HBO: The Failed State Network

The Wire, The Sopranos, Rome--has everybody but me noticed how the three hottest shows on HBO are about state failure? I concede they do it in different ways: on The Sopranos, aside from Tony and the gang,there is the FBI, and they might even win--though what, exactly, you win by turning the game over to a bunch of guys in polyester behind Steelcase desks probably does not bear thinking about. Rome--yeh, funny about Rome, so admired by the founders, but it turns out there never was much res publica there to begin with. I've seen less of The Wire than the other two, but I don't think it's a model your high school civics teacher would enjoy. In all three we seem to lack what Ed Banfield (I think) called "the luxury of politics." This is the sort of stuff we were supposed to have put behind us a long time ago, not so?

Ronald Syme, and HBO's Rome

Having caught a bit of HBO’s Rome (on DVD), I hauled out my old copy of The Roman Revolution by Sir Ronald Syme. First published in 1939, it’s apparently still in print, which is no small achievement for an academic history of any density, not to say one whose footnotes are mostly in Latin. Even aside from the footnotes, it’s not an easy read—not, at any rate for a reader unblessed by a classical education: Syme pretty much presumes you know the outlines of the story already, and he is not going to insult your intelligence by retailing the supermarket-tabloid stuff. Also, perhaps inevitably for an academic history of this date, Syme taken a fair amount of abuse from later scholarship—the canonical response is Erich Gruen, The Last Generation of the Roman Republic (1974).

Yet that is the odd thing about some historical writing: people still read Tacitus and Gibbon on Rome, without entertaining any illusion that they speak the last word on their subject. Indeed, if they capture any zeitgeist, it is that of their own time, not of their subject’s.

I don’t suppose Syme is a Tacitus (or even a Gibbon) but I think he deserves a place at the table. His style is compact, aphoristic—Tacitean. And his general pessimism about the fortunes of free institutions is bound to find an audience in the current market.

Executive summary of Syme: the Roman Republic was corrupt and in decay; a revolution was inevitable and in a sense, even necessary. Executive summary of Gruen: not so, the Republic was durable, and could have endured. It’s a cop-out to say that there is “probably truth on both sides,” but history is a complex business, so the chances are that there is truth on both sides—or at least enough truth in Syme to help sustain his appeal. Some fragments:

On “the assassins”—Brutus, Cassius and company:

They stood, not merely for the traditions and institutions of the Free State, but very precisely for the dignity and the interests of their own order. Liberty and the laws are high-sounding words. They will often be rendered, on a cool estimate, as privilege and vested interest.

—Ronald Syme, The Roman Revolution 59 (Oxford U Paperback 1960)

On the young Octavian, later Augustus:

Exuberant ambition mated with political maturity is not enough to explain the ascension of Octvianus A sceptic about all else, Caesar the Dictator had faith in hs own star. The fortune of Caesar survived his fall. On no rational forecast of events would his adopted son have succeeded in playing off the Republican cause against the Caesarian leaders, survived the War of Perusia and lived to prevail over Antonius in the end.

—Id,., 114

On the legend of Actium, as a public relations triumph:

Of the ability of Cleopatra there is no doubt: her importance in history, apart from literature, is another matter. … Created belief turned the scale of of history. The policy and ambitions of Antonius or of Cleopatra were not the true cause of the War of Actium; they were a pretext in the strife for power, the magnificent lie upon which was built the supremacy of Caesar’s heir and the resurgent nation of Italy. Yet, for all that, the contest soon assumed the august and solemn form of a war of ideas and a war between East and West. Antonius and Cleopatra seem merely pawns in the game of destiny. The weapon forged to destroy Antonius changed the shape of the whole world.

—Id,., 274-5

A footnote: HBO’s Rome in the end tracks Syme rather well. Syme doesn’t give you the horndoggery or the torture porn, but for the general political structure, somebody on the writing team must have had a copy of Syme near at hand.