthouse and Hustler proliferate on New York newsstands; Pompeii had its pornography memorialized in frescoes.

Public entertainment in the imperial city assumed an influence not unlike that of television today. Armies of Roman unemployed, living on a dole from the state, were diverted by athletic contests and theatrical spectacles. At the Colosseum, some 50,000 watched gladiators in combat with wild beasts. In the Circus Maximus, 260,000 cheered on charioteers as they raced in perilous Ben-Hur style. To supply those circuses, hunters fanned through the empire, caging behemoths and great wild cats. So many animals were rounded up that even then there were endangered species: the hippopotamus was made extinct in Nubia, the lion in Mesopotamia, the elephant in North Africa. Sport was the adult's amusement and the child's obsession. Rather like a querulous Harvard professor, Tacitus complained that few students of 1st century Rome "are to be found who talk of any other subjects in their homes, and whenever we enter a classroom, what else is the conversation of the youths?" Ancient witnesses to Rome's concern about modes of dress have a distinctly modern ring. "I cannot keep track of fashion," Ovid complained. "Every day, it seems, brings in a different style."

Series of Revolts. Today the names are different but the phases are familiar. The overextended superpower, the mean streets of the wrecked cities, the expensively disastrous foreign ventures, the runaway prices, the hedonism --who can blame social historians for their sardonic dej`a view?

Beyond the surface similarities, though, the analogies simply do not hold. True, the U.S. after World War II was the world's international policeman against Communism, as Rome was against the barbarians when the Mediterranean was known as the mare nostrum. True, war and inflation have wrought powerful alterations in American society. There remain inequities in taxes and income. But compared with modern America, the Roman Empire was a constricted society, severely limited in power and communication. It suffered through a series of revolts and insurrections, and proved incapable of change. The U.S. has nothing to compare with Rome's great proletarian under class, which had no voice in government. Even after Constantine accepted and adopted Christianity as the state religion, the ideal of equality for all men was unobserved; this, after all, was a society supported by the labor of slaves. The foreign conquests pursued by imperial armies were backed by the people until taxes grew too great. The very idea of ending a war on moral grounds was beyond the scope of Emperors, freedmen and plebeians. Expanding the bounds and privileges of the empire, Romans tried to homogenize all alien civilizations they touched; the U.S. burns in a fever of ethnicity. Americans hunger for new technology, new machines, new spatial frontiers to conquer. By contrast, observed H.G. Wells in The Outline of History, "the incuriousness of the Roman rich and their Roman rulers was more massive and monumental even than their architecture." Their economics were founded on ignorance; the laissez-faire policies of the Emperors were nothing more than a lack of ideas. Science was superstition; Archimedes, the great physicist, was slain by Roman soldiers while writing mathematical figures in the sands. Even navigational skills were neglected; Rome's lumbering vessels hugged the shores instead of exploring the open sea.

Far more significant are the gaps in attitude. Invaders from the north and east--Goths, Persians, Vandals, Franks --might have been repelled by the Roman militia. What the old empire could not withstand was the pusillanimity within. When Rome fell, it was a fatigued society, sustained by delusions of past conquests. As the empire contracted against barbarian onslaught, St. Cyprian, 3rd century Bishop of Carthage, mourned: "The world has grown old, and does not remain in its former vigor. It bears witness to its own decline.

The rainfall and the sun's warmth are both diminishing; the metals are nearly exhausted; the husbandman is failing in the fields."

In the end, Rome suffered less from barbarians, less from civil strife and debt than from a failure of its collective imagination and spirit. The empire that built the ancient world's greatest roads, that created a profound system of laws, that gave the world a culture, a language and a sustained peace succumbed at last to a deficiency of energy and will. There is no such parallel in American life. In deed, an ingenious nation that can still produce Viking and the new language of CB chatter, annual medical break throughs and quadrennial pre-election skirmishes, seems to suffer from an opposite affliction -- an excess of zeal and ambition.

Challenge of Events. It is, of course, still possible that the U.S. may end much as Rome did: its codes defiled, its cities scourged, its self-absorbed people consumed by instant gratification that is neither instantaneous nor gratifying. The decisions have yet to be written; the outcome has still to be acted.

Reflecting on the collapse of Rome, Edith Hamilton, one of the most eminent classical scholars of this century, observed: "It is worth our while to perceive that the final reason for Rome's defeat was the failure of mind and spirit to rise to a new and great opportunity, to meet the challenge of new and great events." Bicentennial America may suffer from internal malaise and external buffeting, but it can hardly be said to be incurious, and it has not shrunk from the challenge of events. Upon the 200th birthday of the U.S. and the 1,500th anniversary of the demise of the ancient regime, it is consoling to remember that, be it ever so humbling, there was no place like Rome.

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