There’s this Rome question—or is it a poll?—on the internet that’s gone a little too far. It asks men (why not women?) how often they think about ancient Rome. In the West, it’s a lot because they see Rome’s shadow everywhere, from philosophy to public health. Stoicism is big now, for instance, as the world turns hostile. Among the Stoics, there is no one easier on the nerves than the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (121-180 CE). In health, as COVID-19 becomes endemic, the world is just emerging from the greatest plague in a century. The first in recorded history was the Plague of Justinian (started in 541 CE), which is believed to have been bubonic.
So, Rome touches all, but this thing on the internet has gone too far. A recent tweet (sorry, an X-text) by Elon Musk said: “I sometimes wonder if Rome was started by exiles from Troy. It’s not completely out of the question. At some point in antiquity, a few ships of very competent soldiers (with almost no women) landed on the coast of Italy. Where did they come from?”
Thousands of people know the answer to that question. Many more would have known, perhaps even Musk himself, if the world’s campuses hadn’t gone all commercial and slashed funding to liberal arts programmes. The answer dates back to 29-19 BC, when Virgil, who was to ancient Italy what Camoes was later to Portugal in the Age of Exploration, wrote the Aeneid. The classic foundational tale traces the journey of Aeneas to Italy after the fall of Troy, to found Rome and invest it with the civilisational values of classical Greece. It was very well-written propaganda providing a sound pedigree for Roman civilisation.
Virgil’s rewrite of history was not deterred by the fact that perfectly good civilisations pre-existed the Romans in Italy. Apart from the Latins, the Etruscans had left behind signs of a flourishing culture in cities like Volterra, which has city gates that visibly predate Roman fortifications, and caves and catacombs filled with urns containing the ashes of the dead. The urns were made in the image of their owners, and the sculptures reveal a civilisation far more cosmopolitan than the Romans who would succeed them.
Virgil gathered together references to Aeneas scattered across the popular culture and literature of his time and created a figure who could serve as a legitimate conduit of Greek values to Roman culture. The Romans had an older founding story, of Romulus and Remus, the twins who make one recall the origin stories of Moses, Krishna and, just for variety, Mowgli. It was a free-standing story until Virgil recruited the twins to the bloodline of Aeneas.
In the ninth century, another alleged descendant of Aeneas was recruited for duty in the British Isles. Nennius was the first to write of Aeneas’ grandson Brutus, who gave his name and his bloodline to Britain, but that was in a footnote. Brutus appears in his full majesty in the opening pages of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, which is dated to the 12th century. So, having served as the civilisational basis for the Roman empire, the line of Aeneas was coaxed into providing substantial antecedents to Britain which, in 400 years, would develop imperial ambitions.
Now, to return to that question travelling the internet: why is everyone thinking about the Roman empire in 2023? Because the US elections are due in 2024 and Donald Trump’s voters fear that if he doesn’t make the cut, civilisation as they know it will cease to exist. The Roman empire is being referenced because as far as they know, it lasted for 250 years, which they believe to be the outer limit for the life expectancy of empires. The US, in their opinion, is an empire that’s 247 years old, uncomfortably close to its use-by date.
Of course, empires don’t just crumple up at 250. The Portuguese empire launched by Prince Henry the Navigator lasted almost six centuries until 1999, when it relinquished Macau to China. The Ottoman empire lasted about 50 years longer, and the Khmer empire may have lasted even longer, though little is known about it. Moreover, the US is not acting very imperially at present. It has withdrawn its forces from occupation in Asia. It is more or less blase about India slipping under the wire of the Ukraine sanctions to buy Russian oil in vast quantities. It wants to use India as a cat’s paw against Chinese territoriality in the Asian seas, but seems to have no interest in helping India resolve its problem with China in the Himalayas. Presumably, many American voters want a champion who’s quicker on the draw, who will make the world a livelier place, just like in the movies.
Unlike Britain and Rome, America does not have a canonical creation myth. Instead, it has a multimillion dollar creation story—the Western, which promotes ideas of national competence and confidence as effectively as a fake Aeneas genealogy. Next year, part of its population will be in search of a John Wayne-like person who can incarnate those ideas. Here at home, too, the opening of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya in January, just before elections are likely to be announced, reflects a similar quest for a maryada purushottam. In the US, Donald Trump is caught up, Laocoön-like, in a web of litigation. But in India, the story of Ram Rajya could fly yet again. But what’s really interesting is that the world’s most important democracies don’t need Trojan blood to justify their existence.