gracchusdixit

On March 17th, 180 CE, the Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius, died in a fortified military encampment near the Danube River where today the city of Vienna sits.  Having spent years fending off a confederation of Germanic tribes, he finally achieved a decisive victory but did not live long enough to see that victory bear fruit.  Marcus Aurelius was the last of the so-called “Five Good Emperors,” who gave to the world the Pax Romana, an extraordinary, and arguably unique, century of peace, order, and civilization.  The historian, Edward Gibbon, famously said of this age:

If a man were called upon to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed between the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus.

It is doubtful that very many professional scholars or historians would today agree with that sweeping assessment.   But its claim on the popular imagination persists, and there is a fair case to be made that, in one sense at least, Gibbon was right.

Marcus Aurelius and the other “Good Emperors” who came before him were exceptional public figures: capable, cultured, civic-minded, and personally virtuous.  Each was adopted by his predecessor, having been singled out for talent, intellect and character.  Each was taught philosophy and trained in the arts of war and government.  Each strove quite consciously to become what Plato called a “philosopher king,” a guardian of the public good, rising above the petty ambitions of politics and personal gain.  Being human, these five men did not always succeed, and the empire over which they reigned was riddled with contradictions and cruelties that seem to us unpardonable.  But for the time and society in which they lived, the “Five Good Emperors” did more than rulers before or since to live up to the ideals of enlightened government.

Marcus Aurelius, in particular, embodied those ideals.  He was not only an emperor but an important philosopher in the Stoic tradition, who declared that his obligation was to govern “a polity in which there is the same law for all, a polity administered with regard to equal rights and equal freedom of speech, and a kingly government which respects most of all the freedom of the governed.”  These words came two thousand years before the Declaration of Independence or the Declaration of the Rights of Man.

For all that, it was Marcus Aurelius who broke with the practice of his predecessors to adopt and train an heir on the basis of merit and character.  Instead, Marcus decided  that his son, Commodus, would succeed him.  We do not know why he made this decision.  Perhaps it was the simple affection of a father for a son.  Perhaps he thought that his son would rise to the occasion, that the office would somehow change the man.  Whatever the reason, his decision was disastrous—for the Roman Empire and for the world.

Commodus turned out to be insecure, inattentive, and ultimately unhinged.  He had none of his father’s personal austerity and scrupulous sense of public duty.  Having no interest in or patience for the dreary details of governing, he turned them over to subordinates, many of whom proved to be incompetent or corrupt.  His vanity was boundless.  He renamed the months of the Roman calendar to honor himself.  He changed the  venerable names of the Roman legions to reflect his own.  Craving the applause and approbation of the Roman mob, he fought in the arena as a gladiator and of course won every match.   Any Roman Senator sitting in the box seats who failed to cheer loudly enough was threatened with immediate execution.

Finally, it all became too much.  Commodus was poisoned by his mistress, and when that attempt failed, he was strangled in his bath.  His disgraceful reign, and his death, marked the beginning of the “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.”  A number of strong emperors—Septimius Severus, Diocletian, Constantine—succeeded in temporarily arresting that decline.  But the trajectory had been set.  After Commodus, the long, upward arc of Roman civilization spiraled irretrievably downward.

Mark Twain once said:  “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”  For all the obvious differences between then and now, it is impossible to ignore the eerie, rhyming similarities.

Barack Obama, our Marcus Aurelius, bid his farewell to the nation just days ago.  Among our many “Good Presidents,” it is difficult to think of one who was more thoughtful, humble, and gracious or more genuinely committed to the public good.  It is equally difficult to escape the thought that, in Donald Trump, we now have our own Commodus—an insecure, inattentive, and ultimately unhinged monster, whose only concern is his own vanity.

With Trump’s occupation of the White House, an unbridgeable fissure seems suddenly to have opened in the political ground under our feet, a chasm dividing our past from our future.  I do not see how we can cross over this chasm and go back.  I do not see how we can reclaim our republic and restore the liberal order we bequeathed to the world at the end of the Second World War.  I fear that the decline and fall of the Pax Americana has begun.