Why do we want a ceasefire?

This question is in the news as a result of the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict, but the question is actually ancient. It reminds me, a historian of ancient Rome, of the 7th-century emperor Justinian II, and of some very old but still relevant concerns about whether ceasefires are worth pursuing.

Romans and others in the ancient world distinguished between a peace treaty and a truce, what we now call a ceasefire. Truces paused fighting, often for a specified period of time and sometimes following concessions by one of the combatants. A truce did not, by itself, end a Roman war. Either side could begin fighting again once it expired.

Peace treaties, or often simply a “peace” in 7th-century Roman parlance, ended hostilities by establishing formal terms that both sides agreed to uphold and conditions that legally prevented war from being renewed without cause. When Rome made formal peace with an adversary, both Romans and their negotiating partners assumed the terms were binding.

In 562, the historian Menander the Guardsman wrote that a Roman envoy arrived to negotiate a peace treaty and began the meeting by saying simply: “The peace treaty will be made with the Romans. It is enough to say Romans because the name tells it all.” And, when the agreement was made, the Roman ruler sent “letters, called sacred in Latin,” agreeing to “adhere to the peace and its terms.”

This was not empty rhetoric. Over the preceding 1000 years, Romans had agreed that peace treaties could only be voided in unusual circumstances—unless, of course, the other side broke the treaty first.

By the early 680s—the time of the aforementioned Justinian II—Rome had been fighting the Arabs nearly non-stop for six decades. When their armies met, Rome usually lost. the Roman Empire, which in the 630s controlled the entire coast of the Eastern Mediterranean and much of coastal North Africa, had lost all of its territory south of the mountains of Asia Minor and east of central Libya. Rome also lacked the capacity to protect much of the land it still controlled. Arab naval raids and cross border attacks had depopulated Roman territory, causing tens of thousands of internally displaced Roman refugees to flee for safety in the cities of interior Asia Minor.

The dynamic between the Roman and Arab empires changed in the 680s. Three events—a rare and successful Roman offensive; political upheaval in the caliphate that temporarily pitted Abd al-Malik’s faction, based in Damascus, against rivals in Arabia and Persia; and the armed resistance of the Mardaites (a Christian group in Syria and Lebanon)—led the Arabs to agree to a peace treaty with the Romans.

The agreement, formalized in 688 and 689, forced both sides to abandon their most optimistic war ambitions. Rome would not recover Syria or other lost lands in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Arabs would not seize the Roman capital of Constantinople. The treaty also required both sides to surrender some of the strategic assets that had helped them in the just-concluded conflict.

The Arab empire was larger and wealthier, so the caliph agreed to pay Rome the significant subsidy of 1,000 gold coins a day. The Romans agreed to allow the Mardaites to move from Arab to Roman territory so the Arabs no longer had to contend with a rebellion on their side of the frontier. The two empires also agreed to share the tax revenue collected from the island of Cyprus equally.

In essence, the treaty represented a win-win. In exchange for abandoning unrealistic war goals, the Romans became richer, the Arabs consolidated control of the Lebanese and Syrian highlands, and the revenue sharing in Cyprus gave both empires incentives to keep the peace going forward.

The peace between Rome and Abd al-Malik was also good for displaced people, who began to return to the no-man’s land along the frontier and the devastated coastal Roman cities that had been depopulated by the Roman-Arab fighting. At least 12,000 Mardaites took up residence in Roman territory emptied by violence. Justinian II also settled upwards of 30,000 Slavic captives on empty lands in Western Asia Minor and tried to arrange for Cypriot migrants to repopulate the city of Cyzicus, which had been devastated following its use by the Arabs as a base to assault Constantinople in the 670s.

In the year 692, Justinian II confronted the forces of the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik on a battlefield close to the city of Sebastopolis, a location somewhere near the modern border between Turkey and Syria. Because of the ethical and practical differences between a peace treaty and a truce, however, Abd al-Malik’s generals reminded the Romans that they had a legal and sacred obligation to uphold the peace of 688-9 before the armies joined battle. Nicephorus, an early 9th-century patriarch of Constantinople, wrote that the Arabs approached the Roman army and announced “that they had upheld the pledges of [the] peace treaty but, if the Romans wished to break them, it would be God’s right to judge their guilt.”

When Roman commanders seemed unmoved by their words, the Arabs “affixed the written peace treaty to a tall standard [in place of a flag] and ordered it to be carried forward. They advanced against the Romans, who turned to flight.” Thousands of Slavic soldiers drawn from the people Justinian had settled in Asia Minor then defected. The battle ended with an overwhelming Arab victory.

Nicephorus tells the story in this way because he believed that Justinian broke both secular and sacred law when he treated Rome’s peace with the Arabs as if it were simply a truce. The Roman violation of the peace treaty endangered the fragile recovery and repopulation of borderland areas. It also forced many Romans to return to a battle they did not want to wage. Romans were willing to fight hard to defend their lands and families in wars of necessity or in response to Arab attacks. The flight and defections of Roman forces at Sebastopolis, however, show that Justinian’s troops were much less willing to participate in a war of aggression against those same Arabs.

The events that took place on this distant battlefield more than 1300 years ago should underline this forgotten truth: While it is vital to stop warring groups from killing each other, the manner in which the fighting stops matters a great deal.

Media, protestors, and governments around the world have responded to conflicts raging across Europe, the Middle East, the Horn of Africa, and Asia by calling repeatedly for ceasefires. But ceasefires in our world are the same as truces in the Roman world. Unless peace negotiations immediately follow, they represent nothing more than a pause in fighting that combatants will use to re-organize, recuperate, re-arm, and resume fighting. If both sides do not treat them as the precursors to a peace agreement, ceasefires resolve nothing. In the worst cases, they simply ensure that even more people will die in conflicts that ceasefires ultimately prolong.

What most people calling for a ceasefire really want are enduring peace treaties that bind both parties in a relationship that makes a resumption of hostilities less likely—by forcing combatants to disavow unrealistic war aims, offsetting some of the strategic advantages each side enjoyed in the previous conflict, and establishing collaborations that benefit both sides.

As Justinian II learned, peace treaties create powerful forces within a society that oppose renewed warfare. This is what we need to resolve the endless conflicts consuming lives, property, and livelihoods across the world—genuine peace treaties, not temporary ceasefires.

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The recent failures, and subsequent government rescues, of Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic, prompt us to consider an ancient question: How do banks prevent the actions of very rich people from endangering the integrity of a widely used banking system?

Like today, the rapid and unexpected movement of large amounts of capital nearly caused the Roman banking system to collapse in the 1st century. Roman banks survived then because the imperial government injected large amounts of money to stabilize the credit market. And, again like today, that action was both necessary and quite unpopular.

Rome’s crisis began in 33 CE, when anonymous informers accused members of the Roman Senate of enriching themselves by loaning excessive amounts of money, in violation of a law that mandated senators hold a certain portion of their fortunes in Italian real estate. An official investigation, according to the historian Tacitus, determined that “not a single [senator] escaped guilt.” The Senate was given 18 months to get its membership back into compliance with the law. Those who failed to do so risked having their property confiscated.

This presented a significant challenge for most senators. Although they were among the wealthiest Romans, the bulk of their assets consisted of loans that they had made directly to others as well as bonds made up of loans originally issued by others. Such an investment portfolio was not atypical among wealthy Romans of the 1st century, seeing as most large transactions in Rome involved the transfer of bonds from the bank account of a buyer to that of the seller.

But the sudden enforcement of a law requiring senators to own property compelled all 600 senators to radically change what their collection of assets looked like. Soon they were calling in the loans they had made, selling the bonds they owned, and withdrawing the money they had deposited in banks. All of this money then flowed out of the banks and into the Italian property market.

