Mary Beard: why ancient Rome matters to the modern world

Failure in Iraq, debates about freedom, expenses scandals, sex advice … the Romans seem versions of ourselves. But then there’s the slavery and the babies on rubbish heaps. We need to understand ancient Rome, but should we take lessons from it?

By the late fourth century CE the river Danube had become Rome’s Calais. What we often call the “invasions” into the Roman empire of barbarian hordes (or “swarms”, perhaps) could equally well be described as mass movements of economic migrants or political refugees from northern Europe. The Roman authorities had no better idea of how to deal with this crisis than our own authorities do, and, predictably, they were less humane. On one notorious occasion, uncomfortable even for some Roman observers, they sold dog-meat as food to the asylum-seekers who had managed to get across the river (dog was off limits for human consumption then as now). It was just one stage in a series of standoffs, compromises and military conflicts that eventually destroyed central Roman power in the western part of their empire. And it was exacerbated by the calculating policy of the Romans in the east, who by this era effectively formed a separate state. Their solution to the crisis of migration was to point the migrants firmly westwards, and try to make them someone else’s problem.

It’s tempting to imagine the ancient Romans as some version of ourselves. They launched disastrous military expeditions to those parts of the world where we too have failed. Iraq was as much a graveyard for the Romans as it has been for us. And one of their worst defeats, in 53BCE at the hands of a rival empire in the east, took place near the modern border between Syria and Turkey. In a particularly ghoulish twist, uncomfortably reminiscent of the sadistic showmanship of Islamic State, the head of the Roman commander was cut off and used by the enemy as a makeshift prop in a performance of Euripides’ play The Bacchae – in which the head of King Pentheus, horribly decapitated by his mother, takes a macabre starring role.

Continue reading...