The Roman code of virtus included discipline, obligation and duty, all grounded in the minds of our Founding Fathers, but such virtus have become touchstones only of nostalgia in modern Washington, as they did in ancient Rome. Washington, as Rome, has become swollen with bureaucracy and titled powers-that-wannabe. Only 29 persons in the Kennedy administration held the title of "assistant," "deputy assistant" or "special assistant" to the president; when Bill Clinton left office, 141 pretenders claimed these titles. The United States, like Rome, began with citizen-soldiers drawn from all ranks of Roman society, and its military legions were a unifying force for nationhood.
Now we separate the cultures between the military and the professional class, as Rome eventually did. The universal military draft was once the equalizer that an all-volunteer army can never be. Of 750 graduates of Princeton in 1956, at least 450 took on the nation's colors. Only 8 of 1,100 graduates in 2004 would wear the uniform. Like that of Rome, our military struggles to find recruits.
Analogies often bite more with wit than insight, and it's amusing -- and no doubt instructive -- to compare the garbage draining from Washington via the Internet into the blogosphere to the engineering wonder that was the Roman sewerage system. Like Rome, Washington doesn't create many of the things a consumer-citizen actually needs. In Washington we manufacture rhetoric, and that requires huge entourages of administration critics and flatterers eager to make a name for themselves.
There aren't nearly as many books about the comparisons between the Roman Empire and the United States as there should be, although hundreds of authors have written about how Rome endured for 12 centuries. We're still a work in progress in our third. "Americans would glare in disbelief at Rome's self-satisfaction," writes Cullen Murphy. "Striving to make life 'better than this' for ourselves and for others, for people living now and for those to come, is part of our social compact." Here's a hope that it will always be so. Happy Fourth of July.