1 Paper for Comparative Imperial Transformations Conference, Sydney, July 2008 ----------------------Roman Fever: Imperial Melancholy in America

Amy Kaplan, University of Pennsylvania March 2008 --For these I set no limits, world or time, But make the gift of empire without end. -Virgil --Do Rome and Carthage know what we deny? Robert Lowell

America has been suffering a chronic case of Roman Fever, at least since the end of the Cold War and heightened since September 11, 2001, and the invasion of Iraq in 2003. From political pundits to comparative historians, HBO to Hollywood, video games to government officials, intellectuals to marines on the battlefield, the title of a recent book reverberates: Are We Rome? The subtitle of this book by Cullen Murphy, The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America, elaborates this question about the present: What can the past of the Roman Empireparticularly its decline and fall, tell us about the future of the American Empire? This pervasive interest in Rome today expresses anxiety about time, about how to circumvent the narrative of future decline that Romes past foretells. In this essay I am not concerned with the historical accuracy of comparisons between empires. I am interested, instead, in what these analogies tell us about Americas ambivalence today toward its own imperial image, and how we reckon with narratives of imperial time. We are accustomed to thinking about empire in terms of

2 territorial expansion, as Edward Said has emphasized in Culture and Imperialism. But empire also has many temporal dimensions, in its projections of power into futurity and efforts to control it, in the writing of history, and in the construction of temporal differences between the colonized and colonizer (such as modern and traditional). Analogies with Rome are at least as old as the founding of the United States and the coincidence of the 1776 publication of Gibbonss The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. From the constitutional debates onward, Americans have expressed ambivalence about whether the nation could emulate the virtues of the Roman Republic without descending into the decadence of its empire. The historical knowledge and literary symbolism of Romes decline and fall have long shadowed American ideologies of Manifest Destiny, The Nation of Futurity, and the indispensable nation, whose exceptionalist narratives envision an endless rise without a corresponding fall. While current comparisons to Rome lend a patina of grandeur to the vision of America as the sole superpower and the violent destruction it has wreaked in its name, these same comparisons also produce a kind of melancholy, what Chalmers Johnson has called The Sorrows of Empire. How does the threat of loss haunt the representations of American imperialism? Can an nation mourn the specter of its future decline, or does that nagging premonition contribute to the exercise of violence to disavow such a future? Contemporary analogies with Rome express Americas ambivalent sense of its own imperial destiny, while leaving open what Suvir Kaul has called, the melancholic gap between the will to empire and the record of history (105). Even before September 2001, imperial analogies with Rome proliferated across the political spectrum, and in popular as well as intellectual culture. These references

3 focus as much on the longevity of American power as on its global reach. Neoconservative intellectuals who in 1997 proposed the The Project for The New American Century, a title which expresses domination of future time, wanted the United States to strengthen its preeminence as the sole superpower for the long term. As Charles Krauthammer proclaimed in February 2001, America is no mere international citizen. It is the dominant power in the world. More dominant than any since Rome. Accordingly, America is in a position to reshape norms, alter expectations and create new realities. How? By unapologetic and implacable demonstrations of will. The Roman analogy projects Americas dominance into the future with its power to shape reality to come. In the disparate realms of academia and popular culture, the year 2000 saw the popular film Gladiator and the publication of Hardt and Negris academic blockbuster Empire. Cultural critics have linked the two in their reliance on Rome as a figure for America and the new world order of decentered globalization. In the film, Russell Crowe, a thinly veiled American cowboy, fights to redeem the golden citys virtues from its own decadence. For Hardt and Negri, Americas constitution, as modeled on Romes, represents the open space of networked possibilities to work through and against empires future. Since the war in Iraq, commentators have returned to Rome with increasing concern about imperial overstretch and the threat military ventures represent to democracy at home. The Comptroller General of the United States, David Walker, warned in August 2007, that America is a great nation, probably the greatest in history. But if we want to keep America great, we have to recognize reality and make needed changes. . .There are striking similarities between Americas current situation and that of