Chaos resulted. Tacitus explains that the sudden demand for high-end Italian estates caused land prices to spike. Meanwhile, there were suddenly too many loans available to sell—collapsing the market and prices of such loans. As a result, Tacitus reports, the more bonds “a man owned, the more disastrous it was for him to sell.”

The senators didn’t have any choice. The law required them to continue liquidating their depreciating assets so that they could purchase real estate at inflated prices. “The result,” Tacitus writes, “was a dearth of money” to loan because the investors “had withdrawn their capital from circulation in order to buy land.”

The Roman banking system had reached a crisis point, threatening the economic life of the empire.

In 33 CE, the Roman banking system was already 200 years old. It was sophisticated and capable when it came to controlling the flow of money. Like modern financial institutions, bankers took in deposits, paid interest to the depositor, and turned profits by loaning money to borrowers at a higher interest rate than they paid depositors. But Roman bankers did far more than this. If someone needed to pay a bill at some point in the future, bankers could receive the funds, and then issue payment in cash on the depositor’s behalf when it was time to disburse it. They would cash checks issued to a creditor by someone who had money deposited with them, either by giving the person currency in exchange for the check or by crediting the sum to their account. Bankers managed property sales, both as agents for the sellers and as figures who provided credit for the buyers.

And, just as the Federal Reserve today depends on banks in the United States to circulate new dollar bills into the economy, the Roman state depended upon bankers to collect worn-out coins, turn them over to the treasury, and replace them with newly minted ones.

All of these actions made bankers money. Every time a banker made a transaction on behalf of a client, he debited a fee from the account balance that the client had deposited. Bankers also were permitted to invest the wealth deposited with them in ventures they believed would make a profit. When they did this, they paid the client for borrowing against their deposits. These usage fees could be quite large. Justinian’s Digest mentions a banker who paid a sum roughly equivalent to $800,000 today to a client because of the “many transactions” he had undertaken using money from the man’s accounts.

Despite all of these innovations, Romans in 33 CE still had not figured out how to secure the wealth of bankers and depositors if the debts upon which credit instruments were based went bad. This was not because they lacked experience responding to financial crises. In the early ’80s BCE, for example, the massacre of thousands of businessmen in Asia Minor by King Mithridates of Pontus made the loans they had taken out impossible to collect. Suddenly those loans, the bonds based on those loans, and all of the deposits backed by these bonds became worthless. In response to the destruction of so much wealth, the Roman government responded by minting large numbers of silver coins, an action that limited but did not reverse the economic damage.

Romans tried a different strategy in 49 BC when armies led by Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon River and captured the city of Rome. When nervous senators called in loans and tried to convert large amounts of high-value bonds into currency that they could carry with them if they needed to flee Italy, Caesar introduced emergency measures that he believed would calm the financial markets. They included mandating a mediation process before any lender could compel repayment, placing a limit on the amount of gold and silver any individual could possess, and instituting capital controls to prevent the wealthy from liquidating their financial assets and fleeing Rome with the cash.

None of these strategies would have, by themselves, solved the problem Rome faced in 33 CE. For the economy to stay solvent, Romans needed to believe in the integrity of their banking system, trust that the funds they had placed in it remained secure, and know that funds were available to borrow if they needed to do so. Only the emperor Tiberius had the capacity to intervene in a fashion that addressed all these concerns.

Tiberius’ answer was to aggressively recapitalize the banks. Tacitus, our most detailed source for this crisis, explains that the emperor infused the equivalent of more than $2 billion of his own money “into the banks and permitted them to make many loans without interest for three years” using these funds. He augmented this short-term injection of capital with a long-term program of monetary stimulus. Roman mints produced 800% more silver coins and 300% more gold coins in the years immediately following this crisis, and many of these coins entered the economy through banks in Rome.

Tiberius also eliminated the condition that caused the crisis in the first place by quietly suspending any further enforcement of the mandate that senators hold a certain portion of their wealth in real estate. “In this way,” Tacitus wrote, “credit was restored and, gradually, private lenders were found.”

The senate honored Tiberius for his successful economic rescue, and later authors praised his “generosity,” but not all Romans approved of his actions. Tacitus, for one, saw Tiberius’ bailout as creating a moral hazard. What began as a rigorous effort to reform illegal financial behavior by senators, Tacitus argued, “ended in negligence, as generally happens.” Tacitus wrote that “the public good was placed below private profit” after “the curse of usury became ingrained in Rome.”

Tacitus’s concerns—about the moral hazards of using public resources to reinforce a financial system undermined by the illegal behavior of the wealthy—remain relevant today. Bank bailouts are essential to the functioning of a sophisticated economy, but they will always be unpopular when they appear to reward the rich rather than protect the interests of the public. In ancient Rome and modern America, these bailouts should be paired with vigorous, sustained reform efforts to correct the misbehavior of the wealthy.

Unfortunately, as Tacitus reminds us, they seldom are.

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Hadrian had inherited the conflict with Parthia—a large empire centered in what is now Iran—from Trajan, his imperial predecessor. Trajan’s generals resisted Hadrian’s withdrawal so forcefully that the emperor feared he might lose both his crown and his life. His ending of the war brought historical condemnation upon him for centuries.

It also was a decision that made Rome stronger.

The war began in late 113 A.D. after Parthian meddling in the Armenian kingdom that sat between the two empires gave Trajan a reason to attack. The emperor assembled as many as 80,000 troops at a forward base near the Armenian frontier and they advanced easily through Armenia, assuming complete control of that kingdom by the end of 114.

In 115, Trajan’s forces absorbed many of the smaller kingdoms occupying the highlands of what is now eastern Turkey and northern Iraq. Then, in 116, Trajan mounted a full invasion of the cities and farmlands situated between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.

By the end of 116, Romans had occupied the famous city of Babylon and seized the Parthian capital of Ctesiphon (the ancient Persian capital, near present-day Baghdad). Trajan even erected a statue of himself in Parthian territory near the Persian Gulf. The Roman Senate voted to give Trajan the honorary title “Parthicus,” and Trajan celebrated the capture of Ctesiphon by issuing a gold coin that displayed two Parthian captives seated beneath a victory trophy. The coin carried the legend “PARTHIA CAPTA”: Parthia Captured.

But Parthia had not really been captured. Roman forces had swiftly occupied a great deal of territory without facing a large Parthian army. Parthian troops had instead withdrawn from the lowlands of Mesopotamia into the Zagros mountains and there began to organize a strong and effective response to the Roman occupation that would make Trajan’s new conquests ungovernable.

While Trajan was touring Babylon and musing about how he might have matched Alexander the Great’s conquests if he were a younger man, the emperor received word of Parthian-sponsored rebellions erupting in cities all along the Tigris and Euphrates. Trajan had to send three different troop contingents to fight against these rebels, with the emperor himself leading the division around Babylon. Then he received word that a Parthian field army was marching on the new Roman province of Armenia.

Although Roman armies recaptured most of the rebellious cities by early 117, the revolts persuaded Trajan to return authority in Armenia to a pro-Roman Armenian king and to place a Roman-backed Parthian pretender on the throne in Ctesiphon. Trajan planned to return to campaign more in Mesopotamia, but he suffered a stroke and died in August 117.

Hadrian took over the empire at this moment of crisis. It was true that Roman forces had won nearly every major engagement in the Trajan’s eastern campaigns. But the new emperor realized that Rome’s large and capable army could not continuously respond to local insurrections in the cities of Mesopotamia, much less attacks by a Parthian adversary able to melt back into mountainous regions where the Romans dared not follow them.

So, the anonymous author of the Historia Augusta wrote, Hadrian “relinquished all of the conquests across the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers.” He later quotes the new emperor as saying that “those areas that can not be defended, should be declared liberated” and returned to local control. Hadrian left the defense of these regions up to the allied governments Rome had just installed.

