History Forum / General / Ancient History / September 2003

The Scourge of Militarism

In the neoconservative world view, America was to be the new Rome.
But the neocons learned the wrong lessons from Rome's imperial
experience.

By Chalmers Johnson
September 12, 2003


http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2003/38/we_546_01.html
 

The collapse of the Roman republic in 27 BC has significance today for
the United States, which took many of its key political principles
from its ancient predecessor. Separation of powers, checks and
balances, government in accordance with constitutional law, a
toleration of slavery, fixed terms in office, all these ideas were
influenced by Roman precedents. John Adams and his son John Quincy
Adams often read and spoke of Cicero as an inspiration to them.
Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, writing in the
Federalist Papers in favor of ratification of the Constitution, signed
their article with the name Publius Valerius Publicola, the first
consul of the Roman republic.
 
The Roman republic, however, failed to adjust to the unintended
consequences of its imperialism, leading to a drastic alteration in
its form of government. The militarism that inescapably accompanied
Rome's imperial projects slowly undermined its constitution as well as
the very considerable political and human rights its citizens enjoyed.
The American republic, of course, has not yet collapsed; it is just
under considerable strain as the imperial presidency -- and its
supporting military legions -- undermine congress and the courts.
However, the Roman outcome -- turning over power to an autocracy
backed by military force and welcomed by ordinary citizens because it
seemed to bring stability -- suggests what might happen after Bush and
his neoconservatives are thrown out of office.

Obviously, there is nothing deterministic about this progression, and
many prominent Romans, notably Brutus and Cicero, paid with their
lives trying to head it off. But there is something utterly logical
about it. Republican checks and balances are simply incompatible with
the maintenance of a large empire and a huge standing army. Democratic
nations sometimes acquire empires, which they are reluctant to give up
because they are a source of wealth and national pride, but as a
result their domestic liberties are thereby put at risk.

These not-particularly-original comparisons are inspired by the
current situation of the United States, with its empire of well over
725 military bases located in other people's countries, its huge and
expensive military establishment demanding ever more pay and ever
larger appropriations from a supine and manipulated legislature,
unsolved anthrax attacks on senators and newsmen (much like Rome's
perennial assassinations), Congress's gutting of the Bill of Rights
through the panicky passage of the Patriot Act -- by votes of 76-1 in
the Senate and 337 to 79 in the House -- and numerous signs that the
public is indifferent to what it is about to lose. Many current
aspects of our American government suggest a Roman-like fatigue with
republican proprieties. After congress voted in October 2002 to give
the president unrestricted power to use any means, including military
force and nuclear weapons, in a preventive strike against Iraq
whenever he -- and he alone -- deemed it "appropriate," it would be
hard to argue that the constitution of 1787 was still the supreme law
of the land.

My thinking about the last days of republics was partly stimulated
this past summer by a new book and an old play. The book is Anthony
Everitt's magnificent account of the man who had his head and both
hands chopped off for opposing military dictatorship -- Cicero: The
Life and Times of Rome's Greatest Politician (Random House, 2001). The
play was a modern-dress production of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar,
seen at San Diego's Old Globe theater. The curtain opened on a huge
backdrop portrait of Julius Caesar looking remarkably like any seedy
politician with the word "tyrant" scrawled graffiti-style beneath his
face in red paint. At play's end, after Octavian's hypocritical
comments on the death of Brutus, who was one of the republic's most
stalwart supporters ("According to his virtue let us use him. . . ."),
the picture of Caesar drops away to be replaced by one of Octavian --
soon to become the self-proclaimed god Augustus Caesar -- in full
military uniform and bearing a marked resemblance to Arnold
Schwarzenegger. In fact, Octavian's military rule did not actually
follow at once after the suicides of Brutus and Cassius at Philippi
(42 BC) and Shakespeare does not say it did. But that is what the play
-- and the history -- are all about: killing Julius Caesar on the Ides
of March, 44 BC only prepared the ground for a more ruthless and
determined successor.