4 thither great power from the past: Rome. . .The Roman Republic fell for many reasons, but 3 are worth remembering: declining moral values and political civility at home, an overconfident and overextended military in foreign lands, and fiscal irresponsibility by the central government. Sound familiar? In my view, its time to learn from history and take steps to ensure the American Republic is the first to stand the test of time. Walker finds in Rome a lesson from the past of a future that can be circumvented and a confirmation of Americas ability to avoid its fate and endure over time. In contrast to Walkers optimism, former CIA official and critic of empire, Chalmers Johnson, in Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic argues that Rome prefigures the inevitable demise of democracy, because America has come to resemble the Roman Empire with its military overstretch of seven hundred bases around the world. He sees America following Romes course: approaching the edge of a waterfall and about to plunge in. For Johnson the key lesson of Rome is the incompatibility of republicanism with imperialism: Roman history suggests that the short happy life of American republic may be coming to an end. Nonetheless Johnson holds out a thread of hope that America could redeem its democratic character if it willingly could relinquish its empire. Johnson expresses not only sorrow about Americas imperial descent, but also nostalgia for a pre-imperial republic, as he plots U.S. history through the historical trope of Romes radical shift from a virtuous republic to a violent imperium. In a parody of todays obsession with Rome, radical intellectual Mike Davis titles a recent collection of essays, In Praise of Barbarians: Essays against Empire. Though none of the essays address Rome, he cleverly uses Roman allusions as titles for sections,

5 and ends with the question Did the Poor Weep for Rome? Not at all, he answers, and concludes: It remains to be seen who will cry for the new Rome on the Potomac. The most sophisticated book about this topic, which has received much critical acclaim, is Are We Rome: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America? Cullen Murphy, former editor of the Atlantic Monthly, demonstrates with wit and erudition troubling parallels between the two empires. Both empires believed in their own exceptional nature as the chosen people and a universal model for the world to follow. What Murphy calls the eagle in the mirror can be found in six parallels: the concentration of power in a solipsistic capitol; military might divorced from civilian society; privatization and corruption; blindness toward the outside world viewed as either barbarian or Americans in embryo; the Janus-faced role of borders as barriers and sites of assimilation; and the sprawling complexity of both Rome and America, which makes control increasingly difficult to maintain. Despite these compelling parallels, Murphys ultimate answer to his own bald question, are we Rome? is, well not really. The analogy breaks down, he claims, around Americas essential goodness: its abolition of slavery, its citizens desires to be a middle class society of equals with a belief in progress, and a capacity for assimilation of immigrants. Yet Murphy asks Why, then do we feel a tug of loss when contemplating Romes demise? a question he repeats but answers only as a general meditation on the nature of times passing. Might this tug portend a premonition of the future rather than sadness about the past? His conclusion is telling: the genius of America may be that it has built the fall of Rome into its very makeup: it is very consciously a constant work in progress, designed to accommodate and build on revolutionary change. Rome

6 dissolved into history, successfully but only once. America has done so again and again. Are we Rome? In important ways we just might be. In important ways were clearly making some of the same mistakes. But the antidote is everywhere. The antidote is being American. In this tautological reasoning, Murphy redeems Americas future from the historical narrative of corruption and decline that he has so astutely drawn And his answer lies in a conception of time; while Rome, he claims, was unable to change and improve but instead clung to an increasingly rigid structure of imperial rule, Americas ability to continually reinvent itself, to fall and rise again, will ultimately preserve it. In contrast to Johnsons nostalgia for a democratic past, Murphy believes that Americas redemption lies in its capacity for change. He answers his own question thus: Americas present may indeed resemble Romes past, but the future Fate of America will be radically different because the United States has an infinite capacity for self-renewal, for resurrection. Intellectuals and government officials are not the only ones grappling with the phantom of Rome. Marines on the battlefield of Iraq and journalists reporting their activities also have recourse to Roman analogies. In a 2006 investigation of the massacre of civilians in Haditha, a Newsweek article starts by describing the same marine battalion preparing for the battle of Fallujah two years earlier: THE MARINES KNOW HOW TO GET PSYCHED UP FOR A BIG FIGHT. In November 2004, before the Battle of Fallujah, the Third Battalion, First Marines, better known as the "3/1" or "Thundering Third," held a chariot race. Horses had been confiscated from suspected insurgents, and charioteers were urged to go all-