The Roman withdrawal happened very quickly. Hadrian officially took power on August 11. Roman forces vacated Dura Europos—a base on the Euphrates and likely one of the last places Roman troops left—by September 30. In a little more than a month and a half,
Hadrian had pulled back from the two provinces of Armenia and Mesopotamia as well as the territory in southern Iraq that Trajan had claimed for Rome.

As Roman troops departed, the ally that Trajan installed as Parthian king in Ctesiphon saw his regime collapse. Hadrian saved face by placing the deposed monarch in charge of a smaller border kingdom, but it was clear to all that Rome’s postwar settlement of Mesopotamia had failed. “Thus it was that the Romans, in conquering Armenia, most of Mesopotamia, and the Parthians, had undergone severe hardships and dangers for nothing,” reflected Roman senator and historian Cassius Dio decades later.

Cassius Dio captures a sentiment that many of Hadrian’s contemporaries shared. Hadrian had to remove several of Trajan’s top generals after he became suspicious that their disapproval of his policies might induce them to rebel. Later Roman historians passed an even harsher judgement than Cassius Dio. Writing more than 200 years after Hadrian’s order to withdraw, the historian Festus claimed that Hadrian “returned Armenia, Mesopotamia, and Assyria” because he “envied Trajan’s glory.”

Hadrian’s answer to his critics remains instructive today. He did not apologize for withdrawing from the lands across the Euphrates. The Historia Augusta instead suggests that Hadrian elected a strategy of “reinstituting the approach of the earlier emperors” and “devoting himself to actions that maintained peace” across the empire. In Hadrian’s view, Rome needed to exit foreign quagmires and stop fighting wars of expansion so that it could focus on improving domestic conditions.

Hadrian devoted much of his 21-year reign to improving the lives of Romans within the empire’s boundaries. He put down internal rebellions that had erupted after Trajan’s foreign wars drained troops and resources away from the empire’s core provinces. Hadrian spent much of his reign traveling across the empire, repairing infrastructure, and building new public buildings. Hadrian’s Wall in Britain, the Pantheon in Rome, and the massive Temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens are among his most famous infrastructure projects. Hadrian then advertised his achievements with a series of coins illustrating his arrival in each province, his restoration of its prosperity, and his departure.

It is unlikely that any of these achievements would have been possible had Hadrian decided to keep fighting the costly war he inherited. Hadrian’s retreat was not popular, but the emperor understood that Trajan’s war had to end before his own Roman renewal could begin.

Many Romans eventually came to respect Hadrian’s choice to put domestic affairs above foreign conquests. When Hadrian died, his successor Antoninus Pius pushed the Senate to declare Hadrian a god. Then Pius decorated the temple in which this new god was worshipped with sculptures of every Roman province, suggesting the prosperity Hadrian had restored.

Hadrian likely could have imagined no better commemoration.

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Cicero set De Re publica in the year 129 BC, a dramatic moment when Romans, for the first time in centuries, had begun to confront the consequences of political violence. In 133 BC, a mob had killed the tribune Tiberius Gracchus after he used a combination of threats and extra constitutional measures to push through a series of land reforms. Four years later, the damage from Tiberius’s recklessness had become clear, but Rome still had a chance to mitigate it. So Cicero chose this moment to stage a dialogue in which the age’s most prominent politicians, jurists, and thinkers debated the nature of an ideal constitution and questioned what would become of their Republic after “the death of Tiberius Gracchus had divided one people into two factions.”

Cicero emphasized that Tiberius’s tactics of intimidation and his willingness to disregard law set Rome on a very dangerous course. “If this habit of lawlessness begins to spread,” he explained, it “changes our rule from one of justice to one of force.” This made Cicero “anxious for our descendants and for the permanence of our Republic.”

Cicero’s fear grew in part out of what he believed the Republic to be: community property of Romans, who were bound together not by race or ethnicity but by a shared sense of justice and fidelity to law. Law, Cicero wrote, provided the foundations for just interaction between citizens. It established the channels through which political decisions passed. And, because Rome was a representative democracy in which citizens elected leaders and voted on the legislation they proposed, Cicero argued that the Roman Republic could last forever if it remained governed by law and administered vigorously by its citizens.

A state governed by violence had much dimmer prospects. At best, such a state might sometimes “seem as if it was at peace” because “men feared each other … but no one was confident enough in his own strength” to challenge his adversaries. A sort of stable anarchy emerged, and a balance of fear was the only thing that held back citizen violence. Such a polity was no longer governed by laws. It could not be considered a republic.

Cicero’s Rome “may retain the name Republic, but we have long since lost the actual thing,” he wrote in De Re publica. By 54 BC, the Republic “was like a beautiful painting whose colors were beginning to fade.” Romans have “neglected to refresh it by renewing the original colors” and “have not even taken care to preserve its shape.” In other words, complacency was undermining the Republic.

During the three years it took Cicero to finish his De Re publica, Rome degenerated into something that looked a lot like the republic of violence the work described. “Murders happened every day,” the historian Cassius Dio later observed, “and [Romans] could not even hold elections” as regular street fighting between factions paralyzed political life. The most notorious of these, a battle on the Appian Way between gangs loyal to the politician Milo and his rival Clodius, led to Clodius’s death in January of 52. Clodius’s supporters then carried his body into the Roman senate house, heaped the chamber’s benches into a pyre, and incinerated both the corpse and the structure.

Cicero hated Clodius so much that, in the midst of writing De Re publica, he agreed to serve as an advocate for Milo at his trial. Constant threats and heckling from Clodius’s supporters interrupted Cicero’s planned remarks. He later published what he wished he would have said, a speech in which Cicero asserted that violence had to be used against Clodius because he was a “man whom we were unable to restrain by any laws.” In the heat of the moment, even Cicero defended vigilante justice.

Order returned to Rome in 52, only after the Senate called upon the powerful general Pompey the Great to secure the city. They granted him an “army and levy of troops,” a force that made Pompey more frightening than any of the petty leaders of Rome’s political gangs. It is hard to imagine more compelling evidence that Rome had descended from a Republic of laws and become a city stabilized by fear.

But, as Cicero understood, all it takes to destroy the balance of fear is a figure who is willing to try.

And, in Rome, Julius Caesar was that figure.

Caesar had spent much of the 50s conquering Gaul with a powerful and loyal army. But his command was due to expire at the end of the year 50. Caesar and his allies in the capital tried to negotiate an agreement that would protect him from politically motivated prosecution if he dismissed his troops, but the leaders of the Republic lacked the will to come to an agreement with him.

More importantly, the Republic’s leaders also lacked the capacity to reassure Caesar that any agreement he made would be observed. “Compelled by its terror at the presence of Pompey’s army and the threats from his friends,” the Senate ordered Caesar to disband his army or be declared an enemy of Rome.

When the Senate followed through on this threat in January of 49, Caesar went before his troops and told them that political activities permitted by law were “now branded as a crime and suppressed by violence.” The soldiers responded that “they were ready to defend their commander” and his allies “from all injuries.” This declaration—that violence, not law, governed Rome—began the series of civil wars that ended the Republic.

The United States now approaches the tipping point between a republic governed by law and the polity of violence, governed by mutual fear, that Cicero described over two millennia ago. Political violence courses through our streets as groups of demonstrators fight each other. The president and his political allies express public support for a young man who shot two protestors. It might be tempting to applaud Americans we agree with when they attack those with whom we do not, as Cicero did. But the distance from Cicero’s defense of Milo’s vigilantism to Caesar’s appeal to his troops is quite short. Neither vigilante justice nor armed insurrection can exist in a Republic whose citizens share a common purpose and respect for laws.

