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...

New Europe, New Rome

On the face of it, it's surprising that comparisons between the European Union and the Roman Empire aren't made more often. There was a brief flurry of them back when the Euro was introduced, with Rome offered as the last example of a single currency, but, at least in English language publications, commentators who normally have no problem in offering any number of dubious analogies as solid facts are suddenly overcome with an awareness of historical difference.

One reason seems to be the ambiguous image of the Roman Empire. A hardline Eurosceptic could certainly invoke Rome as a prototype of the repressive, over-bureaucratic state tyranny that the EU allegedly wishes to impose on the heroic Asterix and Obelix figures of each individual nation - but that leaves open the possibility of the old "what the Romans did for us..." argument, which might make repressive state tyranny seem a less unpleasant possibility. Conversely, pointing to the success of Rome in bringing peace and civilisation to warring and barbarous nations while nevertheless permitting them to rule themselves and retain as much of their identity, a positive vision for what Europe might become, is always at risk of someone pointing out the less-than-consensual means by which this 'peace' was introduced. The contrast with the US, where the ambiguous image of the Roman Empire is nevertheless at times embraced with enthusiasm, must be due at least in part to the fact that no one is countenancing military force as a means of resolving disputes about the level of agricultural subsidies, even if Barroso must sometimes wish he had a couple of legions to despatch. Military force as a means of preventing the coronation of President Blair, on the other hand...

However, there is one group whose view of Rome isn't ambiguous in the slightest, and who therefore have no hesitation in drawing analogies with the equally satanic force of the European Union: the Christian lunatic fringe. "Europe will one day almost certainly be the heart of the Antichrist beast-system of governmental, economic and religious control prophesied to engulf the world," asserts Rapture Ready. "The fifth world empire symbolized in the statue is prophesied to be an extension of the fourth kingdom. That is exactly what the EU is –an extension of the ancient Roman Empire." "All that currently remains to create a truly revived Roman Empire is the creation of a permanent executive branch of government and the full integration of the new Euro currency. With the introduction of the new EU constitution, the groundwork is being laid for just such an executive branch and economic system," suggests Contender Ministries, adding helpfully that Javier Solana was granted emergency powers in 2000 through recommendation 666. Above all, as Heisnear.com notes, Europe will be where Antichrist rises to power as the new emperor of Rome's successor - and let's not start on the number of websites that think Tony Blair is the obvious candidate for the job...

Or maybe not. World News and Prophecy thinks that Europe is trying to revive not the Roman Empire but the Holy Roman Empire. So that's all right.

The End of European Civilisation

It had to be just a matter of time. The ‘debate’ over the ‘Islamisation’ of Europe, like the ‘debate’ over immigation in previous decades, makes much of the imagery of ‘swamping’; entire streets and districts are being taken over by Them, there are places where you don’t hear any English/French/German and they eat cats you know, our lovely culture is being smothered in curries and sharia law and so forth. The obvious riposte, from the people who feel a duty to respond wearily to this sort of nonsense, is that Muslim immigrants make up at the most 3-4% of the population of Europe; what sort of ‘swamping’ is that, and what sort of a society feels threatened by a tiny minority of mainly poor and marginalised foreigners? A society run by wishy-washy liberal multi-culturalist race traitors, of course...

The Roman Empire always tends to crop up in these discussions. Enoch Powell’s classical education allowed him to pinch the image of rivers foaming with blood from Virgil, but decades earlier there was the obsession of the French with the vast hordes of German barbarians lurking just over the eastern border, intent on destroying all (i.e. French) civilisation just as their ancestors had done, the obsession of the Germans with the vast hordes of Jewish and Slavic barbarians lurking just over the eastern, intent on swamping true (i.e. German) culture, and the obsession of almost everyone, British and American included, with the threat of the Inferior Races. The example of Rome showed what happened to a civilisation that allowed itself to be overwhelmed by aliens and/or corrupted from within by allowing aliens in.

What lay behind and constantly reacted upon all such causes of Rome’s disintegration was, after all, to a considerable extent, the fact that the people who built Rome had given way to a different race. The lack of energy and enterprise, the failure of foresight and common sense, the weakening of moral and political stamina, all were concomitant with the gradual diminution of the stock which, during the earlier days, had displayed these qualities.

(Tenney Frank, ‘Race mixture in the Roman empire’, American Historical Review 21 (1916).)

The last few decades of research into the later Roman empire has undermined the main planks of these accounts. Even leaving aside all the evidence that in most cases the transition from a loose federation of cities paying taxes to the Roman state to smaller but more tightly organised kingdoms paying taxes more locally was gradual and peaceful, how do we imagine that disorganised barbarian tribes, numbering a few hundred thousand at the most, swamped a population of 60 million? Either Roman culture was completely rotten and needed to be invigorated with an infusion of Germanic dynamism, as German historians and Nazi ideologues tended to argue in the first half of the twentieth century, or we’re thinking about the phenomenon of ‘culture change’ in completely the wrong way.

‘Yes, but Rome did fall.’ That’s the line of argument that worries me. At some point – quite possibly it’s already happened, but I can’t bear to read every racist screed about the threat of ‘Islamification’ – someone is going to say, yes, I accept that Muslims are a tiny minority – but Rome fell because of a tiny minority of barbarians, so we need to be even more afraid, and protect our culture ever more zealously. Rome as the archetypal empire, above all in its ending; ‘decline and fall’ appears to legitimise any dodgy political position you care to mention, even contradictory ones. The political organistion of the empire fell apart; that is taken to mean that the entirety of Roman Civilisation was destroyed, and then the alleged lessons of Rome’s fall are extended to contemporary Europe. Modern Muslims are the vast barbarian hordes that swamped the empire, and the sinister groups of outwardly civilised barbarians who undermined it from within – and the descendents of the Arabs who, according to the French historian Henri Pirenne, should take the real responsibility for destroying the empire’s unity in the eighth rather than the sixth century. They are to be seen as the great enemy, and we can find any number of dubious but powerful historical analogies to present them as such.