7 out. The men of Kilo Company--honored to be first into the city on the day of the battle--wore togas and cardboard helmets, and hoisted a shield emblazoned with a large K. As speakers blasted a heavy-metal song, "Cum On Feel the Noize," the warriors of Kilo Company carried a home-made mace, and a ball-and-chain studded with M-16 bullets. A company captain intoned a line from a scene in the movie "Gladiator," in which the Romans prepare to slaughter the barbarians: "What you do here echoes in eternity." Given the gravity of the article it seems to start in a frivolous manner, but one that gets to another appeal of Romethe spectacle of bloody corporeal masculine violence. As in the HBO series Rome, political views of empire pale besides the vision of half naked muscular men engaged in face to face brutal physical combat, unencumbered by modern mechanical military equipment. This theatrical enactment conflates scenes from two hugely popular films, Gladiator, which most soldiers would have been old enough to see in theaters or videos, and another Oscar-winning film, Ben Hurfrom 1959, released on DVD in 2001 and 2005. Many people who have never seen Ben Hur will remember the chariot race, which made popular theater since its lavish enactments in Central Park and Coney Island at the turn of the last century. The Newsweek article ends with a more somber reference to Rome, speculating on the reasons for the gruesome Haditha murders: Left to their own devices , grunts sometimes improvise. It is possible that the Kilo Company was determined to leave a calling card, which is to say, to warn Haditha that IEDs would be met with heavy retribution. Its an old and primitive counter-insurgency tactic. Long ago, the Romans used it against the barbarians. In the play-acting before

8 Fallujah, the captain recalls one memorable line from Gladiator, What you do here echoes in eternity, but he omits another: at my signal unleash hell. While some believe that Romes example should lead America to relinquish its commitment to militarism, others believe that that America can reclaim a future once lost to Rome, only by recommitting to its military mission. In The Decline Begins a May 2007 cover story of the National Journal, James Kitfield quotes Donald Kagan, neoconservative professor of classics at Yale (and father of Robert and Frederick): "I've argued that not since the Roman Empire has anyone had such extraordinary power as the United States after the Cold War . . . .But all of the elements of our strength are now being challenged, and it's perfectly possible that we are seeing a relative decline in U.S. power that will prove lasting." Kagan is concerned about another Vietnam Syndrome: "That worries me more than anything . . .because already we're seeing Iraq treated like a political football even though our very existence could be at risk. So in my mind, the main challenge is not external but internal. . . . If we get kicked out of Iraq with our tails between our legs, we will feel that impact right away and for a very long time." For Kagan, to lose Iraq due to a failure of nerve is to court a catastrophe that could threaten Americas existence, and to forfeit Americas future preeminence in the New American Century. What ties all of these examples together is their focus on futurity, their ambivalence about time and anxiety about impending loss. Will America endure, will it outlast Rome, even if it has 750 years to go. Will it be the first to stand the test of time? Does the tug of loss felt for the demise of Rome foreshadow the demise of America? Will the barbarians weep for the New Rome on the Potomac? Will this battle echo into

The discourse of American imperialism has long had as much to do with time as space. In the 1830s, journalist, John OSullivan, who coined the term Manifest Destiny wrote an influential essay, The Great Nation of Futurity, which stated, We have no interest in the scenes of antiquity, only as lessons of avoidance of nearly all their examples. The expansive future is our arena,. . . .The far-reaching, the boundless future will be the era of American greatness. British historian E.P. Thompson, in writing about antinuclear proliferation in the 1980s, criticizes America for seeing itself not as a race or nation at all, but as the universal future. Madeline Albright, Clintons Secretary of State, is often quoted as stating that We are the indispensable nation. The fuller context in 1998 justified Clintons use of cruise missiles in Iraq : If we have to use force , it is because we are America! We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further into the future. But what does America see in the future? Its exceptional universalism that transcends time or ominous threats to its longevity that must be met with preemptive violence? I have been arguing that Roman Fever today expresses a range of reactions to the threat of imperial loss. A brilliant analysis of the fear and denial of imperial decline and its relation to violence can be found in another allusion to Rome, this one not from America but from South Africa: in J. M. Coetzees powerful novel, Waiting for the Barbarians (1880). Empire has created the time of history. Empire has located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the seasons but in the jagged time

