January 6, 2016
Is America the new Rome?
12:01AM GMT 09 Mar 2008
Noel Malcolm reviews The New Rome: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America by Cullen Murphy
The American edition of this book, which came out a few months ago, bore the title Are We Rome? Apparently that was the sort of question for which ancient Romans would have used the word 'nonne', expecting the answer 'yes'; for the British edition is baldly entitled The New Rome.
Sidney and Beatrice Webb did something similar when they dropped the question mark from their Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? - but at least they waited a couple of years before they did so.
Cullen Murphy, an author of stylish think-pieces in Atlantic Monthly and Vanity Fair, has become obsessed with the resemblances between the present-day US and ancient Rome.
The big similarity, of course, is in geopolitics: at its height, the Roman Empire was a military superpower which dominated much of what is tendentiously called 'the known world' (known by whom? - answer: by people in the Roman Empire).
Rome's imprint on that large part of the world was not just military. The material culture of Roman life - art and architecture, clothes and food, even including the Romans' disgusting fermented fish sauce - had an overwhelming allure for almost everyone who became part of the empire, or was in regular contact with it.
And for those brought into the empire, Roman law and Roman moral values were powerful influences, often superseding the value-systems they had lived by before. For fish sauce, read McDonald's; for Roman values, liberal democracy (or neo-con dogma, according to taste).
Most of these broad-brush comparisons are obvious and familiar; they are the bread and butter of highbrow op-ed pieces about the 'imperial' status of America today. But Cullen Murphy goes further, using his Roman analogy to make points both about the blinkered mentality of the imperial elite, and about the short-sighted way in which it is now undermining the foundations of its own power.
Click on Link:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/non_fictionreviews/3671722/Is-America-the-new-Rome.html
