The Ruin of the Roman Empire (2009) by James O'Donnell. HarperCollins, New York Irony courses through these pages like adrenaline. "If you seek the last day of the Roman Empire, you'll have many choices," James O'Donnell extrapolates. "Rome to be sure still holds our imaginations," the author postulates, most probably because there is a curious parallel between the widely perceived decline of the United States of America and the ruin of the Roman Empire. By design, or perhaps default, there are some uncanny echoes between the two empires. Roman resentment at the ingratitude of the subordinate client states is matched in contemporary America. The real world of Rome was more fluid in many ways than present day America. People did not pay much attention to borders demarcating the extent of Roman rule. The border control fracas in the US, especially along the Rio Grande, in spite of increasingly tight passport controls mean that effectively the policy of erecting barriers has failed. It will never be known how many illegal aliens have entered America. And so it was with Rome. There were no passport controls, or airports for that matter, and entire tribes moved with audacity into the Roman Empire with roughly equal rigour as modern migrants. Most frustrating for the Romans was the arbitrary nature of the thrust of barbarian hordes who did not particularly care where Roman territory ended and the "barbarian" world of Goths and Huns, Slavs and Bulgars began. The Danube and the Rhine formed natural boundaries in the north. The formidable mountains of eastern Anatolia, the Caucasus and the Euphrates were more or less the eastern frontier with Persia. The Sahara of Africa was as impregnable a barrier as the Alps in Europe. With thunderclouds looming over Rome it was easy for the Romans to miss a bright piece of news from the crucible of their crumbling empire. Slaves sat on imperial thrones. Roman officials pandered to the whims of Germanic savages. Then the tide truly turned against Rome. Such about-face developments seldom happen abruptly. New religions such as Christianity had arisen from the ashes of paganism and the ethnocentric putrefaction of Judaism. Pagan emperors turned to Christianity for solace and political acumen. Africans and Goths rose the ranks to become emperors of Rome. Just like today an African-American Barack Obama assumed office as the first black president of America. "To the naked eye, Rome was Rome as it had always been; to the historical eye, change was everywhere, and continual," O'Donnell succinctly puts it. If there was any silver lining at all to emerge from the turmoil of fallen Rome, it was that meritocracy took precedence over aristocracy. The Romans learnt to compromise. "As long as these old families were certain of their prerogatives, they were content to surrender their power to the new men. The city needed the subsidies rich families could provide and clung as well to its ancient self-esteem, but power was another matter." Corruption had set in. Determined to be the biggest and best, there were unmistakable signs that the once invincible Roman army was in serious decline. Mercenaries from outlandish backwaters were recruited in ever increasing numbers. Sinister forces overcame Rome. The irony was that the motley mercenaries aspired to be Roman, just like African, Asian and Latin American immigrants in the US today are enamoured by the elusive "American Dream". Much to their consternation, the Romans learnt that it would help if the Germanic warrior riders showed better order in warfare, Roman-style, and learnt to shoot as straight as the Roman legionnaires. So the barbarians rode in and they had to prove that there was more to their cause than blind fury. To keep the spectators at bay, the Romans armed themselves with the biggest gun they could muster -- incorporating the barbarians into the Roman armies. The opulence and extravagance of Rome barely deterred the barbarians. Rome itself was under assault. The rise of rival Roman capitals exacerbated matters. Constantinople and Ravenna eclipsed Rome's real function as a capital of the Roman Empire. Effete emperors were not entirely to blame for the feckless failure of Rome. "In the fifth century the retirement of delicate young emperors to palaces brought forward the real generals, stern men from the northern marches, to do the emperor's dirty work for them," the author extrapolates. The memory of the glory of Rome was fiercely contested. New thinking and old wounds around what exactly constituted Rome surfaced. Romans were riding a wave of resentment for they suspected their empire was on the wrong track. Yet the Romans were loath to stick their heads above the parapet of their cloistered cities. But this strategy was as risky as it was irresponsible. "For a very long time, the dirtiest of that work had gone on far from the Mediterranean, its cities, and its settled populations. Roman soldiers, coming to the end of their service, expected to be looked after, and the customary form of care was a gift of land. Viewed from inside the empire, they could seem like Zionists in Palestine during the early twentieth century. Looked at from far enough away, with the right spyglass, it could seem that the land they were given was empty," the author draws a defining parallel. The rulers of Rome cloaked authoritarianism in an outwardly democratic façade. For Romans the lesson was simple enough: sharpen up and prepare for a howl of rage from barbarians who yearn to be Roman. However, as the author rightly points out it never paid to underestimate Roman might. Romans and barbarians lived side by side, the Romans civilising those from the more sensible end of the barbarian hordes. Jockeying for position and prestige within the crumbling empire they became more Catholic the Pope so to speak. O'Donnell certainly doesn't lump them solidly together. But the barbarians eventually adopted Christianity as their religion, just as the Romans did before them. A classic example was Theodoric the Great, King of the Ostrogoths and the Visigoths and Viceroy of the Eastern Roman Empire, Byzantium. Born in Pannonia, modern day Croatia and Serbia, Theodoric was appointed Roman Consul by the Eastern Roman Emperor Zeno who also conferred on him the honorary titles of Patrician and Magister Militum. Emperor Zeno appealed to Theodoric to thwart the German usurper to the Italian throne Odacer. Theodoric slew Odacer with his own hands to be appointed King of Italy where he resettled many of his own tribesmen. O'Donnell tells the tale with much polish and panache. He applies his elegant literary genius to the subject. Things pick up when the pagan emperors of Rome get wind of the novelty of