Nam dempto hoc uno fulgore nominis Romani, quid est cur illi vobis comparandi sint?
For, setting aside only the splendour of the Roman name, what remains in which they can be compared to you?
—Titus Livius, Ab urbe condita XXI:xliii (Cyrus Edmonds, 1850 translation)
Chapter II-IV, the centerpiece of the book, answer the epigraph’s question by restating, defining, redefining, questioning, criticizing, deconstructing, and rejecting some of the most important analogies and parallels that are made between Rome and America, and they detail a number of fundamental differences that make any meaningful comparisons questionable. I divide these matters among three broad categories and, for a closer topical examination, subdivide each into three subcategories. This division has nothing to do with any triadic preferences (not uncommon among Romans and even more favored in the Chinese numerology)1 and everything to do with imposing necessary brevity. Matters tend to get out of hand when scholars deal with the history of the Roman Empire; they have suggested scores of reasons for its fall, ranging from indisputable to frivolous (Rollins 1983; D. Kagan 1992; Heather 2005).2
The recent flood of commentary devoted to the rise of American empire and its impending demise presents a similarly daunting array of reasons and causes behind these trends. Consequently, if the task were to be approached in an exhaustive manner, it would necessitate dealing with an encyclopedic range of subjects. Instead, I restrict my treatment to a relatively small number of fundamental realities and processes that best capture the internal dynamics and external affairs of the two states. With this choice I follow the ancient Roman admonition non multa sed multum and try to keep the task within reasonable limits. Even so, my topics range from the borders of the Roman Empire to the misfortunes of America’s foreign policy, from childhood mortality to ingenious machines.
But before I introduce brief descriptions of the three central chapters, I must stress my commitment to definitional clarity. Using terms with clearly determined meaning is the mainstay of modern scientific inquiry, and it has been my practice in more than 40 years of research and writing. But this imperative is commonly ignored by many of those who deal with historical analogies. Even if we agree with Kamiya’s (2007, 1) description that comparisons between two historical epochs are just “an excellent intellectual parlor game,” we would still need some basic rules to play by. For any serious, systematic inquiry, an unambiguous understanding of essential terms is a necessary precondition of all meaningful comparisons; yet the relevant definitions are almost never supplied by those who casually measure the actions and the travails of today’s America using the yardstick of Rome’s ancient ways and accomplishments.
The first broad category of my inquiry concerns the extent and the power of the two great states. In the second chapter I begin these appraisals and contrasts by answering a key question: What is an empire? The term has been used casually in referring to the current actions and policies of the United States, as if its meaning were generally so well understood that it could go undefined. I examine it by explaining the dual meaning of the original Latin word imperium, by offering multifactorial definitions of the term, and by demonstrating that empire is not suitable for labeling the intents and actions of the modern American republic.
Only then do I contrast the often exaggerated power of the two states. I describe the borders and size of the Roman Empire in order to show that Rome, contrary to repeated assertions, did not control most of the world known in antiquity, and that the empire had contemporary peers. Paradoxically, it is on both of these accounts, and contrary to the commonly held notion of U.S. global supremacy, that the Roman-U.S. analogy works with near perfection. The United States also has never had any truly global political, strategic, or economic control (again, I am using the word global in its correct scientific sense). And ever since it emerged victorious from WW II the country has faced enormous military, economic, and ideological challenges not only from other major powers but also from determined adversaries in control of smaller states and more recently also from more nebulous, but no less deadly, terrorist organizations; unfortunately, a sober conclusion is that all these challenges may only intensify in the future.
In the third chapter I leave the mainstream of historical studies and concentrate on the biophysical fundamentals of the two states, on forces that circumscribe the achievements of all societies, be they military conquests, economic advances, or prevailing levels of individual well-being. The first section of chapter III contrasts the truly incomparable roles played by invention and innovation in the history of the two states, the second details their vastly different reliance on machines, and the last compares the energetic foundations of the two societies that circumscribe the scope and mode of strategic and economic action.
