What Can Karl Marx Tell Us About Comparing Donald Trump to Roman Emperors?
The Emperor Claudius was notorious for his inconsistency and emotional instability; “sometimes ill-advised and hasty, occasionally capricious and like a lunatic,” as the biographer Suetonius put it. Manipulated by family members and close advisers who knew how to play on his vanity to enrich themselves and further their own interests, Claudius built projects “that were grandiose rather than necessary” and made populist gestures like a crack-down on aliens usurping the privileges of citizenship. “Cruel and bloodthirsty by temperament,” he didn’t hesitate to call for the use of torture in interrogations. His cowardice and suspicion caused him to see enemies everywhere. He had no regard for decorum or tradition in his dealings with anyone: “In his speech and his actions he often showed such great insensitivity that he was thought neither to realize nor to care to whom or with whom or at what time or in what place he was speaking.”
Recognize anyone? We’ve had Trump as Caesar, Augustus, Caligula, Nero and Commodus (and Caracalla, but only on Twitter). Cherry-picking autocratic anecdotes from Suetonius, the Historia Augusta, and elsewhere to portray him as an elderly, irascible tyrant seems no more dubious or unhelpful than cherry-picking them to portray him as a younger, unbalanced tyrant. But also no less dubious and unhelpful…
Why are so many people responding to current events with Roman analogies? The much-cited fact that the Founders knew their ancient history and drew on Republican ideas in designing the United States Constitution is scarcely an explanation, unless you buy the implausible idea that the country is destined to follow exactly the same historical trajectory as its ancient model. I suppose one might take comfort in the fact that this is a change from comparisons with the Nazis — but with a strong suspicion that the evocation of Roman emperors is basically a Hitler analogy for people who are far too sophisticated and self-aware to make Hitler analogies.
We classicists have an understandable tendency not to look a gift horse in the mouth when the wider culture takes an unexpected interest in our subject. We think that people would find our material fascinating and illuminating, if only they’d take the trouble to investigate it. So, while we may get annoyed at some of the more ridiculous misconceptions, appropriations, and inherited absurdities being peddled by journalists and popular historians, we’re most likely to see this development as something to celebrate: if not an opportunity to get ourselves a bit of publicity as well, then at least a chance for our discipline to step into the limelight and attract new students. Surely we want people to be talking about the ancient Greeks and Romans?
I’m not so certain — and not only because they may not be the sort of people we would actually welcome as lovers of the Classics (if the gift horse turns out to be a Trojan one…). We need to think about the image of the ancient world that is being projected, and its implications for our understanding of the present, rather than assuming that all publicity is good publicity. We need to think about what, if anything, this is doing to the image of our discipline — including the possibility that it is actively damaging to all but a few of us. Finally, we need to take a step back and try to think about this moment of politicized Romanitas in a wider context. How will this period look to the serious reception scholars and historians of ideas of the future — assuming that in a century or so there are still some around to take an interest?
Men make their own history, but they do not make it just of their own free will; not under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and handed down. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.
In the opening section of his 1852 essay “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” Karl Marx developed — almost in passing — a theory of reception and the appropriation of the past. He identified a human tendency to “conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes” to present their own times and actions in “time-honored clothing and borrowed language.” The past that was summoned back to life in this way was not necessarily classical — Martin Luther, he noted, “masked himself as the Apostle Paul” in his campaign against the established Church — but in the case of modern France, it was Rome that had provided the models: the Republic for the leading figures of the Revolution, and the Empire for Napoleon.
This was not, of course, an actual revival of the values and virtues of ancient Rome, but the reenactment of an inherited tradition. It was not a sham, nor was it, in Marx’s view, an attempt to escape from the present into an imagined past. Rather, he saw these borrowed costumes and slogans as a genuine source of inspiration for those who adopted them, a means of creating something new using the old language:
In the classically austere traditions of the Roman republic, its gladiators found the ideals and the images, the self-deceptions that they needed … to keep their enthusiasm on the high plane of the great historical tragedy.
The men of the French Revolution needed a model of heroism, a precedent for their struggle to defeat monarchy and establish a new order. As Marx noted, it is precisely at such moments of crisis that people need reassurance that what they are attempting is possible, because it’s been done in the past. The evocation and appropriation of Roman ideals and images could in this way be creative and dynamic: glorifying the new struggles rather than parodying the old, and finding once more the true spirit of revolution.
We can look at the American Revolution and the foundation of the United States through a similar lens: the ghosts of ancient Rome watched over the cradle of this young Republic too, providing a template for its institutions and political vocabulary. Can we understand our own times and their sudden fondness for Roman analogies in the same way? The historical incoherence and fictional nature of these ancient images are harder to ignore than they once were; the anachronism is all too obvious. Perhaps the keyboard warriors of the alt-right draw genuine inspiration and self-confidence as well as silly pseudonyms from their kitsch fantasies of Roman heroism, presenting their prejudiced screeds as a revival of Republican virtue, and maybe even believing it themselves — but this adolescent toga party atmosphere doesn’t carry weight with anyone else.