Cicero himself said so in one of the very last things he ever wrote before soldiers loyal to Mark Antony and the future emperor Augustus killed him, hanging his hand and head on the speaker’s platform in the Roman Forum. “Nothing,” Cicero proclaimed, “is more destructive to civilizations, nothing is so contrary to law and justice … than governing through violence in a Republic.”

The post What Would Cicero See in American Governance Today? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Democratic governments have existed for more than 2,500 years, but most democracies have historically failed to survive more than a generation. Indeed, the strongmen whose policies are currently warping the democracies that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s in Turkey, Hungary, and the Philippines are similar to the ancient tyrants who seized control of young democratic regimes in ancient Syracuse and Cyrene.

When a representative democracy makes it through its first generation without falling into tyranny, political norms often take deep root and patterns of democratic government become quite strong. This is as true of current republics like France and the United States as it was of ancient republics like Rome. In states like these, citizens prize the voice that representative government brings and robustly defend their freedoms against the sudden and direct attacks of tyrants. Their representative democracies can last for centuries.

But even these old democracies are mortal.

As Americans living through the past 25 years know well, citizens of representative democracies are less easily roused to defend against the slow erosion of political norms. In the years since the Newt Gingrich-inspired Republican takeover of the Congress in 1994, Americans have seen government shutdowns become political tools, the confirmation of judges routinely blocked, and even the denial of a hearing for a Supreme Court justice. None of these things were normal a generation ago. Many of them were unimaginable.

And yet American voters, feeling secure that their Republic will endure such assaults on American political norms, have responded with surprising indifference to these radical actions.

This is a mistake.

The Roman Republic shows the danger that arises from this sort of complacency. Rome lived under a republic for nearly 500 years—more than twice as long as the United States has existed—and its success caused our Founding Fathers to model the nascent American Republic on its Roman predecessor.

The Romans inspired the American separation of powers, the system of checks and balances, and the presidential veto—because Rome showed how these constitutional elements compelled lawmakers to compromise with one another by preventing narrow majorities from enacting policies that did not enjoy broad support. Both Rome and the United States developed into economically sophisticated world powers because their republics gave them an unmatched ability to build broad political consensus behind difficult national decisions.

But ancient Romans eventually grew to take the survival of their Republic for granted. In the second century B.C., the tools that had encouraged compromise and fostered political consensus for more than 300 years were transformed into weapons as Roman economic expansion opened a large wealth gap between the richest Romans and everyone else.

This transformation occurred at a moment when living standards for most citizens began to plateau after two generations of rather steady growth. Romans first hoped and then demanded that the Republic respond to this widening divide between the super-rich and the struggling middle classes. In the 140s and early 130s B.C., two different politicians sponsored laws that would distribute public land to the Roman urban poor, but wealthy rivals used vetoes to block their proposed laws. These wealthy opponents of economic reform did not use the veto so that they might work out a more broadly acceptable compromise. They simply did not want to see the issue of wealth inequality addressed at all.

Finally, in 133 B.C., after nearly a decade of inaction, frustrated Romans turned to a populist named Tiberius Gracchus who was willing to use all means available to him to push economic reforms into law. Backed by angry crowds of supporters, Tiberius removed a rival lawmaker who threatened to veto his proposals and then funded his reforms by appropriating money normally controlled by his opponents in the Roman Senate. All of these things violated the political norms of the Republic, but Roman voters seemed disinclined to punish Tiberius for any of them. He was stopped only when opponents killed him in a riot.

The final century of the Roman Republic saw the Romans repeatedly look away as politicians followed the path set by Tiberius Gracchus and his rivals. Roman political life slowly but progressively degenerated into multi-year cycles of legislative gridlock that broke only when Romans voted overwhelmingly for figures who promised to do anything necessary to solve long-neglected problems. Then, when these populists inevitably overreached, their opponents often responded violently. This cycle of political dysfunction became increasingly destructive each time it reset. It ended only when Rome fell into the civil wars in the 40s and 30s B.C. that killed the Republic and enabled Augustus, Rome’s first emperor, to take power as an autocrat.

Romans failed to stop these cycles of political dysfunction in large part because they did not imagine their republic could die. Indeed, no single person or choice destroyed the Roman Republic. It was much too robust for that. But the individual Roman politicians and voters who chose not to punish political obstruction, reckless populism, and intimidation steadily eroded the Republic’s integrity.

Throughout the Republic’s final century some Romans tried to unify their fellow citizens around the defense of the political liberty they all shared. None did this more eloquently than Cicero in the aftermath of a failed insurrection in the year 63 B.C.

At the end of a speech he gave on November 8 of that year, Cicero implored Romans that “if we preserve forever this unity now established…no civil and domestic calamity can ever again reach any part of the Republic.” Relieved at avoiding civil war, nearly all Romans applauded this sentiment on that day.

The painting Battle of Actium—by the 17th-century Flemish painter Laureysa Castro—shows a decisive naval battle in the Final War of the Roman Republic. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

But the unity Cicero called upon Romans to protect lasted for only a few weeks and Romans quickly began to take stability for granted. On January 1 of 62 B.C., a political opportunist harangued Cicero in the senate. By 58 B.C. Cicero found himself an exile from Rome, forced from the city by a violent populist backed by a mob of supporters.

Cicero’s allies engaged in similarly destructive policies. His friend Cato so disliked Julius Caesar that he filibustered an entire senate meeting in which proposals that could benefit Caesar were discussed. He bribed voters to support candidates other than Caesar. By claiming a dubious religious prohibition, he even worked with his son-in-law to try to block all public business for the entire year when Caesar held Rome’s highest office.

All of these figures agreed with Cicero that Romans should come together to protect their Republic, but, taking the strength of their republic for granted, they never let republican principles dissuade them from a potent line of attack against a political opponent. This shortsightedness normalized a form of political combat in which the Republic no longer set the rules and no longer protected the losers. Robbed of its institutional defenses, the Republic could not prevent Rome’s descent into civil war or stop the emergence of a Roman autocracy. And Romans were shocked when the Republic’s impotence was finally revealed.

This is the real risk of political complacency. Until Donald Trump’s election, Americans largely turned a blind eye to the damage that the past generation of political dysfunction has done to our republic. Morally and legally dubious political tactics often seemed relatively harmless when they benefitted people and policies that one approved. But today Americans who continue to vote for the senators who block judicial nominations made by the opposing party, representatives who endorse government shutdowns, and presidents who traffic in threats and intimidation should realize that these decisions weaken our republic. We can avoid the complacency that doomed the Roman Republic. If we do not, there is a real risk that Americans will repeat Rome’s mistake.

The post Complacency—Not Hubris—Is What Killed the Roman Republic appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

How will California survive the end of the American empire?

The question might seem hypothetical, but I found it inescapable last week in Rome, where I was running a global forum on the future of direct democracy. Our forum’s mission, on its face, was hopeful: Hundreds of participants, from 80 countries, discussed how to make the world’s democracies more participatory through initiatives, referenda, and other tools.

But each morning, as I left my budget hotel, I found myself picking through the less-hopeful remains of the fallen empires that lay directly in my path.

To reach Rome’s city hall, the conference site, I had to walk up Capitoline Hill, passing two ancient monuments, each of which inspired a different thought.

The first monument, the Colosseum, seemed less special with each day’s viewing. I mean, what’s the big deal about a dilapidated old stadium known for hosting violent spectacles on the field and in the stands? Heck, you can go to Los Angeles and Oakland and see similar coliseums today.

But the second monument, the Roman Forum, felt more profound and sobering, every time I passed. Its layers of ruins—of temples and stores and the grand plans of so many great powers—serve notice that no regime and no republic lasts forever.

Still, the most enduring lessons of the Eternal City lie not in the ends of eras, but in how people respond in the aftermath of those ends.