The fourth chapter looks at the most fundamental differences in quotidian lives of ordinary Romans and Americans. Its first section contrasts the population dynamics of the two societies, their vital statistics, life expectancies, and age structures in order to illustrate disparities whose magnitudes create profoundly different demographic and hence human and socioeconomic realities. The second looks at illness and death in the Roman Empire in general and in the capital megacity in particular in order to portray the reality of ubiquitous suffering and truncated lives. The last section is once again a foray into unorthodox history by using the best available evidence to contrast the magnitudes and distribution of wealth and misery in the two societies.
These two chapters—chapter III on inventions, machines, and energy sources and chapter IV on population dynamics, standard of living, and basic economic realities—could be criticized for engaging in anachronistic exercises or for being simply superfluous. How can we put the accomplishments and capacities of an ancient state on the same scale as those of a modern society that is two millennia younger? Is not the fact of dramatically different lives in the Roman world and in the modern United States a truism not worth belaboring? And can not one grant all these fundamental technical, demographic, and economic differences and still argue, as so many have done, that Rome and the United States enjoyed, in their respective (yet very different) worlds, similar positions of imperial power (however defined)?
There is perhaps no better quote to disarm the anachronism argument than to repeat what Scheidel (2003, 160) pointed out when explaining why a comparison of Roman and modern hygiene is not misplaced, even though the Romans were obviously not aware of bacterial infections or communicability of diseases: “It is exactly because the Romans were unaware of modern notions of hygiene that we must apply our own deliberately anachronistic standards in ascertaining the probable consequences of their absence.” Similarly, a relative deficit of Roman inventiveness, marginal reliance on machines, low levels and inefficient modes of energy use, and a near-subsistence standard of living for most of the empire’s citizens had immense consequences for the empire, and hence all of them must be examined (and wherever possible quantified) from modern perspectives.
Ignoring these contrasts between the ancient Romans and modern Americans because they seem obvious produces a comparison devoid of any attention to a critical set of fundamental factors that shape history and delimit the power of states. Criticizing their inclusion because they are simply a part of well-appreciated differences between life in antiquity and modernity is to argue in favor of unrealistic, selective, and biased comparisons. It is one thing to grant this acknowledgment tacitly and without any examination or to do so in broad qualitative terms, and quite another matter to explore these differences (in inventiveness, reliance on machines, energy use, population dynamics, and economic performance) in as much quantitative detail as the combination of first principles and available historical sources allows.
Only such quantitative appraisals can make it clear if we are dealing with two societies whose differences in energetic, demographic, and economic matters are largely irrelevant for a comparative examination of their respective imperial postures, or if these biophysical fundamentals are (once they are properly taken into account) so unlike that focusing the comparison only on the political-military sphere does not make much sense. An excellent modern example of the failure to appreciate critical demographic and economic differences (or just acknowledging their existence in broad terms without in-depth specific inquiries) is the misleading nature of the standard comparison of the United States with the USSR.
Expert analysis agreed that the Soviet per capita GDP (even using the Central Intelligence Agency’s highly exaggerated aggregates) was lower than the U.S. rate, that the Soviet economy was generally less flexible, and that Soviet citizens had a shorter life expectancy than Americans, but all these acknowledgments were perfunctory compared with the obsession about the numbers and capacities of the Soviet nuclear warheads, bombers, fighter planes, tanks, and troops. As a result, the USSR was seen even a few years before its dissolution as a very formidable superpower whose seemingly unstoppable ascent warranted higher military spending; during President Reagan’s two terms the Pentagon’s budget increased by about 40%, and the United States launched “Star Wars,” a technically questionable missile defense program.
And yet a proper comparison would have shown that by the mid-1980s the USSR was an economically and demographically failed state, a state where the average life expectancy was actually declining and whose economy could not satisfy even the basic daily needs of its citizens. The result was inevitable—a collapse of that state brought about by its fundamental internal weaknesses, not by foreign determination. How different the U.S. posture vis-à-vis the USSR could have been if it had been genuinely appreciated that its citizens had an average standard of living commensurable with a second-rate regional power and that its demographic indicators pointed to a combination of quantitative and qualitative decline unparalleled in any other industrialized nation.