Lawrence W. Read. Are We Rome? Atlanta: Foundation for Economic Education, [2013]. Print.
We recommend this tract to any American. Those from other Western countries may learn from it, too. It is only ten pages, so it is not time-consuming.
The history of ancient Rome covers roughly a millennium, 500 years as a republic and 500 as an autocracy. This booklet outlines how the republic was transformed as citizens began to look to government rather than their own industry for livelihood.
The first Emperor Augustus tried to turn the economic tide back but realized it was fruitless. His contemporary biographer stated that he wanted to abolish grain distribution because people “had ceased to till the fields,” but he realized that some successor would just bring it back. (7) Later on, the government would distribute bread, so the people did not even have to grind their grain and bake their own bread.
Shortly before A.D. 300 the Emperor Aurelian declared welfare payments an hereditary right. At the same time the denarius was worth about five percent of what it had been worth during the republic. When Rome fell in 476, there was little free enterprise left.
The repeated lesson: No people who have lost their character have kept their liberties.
The pamphlet, the publisher calls it a monograph, is available at low cost, free online and to students. Nearly twenty years ago, the publisher published a more detailed analysis of the fall of Rome, but this is a good introduction. Also popular historian Cullen Murphy has a book by the same title.
The tract is put out by an organization focused on economics, but the question of character is not limited to personal hard work and government indebtedness. The first emperor in all fairness did attempt to maintain traditional morality and respect for personal honor. However, we know that by the time of Nero those concepts had been largely supplanted.
Though Gibbon was not Christian, his monumental The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire notes that Christianity ultimately succeeded in the empire because of the miracles its adherents performed and because its selfless morality became more appealing to the common man than the self-indulgent exploitation by the upper classes. The story has been told before, but this might remind us of what happened.
The same week I received this tract, I received a totally unrelated mailing (which I have already misplaced and cannot give the attribution) quoted Cicero, a contemporary of Julius Caesar who was the great uncle of Augustus:
Do not blame Caesar. Blame the people of Rome who have so enthusiastically acclaimed and adored him and rejoiced in their loss of freedom and danced in his path and gave him triumphal processions. Blame the people who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of the “new, wonderful, good society” which shall now be Rome, interpreted to mean “more money, more ease, more security, more living fatly at the expense of the industrious.”