View source for What Did the Romans Ever Do for Us?

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{{DES | des = "The Pax Americana, the three generations of relative peace and prosperity that followed World War II,... has been held together mainly by soft power rather than violence. Even when America was an overwhelmingly dominant economic and military power, it generally exercised restraint, getting its allies to buy in to our system rather than resorting to raw compulsion. | show=}}
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For some reason I’ve been feeling the urge to write too much the past couple of days. I just put out a monster piece on trade war, but still have another itch to scratch, this time about Roman history, with relevance to current events.

OK, that should be a red flag right there. Anyone claiming to see modern lessons in ancient history, especially Roman history, should be considered a hack until proved innocent. Brad DeLong is rightly scathing about Niall Ferguson, who is now regurgitating the plots of Cecil B. DeMille movies as if it were scholarship, declaring that luxury and orgies brought down the Roman Republic. Silly man: doesn’t he know that it was bad statistics, that the true rate of inflation was ten percent?

But I find myself thinking, not about the fall of the Republic, but about the Pax Romana that came after — the two-plus centuries of stability that followed Augustus. Believe it or not, I think that era does have some lessons for us; this may be a sign of mental infirmity, but I’m gonna let it all hang out.

Not long ago, I would have said that very little about the Roman Empire was relevant to anything modern. It may have fascinated early modern Europeans like Edward Gibbon, but in the end it was a pre-industrial society, incredibly poor by modern standards, and sharing few modern values. True, the Roman Empire was bigger than most pre-industrial empires, and lasted a lot longer. But was it really different in any important way from, say, Assyria?
But I read a lot of history in my spare time, and as best I can tell modern scholarship is telling us that Rome really was something special.

What I learned first from Peter Temin, and at greater length from Kyle Harper, was that Rome wasn’t your ordinary pre-industrial economy. Of course it didn’t have a technological takeoff; but peace, interregional trade, and a sophisticated business and financial system made it surprisingly productive, with an overall standard of living probably not equaled until the 17th century Dutch Republic. Harper notes that Rome was held back in some ways by a heavy burden of disease, an unintentional byproduct of urbanization and trade that a society lacking the germ theory had no way to alleviate. But still, the Romans really did achieve remarkable things on the economic front.

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They also achieved remarkable things on the political front. The Romans were not nice guys; they weren’t Edwardian gentlemen in togas. They had no qualms about slavery, were often casually cruel, and had no compunctions at all about using extreme force to put down any challenges to imperial rule. But while the threat of violence always lurked in the background, the Roman Empire wasn’t held together by a reign of terror. For the most part the Pax Romana was maintained through the willing cooperation of local elites.

How did they manage that? The secret, as I read the new literature, is that Rome actually exerted a lot of soft power. Local elites were offered a good life, with attractive Roman values — Amphitheaters! Bathhouses! Wine! Stuffed dormice! — and the imperial system was open enough that especially able and ambitious provincials could aspire to move to the center of things. And that thriving, interdependent economy rewarded those who adopted Roman values and assimilated with the Roman system.
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Or to put it another way, Rome did so well for so long by not being too greedy, by limiting short-sighted exploitation of its power in favor of long-term system-building.

Obviously some people, like my own stiff-necked ancestors, refused to be assimilated and had to be put down; and as I said, the Romans had no problem being vicious when that served their purposes. Even during the paxiest parts of the Pax Romana, there was always a war somewhere. But overall restraint and a set of values that appealed to many of their subjects produced a long run of unprecedented peace and prosperity.

OK, you can probably see where I’m going with this. The Pax Americana, the three generations of relative peace and prosperity that followed World War II, was different in every detail from the Roman Principate. Not only are we vastly richer than Rome could have imagined, we’re also a lot nicer: America has done some terrible and shameful things, but nothing like what the Romans did when they got angry.

Still, our sort-of empire, like Rome’s, has been held together mainly by soft power rather than violence. Even when America was an overwhelmingly dominant economic and military power, it generally exercised restraint, getting its allies to buy in to our system rather than resorting to raw compulsion.

And it worked really well. Not perfectly, of course, but we gave the world — and ourselves — an era that was incredibly benign compared with the modern Thirty Years War that came before.

But now a barbarian invasion seems likely to tear it all down. And the sad thing is that the barbarians rejecting the values that made America truly great aren’t at the gates — they’re inside the gates, in fact in the Oval Office, because they’re basically home-grown (with an assist from Russia, of course.)

It’s a terrible story. We built something wonderful, and we’re throwing it all away for no good reason.
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