A new book, Rome: A History in Seven Sackings, shows how Romans, having been conquered so many times over thousands of years, have responded in every conceivable way in the post-sacking. They have brushed off some defeats quickly, while stewing over others, according to author Matthew Kneale, a British novelist who is a longtime Rome resident. Romans have sometimes abandoned the city, and in other cases have returned to the city to buck it up. They have come together, and they have turned on one another. They have descended into authoritarianism as well as anarchy. They have turned toward religion and turned away from it.

But Rome has survived because Romans eventually “shrugged off catastrophes and made their city anew, adding a new generation of great monuments,” Kneale writes.

Californians can’t match the history of Romans, but our state too was reshaped after apocalypses. For all our booms, from the Gold Rush to Silicon Valley, the state has mostly been fashioned during the busts, when we were forced to reassess. Our current state constitution was a response to disastrous financial panics of the 1870s. Our state government’s progressive structure was fashioned by survivors of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake while their city lay in ruins.

Today, Californians from Redding to Santa Rosa to Montecito are wrestling with the decisions that come after massive destruction from fire or mudslides. Do we stay? And if we do, do we rebuild the way it was, or figure out something different?

In a larger sense, the state is still struggling to renew itself after the Great Recession. Our record in this is mixed. The economy has come back—along with our spirit—but we responded to the housing bust by not building housing, creating a historic shortage. And it appears that, by embracing Jerry Brown’s excessive frugality, we missed a great chance to rebuild our state’s crumbling infrastructure when land and construction were cheaper at the beginning of this decade.

But for all California’s experience with disaster, the soon-to-come end of the American empire—accelerated by crushing debt, faltering defense alliances, educational underinvestment, trade wars, racial resentment, and, of course, that Nero in the White House—will test California like never before. We are accustomed to being the richest part of the richest country, playing in an international economy that runs on our money and follows our rules. So it is hard to know how we’ll respond when all of that changes.

Will we be drawn deeper into the internal fights of a polarized America, and ape its violence? Will we quietly accept a diminished status? Will we fight and turn on each other? Or will we come together, reinvent ourselves, and find a distinguished place in a less American world?

Rome is the perfect place right now to think through such questions, not only because it’s old but also because the city has a vital young government that is thinking anew. Led by 40-year-old Virginia Raggi, the first woman to rule Rome since Marozia in the year 930, the government is run by an internet-based party called the Five Star Movement, which uses an online program (named Rousseau) to let members choose its candidates and determine its agenda.

And so ancient Rome is now run by a team of highly educated, self-critical millennials who don’t share an ideology but are obsessed with technology. As they will tell you, it’s unclear whether Five Star can transform Rome and reinvent democracy with its digital platforms, or whether it will splinter or fail like so many other populist movements. (One worrying fact: At the national level in Italy, Five Star is governing via a tenuous coalition that includes an anti-immigrant Trumpian party called the League.)

But it was refreshing to spend long days with the young people running Rome. Unfortunately, each day’s optimism would last only until I went back to the hotel, where the lobby TV was turned to CNN.

The screen conveyed all the late-empire awfulness of America’s leaders. And it posed that question again: How will California get through this? The psychologist from Palo Alto dominating the news embodied the Californian predicament. There Dr. Blasey Ford was, struggling to maintain her cool and her dignity in the face of the American meltdown.

From Rome, it looked like opera buffa, with the tenor Kavanaugh singing his angry arias about the maiden he claims he did not violate. And why couldn’t they get younger actors for the chorus of senators? Our own representative on that stage, Dianne Feinstein, is more than a half-century older than the officials I was seeing at Rome’s city hall. How could the New World of America have gotten so old, and the Old Europe of Rome become so young?

One evening, Mayor Raggi and her staff took hundreds of conference attendees to a fashionable, open-air Roman nightclub. I quickly realized that I’m not cool enough for my own conference.

The nightclub was covered by a canopy of cypress trees so beautiful that even Monterey peninsula residents would marvel. And, in another California-style twist, different areas of the club seemed to represent different ecosystems—marsh, forest, beach—while various bars and food stations offered wildly different cultural styles—Japanese, Thai, Cajun, TexMex, Hawaiian, and something reminiscent of Disneyland’s Enchanted Tiki Room. There were hammocks, beds, and even an attached second nightclub with its own maze of laurel bushes.

I couldn’t see a sign, so I asked a manager for the place’s name. “The Sanctuary,” he replied.

California is proudly a sanctuary state for unauthorized immigrants. But when empires fall, we all need sanctuary. Here’s hoping that, when the time comes, California can construct its own new and diverse democracy on top of the ruins of the American one.

The post How Will California Survive the End of America’s Empire? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It’s true that Rome, which has never been an easy place to make a living, is struggling these days. The economy is stagnant, I’ve never seen so many homeless people and beggars on the streets, and many Romans look visibly frustrated. It’s no wonder that populist parties are riding high. 

So why be here? Leaving aside the city’s superficial delights, like its superb climate and wonderful food, my own answer is simple:

History.

I am aware of no other great city whose past has been so well-recorded for so long. We have some idea—and often a very good idea—of what Rome was like, and what happened there, during each of the last 25 centuries. Nor, in any other great city, has so much survived physically from its past, through buildings and objects. If you know where to look, you can find souvenirs of the events that shaped Rome, allowing firsthand connections with great moments hundreds or thousands of years past.

I can give a few examples. In a modern hall at the back of Capitoline Museum are what look like weathered stone walls. One has been excavated, and you can see it descending deep into the ground. These are the foundations of classical Rome’s most important temple, to Jupiter Best and Greatest, which dominated Rome’s skyline for a thousand years. Created 2,500 years ago by the last of Rome’s early kings, Tarquin the Proud, the temple was partly responsible for his being the last king. Romans became so aggravated by the building costs that they rebelled and took power. Look at these piles of stone and you are looking at the moment the Roman Republic was born. 

Another temple built five centuries later—the Ara Pacis, or Temple to Peace—is in a much better state, having been painstakingly reassembled in the 1930s from scores of fragments. By the time it was built, Rome ruled the Mediterranean world, and the republic was dead. On the side of the temple, you can see a relief depicting—in their best and most fashionable togas—Rome’s ruler Augustus, his sidekick Marcellus, and their families and helpers walking in procession. It is a portrait of a new elite: the people who dismantled the Republic. In its place rose an unstable military dictatorship, whose administrations would often be decided by civil war.

If you visit the Museum of Rome near Termini station, you can capture the panic and anger during one especially important such regime change. A decade ago, during excavations of the emperors’ Palatine Palace, a scepter and two imperial standards were found. They had been carefully wrapped in silk and placed in wooden boxes. Dating work showed they had belonged to Emperor Maxentius, who at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge just north of Rome, was defeated by Rome’s first Christian emperor, Constantine. Looking at these objects, one can imagine the desperate moment when pagan Maxentius’s courtiers, learning that their emperor was vanquished and dead, hid his regalia of power to spite his successor. 

Rome has preserved its own defeats. In the city’s ancient Aurelian wall you can see the Asinarian Gate with its tall round towers. There, on a December night in A.D. 546, soldiers defending the city shimmied down a rope to search out the commander of their enemies, the Ostrogoth Totila, to ask how much he would pay for them to open the doors (he paid enough). Across the city, you can see the raised walkway leading from the Vatican to Castel Sant’Angelo, where, in early May 1527, Pope Clement VII ran for his life as Spanish and Lutheran German soldiers below took pot shots at him, and their comrades turned Rome into a slaughterhouse. And you can see the Papal Walls on the Gianicolo Hill, where in June 1849 Garibaldi’s soldiers heroically defended Rome in a hopeless struggle against a much superior French army. Though Garibaldi lost the battle, he won the war right there, as his forces’ courage gained sympathy around the world. Within a few years his dream of a united Italy, free of foreign rulers, was reality.

