Part Two: When Romans Stopped Being Roman

Imagine yourself living somewhere in the Roman Empire around A.D. 400.

Your grandfather keeps telling you Rome isn’t what it used to be. Taxes are burdensome, politicians appear corrupt, money doesn’t purchase what it once did, the borders are increasingly difficult to defend, and the government seems incapable of solving one problem without creating another. Foreign-born soldiers are increasingly important to Roman armies, spectacular entertainment remains abundant, enormous wealth exists alongside deep poverty, and nearly everyone has an opinion about who ruined Rome.

Does any of that sound familiar? Perhaps. But this is where historical comparisons can become silly if we’re not careful. 

After all, there are many differences between the historic Roman Empire and the youthful United States of America.

Social Security isn’t the Roman grain dole. The National Football League isn’t the Colosseum. Modern immigrants aren’t Visigoths, and Congress isn’t the Roman Senate—however tempting that comparison occasionally becomes. History isn’t a collection of interchangeable pieces that can be rearranged until ancient Rome looks exactly like twenty-first-century America.

Still, sometimes the echoes are difficult to ignore.

The Roman satirist Juvenal gave history one of its most enduring political phrases: panem et circenses—bread and circuses.

Juvenal wasn’t simply complaining because Rome distributed grain or staged public entertainment. Feeding a huge urban population was a legitimate governmental concern, while public games had long performed religious, social and political functions in Roman society.

His criticism went deeper. Juvenal believed the relationship between citizen and government had changed. Romans who had once participated vigorously in public affairs seemed increasingly satisfied when political power provided material benefits and spectacular entertainment.

The issue wasn’t bread. The problem was what happened when citizenship became consumership.

What happens when citizens judge government primarily by what it gives them rather than what citizenship requires from them?

What happens when entertainment becomes so abundant that people spend more time watching their civilization than participating in it?

The historian Will Durant described later Romans with a memorable phrase: they had become increasingly “brave by proxy.”[1] They could watch other men fight, bleed, and demonstrate courage in the arena, then return home having experienced danger safely from the grandstands.

A prosperous civilization can fall prey to admiring virtues that it increasingly refuses to practice. It can celebrate sacrifice while avoiding sacrifice, praise greatness while rejecting the disciplines that produce greatness, and enjoy an inheritance without replenishing it.

Eventually citizens become spectators to their own civilization. Isn’t that what John F. Kennedy warned in his infamous question: “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country?”

Rome was expensive to operate.

Its government supported armies, fortifications, roads, public works, bureaucracies, and an imperial administration stretching across three continents. As political and military pressures increased, the demand for revenue increased with them.

Durant observed that “The bureaucrats found their task too great for human integrity,” while taxation climbed to support Rome’s growing obligations.[2] Currency also deteriorated as successive emperors reduced the precious-metal content of Roman coins, particularly during the third-century crisis. Monetary instability and inflation followed.

Ancient Rome obviously possessed no Federal Reserve, Medicare, Social Security or modern bond market, so we shouldn’t force an exact comparison onto America.

But Rome learned an economic principle every government eventually encounters: somebody has to pay the bill.

George Washington understood that principle too. In his Farewell Address, he urged Americans to preserve public credit and avoid “the accumulation of debt.” Then he warned against “ungenerously throwing upon posterity the burden which we ourselves ought to bear.”[3]

Washington wasn’t merely giving economic advice. He was making a moral argument. One generation shouldn’t enjoy benefits and send the invoice to the next.

Some problems really are timeless.

Perpetuating the Roman Republic to the next generation.

Now we reach one of the most controversial Roman-American comparisons: immigration. The popular version says Rome opened its borders, barbarians poured in, and the Empire collapsed.

It makes political points, but it’s far too simple…and inaccurate.

Rome had been absorbing outsiders for centuries, and its ability to do so was actually one of its great strengths. Conquered peoples became allies, provincials became citizens, foreigners served in Roman armies, and men born hundreds or even thousands of miles from Rome eventually became senators, generals and emperors.

Rome grew partly because it knew how to make Romans.

But assimilation required something important: there had to be a recognizable Roman civilization into which newcomers could assimilate.

By the fourth century, enormous population movements were occurring while Roman political, military and economic institutions were already under severe pressure. In A.D. 376, large numbers of Goths fleeing the Huns were permitted to cross the Danube into Roman territory. Corrupt officials exploited them, food became scarce, resentment intensified, and rebellion followed.

Two years later, at Adrianople, Rome paid dearly for the failure. A major Roman army was destroyed, and Emperor Valens was killed.

Durant later wondered whether Rome might sometimes have benefited by slowing migration sufficiently “to let assimilation catch up with infiltration.”[4] His terminology belongs to the 1940s, but Durant’s larger point remains relevant: immigration and assimilation aren’t the same thing.

