Noel Malcolm: Is America the new Rome?
[Review of The New Rome: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America by Cullen Murphy.]
The American edition of this book, which came out a few months ago, bore the title Are We Rome? Apparently that was the sort of question for which ancient Romans would have used the word 'nonne', expecting the answer 'yes'; for the British edition is baldly entitled The New Rome.
Sidney and Beatrice Webb did something similar when they dropped the question mark from their Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? - but at least they waited a couple of years before they did so.
Cullen Murphy, an author of stylish think-pieces in Atlantic Monthly and Vanity Fair, has become obsessed with the resemblances between the present-day US and ancient Rome.
The big similarity, of course, is in geopolitics: at its height, the Roman Empire was a military superpower which dominated much of what is tendentiously called 'the known world' (known by whom? - answer: by people in the Roman Empire).
Read entire article at Telegraph (UK)
The American edition of this book, which came out a few months ago, bore the title Are We Rome? Apparently that was the sort of question for which ancient Romans would have used the word 'nonne', expecting the answer 'yes'; for the British edition is baldly entitled The New Rome.
Sidney and Beatrice Webb did something similar when they dropped the question mark from their Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? - but at least they waited a couple of years before they did so.
Cullen Murphy, an author of stylish think-pieces in Atlantic Monthly and Vanity Fair, has become obsessed with the resemblances between the present-day US and ancient Rome.
The big similarity, of course, is in geopolitics: at its height, the Roman Empire was a military superpower which dominated much of what is tendentiously called 'the known world' (known by whom? - answer: by people in the Roman Empire).