Clinging to the Plough

Cincinnatus was, as yesterday's editorial in the Grauniad noted, one of the Roman Republic's great cultural heroes, the man who was busy ploughing his own fields when the delegation arrived to ask him to take up the dictatorship and save Rome from its enemies, and who laid down absolute power the moment the crisis was over, just as he was supposed to. Agriculture, war and civic duty, the perfect combination of Roman aristocratic virtues, and Cincinnatus' descendents proudly claimed him as an exemplum for their own lives - even if their involvement in farming was confined to owning a lot of farms, cultivated by slaves and tendants, and their wars were about booty and territorial expansion rather than the defense of Rome.

The Guardian writer is astute enough to distinguish between the myth of Cincinnatus, as told by Livy and others, and the reality (his extreme conservatism, for example) - but we might ask whether even the myth is such a good example for modern politicans as the editorial claims. Cincinnatus was scarcely an amateur who "did his bit then quit": his entire adult life, up to the consulship he held two years before being appointed dictator, had been spent in politics, working his way up the greasy pole not in order to put his convictions into action but for the glory and power. True, Roman aristocrats didn't just do politics, in the way that today's 'policy wonk to MP' crowd seem to have known no other life; they interspersed periods of office with military service, equally driven by the opportunities for glory and enrichment. The fact that Rome's decision-making was dominated by those who had shown equal abilities in deviousness and killing people may perhaps help account for the city's chronic inability to get along with its neighbours without conquering or subjugating them.

It's only under the later Republic, so afflicted by a sense of its inadequacy and decadence compared with the great and virtuos heroes of the past, that we find senators with a genuine life outside the traditional pursuit of power: senators with an interest in art, literature, philosophy and science. But of course they could do this because of the leisure afforded by vast independent wealth, wich doesn't leave us any closer to finding useful role models for today's politicians in the history of Rome, tempting as it always is to lay some sort of claim to that legacy...

The Roman Taliban

With some previous wars, most obviously Vietnam, it took a long time for Hollywood to engage with the conflict and its consequences at all, let alone directly; the first films to start exploring Vietnam did so obliquely, like Altman's M.A.S.H., ostensibly set in the Korean War. When it comes to involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq over the last decade there's scarcely been the same hesitation - for goodness' sake, Bigelow's Hurt Locker has been showered with Oscars - so it's a little difficult to imagine that films seeking to address recent experiences by depicting the Roman army's travails north of Hadrian's Wall, Centurion and The Eagle of the Ninth, are going to have much to add to our understanding. I suppose the case could be made that M.A.S.H. was a rather better and more interesting film than most later attempts at showing Vietnam directly and explicitly, so an oblique approach may be an artistic choice rather than a political necessity, but it's not obvious that the director of The Descent and Dog Soldiers is the man to do this. Still, the appearance of these films offered Charlotte Higgins the opportunity to make some interesting points about our attitudes towards Rome (not missing the fact that the traditional account of the IX Hispana legion disappearing in the mists of Scotland, the basis for both stories, is complete cobblers).

Higgins suggests that we're invited to have some sympathy for the Picts but to identify with the Romans, lost in enemy territory; more than likely, given both the dynamics of the story-telling and the inherited weight of positive images of Rome = civilisation. There's a missed opportunity here to engage with Richard Hingley's discussion of nineteenth-century ambivalence towards Rome in Britain; certainly we could choose to side with the forces of empire, as imperialists ourselves, but focusing on Roman Britain, rather than on other regions, creates the possibility of seeing ourselves instead as the natives, facing an invasion from the continent.

What is most striking, however, is Higgins' assertion that Rome's enemies "did indeed use what we would now call terrorism", and the quotation from Mary Beard that "Boudicca is a good analogue for the Taliban". Really? I'm struggling to think of the slightest resemblance (Fanatical religion? Nope. Suicide bombers? Nope. Maybe it's the propensity for skirts...). The only thing I can come up with is the simple fact that both are/were opposed to the dominant imperial power - and that is the exact logic of those who draw analogies between Rome and the United States in order to offer dire warnings about the threat of barbarian hordes. Anyone who opposes an empire is by definition a terrorist? In one sense that's true - the Romans depicted any sort of opposition in terms of banditry and piracy, stripping it of any legitimacy just as the label 'terrorism' does today - but you wouldn't expect respected contributors to a liberal newspaper to be taking that sort of line, or identifying with the forces of imperial domination to quite such an extent.

Dekandenz ueberall!

They really do get a higher class of political debate in Germany; for the last couple of weeks, anyone remotely involved in discussions about employment policy, minimum wage and the Hartz IV programme has been engaged, willingly or not, in arguments about the history of the later Roman Empire. It all began with the claim of the current foreign minister in the CDU/CSU/FDP coalition, the neoliberal ideologue Guido Westerwelle, that "Wer dem Volk anstrengungslosen Wohlstand verspricht, lädt zu spätrömischer Dekadenz ein" ("Whoever promises the people effortless prosperity is inviting late Roman decadence"). The leader of the left-wing Linkspartei responded by pointing out that it wasn't the slaves who lived in decadence in late antiquity but the political and economic elite, while the SPD's employment expert was reminded less of ancient Rome than of a medieval witch-hunt against the poor and unemployed. Media commentators have eagerly seized the opportunity to point out that Westerwelle's grasp of history is as shaky as his idea of 'socialism', while the Maerkische Allgemeine noted that, according to many historians, the later Roman state suffered rather from chronic lack of resources. Rome serves, as ever, as confirmation of more or less any fear about the future of European civilisation you care to mention, but it's still fun to see, for the moment at least, the ubiquity of such historical questions; the third question in a recent Stern interview with the Employment Minister was whether, in a visit to a Dutch employment centre, she'd seen any sign of late Roman decadence.

Roman Defence Procurement

From Michael White's Parliamentary Sketch in today's Grauniad:

So when Liam Fox, tipped not to be Bob's successor, said he would get an "honourable mention" in the baleful ­history of New Labour there were genuine Tory cheers. At least two. It did not stop Fox hinting at Tory defence cuts ahead because Labour has been borrowing "the equivalent of £1.1m every day since the birth of Christ". This was a rare deployment of Christ in a military context and is certain to offend both Christians and admirers of Roman defence policy. When Roman generals thought they weren't getting enough chariots they didn't whinge to Chilcot. They marched on Rome and replaced the emperor using the alternative vote: themselves.

Nice to see the Romans getting a positive press for a change: not only are they offered as models of decisive and effective action, in contrast to feeble modern generals (let alone politicians), but they're even credited with the noblest of motives, ensuring that their men are properly equipped to face the barbaric hordes rather than all the nasty self-interest and ambition attributed to them by cynics like Tacitus. Not sure why he's focused on chariots, though; surely it would have been a more believable comparison to focus on the availability of body-armour...