America has repeatedly demonstrated that immigrants can strengthen a nation economically, intellectually, and culturally.

Successful immigration, however, involves more than crossing a geographic boundary. It requires a nation confident enough in its identity to invite newcomers into a shared language, constitutional order, historical memory, civic culture, responsibilities and future.

Rome’s eventual problem wasn’t simply that foreigners entered Roman territory. Outsiders had entered Rome for centuries and often strengthened it.

The deeper problem was that Rome became increasingly less capable of making newcomers “Roman” because Rome itself was becoming less certain of what “being Roman” meant.

And eventually Rome struggled to make even its own people “Roman.” And that’s when the wheels really came off this historic Republic. When patriotism and pride in being “Roman” were no longer in fashion, Rome, as a distinct and superior culture in its time, began to decline.

When virtue goes out of style, stick a fork in it.

Roman writers were often their civilization’s harshest critics. Sallust attacked greed and ambition. Juvenal mocked decadence and hypocrisy. Tacitus lamented corruption and lost liberty. Christian writers later condemned avarice, cruelty, injustice, and sexual immorality.

We shouldn’t romanticize early Rome. Slavery, political corruption, prostitution, violence and immorality existed during periods of Roman expansion as well as decline. Ancient moralists could exaggerate, just as moral critics still do today.

But beneath their complaints was a serious question:

Can a civilization remain strong after the virtues that created it weaken?

America’s Founders repeatedly asked the same thing…and repeatedly stated their conviction:

John Hancock: “Sensible of the importance of Christian piety and virtue to the order and happiness of a state, I cannot but earnestly commend to you every measure for their support and encouragement.”

Patrick Henry: “The great pillars of all government and of social life [are] virtue, morality, and religion. This is the armor, my friend, and this alone, that renders us invincible.”

Thomas Jefferson: “The practice of morality being necessary for the well being of society, He [God] has taken care to impress its precepts so indelibly on our hearts that they shall not be effaced by the subtleties of our brain. We all agree in the obligation of the moral principles of Jesus and nowhere will they be found delivered in greater purity than in His discourses.“

Gouverneur Morris: “Your good morals in the army give me sincere pleasure as it hath long been my fixed opinion that virtue and religion are the great sources of human happiness.“

Jedidiah Morris: “To the kindly influence of Christianity we owe that degree of civil freedom and political and social happiness[virtue] which mankind now enjoys. All efforts made to destroy the foundations of our Holy Religion ultimately tend to the subversion also of our political freedom and happiness [virtue].”

Joseph Story: “I verily believe that Christianity is necessary to support a civil society and shall ever attend to its institutions and acknowledge its precepts as the pure and natural sources of private and social happiness.”

George Washington: “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports…And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle…Can it be, that Providence has not connected the permanent felicity of a nation with its virtue? …Alas! is it rendered impossible by its vices?[5]

Daniel Webster: “[T]he Christian religion – its general principles – must ever be regarded among us as the foundation of civil society…Whatever makes men good Christians, makes them good citizens.”

Noah Webster: “[T]he Christian religion… is the basis, or rather the source, of all genuine freedom in government… I am persuaded that no civil government of a republican form can exist and be durable in which the principles of Christianity have not a controlling influence.“

John Witherspoon: “[H]e is the best friend to American liberty who is the most sincere and active in promoting true and undefiled religion, and who sets himself with the greatest firmness to bear down profanity and immorality of every kind. Whoever is an avowed enemy of God, I scruple not to call him an enemy to his country.“

Their reasoning rested upon an idea that modern Americans sometimes overlook: self-government requires self-governed people.

A free society cannot place a police officer in every home, a regulator inside every business, a judge inside every relationship or a government monitor inside every conscience. Something has to happen within the citizen.

Honesty, responsibility, restraint, courage, duty and integrity reduce the amount of external coercion necessary to keep society functioning.

Government can punish theft, but it cannot create honesty. It can prohibit violence, but it cannot create self-control. It can enforce contracts, but it cannot create trust. Government can write a Constitution, establish courts and pass laws, but it cannot manufacture character.

When people become less capable of governing themselves, somebody eventually has to do more governing for them.

Then something extraordinary happened during Rome’s long decline. Rome eventually fell in the West, but Christianity survived

This is particularly interesting because Edward Gibbon famously assigned Christianity some responsibility for weakening traditional Roman civic and military culture. Historians have debated that interpretation for more than two centuries, but Gibbon’s own assessment was more complicated than is sometimes remembered. He also described Christianity as “a pure, benevolent, and universal system of ethics.”[6]

Will Durant was more direct in rejecting the idea that Christianity destroyed Rome: “Rome was not destroyed by Christianity, any more than by barbarian invasion; it was an empty shell when Christianity rose to influence and invasion came.”[7]

Then Durant offered one of the most memorable sentences in his eleven-volume Story of Civilization:

“Caesar and Christ had met in the arena, and Christ had won.”[8]

Consider the irony. Emperors who persecuted Christians died and were eventually forgotten. The Western Empire declined and disappeared. The Colosseum eventually fell into ruin, but Christianity remained.

