Is America the Second Rome? - Part One

by Tom Kando

Abstract: This article does the following: (1) It shows that the continuities between modern-day Europe and America are in many ways similar to those between Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome. (2) using an organicist theoretical framework, it traces and compares the births, life spans, transformations, similarities, golden ages, and (possible) declines of America and Ancient Rome. (3) Based on generational theory, it asks whether future American history is likely to repeat Ancient Roman history, including Roman mistakes.

1. The Parallel: Modern-day America Continues and Amplifies Europe, as Ancient Rome Continued and Amplified Ancient Greece:
Ever since my teen years in Gymnasium, I have been struck by the similarities between the history of the modern Western world and Greco-Roman Antiquity. It has always appeared to me that, separated by two millennia, Western man has TWICE chartered a very similar course.


The first of these two broad forward jumps spans about one millennium and consists of what happened in the Mediterranean world from roughly the fifth century BC to the 55th century AD, notably in two places: Greece and Rome. The second episode - which in so many ways seems to be patterned after the first - is the history of Europe and America over the past six and a half centuries. 

The parallel, in a nutshell, is this: Europe has been the new Greece, America has been the new Rome, and the continuities between Europe and America are uncannily reminiscent of those that occurred between Greece and Rome two thousand years earlier.

Classical Greece and Athens’ Golden Age took place during the 5th and 4th centuries BC, from about 480 BC (the defeat of the Persians by the Greeks at the Battle of Salamis). Pericles’ death in 429 BC signaled the end of Athens’ Golden Age. However, Greek thought, science and culture continued to dominate for at least another century, well after the death of Alexander the Great in 324 BC, and into the Hellenistic period.

Europe’s cultural, scientific, intellectual, political and military hegemony in the modern era can be traced to the beginnings of the Renaissance in the middle of 14th century in Italy, for example to men such as Petrarch. This hegemony officially came to an end in 1945, when the world’s main centers of power shifted to the United States and the Soviet Union.

As the Greek world declined, it was gradually replaced by the hegemony of Ancient Rome. Similarly, Europe’s dominance was supplanted by that of America.

The origination of the vast majority of modern scientific, philosophical and cultural ideas occurred in Europe, as most of the scientific, philosophical and cultural ideas of antiquity occurred in Greece. What America has added to European knowledge is the same thing as what Rome added to Greek ideas, namely: enlargement and practical application. Rome made everything Greek “bigger and better,” and that is what America has done with everything European.

The Romans used to look down upon the Greeks as being little, effete men - calling them “Graeculi.”When Rome ruled the Western world, Greeks often served them as intellectual slaves - highly erudite, but considered weak and servile. In the 20th century, Americans have often derided
Europeans as being indolent intellectuals, people who lack manly martial and practical skills.

Europe, even at its apogee, remained fragmented, as did ancient Greece. That was the undoing of both civilizations. Rome on the other hand, drove to unify the world under a Pax Romana, as America has unified a vast territory and attempts to enforce a Pax Americana upon the planet. With half of the world’s military power, America has become a garrison state not unlike Ancient Rome was two thousand years ago.  (To be continued)  leave comment here
© Tom Kando 2015