THE ROMAN REPUBLIC is conventionally dated from 509 to 27 BC even
though Romulus's founding of the city is traditionally said to have
occurred in 753 BC. All we know about its dim past, including the
first two centuries of the republic, comes from the histories written
by Livy and others and from the findings of modern archaeology. For
the century preceding the republic, Rome had been ruled by Etruscan
kings from their nearby state of Etruria (modern Tuscany), until in
510, according to legend, Sextus, the son of the king Tarquinius
Superbus ("King Tarquin"), raped Lucretia, the daughter of a leading
Roman family. A group of aristocrats backed by the Roman citizenry
revolted against this outrage and expelled the Etruscans from Rome.
The rebels were determined that never again would any single man be
allowed to obtain supreme power in Rome, and for four centuries the
system they established more or less succeeded in preventing that from
happening. "This was the main principle," writes Everitt, "that
underpinned constitutional arrangements which, by Cicero's time [106
to 43 BC], were of a baffling complexity."

At the heart of the unwritten Roman constitution was the Senate,
composed by the early years of the first century BC of about 300
members from whose ranks two chief executives, called consuls, were
elected. The consuls took turns being in charge for a month each, and
neither could hold office for more than a year. Over time an amazing
set of "checks and balances" evolved to ensure that the consuls and
other executives whose offices conferred on them imperium -- the right
to command an army, to interpret and carry out the law, and to pass
sentences of death -- did not entertain visions of grandeur and
overstay their time. At the heart of these restraints were the
principles of collegiality and term limits. The first meant that for
every office there were at least two incumbents neither of whom had
seniority or superiority over the other. Office holders were normally
limited to one-year terms and could be reelected to the same office
only after waiting ten years. Senators had to serve two to three years
in lower offices -- as quaestors, tribunes, aediles, or praetors --
before they were eligible for election to a higher office, including
the consulship. All office holders could veto the acts of their
equals, and higher officials could veto decisions of lower ones. The
chief exception to these rules was the office of "dictator," appointed
by the consuls in times of military emergency. There was always only
one dictator and his decisions were immune to veto; according to the
constitution, he could hold office only for six months or the duration
of a crisis.

Once an official had ended his term as consul or praetor, the next
post below consul, he was posted in Italy or abroad as governor of a
province or colony and given the title of proconsul. It is absurd for
journalistic admirers of the U.S. military today to pretend that its
regional commanders-in-chief for the Middle East (Centcom), Europe
(Eucom), the Pacific (Pacom), Latin America (Southcom), and the United
States itself (Northcom) are the equivalents of Roman proconsuls.1 The
Roman officials were seasoned members of the Senate who had held the
highest executive post in the country, whereas American regional
commanders are generals or admirals who have served their entire
careers away from civilian concerns and risen to this post by managing
to avoid making egregious mistakes. After serving as consul in 63 BC
(the year of Octavian's birth), for example, Cicero was sent to govern
the colony of Cilicia in present-day southern Turkey, where his duties
were both civilian and military.

Over time this complex system was made even more complex by the class
struggle embedded in Roman society. During the first two centuries of
the republic, what appeared to be a participatory democracy was in
fact an oligarchy of aristocratic families that dominated the Senate.
Not everyone was happy with this. After 287 BC, when the constitution
was more or less formalized, a new institution came into being to
defend the rights of the plebs or populares, that is, ordinary,
non-aristocratic citizens of Rome. These were the tribunes of the
people, charged with protection of the lives and property of plebians.
Tribunes could veto any election, law, or decree of the Senate, of
which they were ex officio members, as well as the acts of all other
officials (except a dictator). They could also veto each others'
vetoes. "No doubt because their purpose in life was to annoy people,"
Everitt notes, "their persons were sacrosanct." Controlling
appointments to the office of tribune became very important later to
generals like Julius Caesar, who based their power on their armies
plus the support of the populares against the aristocrats.