However, it’s the fact that liberals and leftists also seem happy to dress up current developments as a sword-and-sandal epic that is most puzzling. At best, it’s a way of mocking Trump and his behavior as the epitome of imperial decadence, an apparently harmless in-joke for those with a bit of classical knowledge. Perhaps it’s also a way of expressing fantasies of his downfall, humiliation and murder without losing the moral high ground to those who actually advocate political violence.
But thinking about our situation in this way locks us into the most conventional sort of Great Man theory of history, according to which events are shaped by the decisions, actions, and pathologies of a few larger-than-life individuals. It’s a conception of historical development that suits the cheerleaders for American Renewal, with their suggestion that the answer to the world’s problems is someone fearless and decisive enough to face up to the paper tigers of globalization, liberalism, and international norms. But it has nothing to offer anyone who sees the world in more complex or democratic terms.
It’s difficult not to be reminded of Tacitus’ comments in the Annals on the writing of history under autocracy: the way that it becomes increasingly focused on the most trivial actions and pronouncements of the autocrat, a monotonous litany of “cruel orders, unremitting accusations, treacherous friendships, innocent men ruined,” because that is perceived as the most useful and relevant knowledge. By adopting the same perspective, we reduce ourselves to the position of the senatorial elite, horrified but fascinated by the outrageous behavior of the ruler and the cheers of the mob, struggling to interpret the smoke and mirrors of the imperial court.
Of course, we’re far enough away from the center of power that our views as individuals are of little concern to the ruler, limiting both the risks and the opportunities presented by the new order, compared to the position of the elite under the Principate. We’re still in the early days of a rapidly changing situation — shortly after I first wrote that last sentence, Trump started threatening to defund UC Berkeley — and the more that the regime starts to interest itself in universities and colleges, the more US-based classicists will be faced with questions of sycophancy, opportunism, and compromise.
But in that case, it’s all the more important to have a clear understanding of the situation, rather than implicitly attributing everything to the pathology of the Emperor and generating conspiracy theories about the intentions of individual courtiers. To do that is an admission of defeat, a loss of belief in any alternative, an intellectual abdication of agency.
The focus of Marx’s essay was not on the French Revolution or the reign of Napoleon I, but on the successor regime of Napoleon III, established after a coup d’état in 1851. In Marx’s view, this period manifested as a caricature of the earlier regime. The French people found themselves forced back into a defunct epoch, directionless, assailed by all the old dates, names, and edicts, a parody of earlier glories. Images of the past now became a trap, an impediment to real understanding or change: “The nation feels like the mad Englishman in Bedlam, who thinks he is living in the time of the old Pharaohs and daily bewails the hard labor he has to perform in the Ethiopian gold mines.” He is imprisoned, true enough — but has no grasp of the reality of his situation, and so no hope of any escape or relief.
In a similar manner, we risk deluding ourselves, or at least limiting our perspective, by our choice of historical analogies. Perhaps through mere force of habit, we resort to antiquated conceptions of autocrats and their power; the inherited belief that these inherited images can help us make sense of the world. This enables us to depict the tyrant in lurid anecdotes, with the effect of magnifying his power and disguising its true nature. The implication is that if we want a way out, we face a stark choice between capitulation and assassination.
There are plenty of ways in which the study of the Roman Principate could be useful and illuminating, that are obscured by an excessive focus on the individual autocrat. If we take a structural view of the system, rather than fetishizing the different personalities and their excessive behaviors, we can then explore interesting issues around the relationship between theoretical and effective power under autocracy, the limits of knowledge and control, the necessity of delegation and hence the constant obsession with trust and loyalty, the dependence on popular acclamation, the forms of rhetoric and coercion, and so forth.
The present regime is not the Roman Principate reborn; far too many things have changed for that to be remotely plausible. But first-century Rome and present-day Washington can be seen as comparable systems in certain important respects, so that historical understanding of the ancient example may suggest possible interpretations of present developments, or at least raise useful questions. This is only plausible if we move beyond colorful anecdotes and glib polemical analogies to develop an explicit comparative analysis, in collaboration (or at the very least dialogue) with those studying similar developments in other contexts.
Being a good classicist under a bad emperor is not only a matter of opposing attempts at appropriating what’s left of the classical legacy for dubious ends — that’s a largely self-interested enterprise, protecting our discipline from such associations. It is also a matter of recognizing the risks of complicity, when we introduce eye-catching but vacuous analogies to the general confusion and uncertainty. As Marx suggested, we need to strip off all superstition about the past, including the instinctive belief that every classical echo is interesting and productive.
Neville Morley is Professor of Classics & Ancient History at the University of Exeter, and an Einstein Visiting Fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin. He is the author of books on both ancient economic history and classical reception, including Antiquity and Modernity and Thucydides and the Idea of History, and blogs at thesphinxblog.com.
