Dreams of Rome: Conversations with Boris Johnson
The lurking presence of history is near the centre of political debate in UK. Politicians feel the hand of history on their shoulders; they appeal to traditions of ‘Britishness’, they cite the lessons of history in their foreign policy. Historic moments and opportunities multiply across the political scene, either to be seized or missed. And yet it is rare for politicians to engage with academic historians or to move beyond the commonplaces needed for their rhetoric. As in so many other matters, Boris Johnson, MP is an exception. Not only has he made a television programme, The Dream of Rome but there is an accompanying book and on March 1st 2007, he addressed the Ancient History seminar (the leading national seminar for Ancient History) at the Institute of Classical Studies. What followed was a fascinating and serious attempt at engagement between a leading politician and academic historians, an engagement which threw light on contemporary political thought and the place of Rome in modern academic and political consciousness.
Boris Johnson’s argument involved a particular interpretation of the Roman empire and the importance of that interpretation for our understanding of modern politics, and especially international politics. He argued, following Gibbon, that the second century AD was the period in which the sum of human happiness was at its greatest; that Rome constructed a long-lasting empire which managed to blend together a diverse set of peoples into a political unity. This was achieved through the use of symbols and political institutions (a common currency, common law, a common head of state, a common language, and a tolerant religious system). Individual local political leaders were integrated into the political and symbolic systems of empire through institutions such as the imperial cult. He argued that various later empires had attempted to recapture the dream that was Rome: Roman imperial symbolism was and is prominent in imperial endeavours from Charlemagne, the Austro-Hungarian empire, Napoleonic France, the British Empire, fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. The imperial urge is still felt in American imperial adventurism in Iraq and Boris Johnson drew parallels between the Roman military disaster at Carrhae when Crassus lost his life and his legions and America’s imbroglio in the same region. Notably, the Treaty of Rome and the 2002 attempt to develop a unified constitution for the EU drew on Roman imagery in what is seen as an attempt to create the largest unified polity in Europe since the Fall of Rome.
The Roman Empire has been an attractive model for imperialists partly because of its association with culture and civilization, but primarily for its longevity and political success. Yet, all these secondary imperial adventures have failed. Johnson argued that failure was due to the inability of the various subsequent imperial ventures to generate unifying political cultures. Quoting Rutilius Namatianus, a fifth-century Gallic writer on Rome, Johnson argued that the subjects of the Roman empire could, in one way or another, feel part of the political system, feel themselves to be part of the citizen body of Rome. Yet, the British Empire, the EU, Napoleonic Europe, and the current dependencies of the US have either failed or largely not attempted to generate such feelings of inclusion. In finishing his paper, Johnson drew parallels between the end of Classical antiquity and the current friction between the Western and Islamic worlds. Following Henri Pirenne’s thesis, he suggested that the end of antiquity as an economic and cultural entity came not with the fifth century barbarian invasions of the West, but with the Islamic conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries which divided the Mediterranean into two competing religious and cultural spheres, the North and West and the East and South. The religious and political polarisation of the Mediterranean brought an end to population and trade flows round the Empire which, according to Pirenne, had been maintained until that point, and, as a result, led to the impoverishment of the Mediterranean. For Johnson, the clear lesson from history was that Turkey needs to be brought within the EU as soon as possible, pointing Turkey’s cultural and political interests towards Greece and the West rather than Iran and the East. To achieve this, Europe needs to adopt the religious tolerance of the Roman system and to value and incorporate the traditions of Islam alongside the Christian and Jewish traditions of Europe.
Although several of the historical points made are tendentious, the serious issue raised in the discussion is how and why the Roman Empire could serve as a model for modern political organisation. Further, is this positive reading of Rome defensible?
