What Does Ancient Rome Teach Us About ISIS and Syrian Refugees?

The short answer to the question is, nothing. But let One Thing after Another explain why it is asking the question in the first place.

In the aftermath of the Paris attacks that took place on November 13, Niall Ferguson wrote the following opinion piece that appeared in the Boston Globe, entitled “Paris and the Fall of Rome”:

https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2015/11/16/paris-and-fall-rome/ErlRjkQMGXhvDarTIxXpdK/story.html#comments

Ferguson argues that the attacks herald the collapse of contemporary European civilization. The Europe of today, he claims, is following the same path as Rome on the way to destruction: “As its wealth has grown, so its military prowess has shrunk, along with its self-belief. It has grown decadent in its shopping malls and sports stadiums. At the same time, it has opened its gates to outsiders who have coveted its wealth without renouncing their ancestral faith.” He likens the great numbers of Syrian refugees to the Völkerwanderung, the great migration of barbarian peoples that swamped the Roman Empire and destroyed it. He points out that while the vast majority of Muslims currently living in Europe are neither violent nor terrorists, they hold views that are extremely difficult to reconcile with the principles of “modern liberal democracies.” For that reason, “it is . . . remarkably easy for a violent minority to acquire their weapons and prepare their assaults on civilization within these avowedly peace-loving communities.”

Ferguson was originally trained as an academic economic historian. He has since written books on a variety of topics (including a biography of Henry Kissinger that was published this year), many of which are aimed at a more popular audience. He has also become a journalist and an opinion-maker. The combination of these roles has turned him into something of a public intellectual. The position of public intellectual is an honorable one, and in this context, one is reminded of the Victorian sages, particularly John Stuart Mill, of whom One Thing after Another is particularly fond. The problem with assuming the role of sage, though, is that it is extraordinarily difficult to express an informed opinion about everything. As Ferguson himself implies in “Paris and the Fall of Rome,” he is not an expert on late Roman history. And Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1789), to which Ferguson repeatedly adverts, does not accord with the most current scholarship on Rome’s demise.

With his constant references to Gibbon, Ferguson seems to indicate that 5^th-century Rome was overborne from without because it was rotten within. He mentions the work of contemporary historians Bryan Ward-Perkins and Peter Heather, but he does not do justice to their findings because they do not necessarily support his argument. Heather’s most important recent book, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History (2005) argues that the Rome which entered the 4^th century was not the decadent and disintegrating society that Gibbon portrays. Instead, it was strong, stable, and full of vigor. For centuries, it had managed its frontiers with a combination of brute force and diplomacy. Any barbarians who settled within the frontier did so on Rome’s terms. Yet starting in the late 4^th century, for a host of reasons that were mainly outside its control, Rome began experiencing great difficulties in asserting control over the Germanic peoples who sought to enter the empire so as to escape the Huns. Such a picture does not accord with Ferguson’s representation of late Rome or contemporary Europe. It is not hard to see why. Fifth-century Rome is not the Europe of 2015. Syrian refugees do not resemble the Völkerwanderung. And Muslims living in Molenbeek are not like the Goths of late antiquity. In other words, as an analogy, Ferguson’s formulation is problematic because historical analogies are problematic in general. If anything, Ferguson’s statements are more metaphor than analogue, and the employment of metaphors themselves entail a number of dangers.

Indeed, if we were so inclined, we could look to Roman history for a completely different “lesson” with contemporary applicability. The reasons for Rome’s fall to which Ferguson refers have long been disputed—by Gibbon, Heather, and a host of others. What is not disputed is that during the period of its greatest expansion under the republic, Rome was an inclusive community that extended citizenship and other privileges on a huge scale to recently conquered peoples. One might be tempted to make the case that Rome promoted a model for assimilation that could have contemporary uses. In other words, by way of analogy, this example might entice one to support a very different set of policies from the ones Ferguson advocates. And one would be wrong because Rome was not a modern liberal democracy. Its “inclusiveness” was not the sort envisioned by the 21^st century. As Machiavelli put it in his Discourses on Titus Livy, Rome’s policy was driven by “friendliness and by force” with an emphasis on force. Roman inclusiveness was imposed on those who had been defeated. It was driven by a rapacious desire for military manpower that was required to destroy enemies and acquire yet more territory: the flip side of citizenship and privilege within the republic was military service that could not be evaded or denied. It was the huge pool of trained military manpower obtained in this fashion more than anything else that allowed Rome to survive three colossal defeats at Hannibal’s hands (the Battles of the Trebia, Lake Trasimene, and Cannae—costing a total of around 100,000 dead) before it turned the tables and smashed Carthage. In other words, Rome’s inclusiveness served the military needs of a ruthless and awesome empire in which we would probably not want to live.

