Reading Livy against Livy: The dream and nightmare of (American) empire1

I wish to thank Sang-Ki Kim and Carl P. Springer for their comments during the colloquium “Thinking About Empire,” at Southern Illinois University—Edwardsville; also Michaela Hoenicke Moore (York University) and Robert Zaretsky (University of Houston) for their help and suggestions.

Abstract

Recent debates over the rise of an American Empire have relied on analogies to past empires, from ancient Athens to modern Britain. Such historical analogies, while inexact and debatable, are a basic mode of understanding our relation to the past. This article explores the analogy of the United States to the Roman Empire. The figure of Rome is a contested legacy, as can be seen in the long-ago writings of Livy and Tacitus, in the developing ideal of Rome during the Middle Ages, and in the works of modern scholars and poets living under Soviet domination in Poland. Tacitus tells us that the most profound symptoms of empire may be seen in the homeland. The debate over analogies for the American Empire is thus a debate over the “state of America's soul.”

Notes

I wish to thank Sang-Ki Kim and Carl P. Springer for their comments during the colloquium “Thinking About Empire,” at Southern Illinois University—Edwardsville; also Michaela Hoenicke Moore (York University) and Robert Zaretsky (University of Houston) for their help and suggestions.

Raymond Aron, “The Imperial Republic,” in The Dawn of Universal History: Selected Essays from a Witness of the Twentieth Century, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 265 and 245. Original edition: Une histoire du XXe siècle (Paris: Éditions Plon, 1996).

George Bush, Address preceding a White House press conference, 13 April 2004; on Jefferson and the history of American empire, see: Richard White, “The Geography of American Empire,” Raritan 23 (2004): 2.

Andrew J. Bacevich, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 167–97.

Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Price of America's Empire (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 7–13.

See the classic article of Walter Grossmann, “Schiller's Philosophy of History in his Jena Lectures of 1789–90,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 69 (1954): 156–72. The concept of effective history (Wirkungsgeschichte) was central for the philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd edition (New York: Continuum, 1998), 300–1. The History of Concepts (Begriffsgeschichte), a historical school inspired by Gadamer, has pursued the notion of effective history systematically. See most notably: Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck, eds, Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, 8 vols.-in-9 (Stuttgart: E. Klett, 1972–97).

The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (The White House: September 2002), 15.

Cheney referred to Hanson's work in a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, 9 April 2003. Hanson is proud of Cheney's interest. See Victor Davis Hanson, “History or Hysteria?” posted in The National Review Online, 28 March 2003; and his recent book, Ripples of Battle: How Wars of the Past Still Determine How we Fight, How we Live, and How we Think (New York: Doubleday, 2003).

Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, trans. Walter Blanco (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), V. 86–114, 227–31.

Ibid., V. 92–3, 228.

Ibid., V. 116, 231.

See the useful commentary of W. Robert Connor, Thucydides (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 147–57.

Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power, America and Europe in the New World Order (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2003). See also Richard Figuier, “Le méridien de partition. La civilization européenne contre la société américaine,” Revue des deux mondes (April 2004): 55–62.

Donald Kagan, The Peloponnesian War (New York: Viking, 2003).

R. M. Ogilvie, ed., Titi Livi Ab Urbe Condita, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, rpt. 1979), pref. 6–7, trans. T. J. Luce, Livy: The Rise of Rome, Books 1–5 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 3.

Gary B. Miles, Livy: Reconstructing Early Rome (Ithaca: Columbia University Press, 1995), 18.

Oswyn Murray, “History,” in The Greek Pursuit of Knowledge, ed. Jacques Brunschwig and Geoffrey E. R. Lloyd, trans. Catherine Porter et al. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 181.

Livy, Rise of Rome, 3.

Gian Biagio Conte, Latin Literature, A History, trans. Joseph B. Solodow (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 367–70.

Eugen Cizek, Histoire et historiens à Rome dans l’antiquité (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1995), 161–4.