Let us start with an oddity and then some observations about Johnson’s Roman Empire. Johnson is not alone among modern political thinkers in looking to Rome as a model for political and cultural solutions to problems that beset the modern world. He can be located in the long tradition of modern political writing which can plausibly be traced back to Machiavelli. Yet, political writers prior to the late nineteenth century concentrated their attention on the Republic and the early imperial period. Although Gibbon, for complex reasons of his own, saw the second-century as a period of unparalleled prosperity and presented the factors that led to Roman decline coalescing at the end of the second century, many earlier thinkers put that crisis centuries earlier. For them, the <st1:placename>Roman <st1:placename>Republic was a model of political success, combining freedom of the individual with a politically successful regime that ably resisted both monarchic absolutism and demagoguery. The Fall of the Republic was, in Ciceronian style, a tragedy, and the subsequent Julio-Claudian period a time of increasing corruption and of decline towards the enslavement of the Roman people. The Republic was the source of the political ideals of citizenship, devotion to the state, and, crucially, liberty. It was that search for liberty that informed the revolutionaries of England, America, and France and lies behind many of the political institutions of the new American state.
Sometime in the late nineteenth century, however, political thinkers turned their attention from Rome the Republic to Rome the Empire. This would seem to represent a fundamental change in the political obsessions of the nineteenth century, shifting from a concern with liberty and constitutionalism to issues of empire and nation. Of course, many European nations were experiencing empire in the late nineteenth century, though this was hardly a new development for England, the Netherlands or France. Yet, if we were to see the interest in Rome as a reflection of shared imperial presences, what are we to make of a Conservative politician continuing to offer the Roman Empire as a political model nearly two generations after the effective end of British and European colonialism? Why has Rome the Republic and the problematics of liberty not reasserted its prominence especially when relations between state and citizen or subject are very much on the public agenda. Further, it seems at first sight rather odd that in an age when liberal democracies are supposedly triumphant, the model state we are presented with is not one with some form of representative government, a body of law which protects the individual citizen against the arbitrary exercise of executive power, constitutional checks and balances which subjected the magistrates to legal limitations and judgements and ensured some sort of popular mandate for laws, but an absolutist monarchy in which there was no semblance of popular or democratic government.
Secondly, the Johnson critique of later attempts to imitate Roman imperialism rests not on the anachronistic, perverse or unintelligent application of images and ideas drawn from Roman imperial history (think of Mussolini), but on the incompleteness of the imitations. The European project is not to be despised because of its grandiose rhetoric of imperial imitation, but because that rhetoric has no political weight in institutions and culture. By implication, if only Europe could be unified by political imagery, the binding of local communities to the imperial ideal, rituals, language and culture, and economy, then the European system might work. This demand may establish insuperable difficulties for modern imperial regimes, but if such regimes do not engage in such thorough programmes of what might be called cultural assimilation, then they are doomed from the outset. The Johnson case is not against empires, but for more powerful, integrationist but tolerant imperial ventures.
So what kind of place is Johnson’s Roman empire? It is polyethnic, blending together lots of different peoples. It is religiously tolerant, a secular state that supervises religion with a light touch if at all and in which religion is an aspect of individual conscience, not politics. It is liberal in its trade policies, creating an enormous single-market. It has a single legal system and uniform economic structures. It is a happy and prosperous place. It is also either pre-nationalistic or suppressing of different national identities. Other than its lack of any form of democratic structure, Johnson’s Roman empire looks remarkably like a modern Western liberal secular state.
Yet, this is where we start to hit problems. It is true that Rome maintained her empire with a rather small military force, mostly located away from the heart of the empire, but the empire was acquired by force, devolution could not be achieved through the expressed will of the people, and. As various rebels discovered, the Roman army may have been slow to arrive when rebellion was attempted, but opposition was ultimately crushed with extreme brutality. One can offset the undoubted technical innovations and probable improvements in material well-being for sections (and possibly large sections) of the provincial populations with stories of imperial corruption and mismanagement, of brutality and incompetence. Slavery and later the tying of peasants to the land were essential factors in generating the prosperity that we see in the archaeology of cities. The unity of the Roman empire brought material benefits and political opportunities, especially for wealthy, but at the expense of gladiatorial games. Religious toleration was limited by the demand that individuals honour the divinity of the emperor, though admittedly this seems to have been more often a technical than a real requirement, and the price of the religious extremism of adopting a monotheistic religion was sometimes torture and death. It is true that we have many provincial expressions of loyalty towards Rome, though the surviving literary creations in praise of Rome were oratorical or poetic exercises which only the most naïve could take at face value. Provincial elites honoured Rome in reshaping their cities to include Roman-style buildings and depicted Roman governors and emperors in statues and inscriptions. Yet, this was a rich-man’s game.