Or you can see the Balcony of the Palazzo Venezia, where, on the 10th of June 1940, Mussolini announced that Italy was at war with Britain and France (the crowd below was so unenthusiastic that a patriotic newsreel of the event had to be dubbed with cheers from sports events). And you can see the Museum of the Liberation of Rome, which was used as a torture center by the SS during Rome’s Nazi occupation. Now preserved as a warning from the past, you can read desperate messages scratched into the walls by those held there. 

For all this history, today’s Romans still aren’t impressed. “What use are monuments?” is a comment I have heard more than once. “Monuments are what’s dead and gone.” I disagree. I don’t believe that history repeats itself, as every age is different—but I do believe it can offer useful clues about human behavior. 

Romans have lived under every kind of political system, from oligarchy to theocracy, and from dictatorship and monarchy to democracy. Frequently they have lived under more than one at the same time. One can see Rome’s past as a vast case study of humankind and politics.

What can be learned from spending time among these relics? For one thing, they tell of the frightening chanciness of events. We like to think that great changes happen for important reasons—that they’re all but inevitable—but it’s rarely so. Huge and enduring transformations can come from the equivalent of a throw of a coin.

If Maxentius had defeated Constantine at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge and had hung on to his imperial scepter, Christianity might never have dominated Europe as it did, and instead might have remained one religion among many. If Mussolini had not been tempted into war in June 1940 his dictatorship might have endured, ever more sluggish and corrupt, for another decade or two. And if river fog had not risen from the Tiber early in the morning of the 6th of May 1527, hiding the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V’s starving soldiers from Rome’s guns, Charles’s army would never have broken into Rome, the city would not have had to endure a horrific 10-month occupation, and Italy might not have been dominated by Spain for the next two centuries.

Rome’s monuments also hold warnings. However infuriating democratic government can be, beware of chucking it away. Once you start down the path to dictatorship you never know who you might get. Rome has been ruled by a paranoid schizophrenic (Caligula), a talentless wannabe singer (Nero), and murderers far too numerous to list—including some popes. For all their claims to efficiency, dictators rarely govern well. Mussolini despised the elected rulers who preceded him and yet, for all their faults, their rule was far more effective and less corrupt than his. Under democracy, Italy thrived economically and was well prepared for war. Under Fascism the economy stagnated and the country’s military was in a hopeless state.

Another warning that seems especially relevant these days is that democracy’s worst enemy is inequality. At the heart of Rome’s first Republic was a patriotic alliance between rich and poorer Romans. When the greed of the rich transformed Rome into a slave economy and the poor lost their role in society, they also lost a sense of connection with the Republic, and it died. 

But Rome’s monuments have some good news for us, too. Somehow, out of all of these wars and tyrannies and destruction there has emerged an extraordinary, fascinating, and beautiful city. The most important thing about Rome is that it endures. There is nowhere else on earth I would rather be.

The post Why I’m Staying in Rome, Even While It Crumbles  appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The ancient Roman tradition of publicly displaying monumental equestrian statues of important historical figures is a particularly striking case of how to convey meaning in no uncertain terms.

Traditionally cast in bronze, these huge forms of horse and rider display messages of dominance, power, and virtue through strength. And, by doing so, they established a template that has persisted for centuries.

Perhaps, no statue embodies these values more than a famous depiction of the emperor Marcus Aurelius on horseback.

The figure of the emperor is seated on top of a regal horse, artfully posed as if it were moving gracefully through a crowd. The rider fully controls his muscular mount. The horse’s bit and bridle indicate that there were originally bronze reins, which were separately cast pieces lost over the centuries. The emperor’s posture, legs, and complete mental dominance over the beast underscores his great power. The emperor effortlessly motions with an outstretched left arm and hand. Art historians have defined this gesture as one of “pacification,” displaying authority and the ability to subjugate foreign enemies or forces of chaos that threatened the stability of the Empire.

This monumental bronze equestrian statue, inarguably one of the most extraordinary artworks that has come down to us from antiquity, was created to commemorate Marcus Aurelius’ great victories over Germanic tribes in 176 CE, or possibly posthumously to honor his prosperous reign (161-180 CE), when he, was canonized as one of Rome’s greatest emperors—a leader who ruled with intellect and decisive action.

Thousands of years later, the statue has become a hallmark in art history textbooks and the pride of the Capitoline Museum in Rome, where droves of tourists flock to see the work and to match it against the illustrations in their guidebooks.

Equestrian statues were not first seen in Rome. Before the Roman Empire existed, other regional cultures used this form of representation to commemorate their noblemen, kings, and heroes. The Romans were acutely aware of these artworks, especially those from Greece, and sought to collect and display them in their luxury villas, as well as dedicate them in public and religious spaces.

Roman equestrian statues, like many equestrian statues before and after, were about much more than men with horses; they embody the relationship between the leader and the military. The equites, a military class, played an incredibly important role in Roman society. Generally speaking, the equites received positions of privilege through merit and imperial favor instead of through a noble bloodline. Emperors selected members of this class for their elite Praetorian Guard, and used them politically as a counterweight to levy power from the high-ranking bureaucrats of the senatorial class.

The Western tradition of creating equestrian statues is interlinked with an appreciation of the equites. In the Marcus Aurelius statue, the emperor’s powers of statecraft are stressed, but his mastery of horsemanship clearly connects him to this elite military class, upon which he depended to manifest his far-reaching power.

Observed carefully, this statue of horse and rider idealizes Marcus Aurelius in an imagined moment of triumph. Romans loved victory, which they celebrated in grand civic gestures called “Triumphs.” They erected massive stone arches, many of which survive in the streets of Rome today, for their military heroes to ceremoniously march beneath in parades. Victorious generals or emperors would have ridden in horse-drawn chariots in these orchestrated events. While it is not specifically a depiction of a “Triumph,” the emperor wears a military cloak representing, perhaps, a humbler moment of victorious homecoming, one that symbolizes all of his achievements.

Ancient sources reference 22 equi magn—colossal bronze equestrian statues—that adorned the imperial capital. It is believed that this Marcus Aurelius statue was one of them, but centuries after the empire fell, the other 21 equi magni—along with hundreds of public statues throughout the city—were melted down during times of war or strife.

This single statue was preserved by a strange twist of fate. During the turmoil of Imperial Rome’s decline and its transformation into a medieval Christian center, the statue was incorrectly identified as the later emperor Constantine, who reigned from 306-337 CE. To later Christians, Constantine was a more favorable historic figure, as they widely believed that his 313 CE Edict of Milan, also known as the “peace of the church,” created a pathway for Christianity to become the principal religion of Europe. Medieval Romans could live more easily under the shadow of a statue identified as the Christian patron Constantine than with the polytheist Marcus Aurelius.

Although modern scholarship can easily settle the matter of the statue’s identity, conflation of Marcus Aurelius and Constantine indicates that, although the two emperors ruled Rome in very different political and social periods, the statue’s message of military prowess and leadership could be applied to them both. Constantine’s most important victory was at the Battle of Milvian Bridge (312 CE), when he—not unlike Julius Caesar in his famous crossing of the Rubicon—led an army into the city, crushed his enemies, and consolidated his power.

The conflation of Marcus Aurelius with Constantine reveals another part of the statue’s message—in which the mounted hero embodies virtue. Marcus Aurelius has been historically cast as the emperor exemplar, a Stoic philosopher with deep moral convictions. His oft-quoted collection of writings, Meditations, remains standard college course reading. Constantine’s virtue, in contrast, is attributed to his Christianity: He reportedly had a vision of the cross before his fateful battle for control of Rome, which led to his status of sainthood as a true defender of the faith. In medieval and later depictions of Constantine, he is almost always looking up, a gesture meant to signal that God is directly communicating with the emperor in his moment of triumph.

