Some roads, but not all, lead to Rome

Are We Rome?: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America
By Cullen Murphy
Houghton Mifflin, 262 pp., $24

"Are We Rome?" is a provocative book title. All the more so when the average pleb in the street fears he's witnessing the disintegration of a civilization and moral order 2,000 years in the making. "Are We Rome?" is not a strict historical treatise answering this question. It is a graceful examination of parallels between the United States and the Roman Empire.

Both Rome and the United States evolved from humble republican roots. Both the Roman and American people ordained themselves a chosen people with a kind of manifest destiny. Even the American dollar bill, writes author Cullen Murphy, "uses Rome's own language . . . to proclaim a novus ordo saeclorum -- a new order of the ages ."

But don't carry the Rome-and-America analogy too far, he warns, or it "breaks down in strategic places. Rome accepted and bestrode its destiny. Americans don't yet agree that an empire is what we've become, much less agree that we ought to be one."

Murphy, a Massachusetts resident and editor at large for Vanity Fair, worked on his book at the Boston Athenaeum library. The Romans would have treasured this noble edifice, whose backbone rises up from the Granary Burying Ground . Roman thinkers and poets thought through the graveyards. No people held a deeper reverence for the wisdom of their ancestors. While Americans are restless and eager for the future, the Romans understood that the future is old.

The American eagle has replaced the Roman imperial one as the symbol of world power. Murphy's best chapter, "The Legions," is an excellent brief on what ails the American military. Once America's elite volunteered for military service. Today enlistment standards are low, while huge cash bonuses are offered to entice new recruits.

Unlike Rome, American predominance in the world did not come about through military conquest. It rose through a curious phenomenon of world Americanization beginning in the late 19th century. American intervention in the world wars merely enhanced this process, described by John Lukacs in "Outgrowing Democracy."

Alexis de Tocqueville had prophesied in "Democracy in America" about the inevitable spread of democracy and its totalistic tendency toward oppressiveness -- "a power that does not destroy, does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people." This is our modern mass civilization.

"Are We Rome?" is well written and read with ease. The author visited the places he writes about. Whether at Hadrian's Wall , in the United Kingdom, or in Emperor Augustus's house at Rome, Murphy brings the place alive with detail and makes the past present.

He mentions "an anxious flicker of recognition," what he calls "the eagle in the mirror . . . when catching sight of the characteristics that Rome and America share." This book encourages our own recognitions. One striking mirror image is the current demise of the family (read Polybius !). Another is the religion we share with Rome, the same cult of worldly pleasure and success. Murphy refers to the sadness of Ovid's exile. Modern poets suffer a similar exile in seeking an otherworldly spiritual vision. They endure what Czeslaw Milosz called a new "Diocletian Rome planetwide." Southern writer Walker Percy expressed this predicament perfectly: "Catholic or Protestant, the believing writer is equally unhappy. He feels like Lancelot in search of the Holy Grail who finds himself at the end of his quest at a Tupperware party."

Patrick J. Walsh is a writer in Quincy.