What About Rome?

So, imagine if Montesquieu wrote a book about the Roman Empire. That book would surely be a runaway bestseller, right?

He did write that book. And nobody has heard of it.

Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline.

OK, the title is lousy and way too wordy. But that can’t explain why nobody has heard of this book.

So, it must not be a very good book. Boring, uninteresting, tedious, uninsightful, something. Right?

Nope. It is actually an easy to read and interesting book. If you are interested in Rome or Montesquieu or political philosophy, you’ll enjoy it. It is not as deep and detailed as The Spirit of Laws, but it hits on the same themes and it is vastly more readable.

Indeed, one way to think of this book is that it is solving a problem political philosophers surely face all the time. Imagine you are writing a book advancing a new theory on how to think about and organize political society. Somewhere along the way, people are going to start asking you, “How does your theory fit with the history of Rome?”

Why will that question about the history of Rome arise? Because Rome has everything. In its 1000 year run, everything that could happen, happened. If you have a theory about political orders, you don’t want Rome standing there as a giant counter-example. So you better figure out how your theory fits Rome.

That is what Montesquieu’s Rome book reads like. You imagine him hammering away at The Spirit of Laws and people keep asking him about Rome, so he starts a notebook on “Thoughts on Rome,” and eventually that notebook gets to be book-length, so he publishes it as a stand-alone book. I have no idea if that is how this book actually originated, but it sure reads that way.

What does he say in the book? We can divide his argument into three parts: Why did Rome rise? What made it so Great? Why did it Decline?

The rise: “always striving and meeting obstacles, Rome…practiced the virtues which were to be so fatal to the world.” The Romans had courage and valor and a determination to win. And so they built the most impressive army in the word, marched into town after town, and assimilated them. They were the Borg. “Resistance is futile; you will be assimilated.” (Surprisingly, Montesquieu does not make the comparison to the Borg. Go figure.) “In short no nation ever prepared for war with so much prudence, or waged it with so much audacity.”

It was a slow way of conquering. They vanquished a people and were content to weaken it. They imposed conditions on it which undermined it insensibly. If it revolted, it was reduced still further, and it became a subject people without anyone being able to say when its subjection began…
It is the folly of conquerors to want to give their laws and customs to all peoples. This serves no purpose, for people are capable of obeying in any form of government.
But since Rome imposed no general laws, the various peoples had no dangerous ties among themselves. They constituted a body only by virtue of a common obedience, and, without being compatriots, they were all Romans.

This leads directly to why Rome was so great. “The government of Rome was admirable. From its birth, abuses of power could always be corrected by its constitution, whether by means of the spirit of the people, the strength of the senate, or the authority of certain magistrates.”

As Montesquieu describes the features of the Roman government which enabled it to be great, you can imagine the Founding Fathers reading this book and thinking, “This is what we should do.” Separation of powers, faction against faction moderating both, well-regulated militias, not seeking monsters to destroy, a federalist system allowing different cultures or religions to exist in different parts of the republic…the list goes on and on. Montesquieu was the second most cited authority by the Founding Fathers (after, of course, the Bible). I always assumed that meant they just spent a lot of time with The Spirt of Laws, but it is hard to believe they were not all well versed in this book too.

So, what went wrong? First we should note the oddity of speaking as if the collapse of the Great Roman Republic somehow means that the Roman Republic failed. Suppose you came up with a scheme of government and I came along and said, “Sure, you could do that, and it will work for a bit, but it is going to miserably fail in the year 2520.” Would that make you think the proposal was a failure?

Montesquieu thinks the failure was inevitable; the greatness of Rome caused the collapse of Rome. (Again, after a 500 year rise, the “collapse” took another 500 years to complete…) As the people got wealthier in the Roman Republic, they became comfortable, and as they become comfortable, they were less interested in the hard work of being a good citizen.

The people of Rome, who were called plebs, did not hate the worst emperors. After they had lost their power, and were no longer occupied with war, they had become the vilest of all peoples. They regarded commerce and the arts as things fit for slaves, and the distributions of grain that they received made them neglect the land. They had become accustomed to games and spectacles. When they no longer had tribunes to listen to or magistrates to elect, these useless things became necessities, and idleness increased their taste for them. Thus Caligula, Nero, Commodus, and Caracalla were lamented by the people because of their very madness, for they wildly loved what the people loved, and contributed with all their power and even their persons to the people’s pleasures. For them these rulers were prodigal of all the riches of the empire, and when these were exhausted, the people—looking on untroubled while all the great families were being despoiled—enjoyed the fruits of the tyranny. And their joy was pure, for they found security in their own baseness. Such princes naturally hated good men: they knew they were not approved of by them. Indignant at meeting contradiction or silence from an austere citizen, intoxicated by the plaudits of the populace, they succeeded in imagining that their government produced public felicity, and that only ill-intentioned men could censure it. 

Go ahead and admit it: when you read that you thought about contemporary American society.

At the end of the constitutional convention in 1787, James McHenry related the following: “A lady asked Dr. Franklin, ‘Well, Doctor, what have we got? A republic or a monarchy?’ ‘A republic,’ replied the Doctor, ‘if you can keep it.’”

If you can keep it. That is why Montesquieu’s book should be vastly better known than it is. Not only is it a work of a giant in political philosophy, not only is it a work about the endlessly fascinating Roman Empire, it wrestles with the question that should occupy the mind of every citizen. Can we keep it?