America and Rome
For some time now I have been struck by the resemblance between the current political turmoil in the United States and the evolution of Ancient Rome. Not the ‘decline and fall’ of Rome chronicled by Edward Gibbon which culminated in the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century AD, but the upheaval which took place five centuries earlier when Rome made the transition from Republic to Empire. I soon discovered that quite a number of other people of a Classical turn of mind had spotted the same similarity, in particular the Belgian historian Professor David Engels who has written extensively on the subject, so that I was unlikely to be able to contribute many original ideas of my own.* But the insights provided by Professor Engels and others seem important enough to me to warrant this further airing: as Mark Twain is famously said to have noted, history doesn’t repeat itself but it does sometimes rhyme.
The first point to make is that the US political system was deliberately modelled by the Founding Fathers on the Roman Republic. After expelling the last of their kings in 507 BC the early Romans were anxious to prevent any reversion to one-man rule and the result was the institution of two elected officials, the consuls, who held power for one year only and were barred from standing again for the consulship for ten years after their first term expired. In times of crisis an all-powerful ‘dictator’ might be appointed, but this was conceived as a strictly emergency measure, and the dictator was obliged to relinquish his powers after no more than six months. The interests of the ruling elite were maintained by a Senate, which had the task of allocating funds and declaring war, and elections were organised by Popular Assemblies supervised by ten tribunes which gave the Roman masses at least a taste of democracy. We can find echoes of these arrangements in the American presidential system, designed to forestall the emergence of any would-be successor to George III: restrictions to this effect were still being tightened as recently as the late 1940s, when it was determined after the death of President Franklin Roosevelt that no future president should serve for more than two terms. A United States Senate was created on the model of the Roman one, and a House of Representatives roughly filled the space left by the former Popular Assemblies. Carried over from Rome at a more superficial level were the US national emblem, the eagle, the Latin national motto, E pluribus unum, and the neo-classical architecture of the White House, the Capitol and other federal buildings.
The republican system served Rome well for the best part of 400 years as the Roman state gradually expanded its dominance throughout the Mediterranean basin – a process which culminated in 146 BC in the defeat and destruction of the great rival power of Carthage. With no major adversary left to confront them the Romans now started to turn on each other. A growing wealth gap made itself felt as riches from the conquered territories poured into the treasure chests of the magnates in the Senate and large landowners started to increase their holdings at the expense of the poor. Against this background of worsening social tension political violence began to break out for the first time with the murders in 133 and 121 BC respectively of the brothers Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, tribunes of the Popular Assemblies who had campaigned for agrarian reform. In the meantime the generals sent out to wage some continuing wars on Rome’s frontiers were starting to treat their troops as their own private armies and declining to give up their commands and resume their seats in the Senate once their missions were accomplished. The result of this was that the restraints imposed by the republican constitution began to break down. One of these would-be warlords, Gaius Marius (157 -86 BC) contrived to get himself elected consul no fewer than seven times in succession and on two other occasions before and after that. This quickly led to civil war, as a rival commander, L. Cornelius Sulla (138 – 78 BC), became in 88 BC the first Roman general to occupy Rome. Sulla had himself proclaimed dictator, a post he continued to hold beyond the statutory six month limit, and introduced a technique of ‘proscription’, posting up notices of his political opponents and encouraging the public to hunt down these ‘enemies’ and bring him their severed heads in return for a bounty. Over the next few decades Roman society fractured into two opposed groups, the Optimates who sought to maintain their wealth and uphold the traditional order and the Populares who put themselves forward as champions of the Roman street. These weren’t formally organised political parties, and Professor Engels points out that the Populares hailed from the same social and economic elite as their Optimate antagonists.
In 63 BC the conflict took a more drastic turn, when a Popular activist named Catiline (L. Sergius Catilina) led an abortive revolt aimed at overthrowing the consuls elected for that year. From now on the struggle was no longer just one between demagogues and fat cats but was an all-out battle for control of the state. Power came to be wielded by an uneasy alliance between the generals Gaius Julius Caesar and Gnaeus Pompeius (Pompey) and the plutocrat Marcus Crassus. By this time it had become impossible for the government to push through substantive legislation of any kind for fear of renewed civil war. In January 52 BC Publius Clodius Pulcher, a Popular agitator working in Caesar’s interest, actually managed to shut down the government by vetoing the election of consuls. By this time, too, the deepening crisis had impelled the conservative Senate to resort to extra-constitutional methods themselves, choosing Pompey to act as their patron warlord. Clodius was soon afterwards murdered by a henchman of Pompey’s named Titus Annius Milo: Pompey like Sulla before him staged a military occupation of Rome, and was appointed sole consul in another clear breach of the constitution. Pompey and the Senate were, however, outmanoeuvred by Caesar, who in January 49 BC began to march south at the head of a powerful army fresh from the conquest of Gaul. Coolly violating the strict constitutional rule that no general should deploy the provincial troops under his command inside Italy proper, Caesar crossed the river Rubicon on the border between Gaul and Italy and headed for Rome. Fleeing to Greece with his senatorial backers, Pompey was defeated by Caesar the following year and murdered in an attempt to take shelter in Egypt. Caesar in the meantime returned to Rome, where he proceeded to concentrate all power in his own hands and establish himself as dictator for life.