The allure of Rome’s greatness held sway over Western culture for millennia and the Marcus Aurelius statue directly contributed to this phenomenon. Part of what made it so influential was simply the fact that it was visible.

In contrast to many excavated archeological discoveries, the statue of Marcus Aurelius and his horse stayed above ground, where it surveyed the streets of Rome for nearly 2,000 years. By the mid-10th century this statue stood near the Pope’s Lateran Palace, and in 1538 it became the focal point of Michelangelo’s new design for the Piazza del Campidoglio. A replica is there today; the original was moved inside the Capitoline Museum in 1981 for conservation reasons.

Bronze replica of the Marcus Aurelius statue in Rome’s piazza del Campidoglio. Photo courtesy of Jean-Pol Grandmont/Wikimedia Commons.

Through the circumstances of its survival, its artistic quality, and its sheer size, the statue became widely known and revered throughout Europe long after the fall of Rome. Local artists and travelers copied it in their sketchbooks and used it as a model for their own artworks. Later rulers appropriated its formidable symbolism for themselves. Charlemagne commissioned his own portraits of dominance, using the Marcus Aurelius statue as a prototype. Machiavellian-style princes of Renaissance Italy revived the ancient Roman tradition in earnest, placing remarkably crafted bronze statues of themselves on mounts in their public squares.

From Europe, the tradition was exported to colonial territories from the early modern period well into the 20th century. The deeply embedded concepts of power and virtue on horseback were exploited by Mussolini and Franco to frame their autocratic regimes—even as the machine gun and other industrial weaponry made mounted warriors obsolete.

Although the specific messaging of any given equestrian statue changes through iconographic details, the basic model persists, as do the core themes of power and virtue. Most equestrian statues visible today in public spaces stick to form by portraying a stoic general on a sturdy horse with an outstretched arm, perhaps brandishing a sword for added effect. Typically, they wear ceremonial dress, not combat armor or field uniforms, a detail that brings them back to their greatest moments of triumph.

In Oyster Bay, the hometown of Teddy Roosevelt, stands a statue (not to be confused with the recently vandalized statue in New York City) that depicts the 26th U.S. president on horseback in his Rough Rider gear, alluding to his leadership of a volunteer cavalry regiment in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. Pulling decisively on the reigns of his horse, and surveying the field before him, he is shown as a man of action, vigor, and clear mind—a rough-and-tumble message that echoes back to antiquity.

In recent months, Americans have fiercely debated whether to preserve or tear down statues of horse-mounted Confederate generals. But criticism of equestrian statues is hardly new to the 21st century; rather, uneasiness with their symbolism has been embedded within the tradition since ancient times. The famous first-century BCE orator and writer Cicero, who frequently commented on virtus—a Roman concept that combines the “masculine” virtues of excellence, valor, honor, and integrity—condemned the erection of public equestrian statues as shameless acts of arrogance. Not immune to political hypocrisy, Cicero later supported resolutions for his allies to be honored by equestrian statues of them installed in a public space. But his core criticism regarding equestrian statues is clear: Representing an individual on horseback in a civic space suggests an infallibility of character and literary sets them above public scrutiny.

A few thousand years later, we can level some new criticism at the Marcus Aurelius statue, or the figure it represents. Even though Marcus Aurelius has historically been labeled one of the “good” emperors of ancient Roman, his army, as with any Roman military force, would routinely massacre, torture, mutilate, and terrorize its adversaries. On the domestic front, he ruled an empire that was bound to an especially brutal and dehumanizing system of slavery. The same indictments can be made against Constantine (who, in addition, ordered the execution of his wife and son), or any of Rome’s emperors.

Yet when one stares up at the statue today—either the one placed in a grand gallery of the Capitoline Museum or the replica in the historic courtyard—the viewer is urged to push those modern criticisms away. The magnificent rider and his steed radiate power and nobility, as if they still were striding through the streets of Rome.

Who would argue that such a venerated artistic marvel is problematic?

The statue itself does not explain the complicated historical circumstances of Roman rule or Marcus Aurelius’ reign, because it has no intention to do so. Instead, it purely celebrates a man for his deeds and the mark he left on the world as viewed by those who commissioned the statue.

Even though historic equestrian statues are direct in their messaging to the viewer, today—if we are viewing these statues for the first or the 100th time—we have the power, and hopefully the virtue, to take a deeper look.

The post Why Are There so Many Statues of Men on Horseback? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I work as an archaeologist, but two years ago the refugee crisis in my country moved me to make a dramatic change in my life and focus on helping those in need. Baobab was a brand new effort then, and I saw in it the possibility to transform the way we think about and treat migrants—a more human and humane approach.

I came together with other volunteers to provide migrants not only with a bed, a meal, and clean clothes, but with empathy, kindness, and curiosity about their lives, and with guidance and legal information about their status in Europe. Thus far our experience has been filled with challenges, but we are not giving up, and we hope our story will inspire others to adopt a similar model.

The Baobab Experience was born in the spring of 2015, near Rome’s Tiburtina train station, three miles east of the postcard locales where tourists flock. It was May 12, one day after the police had forcibly cleared migrants from the area nearby Ponte Mammolo metro station, where refugees from the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, many of them survivors of arduous and terrifying journeys across the Mediterranean, had been congregating for months.

Chased out of their temporary shelter, hundreds of migrants poured into a cultural center in Via Cupa, a few blocks southeast of the train station. The reaction of Rome’s citizenry was immediate: In just a few hours, thousands of donations were brought to the center, and dozens of volunteers showed up, ready to help in any way they could. Some would pop by to donate some basic necessities and end up spending the whole day in Via Cupa, helping out. Donors and volunteers of different ages, origins and experiences would work side by side for hours.

In just a few weeks, Via Cupa became a unique place, with a vital energy springing from the mix of cultures animating it. It also was a place where people who had spent months fleeing for their lives finally could stop and repose in relative calm and safety—a place where they knew that, when they talked, someone would be listening. That deep, reciprocal act of listening forged the bonds that gradually arose between the migrants and us.

While we were listening, Rome’s political institutions stayed silent, not wanting to get tangled up in such a complex situation. During that summer of 2015, Baobab welcomed a total of 30,000 migrants. Doing our best to accommodate 800 people at a time in a space that had been built to host 250, we were constantly battling unsanitary conditions. We began to speak out publicly about the struggles we faced, and to meet with local government officials to begin searching for solutions.

The Baobab Experience continued to grow, as our volunteers began to forge solutions to our many logistical challenges, and to organize assistance and activities for our migrant residents. They called weekly meetings, organized indoor gathering spaces, and set times for clothing distribution and meals—our volunteer cooks were preparing more than a thousand meals a day. They assembled “arrival and leaving kits” with basic necessities, such as soap, toothbrush, toothpaste, snacks, fruit juice and water. A basketball hoop and other sports equipment were brought to the center, and migrants were given tours of the city to help orient themselves in their new home.

Meanwhile, other civic and charitable groups provided their skills and expertise, as well as space to collect, sort, and store donations. A sanitary squad and a legal team were created. Cultural mediators helped us to communicate across language barriers. Using a world map at the center’s entrance, we encouraged migrants to share their personal stories by pinpointing the routes of their journeys to Europe—and to plan the next passage to their final destinations.

But as autumn turned to winter, our situation changed. With cold weather discouraging migrants from making the perilous sea crossing, the number of new arrivals began to drop dramatically.