The Roman political system worked through a public exchange of honours and favours. The favours enjoyed by town councillors allowed them to control the local judicial and tax system, confident in the support of the Roman authorities should there be local difficulties. It mattered little what those at the bottom of the social and political system thought and felt: they are almost historically invisible and their political choices were extremely limited. Further, although the Empire consisted of many peoples, it was ultimately not multi-cultural. Latin and Greek were the languages of power. Rome assimilated aspects of foreign cultures and imported them into Rome, making them thereby Roman, but that assimilation was two-way and unequal: provincials were expected to conform to the interpretatio Romana, assimilating their cults and culture to the dominant mix so that cultures could be seen as little more than local colouration of a Mediterranean norm. When certain cultures found assimilation difficult, the results were violent. Thus we see three major wars between Rome and the Jews in the sixty years between 66 and 136 AD and countless violent and fatal confrontations.
Johnson’s Dream of Rome can be set in the historiographic context of recent attempts to re-evaluate empires and present the legacy of empire (modern and ancient) on a much more favourable light. At least in some quarters, empires are back in fashion. Apologists for empire point to material benefits, the less than ideal governmental systems that empires replaced, and the idealism of the imperial ventures. In this context, liberty disappears from the political radar. Order is preferred to the undoubted uncertainties of representative governmental and some may even worry whether great empires can be governed by representative systems: is the message of the Roman Empire for the EU, that everything would work if the feeble attempts at representative government were abandoned and we turned power over to an enlightened despot? Although Pliny’s claim that he and his fellow senators were free because the emperor ordered them to be free seems laughable from the point of view of a modern Western state, when American congressmen berate the Iraqi government and people for not embracing the freedoms brought to them by invasion, the joke becomes somewhat less funny. The closest historiographic parallel is Britain’s protectorates, places such as Egypt, which were rescued forcibly from corrupt, often cruel, and seemingly incompetent governments, which had little in the way of a popular mandate. British rule had the goal of returning Egypt to local rule once the institutions of modern government resolved the financial and political problems of the country, but it very quickly became clear that there was no structure of government other than direct rule in which British interests could be adequately protected. Here, we have a model in which empire preserves order so as to introduce freedom, but the balance between order and freedom is such that the imperial power is never quite able to order its subjects to be free. And again parallels with Rome abound, for the foundation of Roman imperial rule centred on a Faustian pact by which the Roman people exchanged liberty for peace and the imperial restoration of order never quite managed to reverse that agreement.
And here we have another clue as to why Rome might be so attractive to the reluctant imperialists of the modern age. The Roman Empire preserved a particular cultural tradition which, for various complex reasons, has been very highly valued in the Western cultural tradition. But when the Empire fell, that cultural tradition is conventionally seen as disappearing into the Dark Ages, to be restored by the Renaissance. In what has to be one the great historical absurdities, Classical culture has been seen as embattled and the Empire as a necessary means of preserving that culture from the barbarians that threatened it with destruction. The familiar image of Rome succumbing to Barbarian invasions, either from the East or North, supports the notion of the embattled Empire. Arguably, the most powerful and prosperous nation on earth was perpetually in danger of being overwhelmed by the largely impoverished and politically weak tribes of the frontiers. Peace had to be imposed on the frontiers to guarantee security and the preservation of Rome, and in so doing, the Romans extended their Empire and order, and at some considerable cost. As Tacitus’ Calgacus puts it, ‘where they create a desert, they call it peace’ (Agricola 30).