This staggering power grab led in the end to a last, desperate backlash from the senatorial diehards, when the dictator was assassinated in the Senate house in 44 BC. But it was already too late to retrieve the cause of a constitutional Republic. Over the next two years the senatorial forces were conclusively smashed by an alliance of Mark Antony (Marcus Antonius), Caesar’s right-hand man, and Octavian (Gaius Octavius), Caesar’s great-nephew and adoptive son, through a second round of proscriptions and a victory on the battlefield of Philippi in Greece. In 31 BC, in a final showdown between Antony and Octavian as the last two warlords left standing, Antony’s forces were shattered and Octavian emerged as the sole authority in the Roman world. And Octavian proved to be subtle - subtler than his great-uncle, subtler than any of the previous contenders for power. He took every care to clothe his rule in the trappings of tradition. Consuls continued to serve on an annual basis. The Senate continued to sit. Popular Assemblies continued to meet periodically. He himself steered well clear of the now inflammatory post of dictator, and contented himself with the modest title of First Citizen (princeps). But the truth was that the quasi-democracy of the Republic had now been replaced by an authoritarian regime. One of the consuls’ two posts was now filled by Octavian and the other by his nominee. The Senate’s function was now confined to discharging routine business and rubber-stamping Octavian’s policies. The Popular Assemblies were similarly confined to a ceremonial role. And Octavian now became known by a name of an almost numinous character which has gone down in history - Augustus, ‘the Venerable One’. Underpinning all this was the latent power of the military, the legions which enforced Roman rule over what was now called the Roman Empire (Imperium Romanum). This military-backed regime soon restored the effective central government which had broken down in the final decades of the Republic, and it continued to function successfully, as the Republic had done in the centuries leading up to its breakdown, for approximately 400 years.
In comparing this century of Roman upheaval with the present-day turbulence in the United States it’s not hard to identify a number of historical rhyming couplets. Following its emergence as the world’s sole superpower after the fall of the Soviet Union the US has turned inwards, much like the Roman Republic after the destruction of Carthage. A growing gulf has opened between the social and economic elite and a struggling underclass who have felt ignored and abandoned by their elected rulers, and the US like Rome has experienced, for the first time since the Civil War, an outbreak of sustained political violence, with the attempted assassinations of Arizona State Representative Gabrielle Giffords in 2011 and of Donald Trump (twice) during the presidential election campaign of 2024, and the successful assassinations of Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman and of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk in 2025. As in Rome the worsening political breakdown has left the door wide open to adventurers ready to bypass the established constitutional norms, and in the last ten years we have witnessed the rise to power of America’s first affluent Roman-style demagogue in the person of Trump. Trump’s refusal to accept defeat in the 2020 election, his reported attempts to tamper with the election results and his expression since his return to the White House in 2025 of a wish to run for an unconstitutional third term all follow the ruthless patterns of conduct established by Marius and Sulla. He may not have subjected the US to a military occupation on the model of Sulla and Pompey, but his dispatch of troops to ‘restore order’ in Los Angeles and other US cities certainly suggests a partiality for the mailed fist. Equally he hasn’t yet gone so far as to encourage the American public to bring him the severed heads of his political enemies; but in ordering the investigation of his opponents and critics, in filing personal lawsuits against companies and news organisations that have angered him , in calling for the impeachment of federal judges who have ruled against him and in generally pursuing a campaign of ‘retribution’ he certainly seems to have taken the first steps along the road to ‘proscription’ as practised by Sulla and later by Mark Antony and Octavian. The polarisation of Congress between Democrats and Republicans, pre-dating Trump but exhibited more starkly than ever during Trump’s terms of office again follows the Roman analogy, with the government getting shut down as it had been two thousand years earlier through the efforts of the Popular agitators Catiline and Clodius; and the point made by Professor Engels in the Roman context that substantive reform of the political system was made impossible by the fear of renewed civil war may help to explain the continued inability of successive US administrations to pass serious gun control measures.
What does all this say about the future trajectory of the United States? Professor Engels reckons, probably rightly, that a military coup is still a long way off, and that Trump should be seen as an activist in the mould of Catiline and Clodius rather than a latter-day Julius Caesar, a powerful army chief poised to dismantle the entire political order. But there’s no doubt of the alarm in some quarters. In October 2025 demonstrators in cities throughout the US took part in ‘No Kings’ protests in an episode eerily reminiscent of the sullen lack of enthusiasm shown by the Roman citizenry for the three attempts made by Mark Antony to present Caesar with a king’s crown on the eve of his assassination in 44 BC. Possibly we shall see a combination of US traditionalists and liberals banding together in a doomed attempt to avert a monopolising of power by Trump and his MAGA following. Or perhaps Trump will succumb fairly soon to old age or political violence and will in due course be replaced by a subtler successor (JD Vance, anyone?!) who will preside over the transition from an American Republic to an American Empire while still preserving the outward forms of the old democracy. However this shift takes place it seems safe to predict that it won’t be accompanied by any kind of a social or economic collapse: on the contrary, if the US-Rome analogy is anything to go by, the new Empire will be at least as strong as the Republic which preceded it and probably more so. Backed by colossal military power it may indeed be equipped to survive, like its Roman precursor, for another four centuries. But it will be very different from the United States we have known.
*See article published by Professor David Engels in website of Ordo Iuris Institute for Legal Culture, October 24 2024.