In December of 2015 the city shut down the center, with the promise that a new site with adequate living conditions would soon be found. But this promise never came to fruition—so Baobab had to begin welcoming and providing practical and legal information to the continuing trickle of migrants in the street, in front of the closed gate of what had been our center. This was when our group of volunteers evolved from being just a group of citizens brought together by their own solidarity, to formally establishing themselves as an association in order to be able to engage in formal talks with the city government. The Baobab Experience, up until then an informal collection of like-minded people, was formally born.

When spring came in 2016, and heavier migrant traffic resumed, we still had only the outdoor space of Via Cupa to welcome and shelter our new wave of guests. We began pitching tents in the street, and in a handful of days an informal camp was operating. Its conditions were even worse than those in the center. There was no running water, no electricity, and no kitchen to prepare meals.

And yet the Baobab spirit remained steadfast. If anything, it was more determined than ever not to give up our fight for human dignity. Although we had no building to offer the 20,000 people who arrived between April and September 2016, our feelings of brotherhood and sisterhood deepened during those days and nights together on the street. During uneasy nights, we turned to singing and dancing to lighten our mood and pass the dark hours. Once again, the strong support of the citizenry of Rome helped sustain us, and we also gained the backing of Italian and international cultural associations, which launched a petition supporting us.

Officials continued their threats of clearing the camp, and periodic, forced round-ups of migrants by police seeking identification documents never stopped. Migrants spent many anxious nights in police headquarters, often with no legal or cultural mediation to assist them. Despite our ongoing negotiations with Rome’s new city government—which, yet again, had promised a rapid solution to the problem—no alternative to our outdoor, informal camp has emerged.

On the last day of September 2016 the camp was cleared for good. Tents, gazebos, all the donations we’d received, and all the migrants’ personal effects were dumped by the police in the abandoned, locked building of Via Cupa, with no possibility for either volunteers or migrants to retrieve them.

From that moment on, we have been in our “itinerant phase,” constantly on the move, from parking lot to parking lot, trying as hard as we can to guarantee the essential needs of those migrants who have stayed and who are constantly being chased out and stopped by police demanding identification. It feels like a manhunt aimed at scaring and scattering us, trying to push us to exhaustion so that we will give up. For our part, we’ve given up on trying to negotiate with the local government, as every promise they’ve made to us has been broken.

But Baobab will not end. We have vowed to each other that Baobab will keep transforming itself in whatever ways are needed so that we can keep doing our essential work. Since the end of October 2016 we have been welcoming migrants in an unused public square behind Tiburtina train station. We continue giving a Baobab welcome to migrants whose long journeys have brought them here to Rome, trying to give them what we value most: the recognition of their precious individuality, and the desire to hear and keep alive their stories and their spirits.

The post In Rome, a New Kind of Sanctuary Is Growing appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

For all the fear and consternation about the lies, insults, conspiracy theories, and rhetorical excesses of the 2016 presidential election, today’s political troubles have been familiar features of democracy since its invention 2,500 years ago, said a panel of scholars of classics, history, and communications during “How Does Democracy Survive Demagoguery?,” a Zócalo/Getty Villa “Open Art” event.

The wide-ranging conversation at the Getty Villa covered accused demagogues from Pericles to Cicero, Thomas Jefferson to Bernie Sanders. The panelists cautioned that “demagogue” hasn’t always had a negative connotation; in antiquity it often had the ambiguous definition of a politician who speaks for the people.

And at times, panelists suggested that there is at least a bit of demagoguery in any democracy, and in almost any democratic politician.

With perhaps one exception, the only current presidential candidate who wouldn’t be recognized as a demagogue in ancient times might be Hillary Clinton—because as University of Florida classicist Victoria Emma Pagán noted, “There wouldn’t have been a Hillary Clinton in ancient Rome or ancient Greece—women did not participate in the government at all.”

At that, Indiana University historian Eric Robinson quipped: “I’d deny that Hillary Clinton is a demagogue. … To be a demagogue, one of the things you’d have to be is a very, very persuasive public speaker.” And he added, “I wouldn’t accuse Clinton” of being able to fire up a crowd.

Robinson said that the classic example of a demagogue was the ancient Greek leader Cleon. “He would stomp up and down the stage, pull up his robes, and shout,” said Robinson, who teaches Greek and Roman history. Records of Cleon’s speeches “show him insulting his political opponents, drawing on the anger of the audience, engaging in bluster about the need to project strength at all times. … Some of this may sound a little familiar.”

Texas A&M University communications professor and rhetorician Jennifer Mercieca said, “One thing that’s consistent from ancient Athens through to today, when we think about demagoguery, we’re really thinking about uncontrollable leaders, who don’t follow norms.” She added, “Americans are obsessed with preventing demagoguery.”

Pagán, the University of Florida classicist, asked the audience to consider trust in thinking about demagogues and democracy. It’s an important currency—and demagogues can succeed when they win the audience’s trust. But today, trust is breaking down in the U.S.—not only trust between leaders and the people, but trust between different parts of the population.

Pagán said that other accusations—of conspiracy or corruption—are much more toxic than to claim someone is a demagogue. “The thing about the charge of demagoguery is that it can be countered. If you call somebody a conspirator, it’s harder to retract. … If you say someone is a demagogue—we can have a really good conversation about whether Bernie Sanders is a demagogue. Just calling someone a demagogue is a starting point.”

Donald Trump was frequently mentioned in the conversation, and in audience questions. But Robinson noted that conspiracy theories, which pass for talking points in speeches of the presumptive Republican nominee, were used by ancient Greek politicians as well. And Pagán pointed out that Cicero, the Roman orator and politician, “used insult and invective in ways that we can’t even begin to imagine. … Trump’s insults look like kindergarten stuff” in comparison.

But in ancient Rome, she said, “Every time Cicero talks about fear, he also says … ‘And these are the steps I’m taking to protect you.’” Today’s demagogic politicians don’t appear to be as specific and concrete in explaining what they’re doing or proposing, she suggested.

The panel’s moderator, Los Angeles Times political reporter Seema Mehta, asked the scholars how, in the past, one fought against demagogues. The panel’s answer: it’s never been easy. Pagán noted that you don’t want to engage in discussion with demagogues. Mercieca explained that America’s founding fathers tried to create a weak executive and our system of checks and balances in part to check demagogues. But, she added, the executive branch has grown far more powerful than they intended.

Successful demagogues, the panelists noted, often get their way, though sometimes a clever historian like Thucydides can expose their tricks for the benefit of future generations. And the opponents of one Roman demagogue had success by taking his exaggerated promises and exaggerating them further—“out-demagoguing the demagogue.”

Demagogues can prosper in times of anger. And Mercieca, the Texas A&M communications professor, said that extreme polarization creates “a context within which demagoguery can flourish. When you have people getting very isolated news information from a very specific perspective … you create enemies out of the other.”

Mercieca, who is writing a book about Trump, noted that while his methods seem new, he is using ancient rhetorical techniques, from threats of force, to ad hominem attack to paralipsis. That last refers to the technique of saying, “I’m not saying … but I’m saying”—essentially repeating gossip or rumors but eliding accountability for it. Mercieca, cheekily exemplifying this, began to claim that one of Trump’s ex-wives said he kept Hitler’s speeches by his bed, before catching herself and admitting she couldn’t prove it. “It’s been reported,” she said, Trump-style, to laughter.

Another issue, she added, is that American presidential candidates have come to depend on appeals to fear. “Presidential candidates try to create a crisis for the nation, and insert themselves into that crisis as the hero of that moment,” she said.

In response to an audience question, Robinson suggested that today’s demagogic politicians be countered with the “ancient answer”: debates in which one candidate’s speech is immediately countered on the same stage by another candidate’s speech.

The problem today is that we hear speeches in fragments, and the media responses to speeches are also fragmented. Our televised debates require such short answers that they don’t offer a real opportunity to challenge demagoguery.

“Maybe it’s time to bring back ancient debate,” Robinson said.

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