Story of Alexander

But that one was critical. Though they knew the story of Alexander, the Romans never really learned his lesson. The fatal flaw of the Roman empire—if we must think empire is a good thing—was that it had for-gotten how to be imperialist. It had no strategy for north, south, or east, and when from any of those directions enemies arose who understood the Romans and their achievement full well and better than the Romans understood their rivals, then the Roman venture faltered.

The prosperity and peace of the Roman empire were unmistakably good things, however one assesses the price that was paid to achieve them. It is reasonable to lament their passing, or at least to wish that more could have been preserved. In the absence of strategy or vision, though, Rome had few unexploited advantages left.

The city of Rome

The city of Rome, once Justinian’s wars did their worst, never rebounded to more than a shadow of itself, rising in the time of the Renaissance from long misery as a malarial swamp, then settling from the Renaissance until the present for being a showplace—that is, a tourist trap. To be sure, in the irony of history, the final lesson that societies learned from Rome was a variant on Tacitus’s quip about making its emperors somewhere else. The long-term lesson now was that “Romes”— new Romes—could themselves be made someplace else, no longer just on the Tiber. Nowhere west of Tibet have we seen, since late antiquity, the emergence of great powers with wide territorial ambitions that weren’t imitating Rome in one way or another.

Constantine was the first to imitate it, with his parody of the seven hills plunked down on the Bosporus, and the Arabs would make Damascus and Baghdad Romes in their own time. To the northeast, Kiev would become the third Rome and Moscow its rival, the latter clinging to the word czar (which is merely Caesar heard at a distance) to the end of its ambitions. The Frankish king Charles, whose spin doctors persuaded us to call him Charles the Great (Charlemagne), and the later Frankish monarch Napoleon, sought restoration of empire on various pretexts. Charlemagne thought empire was his for the taking because the throne in Constantinople was inappropriately held by an impossible pretender; Napoleon, observing the panoply and politi¬cal disunity of the last days of the Holy Roman Empire, compelled it to dissolve in 1806 to make way for his own imperial pretensions. Each of these rulers of the Franks made sure that Rome’s religious power—in the person of the reigning pope, who crowned him—would underscore the legitimacy of his role.