Pax Romana/Pax Americana : Perceptions of Rome in American Political Culture, 2000-2010

Abstract

The citation of the parallels between ancient Rome and the modern U.S. enjoyed a resurgence in popularity in American journalism, political commentary, and popular current affairs literature during the first decade of the twenty-first century. These discussions, however, are riddled with errors about Roman history and mired in contemporary political partisanship, and the specific parallels cited are often irrelevant or too superficial to be meaningful, while other, more salient parallels are simply overlooked. Underlying such problems are American prejudices concerning Republics and Empires, an unsophisticated popular understanding of the terms "empire" and "imperialism, " as well as the predominance in modern American consciousness of a caricatured image of Rome that originates in Hollywood films. Recent discussions of the Rome-America parallel have been informed by all of these distortions, and by "projection"- the simultaneous identification and distancing impulses Self experiences when encountering the Other. Projection theory suggests that discussions of Roman power on both ends of the American political spectrum in the early 2000s tended towards the same end: the articulation of a desire for the preservation and perpetuation of American power and pre-eminence in an increasingly uncertain and dangerous world.