10 of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe. Empire dooms itself to live in history and plot against history. One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era. By day it pursues its enemies. It is cunning and ruthless, it send its bloodhounds everywhere. By night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation. A mad vision yet a virulent one: I, wading in the ooze, am no less infected with it than the faithful; Colonel Joll as he tracks the enemies of Empire through the boundless desert, sword unsheathed to cut down barbarian after barbarian until at last he finds and slays the one whose destiny it should be (or if not he then his sons or unborn grandsons) to climb the bronze gateway to the Summer Palace and topple the globe surmounted by the tiger rampant that symbolized eternal dominion, while his comrades below cheer and fire their muskets in the air. Coetzee argues that the colonization of space is inseparable from the domination of time. Empire has located its existence not in geography alone but in the history it creates and tries to undo. Imperial tropes that tell stories of the past and plot the future may appear to impose narrative order-- rise and fall, beginnings and ending. But the narrator finds imperial time, as opposed to the trope of natural cycles, to be filled with catastrophic ruptures and wreckage. If empire creates the time of history with mythical origins and pyrrhic endings, it also desperately tries to unravel its own tropes of rise and fall through repeatedly rejecting the future history of its own demise. Coetzee reveals the inherent violence of Empires obsession with how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era, in other words how to remain unchanged, while it changes everything it

11 conquers. This desire than can only become the pursuit of annihilation in space and time. The military agent of empire, Captain Joll tracks the barbarians in boundless space, as he does in endless time, trying to track the one whose future progeny will topple the empire. But if empire is doomed to the history it both creates and tries to destroy, it can only imagine the specter of that future defeat at the hands of the unborn. In imagining the future, the empire becomes indistinguishable from the barbarians. Do the images of disaster empire feeds on at night refer to violence it enacts or the violence it imagines at the hands of the barbarians? Territorial expansion is figured as acres of desolation, apocalypse, the end of time. In the final scene, it is grammatically difficult to distinguish who is cheering, the comrades of the captain for destroying forever the unborn barbarians, or the future comrades of the one who will vanquish empires symbol of eternity. In imagining how to endure, how to prolong its era, empire can only project its invincibility into the future by imagining its utter vulnerability, the probability of disaster, the unborn child whose parent has not yet been destroyed. Thus it can only imagine how not to end through a vision of annihilation. And empire could not prolong its era without the prolonging the threat of the barbarians to quell. Coetzee takes his title from the poem Waiting for the Barbarians by the Greek Alexandrian poet, Constantine Cavafy (1904) This is how the poem ends: Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion? (How serious people's faces have become.) Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly, everyone going home so lost in thought? Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come. And some who have just returned from the border say there are no barbarians any longer.

12 And now, what's going to happen to us without barbarians? They were, those people, a kind of solution.

In this great anti-climax, without the imagined barbarians, empire cannot not prolong its era. It needs to keep conjuring and destroying their threat to its existence to prolong the history of imperial time. Do the current American obsessions with Rome express Coetzees characterization of the submerged mind of empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era? Or is it possible to accept peaceably a future of loss, to relinquish an image of oneself as the indispensable nation of futurity, without imagining annihilation and apocalypse, the end of time? If Americans report from the border that there are no barbarians any longer, do they then need to conjure new barbarians as a kind of solution to propel the engine of empire? Does the decline of imperial power necessarily imply catastrophe, against which all violence is preferable, or is it possible to relinquish and to mourn for imperial America and to embrace an as yet untold future?

Works Cited Albright, Madeline. Interview. NBC "Today" show, February 19, 1998 Cavafy, Constantine. Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Edited by George Savidis. Revised Edition. Princeton University Press, 1992. Coetzee, J. M. Waiting for the Barbarians. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England. New York: Penguin Books, 1982. Davis, Mike. In Praise of Barbarians : Essays Against Empire. Chicago, Ill.: Haymarket Books, 2007. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000.

13 Johnson, Chalmers A. Nemesis : The Last Days of the American Republic. New York: Metropolitan Books, 200 ---. The Sorrows of Empire : Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004. Kaul, Suvir. Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire: English Verse in the Long Eighteenth century. Charlottesville. University of Virginia Press. Kitfield, James. The Decline Begins. National Journal. May 19, 2007. Krauthammer, Charles. The Bush Doctrine. Time Magazine. February 25, 2001. Murphy, Cullen. Are We Rome? : The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin 2007. OSullivan, John. The Great Nation of Futurity. The United States Democratic Review, Volume 6, Issue 23, pp. 426-430.. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York. Vintage 1994. Thomas, Evan and Johnson, Scott, Probing a Bloodbath, Newsweek. June, 12, 2006. Thompson, E.P., The Heavy Dancers: Writings on War, Past and Future. New York. Pantheon 1985. David M. Walker, Transforming Government to Meet the Demands of the 21st Century. Speech to the Federal Midwest Human Resources Council and the Chicago Federal Executive Board. August 7, 2007. Available at http://gao.gov/cghome/d071188cg.pdf.