My husband and I were visiting the Coliseum in Rome three years ago. Our talkative and self-deprecating Roman tour guide, a rare find among boisterous Italians, commented, while pointing to the Coliseum, that he did not know what happened to Rome, they used to be such great architects, engineers, and builders. He added that they devolved into Italians who take months to complete a simple job. When projects are finished, they are full of errors, and every team member blames somebody else. We laughed in agreement, having spent time in northern Italy and having dealt with the ridiculous bureaucracy. We had spent once all day driving from one office to another just to pay a landline phone bill.
What happened to Rome? They built the world’s greatest empire, the greatest military, the longest network of roads, paved streets, raised pavements, city grids, indoor and outdoor plumbing, marble palaces, bridges, military portable hospitals, portable bridges, indoor and outdoor water fountains, public baths with heated swimming pools, heated marble floors, extensive gyms, self-supporting cupolas, eleven aqueducts, just to name a few accomplishments. Why did their civilization collapse in 476 A.D. when the last emperor resident in the West, Romulus was deposed at Ravenna? The eastern empire (the Byzantine Empire) did not fall until 1453 when the last bastion, Constantinople, fell to the Turks, to Islam. Are there parallels between Rome and our Constitutional Republic?
Many factors have been debated such as Christianity, the rise of Islam, moral decadence, greed, invasions by barbarians, especially Goths and Vandals, lead poisoning, monetary issues, inflation, corruption, military inability to rule such a vast empire and defend its borders, even after it split into the Western and Eastern Empire.
Edward Gibbon concentrates on four reasons for the decline of Rome. “After a diligent inquiry, I can discern four principal causes of the ruin of Rome, which continued to operate in a period of more than a thousand years: the injuries of time and nature, the hostile attacks of the barbarians and Christians, the use and abuse of the materials, and the domestic quarrels of the Romans.”
The domestic quarrels of the Romans are interesting to explore because Gibbon refers to peace as having been disturbed by frequent seditions, domestic hostilities, and private wars between the nobles and the people, violating the laws of the Code and of the Gospel.
The earlier history of the empire produced a slow decline over the centuries. Edward Gibbon stated, “The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness.” Conquest yielded prosperity and, as soon as it waned, the empire folded like a house of cards, crushing under its own weight. “The story of its ruin is simple and obvious; and instead of inquiring why the Roman Empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it lasted so long.”
Bryan Ward-Perkins believes the demise of the Roman civilization to be materialistic. “The capacity to mass-produce high quality goods and spread comfort makes the Roman world rather too similar to our own society, with its rampant and rapacious materialism.”
Rome was a superpower but it did not have challengers. The United States is a superpower but there are other powers among the 200 countries in the world. Several countries are emerging as powerful competitors in the New World Order.
Cullen Murphy, in his book, “Are We Rome,” points out that America and its allies rely on private companies to provide resources and manpower for war efforts. It is much cheaper and addresses the shortage of a volunteer army. The Roman Army staffed its legions with mercenaries.
During the Late Roman Empire, civil service in the government and in the army brought rewards, promotions, and elitist privileges. Emperors and government officials had forgotten what the Res Publica (Latin for “Public Thing”), the Republic, stood for. The interests of the republic became secondary to their success, enrichment at the public trough, and daily survival.
The fight for personal survival meant that every public servant, including ranking officers could be subject to imprisonment, torture, or killing not at the hands of the enemy but at the hands of other Romans. This puts American political fights and briberies into proper mundane perspective.
Bureaucratic inadequacies and corruption traveled much slower in the Roman Empire. By the time a weakness became obvious, it was quite serious and hard to address. In modern U.S., bureaucratic mismanagement, corruption, and waste are known. News and information travel fast but are often unreported or covered up due to political correctness. As Adrian Goldsworthy states in his book, “How Rome Fell,” “yet the warning from the Roman experience is that major catastrophic failures often arrive both suddenly and unanticipated.” It is Goldsworthy’s opinion that the “fatal decline of the empire came from internal problems.” The self-inflicted decline was impossible to determine when it reached the point of no return. Is our American superpower in decline and at the point of no return?
The sudden, catastrophic failure puts into interesting perspective the notion of TARP, which was presented one day in 2008 as necessary or else by the Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. The authorities did not hesitate to provide the money although we now know that it was a scheme to save Wall Street, Goldman-Sachs, a few domestic banks, AIG, and foreign banks that were caught red-handed with insolvent hedge funds and re-packaged worthless mortgage securities. Taxpayers were ultimately the losers.
We are unable to defend our border with Mexico in the same manner that the Romans were unable to defend their Rhine-Danube frontier. Whittaker, in his book, “Rome and Its Frontiers,” makes an analogy:
“The Roman Empire of the fourth century was in some ways undergoing the same kind of transformation as the modern nation-state in the face of globalization. Both can be viewed as what Karl Marx called “disordered societies”; that is, as societies where traditional values were in conflict with new interests, when relations between national and foreign cultures were being renegotiated, and when the concept of ethnicity was being redefined under pressure from external frontiers.”
In 376, a large group of Gothic refugees arrived at the Empire’s Danube frontier, asking for asylum. According to Peter Heather, “in a complete break with established Roman policy, they were allowed in, unsubdued.” Within two years, they revolted, destroyed two-thirds of the army and killed the very emperor Valens who received them. It is interesting to note that some of the refugees that we accepted in our own country have become hostile and are trying to destroy our way of life by using tolerance and political correctness against us.
In 301 A.D. emperor Diocletian had an unfortunate idea to curb inflation by passing a law with a harsh punishment for breaking it: death. His law fixed maximum prices for about 1,000 goods, including food, raw materials, textiles, transportation, and wages. The law was not the first tried but the scale was massive and Diocletian was determined to make it successful. Anyone who tried to keep goods off the market would be summarily executed. A series of financial crashes caused people to rush to turn their money into goods, creating a rate of inflation of 1,000% because there was too much money chasing too few goods. The coins were so debased, that what looked like precious metal was mostly copper underneath.
Diocletian’s law placed blame on speculators who gambled on grain’s futures, diverting attention from the government’s shortcomings – “men who have nothing better to do than carve up for their own advantage the benefits sent by the gods… that would satisfy a whole people, who think only of their gain and their percentage.” This administration blames the “evil” rich and the speculators for its own failed policies.
The law did not work. You cannot beat inflation by legislation. Instead of seeing money devalued even further, people rushed to stockpile all the goods they could find, and the black market flourished at the expense of the rest of the economy. The first prices and incomes policy was a failure and nobody was ever punished. Nobody has been punished in the U.S. for all the failed financial schemes such as TARP. What is going to happen to our economy with the rising inflation, uncontrollable spending, and printing of worthless money?