The system worked well enough and afforded extraordinary freedoms to
the citizens of Rome so long as all members of the Senate recognized
that compromise and consensus were the only ways to get anything done.
Everitt poses the issue in terms of the different perspectives of
Caesar and Cicero; Caesar was Rome's, and perhaps history's greatest
general; whereas Cicero was the most intellectual defender of the
Roman constitution. Both were former consuls: "Julius Caesar, with the
pitiless insight of genius, understood that the constitution with its
endless checks and balances prevented effective government, but like
so many of his contemporaries Cicero regarded politics in personal
rather than structural terms. For Caesar the solution lay in a
completely new system of government; for Cicero it lay in finding
better men to run the government -- and better laws to keep them in
order."

1. See, for example, Dana Priest, The Mission: Waging War and Keeping
Peace with America's Military (New York: Norton, 2003).


Imperialism provoked the crisis that destroyed the Roman republic.
After slowly consolidating its power over all of Italy and conquering
the Greek colonies on the island of Sicily, the republic extended its
conquests to Greece itself, to Carthage in North Africa, and to what
is today southern France, Spain, and Asia Minor. By the first century
BC, Rome dominated all of Gaul, most of Iberia, the coast of North
Africa, Macedonia (including Greece), the Balkans, and large parts of
modern Turkey, Syria, and Lebanon. "The republic became enormously
rich on the spoils of empire," Everitt writes, "so much so that from
167 BC Roman citizens in Italy no longer paid any personal taxes." The
republic also became increasingly self-important and arrogant,
believing that its task was to bring civilization to lesser peoples
and naming the Mediterranean Mare Nostrum (our sea), somewhat the way
some Americans came in the twentieth century to refer to the Pacific
Ocean as an "American lake."

The problem was that the Roman constitution made administration of so
large and diverse an area increasingly difficult and subtly altered
the norms and interests that underlay the need for compromise and
consensus. There were several aspects to this crisis, but the most
important was the transformation of the Roman army into a professional
military force and the growth of militarism. During the early and
middle years of the republic, the Roman legions were a true citizen
army composed of small, conscripted landowners. Differing from the
American republic, all citizens between the age of 17 and 46 were
liable to be called for military service. One of the more admirable
aspects of the Roman system was that only those citizens who possessed
a specified amount of property (namely, a horse and some land) could
serve, thereby making those who had profited most from the state also
responsible for its defense. (By contrast, of the 535 members of
Congress, only seven have children in the U.S.'s all-volunteer armed
forces.) The Roman plebs did their service as skirmishers with the
army or in the navy, which had far less honor attached to it. At the
beginning of each term, the consuls appointed tribunes to raise two
legions from the census role of all eligible citizens.

When a campaign was over, the troops were promptly sent back to their
farms, sometimes richer and flushed with military glory. Occasionally,
the returning farmers got to march behind their general in a
"triumph," a victory procession allowed only to the greatest
conquerors that was the most splendid ceremony in the Roman calendar.
The general himself, who paid for this parade, rode in a chariot with
his face covered in red lead to represent Jupiter, king of the gods. A
boy slave stood behind him holding a laurel wreath above his head
while whispering in his ear "Remember that you are human." In Pompey's
great triumph of 61 BC, he actually wore a cloak that had belonged to
Alexander the Great. After the general came his prisoners in chains
and finally the legionnaires, who by ancient tradition sang obscene
songs satirizing their general.

By the end of the second century BC, in Everitt's words, "The
responsibilities of empire meant that soldiers could no longer be
demobilized at the end of each fighting season. Standing forces were
required, with soldiers on long-term contracts." The great general
Caius Marius undertook to reform the armed forces, replacing the old
conscript armies with a professional body of long-service volunteers.
When their contracts expired, they expected their commanders, to whom
they were personally loyal, to grant them farms. Unfortunately, land
in Italy was by then in short supply, much of it tied up in huge sheep
and cattle ranches owned by rich, often aristocratic, families and run
by slave labor. The landowners were the dominant conservative
influence in the Senate, and they resisted all efforts at land reform.
Members of the upper classes became wealthy as a result of Rome's wars
of conquest and bought more land as the only safe investment, driving
small holders off their property. In 133 BC the gentry arranged for
the killing of the tribune Tiberius Gracchus (of plebian origin) for
advocating a new land-use law. Rome's population continued to swell
with landless veterans. "Where would the land be found," asks Everitt,
"for the superannuated soldiers of Rome's next war?"

