The American fascination with Rome
Most recently, a book by Cullen Murphy, titled, plainly enough, “Are We Rome?” begins with an extended comparison of President Bush to the emperor Diocletian from the third century A.D. Everything from their respective foreign policies to their retinues of courtiers comes under scrutiny. (It’s a bit of puckish humor that the author, whose sympathies are decidedly of the liberal sort, chooses that particular Roman ruler, who was famous for feeding Christians to the lions.)...
Meanwhile, other commentators have their own comparisons. Conservative bloggers thunder about illegal Mexican immigrants as latter-day versions of the Vandals and Ostrogoths. Fundamentalist pastors like Pat Robertson warn of Neronian moral decay — pornography, abortion, gay marriage — that, they say, is hollowing out our society from within. And it seems as if everyone who watched the HBO series “Rome” has a pet theory on which ancient warlord resembles which modern pol (Pompey as Al Gore, anyone?).
Even Middle Eastern jihadists have joined in. Last November, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, the leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, released an audiotape in which he vowed: “We will not rest from our jihad until we are under the olive trees of Rumieh and we have destroyed the dirty black house — which is called the White House.” The reference to “Rumieh” puzzled translators at first. It is Arabic for the Roman Empire.
What few remember is that America has always been compared to Rome. It’s only the nature of the comparisons that are constantly changing. Nearly a half-century ago, in the aftermath of the McCarthy era, Stanley Kubrick’s “Spartacus” was a thinly veiled attack on the Hollywood blacklist. In 1979, Tinto Brass’s notorious “Caligula” gave us ancient Rome as a Saturday night at Studio 54, with togas.
But it all started long before that, and the comparisons began as positive ones. America’s early leaders thought about Rome quite a lot, comparing themselves to statesmen whose names, unlike those of Nero and Caligula, are all but forgotten today: the noble freedom fighters like the Gracchus brothers, or the virtuous legislators like Cato the Younger. Their emphasis was usually not on the Roman Empire, but rather on the republic that preceded it.
In fact, George Washington’s favorite literary work was a play about Cato by the 18th-century English author Joseph Addison. So fond was he of Addison’s “Cato” that one of the first things he did at the end of the winter of 1778, when his men had scarcely recovered from the frozen misery of Valley Forge, was to arrange a performance by his troops. In the 19th century, an immense marble statue of Washington in the guise of a Roman god — naked except for some strategically placed drapery — actually stood in the rotunda of the United States Capitol. Thomas Jefferson, meanwhile, was painted in a Roman laurel crown by his friend and fellow Revolutionary hero Thaddeus Kosciuszko.