A Perspective on Modern Parallels

Forgive me for disregarding my own maxim I wrote in the previous post, but I read an article by Bill Croke at The American Spectator online that I want to comment on briefly. The piece is called "Obama as Diocletian", and engages in the practice of finding historical parallels that stretches back at least as far as Plutarch in his biographies nineteen centuries ago. Trying to find common themes in the decline of the Roman Republic and/or Empire with the current American experience is also a well (if not over) used rhetorical trope.

As I've written, Diocletian does appear to represent the beginning of a new era in Roman history in a political sense; culturally, he is at the end of pagan dominance over Christianity. Croke compares Diocletian to Abraham Lincoln for rebinding the empire together; yet, it was Diocletian who conceived what would eventually be the permanent split between East and West that allowed the former to survive the latter by a millennium. I might even say that Diocletian may well be viewed as the first Byzantine emperor. While I certainly agree that his economic policies were onerous, to call them Marxist is inappropriate in two ways. First, there was as much or more redistribution to the wealthy and well-connected in the imperial hierarchy as to the poor (and without any attempt at hiding the fact). The second reason is because Marxism, though evil and wrong, has a foundation in the "science" of economics, and no such knowledge existed in those times.

A century after Diocletian, Theodosius still looks as stable as Augustus. If I didn't know that the Western Empire would fall, I wouldn't think it inevitable; indeed, Orosius
had already witnessed some of the first permanent losses and still didn't expect the Roman Empire would end. While the movement of the Huns into Europe clearly put new pressures on the Teutonic peoples against Rome, there was no reason before the fact to think this would be any different from the movement of those Germans into Europe against the Celts/Gauls one thousand years earlier. The Romans were fighting the Gallic peoples in Italy for much of the fourth and third centuries before the Common Era, and they were fighting the Germans defensively at the end of the second century BCE.

On the other hand, I view the fall of the Roman Republic as much earlier determined than Croke seems to. He refers to the Gracchi as "civically virtuous." I see them as symptoms of the Republic already in decline, about a century before the beginning of Augustus' principate. The spectacular treasure Rome won in 167 BCE from the Third Macedonian War allowed domestic taxes to lapse for generations. As political scientists say today about oil states, there's no representation without taxation. The Roman economy hollowed out for this and other reasons. They were able to stave off total state collapse because, unlike any of the empires that had preceded them, the Romans were very good at incorporating conquered and allied nations into their system. Julius and Augustus Caesar created a new system because the old one had already ceased to be effective; their changes were more revolutionary than Diocletian's because the state of things that preceded them was more problematic.

The war in the Roman mind that was most similar to World War II for the United States was the Second Punic War. There is a difference of extraordinary importance between these two great victories. The U.S. finished the war with half the productive capacity in the world, including likely too much manufacturing, so a relative economic decline was necessary for stability, even though it may look like a decline of much greater significance (I don't know how old Croke is, but I wouldn't be surprised if he grew up in the 1950's and thought that was the normal order of things). The Romans, however, were economically devastated by Hannibal's invasion. Because of the perks of victory, however, they never redeveloped the agricultural capacity that had previously been the base of their economy. Maybe if the Gracchi had been successful, though I doubt this was what they actually understood as their goal.

I think the reason comparisons are made so often between Rome and the United States is that Rome was at one time a republic, as America is. It is necessary to remember, however, that the Roman military was still strengthening while their political liberty was deteriorating. By the time of Diocletian, the parallels to U.S. are merely in being a large and hegemonic world power—in which case any other authoritarian empire in history is no worse a comparison. President Obama and Diocletian have both engaged in fighting wars in Mesopotamia and raised some taxes, but so have numerous other world leaders throughout history—Persian, Greek, Arab, Mongol, etc.—and many of their regimes fell a lot more quickly than Diocletian's. Among the four centuries of Roman emperors, Diocletian probably comes off as a bit better than average in performance; whatever one's opinion of Obama, he and every American president are far superior.