Men of Cornwall stop your dreaming;
Can't you see their spearpoints gleaming?
See their warriors' pennants streaming
To this battlefield.
Men of Cornwall stand ye steady;
It cannot be ever said ye
for the battle were not ready;
Stand and never yield
Are We Ready, Able to Be Romans?
James P. Pinkerton
December 18, 2003
As I write these words, I am looking down at four different currency notes that I collected last week in Syria and Jordan, all printed by their governments and which feature prominently images of ancient Romans, and their ruins and statues.
At first glance it seems odd - why does the Roman Empire grip the imagination of Middle Eastern countries, and ours? Now that American soldiers are retracing the steps of the Roman emperor Trajan in Iraq, what lessons should we learn?
To be sure, Roman-era archaeological sites, such as Palmyra and Jerash, are major tourist attractions in both Syria and Jordan. But the prominence of such imagery bespeaks something deeper: 2000 years later, the Roman Empire is in their heads.
And how could it be otherwise? In downtown Damascus, one sees a Roman arch next to the cathedral-sized Umayyad mosque - itself built on the site of a Roman temple of Jupiter. In the middle of Amman, the Roman amphitheater, still in use, is the size of the Hollywood Bowl. These remains of past days naturally give rise to heady thoughts about the timelessness of martial glory and political power.
It's not just Arabs who are still influenced by the Romans. At its peak, the empire stretched from the British Isles to the Persian Gulf, from Eastern Europe to North Africa. In all those places, one can find ruins, words, concepts inherited from Rome. The German word "Kaiser" and the Russian word "Tsar," for example, are both derived from the Latin word "Caesar."
The Roman legacy is visible even in faraway America, dotted with buildings done in the Greco-Roman style, where key political words such as "republic" and "senate" and "judiciary" are all derived from Latin.
In today's America, when people speak of being "in a public forum," or "in the arena" they are echoing expressions from 20 centuries ago. Those who thrill to the movie "Gladiator," or gamble at Caesar's Palace, or chomp away on Little Caesars pizza, are all paying homage to Rome, the Eternal City.
Pop culture aside, the pundits take the Roman Empire seriously, both pro and con. Critics on the left, such as Gore Vidal, have been arguing that America is an imperial power since the 1960s. "Imperial," of course, comes from the Latin imperium.
But what's changed in the last decade is that observers on the right have gone from rejecting that criticism to embracing it. In 1998, for example, neoconservative writer Robert Kagan published an essay in Foreign Policy entitled "The Benevolent Empire." While Kagan didn't argue that the United States should be like the Romans, he nevertheless used the Roman empire as his benchmark for political power. The point of his article was that Washington should be more forthright about its benevolent imperial aims.
But the Romans, of course, were hardly benevolent. Jews and Christians, for example, both have occasion to reflect on the brutality of the Romans in their religious observance. In Judaic tradition, the Romans, destroyers of the Temple, are remembered as the descendants of Esau; which is to say, evil incarnated. In the Yom Kippur liturgy, the congregants read about the Ten Martyrs, put to death by the Romans. And the forthcoming Mel Gibson movie, "The Passion of the Christ," will remind everyone of who did the actual scourging and crucifying of Jesus.
For the Romans, the putting down of Jewish rebellions, or the persecution of Christians, was all part of empire-maintenance. They were equal-opportunity oppressors. In the National Museum of Damascus is a replica of Trajan's Column, built in second-century Rome by Apollodorus, who hailed from Damascus. The friezes on the column depict Trajan's conquest of Dacia - modern-day Romania. In blood-loving detail, the sculptures depict the carnage of battle, even the mass suicide of Dacians, unwilling to be enslaved by the Romans. Trajan, not satisfied with that conquest, went on conquer Mesopotamia - our Iraq.
Today, the Americans are having trouble in the same place, and many right-wing intellectuals urge a Roman-style toughening of tactics. Princeton's Angelo Codevilla, for example, writes in The Claremont Review of Books that those Americans who dream of "gentle imperialism that would hold Iraq together, spreading liberal democracy" are, in fact, dreaming. Uncle Sam could lose in Iraq, Codevilla warns, because "America has found itself on the short end of the balance sheet of fear."
Some argue that the Americans have been plenty tough. Last Thursday's USA Today devoted more than 4,000 words to the Pentagon's use of cluster bombs - big bombs that contain smaller bombs that can explode days or years later - that have killed, according to one estimate, 372 Iraqi civilians. And the Dec. 15 issue of The New Yorker reports on American efforts to launch a program of "pre-emptive manhunting" against suspected Iraqi insurgents.
As author Seymour Hersh observes, this new program begs comparison to the Vietnam War's Operation Phoenix, in which teams of American irregulars combed the countryside for enemies. Estimates of the number of Vietnamese killed in this operation range between 20,000 and 41,000.
War is always hell, but the two questions raised by such operations are (a) whether even minimum standards of Geneva Convention-type rules were upheld, and (b) whether the program was effective in winning the war. In retrospect, Operation Phoenix seems to have flunked both tests: it was brutal, and it didn't work.
Indeed, in Iraq, the Americans face an even greater challenge than in Vietnam. The focus of the fighting in Southeast Asia was anti-communism. Democracy for South Vietnam was an afterthought.
But in today's Middle East, democracy is front and center. As President George W. Bush said on Monday, "A free and peaceful Iraq . . . will be a transforming event in a part of the world where hatred and violence are bred." Persuading free Iraqis to vote for a pro-American government in the midst of major combat operations may be prove difficult.
The Romans, of course, didn't worry about democracy. What they wanted was docility. They took imperial management seriously. An ambitious young Roman would head for the frontier of Germania or Armenia with the thought that he would live there for most or all of his life. The prospect of making a fortune through plunder was part of the lure.
And for ordinary soldiers, enlistment in a Roman legion was typically a 20-year hitch and, when they retired, surviving legionaries on the fringes of empire were encouraged to settle there, on land seized from the locals. It was an iron-fisted system, and it lasted like iron - not forever, but for a long time.
The question today is whether Americans have the means to achieve their ends. Bush speaks of a "generational commitment" to Iraq and to the cause of transforming the Middle East. But do we have determination and the fortitude to see "benevolent imperial" projects through to completion?
A single item from the Department of Defense news service indicates how imperialism plays out when it moves from theory to practice. The press release tells of the Dec. 10 death of Pfc. Jerrick M. Petty, 25, of Idaho Falls, Idaho. Petty, of the 101st Airborne, was killed in Mosul, Iraq. In the flat phraseology of the Pentagon, "While guarding a gas station, Petty was attacked by enemy forces." Are we prepared for generations of items such as that?
At the same time, has the nature of countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq changed since Roman times? Men fighting with swords and spears never had to confront modern nationalism fueled on by mass communication. And they never had to worry about media reports of their brutality affecting world opinion.
The Romans made a kind of Faustian bargain. They gained their empire, but the terms of their diabolic contract were written in blood - their own, as well as their victims'.
The Romans proved that it's possible to achieve historic immortality, but also that there's lot of mortality along the way. Those who trod the path of the Romans trod a path strewn with skulls.
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