C. D. Fisher, ed., Cornelii Tacitii Annalium ab excessu Divi Augusti libri (Oxford: Clarendon, 1906), I.1.

Ronald Syme, Tacitus, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), vol. 2, 520.

Arnaldo Momigliano, “Tacitus and the Tacitist Tradition,” in The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 123.

1 Peter 5:13; Rev. 14:8, 16:9, 17:5 and elsewhere.

James A. Sanders, “Isaiah in Luke,” in Luke and Scripture: The Function of Sacred Tradition in Luke-Acts, ed. Craig A. Evans and James A. Sanders (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 23.

Augustine, The City of God Against the Pagans, trans. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), V.17, 217.

Ibid., V.15, 161.

Peter Heather, Goths and Romans, 332–489 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 164.

Friedrich Prinz, Von Konstantin zu Karl dem Grossen. Entfaltung und Wandel Europa (Düsseldorf: Artemis & Winkler, 2000), 190–7.

Christine Delaplace, “La Provence sous la domination ostrogothique (508–536),” Annales du Midi 115 (2003): 479–99.

Raymond- J. Loenertz, “Constitutum Constantini. Destination, destinataires, auteur, date,” Aevum 48 (1974): 199–245, see 227; Nicolas Huyghebaert, “Une légende de fondation: Le Constitutum Constantini,” Moyen Âge 85, 4th ser. 34 (1979): 177–209; Michael E. Hoenicke Moore, “The King's New Clothes: Royal and Episcopal Regalia in the Carolingian Empire,” in Robes and Honor: The Medieval World of Investiture, ed. Stuart Gordon (New York: 2000), 95–135.

Friedrich Heer, The Holy Roman Empire, trans. Janet Sondheimer (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1967), 278.

A detailed analysis of the coronation: François Furet, Revolutionary France, 1770–1880, trans. Antonia Neville (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 240–8.

Ferguson, Colossus, 19–24.

Henryk Sienkiewicz, Quo Vadis (1st edition 1896), trans. C. J. Hogarth (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1989), 318.

Ryszard Kapuscinski, Downfall of an Autocrat, trans. William R. Brand and Katazyna Mroczkowska-Brand (New York: Random House, 1983); and Ryszard Kapuscinski, Shah of Shahs, trans. William R. Brand and Katazyna Mroczkowska-Brand (New York: Random House, 1985).

Czeslaw Milosz, The History of Polish Literature, 2nd edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 470–5.

Zbigniew Herbert, Selected Poems, trans. John Carpenter and Bogdana Carpenter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 74.

Zbigniew Herbert, Report from the Besieged City and Other Poems, trans. John Carpenter and Bogdana Carpenter (New York: Ecco Press, 1985), 77.

Zbigniew Herbert, Elegy for the Departure and Other Poems, trans. John Carpenter and Bogdana Carpenter (New York: Ecco Press, 1999), 87.

Ibid., 88.

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd edition (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1951), 125.

Jill Harries, Law and Empire in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 19–21. On the lex regia as the basic legal formula of the Principate: Fustel de Coulanges, La Gaule romaine (Paris: Éditions de Fallois, 1994), 122–31.

Theodor Mommsen, A History of Rome under the Emperors, ed. Thomas Wiedemann, trans. Clare Krojzl (London: Routledge, 1992), 375.

Marcel Mauss, Politique, a fragment edited by Christian Papilloud, “Un inédit de Marcel Mauss,” Archives européenes de sociologie/European Journal of Sociology/Europäisches Archiv für Soziologie 44 (2003): 7. Compare Aristotle on the mutual enjoyment of justice in the City: Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, translation and commentary Christopher Rowe and Sarah Broadie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 1129b–30a; and Politics, 1253a, in Jonathan Barnes, ed., The Complete Works of Aristotle, Bollingen Series 71; 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), vol. 2, 1988.

Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 5.