America and Rome

Although we remember Rome more as an empire, for almost half her history she was in fact a republic, and like us, an altogether imperfect, yet earnest, democracy.  This now rather obscure fact was once considered common knowledge to anyone deemed educated in this country, when knowledge of classical studies was an indispensable cornerstone of a well rounded education.  Any study of the thoughts and writings of our forefathers will reveal that such understanding of the Greco-Roman past profoundly influenced their vision for our future.  We chose to name our upper legislative house "the senate" and proceeded to imitate Roman architecture not only in the design of our capital, but in early civic buildings throughout our country.  This did not spring from an admiration of the degenerate imperial phase of Roman civilization, but rather from the first half millennium, before multiple pressures, including their inability to make the leap from direct to representative democracy, as well as their own success, drowned out Rome's once vibrant democratic traditions.   

When Rome was nothing more than a city state, her people, after overthrowing an Etruscan tyrant, established a democratic form of government similar to that of Athens and other Greek cities, a direct democracy.  The free Roman people, divided by class into patrician and plebian (aristocrat and commoner) came together in the assembly, to vote for officials and on laws.  This idyllically imperfect system served Rome well as long as she was little more than a geographically limited city state, relying on the sturdy and patriotic muscle and sacrifice of her vibrant, free, plebian masses of farmers and craftsmen, led by civic minded landed yet not corrupted patrician aristocracy.  The oft mentioned senate, in fact held very little power in domestic affairs, being a body of former elected officials, a semi-retired deliberative sort of gentlemen's club.   

The problems with her democracy began when, as a result of various wars of conquest, the political entity of Rome grew until it came to encompass most of modern Italy, and strained to extend her control even further.  The pattern was as follows...Roman legions would march out to war against another state, often to the rallying cry of defeating tyranny, conquer her challenger, and return home laden with booty and a string of slaves.  These slaves, naturally, were sold to those Romans, largely the patricians, who could afford them the most.  The more slaves these wealthy landed aristocrats accumulated, the more productive, efficient, and prosperous their great agricultural estates, or latifundia, became.  The patricians, however, were not the only ones who profited from these wars of conquest, sometimes begun as wars of defense.  Certain industrious and clever plebes, as well as conquered yet friendly aristocrats, came to form a third pseudo class eventually known by the curious name of the "equestrians" (those who could in time of war afford a horse) who came to be the commercial, business class of Rome.  Often it was men of this group who bid for and received contracts from the Roman government to collect taxes in the conquered provinces, men the Romans referred to as "tax farmers", who of course were universally hated by those who were farmed, in that they invariably harvested considerably more than they were authorized, thereby amassing impressive fortunes and with such, political power to rival the patricians... 

While this situation improved the fortunes and positions of these two groups, the same cannot be said for the great majority of plebes, nor for Roman democratic rebublicanism.  You see, as the wars against tyranny became ever more frequent, ever more distant, and required ever more time away from family and modest farm, the plebian Roman farmer citizen soldier found his lot ever more untenable, his voice in politics ever smaller.   The patrician great landholders, with all their slaves, out competed the small farmer who, more and more, away for years on end fighting the very wars that netted these unfortunate thralls, often returned home to find his farm sold to his social betters.  Even without the absence of these brave, humble, citizen soldiers, the latifundia were just too powerful to compete with, but without the strongest back there to help, the family left behind was even less able to hold on.  Year after year, campaign after campaign, humble, hard working, patriotic, plebian farmers sold their farms to the great landowners and trickled into the city of Rome itself, desperate, impoverished, and betrayed by the very people their sacrifices had enriched the most.   

But the patrician and his growing slave holding agricultural factories were not the only beneficiaries.  As stated above, the equestrian, or business class, also benefited from these far flung conquests.  They were awarded tax farming contracts, and obtained preferable trading status, supplied the ever growing mob of Rome with grain (bread) to feed the once proud plebeians, and animals and gladiatorial slaves to distract the same with bloody games(circuses).  They operated mines and armed the legions with slave factory produced weaponry.  Initially, as a result of their non-patrician roots, they often sided with the plebian political cause against the ever more rapacious and proud aristocrats who denied them membership into the senate or elected position, but eventually they were able to force, bargain, and marry themselves into all positions of privilege and power, thus abandoning forever their plebian roots and their plebian fellows whom that left behind in permanent, dependant, marginalized, destitution.  

Even as Rome eventually granted to the free peoples of conquered territories first, of course, in Italy, the coveted rights of citizens, the nature of Roman direct democracy made such rights, including the right to vote in the assembly, meaningless.  How could a plebian farmer, ever threatened with economic ruin, take time out of his can see to can't see routine to make a 20, 30, 50, 100, mile journey to the capital to vote? Even in modern America, such would be difficult, but in ancient Rome, it was impossible.  Yet the assembly remained the bedrock of roman political power, an increasingly farcical facade of democracy-in-form-but-not-in-fact.  Because this is what developed... 

Remember the senate? The rich old men's lifetime club of former officials which in law held little power other than advisory capacity and foreign affairs (an ever more important factor, to be sure)?   As Rome became ever more infested with these landless, destitute plebes from throughout the republic, who clamored for sustenance and entertainment (gainful employment often simply not an option as slave labor increasingly took the place of good paid hard work) gathered restlessly in the very capital itself.  The wealthy men of the senate, patrician and equestrian alike, took to hiring armies of these idle, now parasitical plebeians for no reason other than to vote as directed in the assembly.  In that the throngs of dispossessed came from a fairly representative geographical cross section of the republic, the degenerate result almost actually came to resemble some form of proto representative democracy, but in only the most cynical and distorted fashion.  Furthermore, this disconnect between the ideal and the real, this dependence on charity and patronage for sustenance, and the ever growing addiction to barbaric, salacious and soul crushing diversion, eventually turned an honorable, patriotic, hard working, sturdy peasantry, the backbone of Roman military might, into an effete, trivialized, angry, petulant, and dependent mob, full of pride in nothing more than their national identity... 