But the threats to Rome’s greatness were not just external. In at least some versions of Roman history, ancient and modern, the real threat stemmed from the corruption of the political system. The immorality of the people undermined the values of Rome and fuelled political discontents. In almost all versions of this imperial story, the threat is populist discontent which is eventually assuaged, but never resolved, by imperial ‘bread and circuses’. Imperial rule was not just imposed on the barbarians. Imperial rule was required to prevent Rome sliding into anarchy, to preserve Roman culture, and manage the empire. Monarchy for Rome was a rescue-act, sacrificing libertas for peace and culture. In so doing, Rome entered a state of emergency which was to last nearly 500 years in the West. If empire fails, then the dark ages come, and thus the imperial adventure has to be undertaken for peace. Empire is a desperate last step in a paranoid world.
Where lies the dream of Rome? There have been other modern dreams of Rome. Freud dreamt of a Rome which looked rather like Prague and in which all the signs were in German, a dream which was perhaps shared by another famous Austrian. This is a dream of Rome in which all differences have been annulled. In Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, Marcus Aurelius dreams of Rome, and this is nostalgia for a brilliant age long gone in which the imperial project is innocent, a dream of a good empire not corrupted by the evils of sinful men, an empire which, although it may be restored at the end of the film, we all know to be a gross fiction. But Freud had another dream of Rome, in which he crossed the Alps as Hannibal, bent on destroying Rome, an identification he put down to his Jewishness. For him, Rome, in spite of his knowledge of its culture, was an exclusive club from which he was forever prevented from joining.
Christians in the second-century Roman arena may have been rather surprised by Johnson’s description of a tolerant second-century empire and perhaps unpersuaded by Gibbon’s suggestion that happiness and prosperity were characteristic of the age. A century and a half later, it may have stretched an orator’s talents to convince the pagans defending the Temple of Sarapis in Alexandria from the imperial troops camped outside that they were living in an age of tolerance, and the Christian crowds that sought out and lynched the pagan philosopher Hypatia a decade later were not obviously rebelling against the dominant values of a Christian Empire, nor were they treated as rebels.
The Christian story has to be read alongside the story of imperial Rome. Christianity begins with the Empire and exists in communication and tension with the Empire. From the crucifixion to the recognition of Christians by Constantine and the adoption of Christianity as the religion of Empire, Christians were negotiating their relationship with imperial power. Although opinions differ as to the popularity of Christianity before the mid fourth century, there can be little doubt that considerable numbers of imperial citizens sought spiritual meaning and truth in a religion which differed considerably from the Classical religious traditions of Rome and Greece. Christianity offered a meaning that transcended the secular world and could be seen to operate in opposition to many of the values of secular society. People sought a monotheistic, exclusive religion to give their lives meaning. Arguably, the power of Christianity lay in its ability to transform all that it touched and create a new society or an anti-society in which religion was all that mattered and for which people were prepared to die. Religious fundamentalism then seems intimately interlinked with this world empire. By the fifth century, the dream of Rome was a Christian dream. The old ideas of Empire had failed and a new ideology integrated the people.
Freud was in a very long tradition of those who wanted to tear down Rome. Christians rejected and re-made Rome in a different image. We cannot accuse them of ignorance. The British Empire, even if we accept the revisionist view of it as a force for good, singularly failed to persuade those it ruled of its virtue and the British were chased from their painfully acquired empire by guns and bombs, by rioters and revolutionaries. If empire was so good for the subject peoples, why did they fail to notice this? The modern American ventures seem to be stuck in an angry astonishment that those they have ‘liberated’ appear to be unconvinced of their virtue and that the imposition of the American technology of power, the apparatus of modern capitalism, is bitterly resented across much of the world. Perhaps we should reassess our stories of the Fall of Rome: perhaps the reason why various impoverished marginal frontier tribes seemed to be able to bring down the most powerful empire in history is that very few were sufficiently exercised to fight for it.
The dream of Rome too often sends serried ranks marching in beautiful order across the battlefields of the world to impose their versions of order on peoples they imagine to be grateful. It justifies authoritarianism, internally and externally, in the mirage of a world made civilized and the fear of a dark age, and demands the sacrifice of liberty for order. Imperial Rome is a nightmare that we dream again and again. Romes fall and empires fail, and still we dream. When we wake and find that the dream of peace and progress has turned to blood and rust, it is often too late.
Richard Alston, Department of Classics, Royal Holloway
