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For these, I set no limits in space and time;
I give them 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. It was heightened by the attacks of 11 September 2001 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Parallels between America and the Roman Empire have become clichés, pervading our public discourse from political pundits to comparative historians, HBO to Hollywood, Pentagon papers to mystery novels, video games to government officials, intellectuals to marines on the battlefield. Are We Rome?, the title of Cullen Murphy's recent book, reverberates throughout the culture. Its subtitle, The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America, elaborates this question about the present: What can the past of the Roman Empire - particularly its decline and fall - tell us about the future of the American Empire? This interest in Roman analogues, whether positive or negative, expresses anxiety about historical time, about whether it is possible to circumvent the narrative of future decline that the past foretells. The turn to Rome reminds Americans, despite long-lasting dreams to the contrary, that their country may never reach Fukuyama's End of History, with its liberal democracy as the final, universal form of human government. Instead it may follow one of the narratives of other empires in history, all of which come to an end.
Parallels with Rome are much older than the founding of the United States and the coincidence of the 1776 publication of Edward Gibbons's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. From the constitutional debates onward, American leaders 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 Rome's 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. At moments of imperial expansion, such as the 1890s, Rome reappeared not only as an emblem of past triumphs but also as a challenge to America's future, especially to the compatibility...