One might support this policy or that one with regard to ISIS, Syrian refugees, and other related issues. But ancient Rome does not provide unambiguous justification for any course of action. History can hone our judgment while historical analogies and metaphors can clarify our thinking. Yet all tools of this sort ought to be handled with great care and applied with some attention to detail.

How Great Was Alexander the Great?

As we bid farewell to the old humanities program and prepare to teach the new one at Saint Anselm College, it seems to make sense that we contemplate some of the questions raised in this recently re-issued book review by Mary Beard (Professor of Classics at Cambridge University) that was originally published in the New York Review of Books almost three years ago:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/oct/27/alexander-how-great/

Beard points out that the historiography regarding Alexander the Great has not changed much over the years. In fact, we ask many of the same questions about Alexander that the Romans did. Such a tendency should come as no surprise, she argues, because our Alexander is largely a product of Roman historians. New material and information have emerged over the years, including the “Alexander Sarcophagus” and material excavated near Vergina. For the most part, though, we still rely on Roman descriptions of Alexander. The Romans themselves relied on earlier documents no longer extant. However, these earlier documents were refracted by Roman experience.  As Beard puts it, the Romans “depended on the writings of Alexander’s contemporaries. . . . But they are bound to have seen this story through a Roman filter, to have interpreted and adjusted what they read in the light of the versions of conquest and imperial expansion that were characteristic of their own political age.” Since our Alexander is the product of Roman sources, we see him in much the same way as they did. The Romans were ambivalent about Alexander. So are we. Like the Romans, we wonder whether or not Alexander was admirable or deplorable.

Beard implies that scholarship about Alexander remains in a kind of Roman prison and that it would be best if the field broke free. Fair enough. But it strikes One Thing after Another that academics who study Alexander do much the same good work that our students did in the second year of the old humanities program—admittedly on a more sophisticated level. Since the program was entitled “Portraits of Human Greatness,” much as we often tried, it was impossible to avoid discussing whether such-and-such figure was “great.” One of the first pieces of advice the blog master of One Thing after Another received upon arriving at Saint Anselm College was, “Don’t ever assign a humanities paper asking whether so-and-so was a portrait of human greatness.” This was sound advice, because students invariably felt compelled to respond in the affirmative to this question (and to lay it on a bit thick). It was not difficult to see why: figures would not have been included in a program entitled “Portraits of Human Greatness” unless they were great, right?

Invariably, though, the question of greatness involved a multitude of problems. The most important of these consisted of determining a standard by which to measure greatness. This difficulty did not merely divide the students; it split the humanities faculty as well. By “human greatness,” did one mean a saintly person, an influential person, or a high-achieving person? Disagreement over this issue was reflected by the diverse types of figures who ended up in the program. At one time or another, Maximilian Robespierre, Dorothy Day, and Pablo Picasso became portraits of human greatness. Frequently, members of the humanities faculty would muse provocatively that if influential people qualified as portraits of human greatness, then it was not entirely clear why we had never developed a Napoleon, Hitler, or Stalin unit (aside from the fact that it would bring the college a hurricane of bad publicity). Surely these people, particularly the latter two, were monstrous, but they had changed the world.

These thoughts bring us back to Alexander. In 335 BC, during one of his earliest campaigns after his father’s death, he defeated the Thebans, killed almost all of their men, looted their property, burned the city down, and sold the remaining women and children (around 30,000 people) into slavery. The story was similar in Tyre: after a lengthy siege in 332 BC, Alexander slaughtered 6,000 soldiers within the city walls, crucified 2,000 men on the beach, and sold another 30,000 people into slavery. Ditto in Gaza that same year. In 330 BC, after conquering Persepolis, the Persian capital and perhaps the most magnificent city in the Near East, Alexander had it looted and may have been responsible for the fire that utterly destroyed it. Alexander was also responsible for mass killings in the Punjab as he attempted to conquer that region after 327 BC.

As Beard points out, it will not do to say that people at the time judged Alexander by a different, laxer standard. Even contemporaries expressed dismay at Alexander’s antics. Consider the response of the pirate who was asked by Alexander what drove him to terrorize the seas: “The same thing as drives you to terrorize the whole world.” The Romans were hardly a squeamish people, but they too appeared uncomfortable with Alexander’s behavior. It is instructive that Dante Alighieri, who lived in rough-and-tumble times himself, had Alexander occupy the Seventh Circle of hell in the Inferno, “screaming in pain, up to his eyebrows in a river of boiling blood, spending eternity alongside such monsters as Attila the Hun and Dionysius the tyrant of Sicily.” Alexander’s conquest of the known world was an unparalleled feat, and such feats require violence in the same way that an omelet requires the breaking of eggs. But in this case (as with, say, Napoleon), does the violence of the achievement destroy the value of the achievement itself? Especially if that achievement was temporary (Alexander’s empire barely survived his death) and inadvertent (the spread of Hellenistic culture was a byproduct of that empire)?