A Couple of Pirates Attack, and a Fear-Whipped Rome Surrendered Her Freedoms

News to no one here, the parallels between America and the Roman Empire are invariably chilling. The history we usually read is the long, great coming apart of a great society, one that had enshrined the rule of law, whose technological sophisication was very comparable to the nineteenth century and had an important though hardly universal form of representative government.

That had taken half a millenium to build. The structures of Roman freedom died much faster than the empire itself.

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Pompey eventually received almost the entire contents of the Roman Treasury — 144 million sesterces — to pay for his “war on terror,” which included building a fleet of 500 ships and raising an army of 120,000 infantry and 5,000 cavalry. Such an accumulation of power was unprecedented, and there was literally a riot in the Senate when the bill was debated.

Nevertheless, at a tumultuous mass meeting in the center of Rome, Pompey’s opponents were cowed into submission, the Lex Gabinia passed (illegally), and he was given his power. In the end, once he put to sea, it took less than three months to sweep the pirates from the entire Mediterranean. Even allowing for Pompey’s genius as a military strategist, the suspicion arises that if the pirates could be defeated so swiftly, they could hardly have been such a grievous threat in the first place.

But it was too late to raise such questions. By the oldest trick in the political book — the whipping up of a panic, in which any dissenting voice could be dismissed as “soft” or even “traitorous” — powers had been ceded by the people that would never be returned. Pompey stayed in the Middle East for six years, establishing puppet regimes throughout the region, and turning himself into the richest man in the empire.

We face these choices now. The savior of the world a few decades ago, we are become invaders. We are enshrining a de facto aristrocracy. We rape our own culture of meaning. We surrender ancient freedoms, and in doing so, spit on the dreams of liberty of all the world.

It sticks in my throat. It tastes of shame.