Blaming Russia for the outcome of our recent election is, among other things, a way of offloading collective guilt for its result. The same goes for blaming the electoral college. (If Clinton had lost the popular vote but won the electoral college, the same people who lament the institution today would be exalting the foresight of the Founding Fathers in preventing the rise of a “populist demagogue.”) These are all natural psychological responses.
The other natural response is to draw analogies with ancient Rome. Here is Dave Eggers, on a lavish election-night party: “The Washington Post has a right to celebrate – the paper is thriving and its political coverage extraordinary – but this felt like Rome before the fall.” I myself wrote (and almost posted here) an essay comparing Trump to Marius Sulla, the forerunner of Julius Caesar, one of the first to break down the Republican ideals of Rome. Sulla even had a strikingly colored complexion that was the butt of jokes, similar to the “orange skin” that contemporary satirists are so fond of mocking in Trump. Here’s Plutarch:
His personal appearance, in general, is given by his statues; but…even more fearful..[was]…the complexion of his face. This was covered with coarse blotches of red, interspersed with white. For this reason, they say, his surname was given him because of his complexion, and it was in allusion to this that a scurrilous jester at Athens made the verse: “Sulla is a mulberry sprinkled o’er with meal.”
Analogies between ancient Rome and contemporary America (with Britain our Greece-equivalent) were irresistible even before the United States existed. That’s why the Founding Fathers called the Senate the Senate, why they gave the country a Latin motto, why Washington D.C.’s architecture is neoclassical. George Washington used to be compared to Cinncinnatus (honest Roman farmer who reluctantly takes up arms, wins, and then lets power go) even during his lifetime. The Founding Fathers consciously modeled the American Republic on the Roman one, and the safeguards they wrote into the Constitution were expressly put there to avoid a transition to dictatorship—that is, to keep us from going the way of late Rome.
We reach for these analogies as a way of getting a handle on our own situation, our own historical moment. But we also reach for them because they feel right sometimes. The one I’m taken with right now is the one that likens Barack Obama to Marcus Aurelius.
Marcus Aurelius was the last of the “decent” Roman Emperors. Gibbon starts The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire with the end of the Age of the Antonines. Here are the three main parallels:
- The idea of Marcus Aurelius as fundamentally a “dove” forced by circumstances to fight dirty frontier wars for the duration of his reign.
Marcus Aurelius, though often thought of as the “philosophical Emperor,” actually spent most of his time fighting Germanic tribes on the frontiers of the Roman Empire. The second Book of the Meditations is subtitled “Writing Among the Quadi, Along the River Gran.” The Quadi were one of many unruly border tribes whose hard, irregular warfare took advantage of the terrain and served as a perpetual challenge to the more sophisticated military structures of Rome. The terrain in question was dense forest, not desert or mountains, but the analogy is tempting enough. Marcus Aurelius, though, didn’t have the advantage of drones. And he spent very little time in Rome hanging out with actors and musicians; that, according to Plutarch, held true of Sulla.
- The idea of Marcus Aurelius as a proponent of equanimity.
The Meditations (which is, rather unexpectedly, one of Anna Kendrick’s favorite books) expresses the Stoic admiration of equal-mindedness in adversity and good fortune alike. (I recently found the identical attitude praised, in almost identical terms, in the Bhagavad Gita.) The contemporary analogy to this Stoic unflappability is no-drama Obama’s famously even-tempered nature.
- The idea of the virtues of Marcus Aurelius being set off by his unsavory successors.
We have Gibbon to blame for this bit of historical sleight of hand. There were corrupt and vile Emperors after Marcus Aurelius, yes, but there were also some before him. And there is a significant percentage of the American population that regards Obama as one of the bad emperors; though educated minorities like myself tend to lean left, I cannot ignore how opposing Obama paid off for his successor.
Still, if I follow Gibbon’s take on the Age of the Antonines, and honestly express my pessimistic view of the near future and the far future as well, this particular analogy with Ancient Rome, though it may not be all that accurate or even particularly helpful for historical understanding, is still good for a few valedictory quatrains.
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Goodbye, Marcus Aurelius
Goodbye, Marcus Aurelius,
Goodbye, my philosopher-king,
The nasty Emperors are lining up,
And all we can do is sing
Goodbye, Marcus Aurelius,
Goodbye to the books and the poems,
You are off to the west to take your rest
While we are stuck in Rome
Singing goodbye in the last clean air
Now that the pigs have burst the pen.
Say hello to the Circus, the sordid show,
And the lion that hungers for men.