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By William Underhill
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Good news for Euro-skeptics: a spiritual forefather has been uncovered--an ax-wielding barbarian from the boondocks of first-century Germany, no less. Almost 2,000 years ago the tribal chieftain Arminius thrashed three Roman legions that had strayed into his forests--stopping the civilizing force of the Roman Empire from spreading east of the Rhine and changing the course of history forever. Arminius knew all about the delights of imperial civilization. But he wanted no part of it. In the words of Boris Johnson, the British M.P. and journalist: "He stands for the incorrigible desire of people to govern themselves."
As Johnson points out, however, the sovereignty-loving Arminius was no trendsetter. Plenty of his fellow barbarians were eager to ditch their trousers and slip on togas. And that leads directly to the question that Johnson, a Euro-skeptic himself, sets out to tackle in his new book, "The Dream of Rome" (200 pages. HarperCollins) : how did the Romans manage to bring centuries of stability to so much of Europe while the European Union remains an unloved and divided mess?
It's a quintessentially provocative subject for Johnson, who has built his career on a mix of talent and idiosyncrasy. In his six years as editor of The Spectator, which ended in 2005, he took circulation of the must-read journal of the British right to new heights. Television quiz-show appearances--and a mop of unruly strawberry blond hair--have won him the kind of national recognition that other middle-aged Tory M.P.s can only envy. His previous works include "Seventy Two Virgins," a satirical novel that tells of an adulterous M.P. and Islamic terrorism. A fling with a fellow columnist once cost him a post in the Tory leadership, although he is now back as the party's education spokesman.
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To Johnson, the idea of Rome is lodged in European folk memory. Deep down, he argues, the continent yearns to re-create an Augustan Age, when 80 million people from Syria to Scotland enjoyed the benefits of Pax Romana. From Charlemagne to Mussolini, Europeans have borrowed the symbols of Rome; when the European Union's now dumped constitution was signed in Rome in 2004, the Italian government erected a marble plaque carved with a Latin inscription that ends with an aspiration to a single European government.
That's hardly likely, according to Johnson. As his engaging book makes clear, the Romans had a genius for assimilation that latter-day Europeans can't match. Theirs was an empire that welcomed any outsiders into citizenship so long as they were ready to conform to Roman ways. Advancement was open to all. Through canny imperial propaganda Rome established itself as a brand. And its subject peoples were eager to buy into the idea of warm baths, public order and civic virtues.
By contrast, the EU has struggled to bring Europeans together. The bloc has no common language, no common literature--every self-respecting Roman with any education would have known the Aeneid--and many of its citizens recoil at the notion of closer union with their neighbors. In short, the EU has no great idea to sell of what it means to be European.
It's a thesis that Johnson spins out easily. As a journalist, he knows very well how to lighten his argument with striking detail. One sure sign of Rome's success in spreading its unifying culture was the empirewide taste for a sauce, garum, described by Johnson as a "foul-smelling fish mulch" or a form of "Euro-ketchup." He writes with a jaunty schoolboy tone: a 19th-century statue of Arminius shows a figure who "would have looked pretty good in the Village People," and Antony and Cleopatra do some "last-minute Burton-Taylor smooching." But this isn't frivolity. Beneath his colloquial touch lies real scholarship and acute commentary. After all, Johnson is a classicist who won scholarships to Eton and Oxford. How many other M.P.s could quote from the works of the fifth-century pagan poet Rutilius Namatianus?
The trouble is that John-son allows his admiration for Rome to confuse his argument. What's unclear is how much--if anything--he'd like to see today's EU learn from the Romans. Sure there's plenty for a good conservative to respect in the empire's light-handed government and modest taxes. But would he really want to see the imposition, even by consent, of a common culture? Barbarian or not, Arminius had a point.
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