Cincinnatus or Benedict?

I always thought the fall of Rome was brought on because it ran out of easily conquerable peoples to exact tributes from, as well as trying to hold said peoples under central rule.

I read your column in the paper on Sunday, and, as a classicist, I thought it was very good.

Aaron--

The borders of the Roman Empire were, for the most part, fairly stable for the last few hundred years before the fall of the Western Empire. The last significant conquest that was held for any length of time was Britain.

The real problem was that the border was so long and so hard to defend, particularly since the northern border was under constant pressure from peoples (mainly Germans), who were themselves under constant pressure from other peoples pushing against them from the East. It just became far too difficult and costly to defend this border, particularly since a military that was developed for conquest was not necessarily well suited for border patrol.

The fact that the government became far removed from the people also didn't help, since this distance diluted the loyalty that the people felt towards the state. One of the things that really brought about the end was when people realized that they could no longer depend on the central government for protection, and turned instead to more local authorities, taking their loyalties with them. By the time the last emperor in West was formally deposted (Romulus Augustulus in 476), few really cared anymore.

What is interesting is that, with few exceptions (such as the two Jewish revolts), there was relatively little internal political strife. The people under Roman rule were, for the most part, content to be so. Life under the Empire opened up possibilities and opportunities that weren't there before, for trade, travel, education, etc. I don't want to paint too rosy a picture of life in the Roman Empire, but the image we're sometimes given of millions of people desperate to throw off the Roman yoke just isn't true. Rome really was the first nation-state in something like a modern sense, with a kind of universal citizenship that wasn't linked to one's ethnic background.

When the Goths and other tribes swarmed across the borders in the 5th century, they weren't trying to destroy the Roman state; they were trying to take it over, because they wanted what it had.

The collapse in the West came relatively quickly, over the course of a single century. In 400 most of the Western Empire was relatively intact. By 500 it was gone.

But the real question is not why Rome "fell". The really interesting question is why such an unwieldy state lasted as long as it did (and of course continued in the East). I think it lasted as long as it did because it represented a civilization whose values and achievements inspired people, who wanted to be part of it.

Some say Dr. Ron Paul is the modern Cincinnatus. He is not going to be president, but he may set the stage for bigger movements later.

And Benedict?

Well, obviously Pope Benedict comes to mind. "De Gloria Olivae" or "The Glory of the Olive"?

Or many Benedict here is just a strawman for a degreed of withdrawl from the world.

PS -- Cincinnatus, of course, was a legendary figure who probably never existed. I hope that isn't somehow symbolic.

I recommend Garry Wills' book *Cincinnatus*. He talks about how the Founders of this country consciously turned to the Roman Republic as a source of inspiration, imagery, architecture, etc.

Of course Cincinnatus himself was an inspirational figure for the officers of the Continental Army, who saw them as civilians who, like Cincinnatus, answered the call of their country and then returned to civilian life. After the war they formed the Society of the Cincinnati (plural of Cincinnatus), the first American veterans' association. The city was named after the Society.

"wear" not "bear." sorry

Lately the comparison seems to be with the first century when the republic became an empire, rather than the fifth.

first things first,

I'm not sure what you mean by "public prayer," but I do know that it is not "illegal to pray in school." Some people just think it is, and if you are challenged on that,contact the Rutherford Institute at www.rutherford.org. They often take up such cases at no charge.

Our empire is a sphere of influence and network of allies, rather than a territory directly under our control. Even the early Roman Empire often preferred to exercise power indirectly, through client kings (e.g., Herod the Great). See Edward Luttwak's The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire.

We have military bases and military commitments all over the world. I think that qualifies us as a global empire, even if we don't control all that territory directly.

Scurvy --

I didn't realize that the Society of the Cincinnati was still around. I know that the proposal to make membership hereditary led many people to fear that it would become the nucleus of a hereditary aristocracy in this country, and led George Washington to resign as president of the Society.

