Nehaveigur

In SPQR, Mary Beard provides an overview of the history of ancient Rome from its founding to the first century AD. She knows her stuff and there are some surprising insights. For example, I didn’t know how much the Romans where sticklers for the rule of law. Unfortunately, her prose is dry and there isn’t much of an overarching theme. Beard is interested in Rome for its own sake, and only in second instance how it relates to our times.

If you’re interested specifically in what ancient Rome can and can’t teach us about what’s going on in modern America, try Vaclav Smil’s Why America is Not a New Rome. His conclusion is that for the most part, Rome can’t teach us much about ourselves. I wonder how much this is true for history more generally. How much can 1930s Germany really help us understand the political situation in the US today? My guess is, not much.

Back to Smil and Rome. As he puts it, it’s fairly easy to point out the significant and meaningful differences between Rome and America. The hard part is to define what the modern US is. He argues that hegemon is a more apt term than empire.

Where Rome relied on conquering others, America relies on innovation. As a result, Rome was economically far behind America or any other modern nation. […] America’s unrivalled position in today’s global techno scientific universe had no analogue in Roman achievements […] An average American is now served by machines whose capacity is about 1 million times greater than that of inanimately energized machines serving an average Roman […] There is no modern population, even amongst the worst-off countries of Sub-Saharan Africa, whose growth, longevity and age structure, would even remotely resemble the ancient Roman pattern […] In per capita term, the countries that come closest to the Roman rate of $650-850 are amongst the world’s poorest nations in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Rome did produce remarkable architecture and writing. One of the big unexplained facts of culture is that neither population nor wealth seem to be good predictors of culture.