DURING THE LAST CENTURY before its fall, the republic was assailed by
many revolts of generals and their troops, leading to gross violations
of the constitution and on several occasions to civil wars. These
included the uprisings of Marius and Sulla and of the failed
revolutionary Catilina. There was also the Spartacus slave rebellion
of 73 BC, put down by the immensely wealthy Marcus Licinius Crassus,
who in the process crucified some 6,000 survivors. Crassus was a
member of the First Triumvirate, along with Pompey and Caesar, which
attempted to bring the situation under control by direct cooperation
among the generals. Everitt writes, "During his childhood and youth
Cicero had watched with horror as Rome set about dismantling itself.
If he had a mission as an adult, it was to recall the republic to
order. . . . [He] noticed that the uninhibited freedom of speech which
marked political life in the republic was giving way to caution at
social gatherings and across dinner tables. . . . The Senate had no
answer to Rome's problems and indeed sought none. Its aim was simply
to maintain the constitution and resist the continual attacks on its
authority. . . . The populares had lost decisively with the defeat of
Catilina, but the snake was only stunned. Caesar, who had been
plotting against Senatorial interests behind the scenes, was rising up
the political ladder and, barring accidents, would be consul in a few
year's time."

Caesar became consul for the first time in 59 BC enjoying great
popularity with the ordinary people. After his year in office, he was
rewarded by being named governor of Gaul, a post he held between 58
and 49 during which he earned great military glory and became
immensely wealthy. In 49 he famously allowed his armies to cross the
Rubicon, a small river in northern Italy that served as a boundary
against armies approaching the capital, and plunged the country into
civil war, taking on his former ally and now rival, Pompey. He won,
after which, as Everitt observes, "No one was left in the field for
Caesar to fight. . . . His leading opponents were dead. The republic
was dead too: he had become the state." Julius Caesar exercised
dictatorship from 48 to 44 and a month before the Ides of March had
arranged to have himself named "dictator for life." Instead, he was
stabbed to death in the Senate by a conspiracy of eight members, led
by Brutus and Cassius, both praetors, known to history as "principled
tyrannicides."

Shakespeare's recreation of the scenes that followed, based upon Sir
Thomas North's translation of Plutarch, has become as immortal as the
deed itself. In a speech to the plebians in the Forum, Brutus defended
his actions. "If there be any in this assembly, any dear friend of
Caesar's, to him I say that Brutus' love to Caesar was no less than
his. If then that friend demand why Brutus rose against Caesar, this
is my answer: Not that I lov'd Caesar less, but that I loved Rome
more. Had you rather Caesar were living, and all die slaves, than that
Caesar were dead, to live all freemen?" However, Mark Antony, Caesar's
chief lieutenant, speaking to the same audience, had the last word. He
turned the populace against Brutus and Cassius, and as they raced
forth to avenge Caesar's murder, said cynically, "Cry 'Havoc!' and let
slip the dogs of war."