One of the reasons why Americans make poor imperialists in the traditional sense is because we don't have the people who are willing to live in a remote country for 10-20 years and, essentially, "go native", the way the British did. I remember after 9/11 someone in the CIA was talking about why they had so few agents placed in places like Afghanistan, and he said, "Operations where diarrhea is a way of life don't happen." Well, if you really want that intelligence, you might have to sacrifice some of your personal comfort. T.E. Lawrence was able to accomplish what he did with the Arabs because he was willing to live without modern plumbing for long periods of time. Empire requires some sacrifice from the imperial power. And we're just not willing to make these sacrifices, these investments of time.

As you say, we have such a short attention span. Both the Romans and British were patient, and were willing to think in terms of years, if not decades, not in terms of months or days or the next 24-hour news cycle.

Neither option works. If we are Rome, we're the late Republican Rome. Its too late to be Cincinnatus and too early to be Benedict. (i.e., we can't go back to a virtuous, agrarian America but we're not going to collapse either. We're going to dissolve into a worldwide society, which is effectively what Rome did vis-a-vis the Mediterranean). Therefore we can only be Cato or Cicero or one of those fellows, who were Cincinnatus-lite. I don't know what the Benedictine equivalent would be. Something sui generis and worth trying.

I've very interested in seeing the stuff you've been doing about the Benedict option, but its important to realize that we're in a different situation than Benedict. The light of civilization was going out, for him. For us its the light of a certain fuller and wholer morality and aesthetics, something like that. Maybe what you're really looking for is something like the Jewish option.

Victor D. Hanson reviewed this book in the National Review and if you read the review carefully, its pretty clear that he's saying that comparisons of modern American to the late Republic are pretty sensible but comparisons to the late Empire are ridiculous.

PS -- Cincinnatus, of course, was a legendary figure who probably never existed. I hope that isn't somehow symbolic. I recommend Garry Wills' book *Cincinnatus*.

Sigh. The last refuge of an advocate like Wills of an untenable idea like his "Cincinnatus never existed" is to posture as though he knows so much more than his critics. Sorry, after he got hoaxed by a con man like Bellesiles, Wills fails to impress or intimidate me anymore on historical subjects.

Which Romans of the time who challenged the validity of Livy's account of the origin of the Republic? I know that Cicero never gave an alternative account of the establishment of the republic. If you imagine that no one before the 2nd century BC ever recorded anything
about contemporary issues and the men engaged in them -- that is too
extreme a position even for a zealot to take, and even Wills never dares make such an argument. Hmmm, even if there was no one engaged in the formal study of the past until the late Republic, could it be that generations of a literate society might leave behind records by which future generations could learn the names of people important in the past and what they had done?

Wills and other similarly puffed-up mountebanks like Niebuhr pretend that they know what records were existent in the day of Augustus. They guess that there were none relating to the start of the republic. They imagine that Livy was unreliable in the extreme, because he gives details about stuff he could know nothing about. And why could he know nothing about the fall of the last Roman kings? Because those geniuses fancy they know the inadequacy of his records. Their arguments are circular, spun from unproven assumptions.

Should reincarnation be a fact, they'll have lots of fun in a couple
millennia. They can argue that the whole Clinton Administration is a
fabrication. "The tale of Monica Lewinski closely parallels the stories of the ancient's soap operas...It is naive to assume that a president would have foolishly concealed such a liaison and unthinkable that any Congress would have gone any distance to remove the president...Clinton is, in fact, a mythical figure named for a portion of the female anatomy, no more deserving of credence than "Prime Minister Churchill", whose very name reflects the antique custom of putting houses of God on high ground..."

Their tortured arguments boil down to the odd assertion that: "The
history that really happens isn't interesting." The tale of Brutus standing up for Lucretia's memory and of a royal dynasty toppling over the scandal and of a people resisting the re-imposition of that control by outside forces --- gosh, do Wills and Niebuhr worry that students might actually stay awake in class?

Face it, history shows that implausible, emotionally riveting stories
are the stuff of fact over centuries. When you have one version of what happened, one shouldn't poo-poo it because he or she personally would rather have a different story.