Rome in Three Acts: A Mirror for America

Historical Lessons for Our Time

(Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire 1: The Savage State, 1834.

The first of five paintings from Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire series, this image parallels Rome’s mythic beginnings and introduces the cycle of rise and fall that frames this political drama.)

Rome lasted from 509 B.C.E. to 476 C.E. – nearly one thousand years.

But the Republic, that strange form of government America’s founding fathers so admired, only lasted until 44 B.C.E.

The next 500 years Rome was an empire, ruled by one man, his followers, and his armies.

The empire was an unstable place, a place of great wealth and tremendous violence.

Her rulers were called Caesar, after the man whose political acumen and personal charisma were great enough to conquer the nation that had conquered the world.

The early modern political philosophers, most notably Machiavelli and James Madison, saw the rise of Caesar as the end of Rome.

Everything that made Rome great was undone by its greatest son.

But, in order to understand this, we have to go back to the beginning of our three act drama. understand the three Roman periods

Act 1 begins in 753 B.C.E..

A set of twins is born and raised by a she-wolf. As they grow, they begin to lay the foundations for a great city.

But, believing that human greatness cannot be shared, one brother, Romulus, murders the other brother, Remus, and founds the city.

The Roman Kingdom, seldom mentioned these days, was founded in 753 B.C.E.

And, for a time, things under the monarchy are relatively good.

However, a line of kings, known as the Tarquins, arises, and they are tyrants.

So, at the dramatic apex of Act 1, a man named Lucius Brutus murders the king and banishes his line from the realm.

The Roman Kingdom falls in 509 B.C.E., after more than 200 years, and the Roman Republic is born.

The Roman Republic, the first ever of its kind, comes into being in 509 B.C.E., and the curtain falls as Act 1 ends.

(Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire 2: The Pastoral State, 1834.)

Act 2 begins right where Act 1 left off – with the creation of the Republic.

Quickly, through the civic virtue of its citizens, the integrity of its institutions, and the strength of its military, the Roman Republic comes to dominate the Mediterranean.

First Italy, then Sicily, then Greece, and soon it was engaged in a great war with its most obvious enemy – Carthage.

After decades of war between these two great mediterranean empires, Rome emerged victorious, razed Carthage and her great walls to the ground, and sold her children into slavery across the empire.

(Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire 3: The Consummation of Empire, 1836.)

But sometimes success can be hard to handle.

Without the ever-present threat of the Carthaginians, the leading men of the Republic, the ones whose civic virtue and moral integrity had made Rome great to begin with, began to prioritize themselves over their state.

The integrity of the institutions which had built this vast nation – her courts, her Senators, her bureaucrats – became corrupt.

It was a slow process at first.

But, corruption seeps into a nation’s character the way alcohol seeps into a man’s blood – slowly at first, then all at once.

At one time, it would have been unheard of for a Roman senator or bureaucrat to use his position to enrich himself – to take silver from the public coffers, as it were.

But by 100 B.C.E., less than 50 years after the defeat of Carthage, corruption had become the norm.

And, as is always the case, corruption led to incompetence, incompetence led to disorder, and disorder led to chaos.

The leaders of Rome, the senators and the political class, began pointing their fingers at one another, each one accusing the other of corruption.

Of course, since everyone was guilty, no one could hold anyone else accountable, creating one big joke of a once-revered political system.

Roman virtue? HA!

In this world, a handful of extremely wealthy, extremely powerful Romans decided to join forces and right the ship of state.

These men were named Pompey Magnus, Marcus Crassus, and Julius Caesar.

Were these men of honesty and virtue?

Hardly, but they provided order to a nation in complete disarray.

And the people of Rome were more than happy to trade something theoretical, like Republican values, for something material, like physical security.

Then, Crassus died, and Pompey and Caesar began to fight, dividing Rome into two factions, the Pompey Faction and the Caesar Faction, the Celtics and the Lakers, the Red team and the Blue.

These factions fought each other until, eventually, Caesar’s faction emerged victorious, and Caesar established himself as Dictator-for-Life.

(Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire 4: Destruction, 1836.)

After nearly 500 years without a king, without an autocrat, without a single man in charge, Rome had once again returned to one-man-rule.

But the men of Pompey’s faction conspired and assassinated Caesar, ostensibly with the intention of re-establishing the Republic.

However, after so many years of such gratuitous corruption, no one believed them.

Like the boy who cried wolf, the Senators who assassinated Caesar in the name of Republican virtue had lost all of their credibility.

Even Marcus Brutus, Republican stalwart and descendant of Lucius Brutus, the great King-Killer of Act 1, was not beyond reproach.

The assassins had no favor among the public, and the inheritor of Caesar’s name and popularity, Augustus, defeated them and crowned himself Caesar.

The Roman Republic, that once-great nation, had fallen, and The Roman Empire was born.

And the curtain falls on Act 2 of this Roman drama.

But this play, this political drama we have been discussing, is not just about Rome – it is also about us – Americans living at the end of the Second Act of the great American Republic.

The civic virtue of American citizens and the integrity of American institutions have become farcical in these past few decades.

Political corruption, the use of one’s political position to enrich oneself, used to be a death sentence for an American politician.

Now, it’s practically a prerequisite for the job.

The two factions of American politics, the right and the left, throw mud at each other and accuse one another of corruption, while the American people cannot stop themselves from laughing.

What’s the point of throwing mud at someone who spends their life bathing in manure?

American politics is no longer about ideas and policies – it’s about factionalism, whose team are you on?

If you aren’t with us, you’re against us.

When America was at war with Fascism, when America was at war with Soviet Totalitarianism, we had a collective enemy.

Now, like Rome after Carthage, American virtue has disappeared, and corruption has become the order of the day.

You can blame the Red team, you can blame the Blue team, you can blame your neighbor – you can blame whoever you want – the truth is, corruption is here, and it looks like it’s here to stay.

We are living out the final scenes of Act II in our political drama. We do not know how this Act will end nor how Act III will begin.

But, if this play has a similar structure to the Roman original, Act III might look something like this.

The curtain opens on an august leader, a great man by all accounts, one who brings order and peace back to the nation.

A great leader in exchange for a great republic.

Then, that leader dies, and the nation, no longer a Republic, lives on, under the reign of progressively worse and worse leaders.

The nation is wealthy enough not to collapse, but it is too corrupt to expand.

Stuck in this strange middle ground, it limps along, through history, like a shadow of its former self.

Until, eventually, the very barbarians it once civilized return to feed on its rotting carcass.

And then, one day, the citizens will look at themselves in the mirror, no less barbarous and uncivilized than the vandals around them.

(Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire 5: Desolation, 1836.)

On that day, 500 years after the nation traded its virtue for its comfort, the bells of history will ring, for the greatest nation of its age had finally died.

Not with a bang, but a whimper.

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