Increasingly the ranks of the legions were filled not with what were in essence drafted levies of citizen soldiery, fighting for hearth and home, ideals of republican virtue and dignity, but of volunteer paid professional soldiers, many serving more as a matter of financial necessity than any robust idealism...(eventually even this reservoir of more or less ethnically Roman soldiery would be replaced, in Rome's long descent into imperial decadence, by foreign , often "barbarian" mercenaries, whose vitality put native Roman virtue to shame, but I am getting ahead of the story here).  Eventually, the common roman soldier came to place his loyalty more in the persons of his generals, who, in a form of noblesse oblige, promised land and patronage in return for service and sacrifice, just as Rome's non military leaders promised bread and circuses to their legions of ever degenerating civilian parasites at home in return for political votes and simply not rioting... 

This is not to say that there were none who saw the dangerous direction Roman civilization had taken, laying the seeds of her destruction so very long before she actually fell, though not so long before her liberty had become a hollow joke, before her "democracy" and "republic" ceased to be such in all but name only...  While most of the patricians and ever more of the equestrians could see the welfare of their nation only in terms of their own, narrowly defined economic interest, certain far sighted, selfless, decent, wise, and compassionate souls from within these moneyed and powerful classes, from whom the term "patrician reformer" comes down to us, saw the danger, and allied themselves with those of the lower classes, betraying their own, and struggled mightily, ultimately futilely, to reversed these wicked trends.  Among the most famous were the Gracchi brothers, a pair of high minded patricians who ultimately paid for their ideals with their lives.  Marius, a plebian general whose ability elevated him through the ranks to generalship, was another.  Eventually, Julius Caesar would make one last, desperate attempt to save the republic by destroying it... 

These last two were military men.  The first, Marius, allied himself with the democratic, plebian forces during the Social Wars, Rome's first bloody civil conflict, and unlike later inter-warlord battles of the imperial era, a true struggle of ideals and class... Marius, a noble soul yet common man, was ultimately pushed to his limit (he was no longer a young man, described as a lean, robust, white haired sextegenarian, much beloved by his followers), losing control of his desperate troops and his better judgment for once, when he captured Rome itself, thereby dirtying his name, which eventually led to a victory by the reactionary aristocratic forces of the nihilistic, Machiavellian, Sulla, who claimed republican victory while making himself a terrorizing, vindictive dictator in an attempt to bleed the will and life out of all resistance to the unenlightened self interest of his covetous, reactionary party.  By the time Caesar came along, a closet democrat himself, (for despite the tyrant's terror, democratic sentiment had somehow survived even amongst Rome's aristocracy) it was painfully obvious that no means short of bloody coup would ever reverse the damage done to Roman democracy in the name of the republic, but in reality in the name of self serving imperialism...and of course the ides of March ended even that last gasp... 

Contrary to the old adage, history never really repeats itself...but it sure can resemble itself.  Our founding fathers, in their sage wisdom, with the example of Rome's folly, thought they had solved this great weakness, this inability to make the leap from direct to representative democracy.  They thought they had enshrined a limitation of government, a guarantee of rights and freedoms in a written document, something else Rome never figured out.  And for some two admittedly imperfect centuries, sometimes in one step backwards, two steps forward fashion, we have ever lurched toward these lofty inscribed ideals.  Despite many shameful episodes, wrong headed fiascos, ancient prejudices and hypocritical injustices, ever has our nation thrown off the negative, picked itself up, righted its own as well as other's wrongs, and, until very recently, succeeded in our march toward a better future, a true city on the hill...a more perfect fulfillment of the ideals of our semi-holy constitution and the dreams of all our people.

   But can our democracy, our republic, survive our own success?  Has our system become compromised by the most selfish and ruthless segments our own equestrians and patricians despite all the well thought out checks and balances that were supposed to allow us to avoid the fate of our predecessor, Rome?  Have they in fact bought and paid for our elected representatives as surely as Rome's elites bought and paid for their armies of voting parasites?  Has a complete, parsimonious unwillingness on the part of the ever more self serving, rapacious, and ruthless, to redistribute wealth in any form other than through military service helped to create a permanent underclass of ever harried plebes in our own time and place?  Have they found a ready supply of (invisible) slaves in the form of low paid, exploited third world workers laboring under barbarous sweatshop conditions that supplant our own blue collar and petty managerial classes who suffered and sweated and bled and fought so hard for so long to raise their wages, occupational safety, security, and dignity?  Is our military devolving from a noble calling for citizen soldiers, levied to defend that in which they have a stake, to a professional refuge for those less fortunate who find fewer and fewer options for personal advancement in a society and economy whose rules are ever more unfairly stacked in favor of their social betters?  Are we, the once  independent, moral, responsible, and dignified plebes of our republic, sliding into ignorant, petty, trivialized, dependency, eternal adolescent petulance, greed, sloth, lust, vanity, rage, gluttony and, most dangerous of all, PRIDE, as a result of our own short sightedness and moral cowardice, as well as our economic overlord's failure to see the difference between their own narrow interests and the interests of our country, our republic, our very democracy, as a whole?  Have we already slain our brothers Gracchi?  Have we found a Marius, and if so, will we plebes have the courage, responsibility, and fortitude to assure that history does not resemble itself in this manner, again? Only if we understand...