The Second Triumvirate, formed to avenge Caesar, ended like the first,
with only one man standing, but that man, Caius Octavianus (Octavian),
Caesar's eighteen-year-old grand nephew, would decisively change Roman
government by replacing the republic with an imperial dictatorship.
Everitt characterizes Octavian as "a freebooting young privateer," who
on August 19, 43 BC, became the youngest consul in Rome's history and
set out, in violation of the constitution, to raise his own private
army. "The boy would be a focus for the simmering resentments among
the Roman masses, the disbanded veterans, and the standing legions."
Cicero, who had devoted his life to trying to curb the kind of power
represented by Octavian, now gave up on the rule of law in favor of
realpolitik. He recognized that "for all his struggles the
constitution was dead and power lay in the hands of soldiers and their
leaders." In Cicero's analysis, the only hope was to try to co-opt
Octavian, leading him toward a more constitutional position, while
doing everything not to "irritate rank-and-file opinion, which was
fundamentally Caesarian." Cicero would pay with his life for this
last, desperate gamble. Octavian, allied with Mark Antony, ordered at
least 130 senators (perhaps as many as 300) executed and their
property confiscated after charging them with supporting the
conspiracy against Caesar. Mark Antony personally added Cicero's name
to the list. When he met his death, the great scholar and orator had
with him a copy of Euripides' Medea, which he had been reading. His
head and both hands were displayed in the Forum.

A year after Cicero's death, following the battle of Philippi where
Brutus and Cassius ended their lives, Octavian and Antony divided the
known world between them. Octavian took the West and remained in Rome;
Antony accepted the East and allied himself with Cleopatra, the queen
of Egypt and Julius Caesar's former mistress. In 31 BC, Octavian set
out to end this unstable arrangement, and at the sea battle of Actium
in the Gulf of Ambracia on the western coast of Greece, he defeated
Antony's and Cleopatra's fleet. The following year in Alexandria Mark
Antony fell on his sword and Cleopatra took an asp to her breast. By
then, both had been thoroughly discredited for claiming that Antony
was a descendant of Caesar's and for seeking Roman citizenship rights
for Cleopatra's children by Caesar. Octavian would rule the Roman
world for the next 45 years, until his death in 14 AD.

On January 13, 27 BC, Octavian appeared in the Senate, which had
legitimized its own demise by ceding most of its powers to him, and
bestowing on him the new title of Augustus, first Roman emperor. The
majority of the Senators were his solid supporters, having been
handpicked by him. In 23 BC, Augustus was granted further authority by
being designated a tribune for life, which gave him ultimate veto
power over anything the Senate might do. His power rested ultimately
on his total control of the armed forces.

ALTHOUGH HIS RISE TO POWER was always tainted by constitutional
illegitimacy -- not unlike that of our own Boy Emperor from Crawford,
Texas -- Augustus proceeded to emasculate the Roman system and its
representative institutions. He never abolished the old republican
offices but merely united them under one person, himself. Imperial
appointment became a badge of prestige and social standing rather than
of authority. The Senate was turned into a club of old aristocratic
families, and its approval of the acts of the emperor was purely
ceremonial. The Roman legions continued to march under the banner SPQR
-- senatus populus que Romanus, "the Senate and the Roman People" --
but the authority of Augustus was absolute.

The most serious problem was that the army had grown too large and was
close to unmanageable. It constituted a state within a state, not
unlike the Pentagon in the United States today. Augustus reduced the
army's size and provided generous cash payments to those soldiers who
had served more than twelve years, making clear that this bounty came
from him, not their military commanders. He also transferred all
legions away from Rome to the remote provinces and borders of the
Empire, to ensure their leaders were not tempted to meddle in
political affairs. Equally astutely, he created the Praetorian Guard,
an elite force of 9,000 men with the task of defending him personally,
and stationed them in Rome. They were drawn only from Italy, not from
distant provinces, and were paid more than soldiers in the regular
legions. They began as Augustus's personal bodyguards, but in the
decades after his death they became decisive players in the selection
of new emperors. It was one of the first illustrations of an old
problem of authoritarian politics: create one bureaucracy, the
Praetorian Guard, to control another bureaucracy, the regular army,
but before long the question will arise Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
(Who will watch the watchers?)

