What is the difference between rome and america

But Rome has always been there, the great example of a successful republic and empire, with a great army, great administration and great roads. Greece was just an add-on, later. The exhibit shows one dark parallel between Rome and the U. Did early America need Rome to justify slavery? Not every legacy of ancient Rome has been admirable. The South in the decades before the Civil War was like ancient Rome a slave society.

In both places, roughly 30 percent of the population was enslaved. Americans frequently looked to ancient Roman slavery to understand their own slave society. Some Americans in favor of slaveholding argued that slavery freed masters to do the important work of governing, just as in ancient Rome. By contrast, in the decades before the American Civil War a growing number of opponents of slavery pointed to the great slave rebellions of ancient Rome to argue that African Americans should rise up against slavery.

The museum exhibit has many pieces from 18th- and 19th-century America. But what about now? Has Rome's hold on us waned? One of the strange things about the long history of ancient Rome and Greece in America is that they've both disappeared almost entirely in the 20th and 21st century.

They're like lost civilizations to us now, and it's hard to recall that they were at the center of Americans' lives for over years. But Rome is still in many places in American culture, if you know how to look for it —I call this putting on your classical goggles.

Our idea of separation of powers is to some degree based on ancient Roman ideals of government. Our idea that you should serve your country — as JFK put it, "Ask not what your country can do for you … " — this is really an ancient Roman ideal of civic virtue, of thinking of the republic before you think of yourself.

And on a different note, there's the whole appeal of Rome as the home of the orgy and the gladiator. Think of Las Vegas and football: Rome definitely lives on!

Cynthia Haven, Stanford News Service: , cynthia. A publication of Stanford's Office of University Communications. But the Roman Republic is the more relevant model. Old republics like Rome differ from young ones like Weimar Germany because their citizens have learned to value the freedom, political norms, and constitutional checks that defend against a rapid descent into autocracy. Romans were taught to expect annual elections, respect the choices voters made, and accept that elected officials would represent the interests of all Romans.

Perhaps most importantly, they believed politics to be a peaceful process that required representatives to compromise with each and build broad consensuses around difficult policies.

The most significant danger old republics like ours face is not the sudden assault of an aspiring autocrat but the slow erosion of their cultural and institutional defenses.

In Rome, this degeneration began gradually and almost imperceptibly in the middle of the second century BC. As in the US now, mid-second century Rome confronted the emergence of a huge gap between its wealthiest citizens and everyone else.

For more than a generation, Roman politicians tried to address the resentments that this growing inequality had created by proposing voting reforms and crafting schemes to distribute public resources to poor Romans. But most of their proposals were blocked. As with similar laws proposed in the late s, Tiberius failed to build the necessary consensus to pass his proposal. Undeterred, Tiberius mobilized crowds of threatening supporters and successfully removed a magistrate from office who had threatened to veto the law—the first time in Roman history such a thing had happened.

Tiberius then paid for the reform with funds traditionally controlled by his opponents in the senate. This broke another long-standing Roman political norm. This was the first act of political violence in Rome in more than years. Calm soon returned to Rome, but the lessons of BC could not be unlearned.

Norm breaking, violence, and even assassination had proven useful political tactics. Edward Watts, a historian at the University of California San Diego, published a book titled Mortal Republic that carefully lays out what went wrong in ancient Rome — and how the lessons of its decline might help save fledgling republics like the United States today.

I spoke to Watts about those lessons and why he thinks the American republic, along with several others, is in danger of going the way of ancient Rome. When I started teaching Roman history, the main questions from students were always about comparing the end of the Roman empire with the state of the American empire, and this was usually tied to the Iraq War.

In the past 10 years, those sorts of questions have died down. Now students are interested in Rome as a republic, and whether the American republic is collapsing in the same way. They see lots of parallels there, especially in how the two systems are structured. First, we have to remember that the US is a representative democracy.

This is not a direct democracy, and Rome was not a direct democracy either. But the representatives are making the choices — and people have noticed that that works fine until those representatives either stop making principled decisions or become paralyzed by the vicissitudes of popular opinion.

Both of those things started to happen when Rome began to decline, and both of those things are happening in the US right now. What could they have done differently, and when could they have done it? For years, this system worked quite well in Rome, but for the past century or so of its existence, these tools of deliberation were used not to facilitate compromise but to obstruct and punish political enemies and basically prevent anything from happening.

That destroyed the goodwill within the system and really poisoned it in the minds of the voters. Basically, he believed that democracies fall into tyranny when too much freedom leads to disorder and citizens choose the stability of autocracy over the chaos of democracy.

The point at which Romans were willing to make that trade occurred after almost years of political dysfunction, but it also occurred after a generation of really brutal civil war. And the process that started that was one of economic inequality and the inability and unwillingness of the people vested in the upper, successful parts of the Roman state to address that economic inequality.

The inequality problem is maybe the most striking for me. What you saw in Rome, and what you see quite clearly today, is the wealthy undermining the very system that made them wealthy, and a total failure to see how ruinous that is in the long term. And what ends up happening is the people who win from this economic revolution try to preserve their gains through just about any means they can, and that includes gross political obstructionism, the rigging of elections, and a total unwillingness to compromise.

Because the story of Rome shows that once you reach that breaking point, that point of no return, you cannot unwind the clock. What short-circuited in their process? There are signs that the system was trying to respond to this new economic reality between and BC. You spend a lot of time mapping the decline of norms and political customs in Rome. Was this the result of Roman politicians elevating their own self-interest over the good of the republic, or was it something deeper happening in the culture?