How Often Do You Think About the Roman Empire?

There’s a meme going viral on TikTok where people are giving funny answers to the question “How often do you think about the Roman Empire?” and for the first time I actually feel like I can relate. When some friends brought this to my attention, I immediately answered “just about every day!” And as crazy as that sounds, it’s true. For someone who loves history and spends all day writing and thinking about citizenship, is it really so hard to believe?

I think it’s important to note that the Rome I’m thinking about every day is not technically the era of the Roman Empire, which usually refers to the post-Republic era where the Caesars were in control. I’m more interested in the events and characters of the era immediately preceding the fall of the Roman Republic. This era produced some of the most memorable characters and remarkable events in all of recorded history. Not only is this an era of great political figures like Caesar, Augustus, and Cleopatra, but this is also the era of Jesus, one of just a few of the truly world transformative individuals in history. It’s an era where you get everything from the clash of empires to civil war to financial crisis to plague to great works of art and monumental architecture, literally a history-shaping era that still reverberates today. No wonder Shakespeare devoted so much time to this period!

But this era is not only fascinating, it’s also instructive. While history might not repeat, it certainly rhymes and what’s scary is that the America of today feels eerily similar to late-Republican Rome. Think about this: the Romans, after winning two world wars against Carthage, became the superpower of the Mediterranean world. Enormous wealth poured into Rome, bringing both unprecedented prosperity but also the seeds for the destruction of the democracy. For after a while, as tends to happen, this newfound wealth accrued more and more into fewer and fewer hands, corrupting and fracturing Roman culture and civic bonds, until eventually their Republic disintegrated in the flames of civil conflict.

Doesn’t that sound kind of familiar? Well, it should because this is basically what happened in America over the last 100 years. We emerged from WWII with global power unmatched in the annals of history. We became fantastically wealthy and our civilization flourished like no other. But, after a while, this great wealth started to corrupt our culture and divide us, especially in the last few decades as it has accrued into the hands of fewer and fewer Americans. To me, it feels like we are still in the early stages of the decline and I believe we can turn things around. In fact, I think we have a moral obligation to do so.

Anyway, when you start to dig into the details of the history, there are just so many parallels like this. The Romans, for example, had a two-party political system just like ours, where the Optimates, who were mostly wealthy elites, battled the Populares, who on paper represented “the people.” Of course, just like in our system, no one really looked after ordinary Roman citizens. In the late stages of the Republic, the Romans were fighting about things like what to do about the concentration of economic power, how to best handle the mass migrations pressuring the empire, and how to keep democracy alive in the face of a citizenry, once lauded for their unusual degree of civic devotion, increasingly unwilling to serve Rome. There’s even this crazy story of Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus—two brothers from the elite class who managed to momentarily re-galvanized Roman civic virtue as they attempted to address Rome’s growing problems only to die in turn by assassination. Doesn’t this sound like exactly what happened with the Kennedy brothers? Similarly, about a generation before Caesar, they had several populist would-be dictators attempt to take control of their system only to fail, mostly due to incompetence. Jan 6 anyone?

Look, most Americans don’t understand the extent to which our system is modeled after the Roman Republic. But the Founders, deeply educated in the history of the Ancient World, looked at the Roman system of shared power and checks and balances as far superior to the more directly democratic system in Athens and incorporated much of the Roman system in ours. It stands to reason that if America was designed like Rome we might fail in a similar way. This is ultimately why I find myself thinking about Rome every day.

The tragic events of January 6^th put us all on notice that things are not well in America. If you weren’t scared before, you should be now, for the economic, cultural, and geopolitical conditions that were present at the time of the fall of the Roman Republic are all with us today, and they are out in force:

• Large and growing debts

• Extreme wealth inequality

• Cultlike worship of the rich and famous

• Pervasive political corruption

• Geopolitical pressure from migration

We are literally brewing-up the same toxic soup that proved existential for democracy and political freedom in Rome. To be sure, things were a bit more extreme in Rome than they are in America today. For example, by the time Caesar was making a name for himself in politics, elections were literally openly bought and sold. Wealthy Romans—today’s equivalent of the billionaire class—would throw enormous sums of money into the campaigns for the candidates willing to advance the policies they wanted. But instead of Super PAC’s and TV ads, they just paid voters directly to vote a certain way.

The question I’ve been asking myself lately is this: “Is there really that much of a difference? In America today, whoever raises the most money wins, right? Instead of just paying people off, we try to manipulate them with TV ads and social media echo chambers. But the end result is the same where money reigns supreme instead of the people. And the problem with money is that it has no built-in moral code and can be used for evil just as easily as it can for good.

What keeps me up at night is that on our current trajectory it seems like it’s only a matter of time before a Caesar-like character emerges on the scene. Let’s be clear about one thing: we haven’t even come close yet. What we’ve seen so far is an absolute joke compared to Caesar, who was one of the most talented, charismatic leaders in all of history. But America today is still a great country and a place that very regularly produces incredibly talented individuals. How long will it be before one of these supremely capable people turns her/his attention to politics? And what will they see when they do?

I think the whole story of the fall of the Roman Republic comes down to this: things were so corrupt in Rome that Caesar came to believe that the Romans were simply no longer worthy of their freedom. While I think he was wrong, he was talented enough to do something about it and he did. Our task now is to right the ship of America and so bear ourselves, that if a would-be Caesar does emerge on the scene, he/she confronts a citizenry well worthy of its freedom.

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