Christianity. The Roman Empire was riven by racial and tribal fault lines. "The frontier societies on the Rhine and Danube were different. These were the liveliest places in the Roman West. There you found a thriving Keynesianism: military leaders spent tax revenues they gathered elsewhere in the empire to support soldiers and officials who were in many respects as economically idle and useless as the perfumed grandees of the city of Rome who complained when the lavish, heavy rings they wore made their hands sweat," notes O'Donnell. The Roman Empire at that particular historical juncture resembled contemporary America, the key role of the fat cats of US giant corporations -- Betchel, Lockheed Martin, Chevron, and of course Haliburton -- in perpetuating the myth that corporate globalisation can be used as a weapon of war to prolong the life of the decadent American Empire. That predication, or rather probability is left open. The Ruin of the Roman Empire brings to sharp focus the dangerous fallacy that Washington, like Rome before it, can secure democracy and civilisation through its "free trade policy, buttressed by the Bretton Woods institutions and the American imperial dream and formidable war machine. The US, like the Roman Empire before it, metamorphosed into the "Evil Empire" a term coined, ironically, by Ronald Reagan to describe the Soviet Union. It is a more apt statement on the state of affairs in Washington and Rome. "We will actively work to bring the hope of democracy, development, free markets, and free trade to every corner of the world," boasted former US president George W Bush. He used this as a pretext to invade Iraq and Afghanistan -- the very same tactic the Romans used as their world collapsed around them. Rome and Washington are models of failure, moral degradation and social and economic degeneration. So what about Egypt in those distant days? Did it have the same subservient political role it plays to Washington as it did with Rome in yesteryear? "Alexandria and Egypt were natural magnates for Jews, some of whom settled there before Romans were even heard of, at Elephantine far south on the Nile at the first cataract. They were probably planted there as a military garrison in the pay of the Persians, when the great kings dominated Egypt long before the time of Augustus, and they kept up their rituals in astonishing isolation from Jerusalem." A down-at-luck religion, an offshoot of Judaism, Christianity thrived in Egypt, and Alexandria was far superior economically to Rome in those days. If Rome was Washington, a position later usurped by Ravenna and Constantinople, Alexandria was New York. The rise of Christianity was inextricably intertwined with the dwindling of Rome's power and prestige and no more so than in Egypt itself. "There were ugly moments, as in the early 400s when a Christian mob murdered Hypatia, an intellectual prodigy who refused to accept or acknowledge the new creed. But prevailing powers usually forget the violence they had used to clear their paths, and so by the sixth century it was possible to think of Alexandria as a place that had naturally and uncomplicatedly endured in its role as the great city of the Mediterranean world. Rome and Constantinople had imperial pomp, but Alexandria had urban flair -- think of Berlin or Washington compared with cosmopolitan Paris or New York." Pax Americana and Pax Romana are comparable in more ways than one. The representative institutions of the US and Rome are curiously identical -- the Senate and Capitol Hill. But, back to Egypt. "Alexandria and Antioch were the real capital cities of the eastern Mediterranean, the former with Egyptian (that is to say Coptic) hinterlands, the latter surrounded by Syraic-speakers." Roman emperors, like American presidents ruled by personal prestige. The US presidents are democratically elected precisely to be princeps (first citizen among equals) and pater patriae (father of the nation). "Had Alexandria and Antioch been left to grow and dominate their regions unchecked, Islam might never have taken the form or achieved the strength it did. Or at least probably would have allied itself with one of the two eastern cities in a contest against the other that would have shaped a far different world." Only a superpower such as the US or the Roman Empire can muster the power to guarantee world peace. The author demolishes many myths about the Romans. The latter years of Roman imperial decline, for instance, tend to be portrayed as a period of bitter repression. It is an argument that betrays Western spin. "Constantinople, while drawing wealth away from Alexandria and Antioch, ensured survival for speakers of Greek, and gave them opportunities for prosperity and comfort." Other accounts of the dying days of empires bygone are racier, and despite the horrors, the intensity of O'Donnell's fascination with his subject matter suffuses the book. There is another way of looking at Roman history. The Ruin of the Roman Empire highlights its heft and weight and especially when the author takes flight in a light-spirited way that the dark, demon-haunted times of Roman ruin never quite did. A similarly cynical view inspired acolytes of Rome to propagate Latin culture far beyond the boundaries of the Roman Empire. The dominant culture was in decline even as it was spreading its tentacles far beyond its borders. The reader is transferred to an entirely different world. Barbarians become emperors, much like contemporary America's Obama, and Roman interests are served even as the empire putrefies and decomposes. In one respect the Roman precedent is not inspiring. The ruin of Rome was preceded by centuries of ultimately fruitless diplomacy. Doesn't that remind the reader of the US and its failed escapades with Iran? Is it prophetic? It was a humiliation from which Rome never fully recovered. What shocks in this book are the similarities with the US. The barbarians secured a niche in Roman politics. They claimed allegiance to Rome. As the ragtag armies invaded, Rome bit the dust. O'Donnell succeeds in providing a vivid chronicle of Rome's ruin. With wit, flair and lashings of historical facts and figures, O'Donnell brings his story of the ruin of the Roman Empire to a terrible close. He did this to shed light on details of a scandalously decadent empire in its death throes. O'Donnell has done a fine job of amassing vast amounts of this sort of material, much of it based directly on historical archival material. Precisely because of the pleasure of this engrossing book, it drives home the fate of our contemporary superpower, with its increased international violence and terrorism. Pax Americana apes the end of Pax Romana. Reviewed by Gamal Nkrumah