Augustus is credited with forging the Roman Peace (Pax Romana), which
historians like to say lasted more than 200 years. It was, however, a
military dictatorship and depended entirely on the incumbent emperor.
And therein lay the problem. Tiberius, who reigned from 14-37 AD,
retired to Capri with a covey of young boys who catered to his sexual
tastes. His successor, Caligula, who held office from 37-41, was the
darling of the army, but on January 24, 41 AD, the Praetorian Guard
assassinated him and proceeded to loot the imperial palace. Modern
archaeological evidence strongly suggests that Caligula was an
eccentric maniac, just as history has always portrayed him.2

The fourth Roman emperor, Claudius, who reigned from 41 to 54, was
selected and put into power by the Praetorian Guard in a de facto
military coup. Despite the basically favorable portrayal of him by
Robert Graves (I, Claudius, 1934) and years later on TV by Derek
Jacobi, Claudius, who was Caligula's uncle, was addicted to
gladiatorial games and fond of watching his defeated opponents being
put to death. As a child, Claudius limped, drooled, stuttered, and was
constantly ill. He had his first wife killed and married Agrippina,
daughter of the sister of Caligula, after having the law changed to
allow uncles to marry their nieces. On October 13, 54 AD, Claudius was
killed with a poisoned mushroom, probably fed to him by his wife, and
at noon that same day, the sixteen-year-old Nero, Agrippina's son by a
former husband, was acclaimed emperor in a carefully orchestrated
piece of political theater. Nero, who reigned from 54 to 68, was a
probably insane tyrant who has been credited with setting fire to Rome
in 64 and persecuting some famous early Christians (Paul and Peter),
although his reputation has been somewhat rehabilitated in recent
years as a patron of the arts.

After Augustus, not much recommends the Roman Empire as an example of
enlightened government despite the enthusiasm for it of such
neoconservative promoters of the George W. Bush administration as The
Washington Post's Charles Krauthammer, The Wall Street Journal's Max
Boot, and The Weekly Standard's William Kristol. My reasons for going
over this ancient history are not to suggest that our own Boy Emperor
is a second Octavian but rather what might happen after he is gone.
The history of the Roman republic from the time of Julius Caesar on
suggests that it was imperialism and militarism, poorly understood by
all conservative political leaders at the time, that brought it down.
Militarism and the professionalization of a large standing army create
invincible new sources of power within a polity. The government must
mobilize the masses in order to exploit them as cannon fodder and this
leads to the rise of populist generals who understand the grievances
of their troops and veterans.

Service in the armed forces of the United States has not been a
universal male obligation of citizenship since 1973. Our military
today is a professional corps of men and women who join up for their
own reasons, commonly to advance themselves in the face of one or
another cul de sac of American society. They normally do not expect to
be shot at, but they do expect all the benefits of state employment --
steady pay, good housing, free medical benefits, relief from racial
discrimination, world travel, and gratitude from the society for their
military "service." They are well aware that the alternatives civilian
life in America offers today include difficult job searches, no job
security, regular pilfering of retirement funds by company executives
and their accountants, "privatized" medical care, bad public
elementary education systems, and insanely expensive higher education.
They are ripe, it seems to me, not for the political rhetoric of
patrician politicians who have followed the Andover, Yale, Harvard
Business School route to riches and power but for a Julius Caesar,
Napoléon Bonaparte, or Juan Perón -- a revolutionary, military
populist with no interest in republican niceties so long as he is made
emperor.

Given the course of the postwar situations in Afghanistan and Iraq, it
may not be too hard to defeat George Bush in the election of 2004. But
regardless of who replaces him, he will have to deal with the
Pentagon, the military-industrial complex, our empire of bases, and a
fifty-year-old tradition of not telling the public what our military
establishment costs and the devastation it can inflict. History
teaches us that the capacity for things to get worse is limitless.
Roman history suggests that the short, happy life of the American
republic is in serious trouble -- and that conversion to a military
empire is, to say the least, not the best answer. What do you think?

2. Shasta Darlington, "New Dig Says Caligula Was Indeed a Maniac,"
Reuters, August 16, 2003.

Chalmers Johnson's new book, to be published this year by Metropolitan
Books, is The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of
the Republic.

This commentary first appeared on TomDispatch.com, a weblog of The
Nation Institute.