Churches, bishops, monasteries, scholars and Christian communities helped preserve manuscripts, education, charity and important elements of classical civilization after Roman political authority fragmented. Even Gibbon conceded that Christianity eventually “broke the violence of the fall” and softened the peoples who inherited Rome’s western territories.[9]

For Christians, there is an important distinction here. Christianity’s future doesn’t depend upon America’s future. The Kingdom of God survived Rome and can certainly survive any decline, fall, or rise in these United States.

America, however, may not be equally indifferent to the disappearance of the moral virtues required to sustain republican liberty.

I pledge allegiance to…the republic…

In September 1787, after months of debate behind closed doors in Philadelphia, the Constitutional Convention finished its work. James McHenry of Maryland attended the sessions. He was a physician, Revolutionary War veteran, and Convention delegate who would later serve as United States Secretary of War.

McHenry recorded a wonderful exchange between Benjamin Franklin and a prominent Philadelphia resident, Elizabeth Willing Powel. Mrs. Powel asked Franklin what kind of government the delegates had produced: “a republic or a monarchy?”

Franklin answered: “A republic … if you can keep it.”[10]

Those six words contain the entire problem. The Constitution could create offices, divide powers, establish courts and restrain government. It couldn’t guarantee that future Americans would preserve what the Founders had created.

Every generation inherits something it hadn’t built. And every generation decides what to do with it.

That’s why Rome matters. Not because Washington is ancient Rome with electricity, not because every modern American controversy has a convenient Roman counterpart, and certainly not because history guarantees that America will suffer Rome’s fate.

Rome matters because it demonstrates something prosperous civilizations easily forget:

Nothing guarantees that what one generation builds another generation will preserve.

Rome possessed armies, wealth, laws, engineers, roads, aqueducts, magnificent cities and centuries of history. What it eventually lacked was sufficient political and social capacity to sustain everything earlier Romans had created.

And the deterioration didn’t happen overnight.

A precedent was abandoned here, another responsibility surrendered there. Another debt was postponed, another institution weakened, another political restraint ignored. Another generation became accustomed to conditions an earlier generation might have considered unacceptable.

Eventually people still called their civilization Rome.

But the Rome they inhabited was fundamentally different from the Rome their ancestors had built.

So perhaps “Is America just another ancient Rome?” isn’t the most important question. Franklin’s question is better: Can we keep the Republic?

Rome eventually couldn’t. America still can. History isn’t prophecy, and Rome’s ruins aren’t America’s destiny. However, they do offer something far more useful: a warning.

And, thankfully, “we the people” still have time to listen and correct our course.

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ENDNOTES

1. Will Durant, The Story of Civilization, vol. 3, Caesar and Christ: A History of Roman Civilization and of Christianity from Their Beginnings to A.D. 325 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1944), discussion of Roman spectacle and changing civic and martial character.

2. Durant, Caesar and Christ, discussion of later imperial administration, bureaucracy, taxation and monetary instability.

3. George Washington, Farewell Address, September 19, 1796. Washington urged Americans to preserve public credit, avoid “the accumulation of debt,” and refrain from “ungenerously throwing upon posterity the burden which we ourselves ought to bear.”

4. Durant, Caesar and Christ, 366. Durant suggested that Rome might occasionally have slowed migration sufficiently “to let assimilation catch up with infiltration.”

5. Washington, Farewell Address, September 19, 1796. Washington wrote: “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports,” adding that “virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.”

6. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chap. 20. Gibbon described Christianity as “a pure, benevolent, and universal system of ethics.”

7. Durant, Caesar and Christ, 667–68. Durant wrote: “Rome was not destroyed by Christianity, any more than by barbarian invasion; it was an empty shell when Christianity rose to influence and invasion came.”

8. Durant, Caesar and Christ, 652: “Caesar and Christ had met in the arena, and Christ had won.”

9. Gibbon, Decline and Fall, chap. 38. Gibbon acknowledged that Christianity eventually “broke the violence of the fall, and mollified the ferocious temper of the conquerors.”

10. James McHenry, diary entry, September 18, 1787, James McHenry Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. McHenry recorded: “a lady asked Dr. Franklin well Doctor what have we got a republic or a monarchy—A republic replied the Doctor if you can keep it.” McHenry then identified the woman: “The lady here aluded to was Mrs. Powel of Philadelphia.”