Reviews
New Yorker review
Financial Times review
New York Times, May 13, 2007
Plain Dealer Review
The New York Sun, May 16, 2007
ForbesLife, May 2007
–Christopher Buckley
How many times have you heard someone pound the table and declare, “The only difference between us and Rome is we’re not driving chariots”? Next time, hand them this marvelous book by Cullen Murphy. It’ll shut ‘em up—or at least get them thinking seriously about the issue, which is a Biggie. If we are Rome, are we living on borrowed time? Is that the barbarian horde pounding on the front door? (Tell them we’re out.) For more than two decades Murphy was the managing editor of the venerable Atlantic Monthly. He appears to have read absolutely everything on his subject, and with a keen editor’s eye and a deft touch on the keyboard, has compressed his argument into a lively and readable book. It’s rich in scholarship, stories and anecdotes, and hooks you on page one with the datum that the Roman road system was 53,000 miles long—about the length of the U.S. highway system. Uh-oh. And that border wall we’re building to keep Mexicans out…would that be some modern version of Hadrian’s Wall? And this war in Iraq we find ourselves in—are we repeating mistakes made 2,000 years ago? So are we Rome? “In a thousand specific ways, the answer is obviously no. In a handful of important ways, the answer is certainly yes.” That’s the worrisome part. But let this wise and gentle docent of the past walk you through his arguments himself. You may come away shaking your head with worry, but you’ll also be grinning with insight as to how we might get out of this historical mess.
Kirkus Reviews
Imperial Rome and imperial America have many points in common, writes former Atlantic Monthly editor Murphy (Just Curious, 1995, etc.), not least that both “have considered their way to be the world’s way.”
Murphy ventures nothing new with the mere observation that Rome and America have similarities; even the Founding Fathers thought as much. But, writing with fluency and grace and possessing a solid grounding in the classics, he actually serves up specifics: a telling comparison of the Roman road system, for instance, with our interstates, and of our president’s mode of international travel with that of the emperors and their flying squadrons. Murphy draws six major parallels that, he reckons, ought to serve as warnings and guidelines for better behavior. One concerns military power, with considerable points against the use of mercenaries and auxiliaries, for instance, whether Ostrogoths or the “Halliburtoni and the Wackenhuti.” Murphy does acknowledge, however, that “the most capable, well-rounded, and experienced public executives in America today are its senior military officers, not its Washington politicians.” Another parallel is what Murphy loosely terms privatization, “which can often also mean ‘corruption,’” which is to say, the trouble certain Romans had and certain Washingtonians have in drawing the line between their things and those in the public. A further point of resemblance is the executive’s arrogating power unto itself without due concern for senatorial counsel, a habit that yields Caesars now as then. And so forth, all adding up to decline and fall, which, Murphy gently observes, doesn’t have to happen so long as we Americans take a broader view of the world and a narrower view of the Constitution and, even if we “don’t live in Mr. Jefferson’s republic anymore,” start comporting ourselves not as Romans but as Americans.
An essay in the Walter Karp-Lewis Lapham mode that’s sure to irk the neocons.
Publishers Weekly, week of 3/19/2007
Lurid images of America as a new Roman Empire—either striding the globe or tottering toward collapse, or both—are fashionable among pundits of all stripes these days. Vanity Fair editor Murphy (The World According to Eve) gives the trope a more restrained and thoughtful reading. He allows that, with its robust democracy, dynamic economy and technological wizardry, America is a far cry from Rome’s static slave society. But he sees a number of parallels: like Rome, America is a vast, multicultural state, burdened with an expensive and overstretched military, uneasy about its porous borders, with a messianic sense of global mission and a solipsistic tendency to misunderstand and belittle foreign cultures. Some of the links Murphy draws, like his comparison of barbarian invaders of the late Empire to foreign corporations buying up American assets, are purely metaphorical. But others, especially his likening of the corrupt Roman patronage system to America’s mania for privatizing government services—a “deflection of public purpose by private interest”—are specific and compelling. Murphy wears his erudition lightly and delivers a lucid, pithy and perceptive study in comparative history, with some sharp points.
Esquire, May 2007
–Tim Heffernan
