What should be done in the Middle East? Ask the Romans

On a rare visit to London not long ago, I followed a short path I used to walk as a schoolboy: from the ruins of the old Roman wall near Tower Hill Tube station to the Merchant Navy memorial. The remains of Londinium contain the fine red “sandwich” bricks which reinforced so many Roman houses, temples and fortifications across the empire.

I studied classics for my first degree and roamed Hadrian’s Wall and the ancient villas of England long before I copied down the Latin inscriptions on the Via Appia outside Rome.

On my very first visit to the memorial, I noticed that the commemorative plaques to the 35,800 merchant seamen of Britain’s two world wars, whose bodies were lost to the sea, contained Arab Muslim names. Many came from Yemen (Arabia Felix to the Romans) – and lived in South Shields – and most worked on the great Atlantic convoys.

And it still comes as a shock to think that the last desperate words uttered by some of those trapped in the engine rooms after the first U-boat torpedoes struck their ships were uttered in Arabic and must have been directed to Allah.

When I returned to Beirut a few days later, I took coffee with friends, quite by chance, beside the ruins of the old Roman city; and I noticed, of course, those familiar red sandwich stones behind the columns of the Via Maximus of ancient Berytus. The building blocks of empire, like the straight stone-slabbed roads, stretched across thousands of miles.

And it was not lost on me that in the coffee shop around me, men and women were speaking the same language as the Yemenis who died in those doomed Atlantic ships. To the east of us lay the great ruins of the Baalbek temples and, further still across the Syrian desert, the wreckage of Roman Palmyra – or those ruins which Isis decided to spare for us amid their iconoclasm.

The Yemenis of history, mostly seamen and merchants of the early Islamic era, travelled even further than the Romans – to the Malay peninsula, which is why, driving south of Kuala Lumpur some years ago, I discovered that the road signs were written in Arabic.

The more you travel, the more you realise the obvious: globalisation is not new. The same goes for empires. They expire rather quicker than we think – and a lot faster than their citizens imagine. Rome’s empire expanded into the lands of the Angles and the Arabs. Local rebels – Boudicca in Britain, the Jews in Judea and Samaria – fought the Romans; Muslims only had to live alongside the eastern Greek-speaking and largely Christian Roman empire of Byzantium (there is a reference to a “Roman” defeat in the Quran).

In later years in the Middle East – itself a geographical location that would have meant little to both Romans and Arabs – you can observe the cross-fertilisation of cultures; in columns, religious buildings, even in Muslim stories of (for them) the Prophet Christ.

The Roman presence in what is now the Arab and Muslim world was as violent as that of later empires. And it left some chilling precedents, not only for the American empire today – and the putative rebirth of the Russian variety – but for the people who lived and still live in those lands. The Roman empire was brought down by vast inequalities of wealth and poverty, by corrupt and megalomaniac dictators and venal militias (rebel legions); not a bad parallel to the modern Middle East.

And rarely did Roman taxes match the military expenses of the legions. Sometimes Arab potentates would turn up in Rome – Syria provided a couple of emperors, including Philip the Arab – or, like the pseudo-monarchy of Palmyra, play enemy and then ally of the empire.

But we may also recall how Crassus, the richest Roman of them all – he made himself a trillionaire in sestertii from slum tenements in Rome – came to grief in the Middle East. Laurence Olivier played him as an all-conquering if self-doubting triumvir in the movie Spartacus, but the real Crassus smashed his way into the deserts northeast of Syria with all the shock-and-awe bravado of the legions and found himself defeated by Parthian cavalry, mostly from Persia (Iran, of course) but some of them ancestors of the present-day Iraqis.

Crassus was invited to his enemy’s tent to discuss surrender terms – where he was promptly decapitated, Isis-style, with a sword, his head stuffed with gold (as would befit such a wealthy victim) and sent back to Rome. Only the videotape of his execution was missing.

Just as the Americans must recover from every imperial defeat – Vietnam, was, I suppose, assuaged by the liberation of Kuwait in 1999 – Rome was enjoined to do the same. But just as George W Bush sent his legions back into Iraq to finish the war that his father had half-heartedly abandoned on the southern banks of the Euphrates, the Romans found that they could advance a frontier too far in the very same desert for rather similar reasons.

When Mark Antony – yes, he of Cleopatra fame – decided to retrieve the Roman standards of Crassus, he set off through ancient Armenia; only to find that the Armenian King Artavasdes betrayed him; the king’s forces abandoned Antony’s military wagon train to the Parthians, who plundered and burnt it.

Some things never change; the Roman and later Byzantine empires did in the Middle East what the Ottomans and the British did and what the Americans still try to achieve. They either beat their local enemies to near-extinction or made them allies. Anyone outside the Roman imperial frontier was a “barbarian” – just as those beyond the frontiers of America’s present-day satraps in the Middle East are “terrorists”.

Those who were accepted into the empire but who betrayed Rome’s trust were liquidated. An al-Qaeda-style assault on the Roman colonies in what is now southern Turkey was immediately revenged. Men, women and children were put to the sword or crucified.

But one policy – a noble, legal, generous but self-serving rule – meant that those born within most of the empire could acquire a limited form of Roman citizenship. The Jewish Saint Paul, we may remember, told his would-be Roman interrogator in Jerusalem that he was a citizen of Tarsus in the Roman province of Cilicia (Turkey), thus saving himself a flogging at the hands of legionnaires. This law not only encouraged loyalty to Rome but it automatically lowered the stigma of occupation.

If you were a citizen of an empire whose other citizens – and centurions – came from Britannia, Dacia, Germania, Africa or Cappadocia as well as Italy, then the idea of national rebellion might appear less attractive. Citizenship expressed a sense of “belonging”, however diminutive the rights it gave the holder. The British tried a very demeaning version of this when they allowed British overseas citizenship – but with “no right of abode”.

I had a weird conversation on this very subject with a CIA officer at a US barracks at Amara not long after the American invasion of Iraq. Amara was a suitable place for this discussion. General Townsend’s surrender of the city to the Muslim Turks of the Ottoman empire in April 1916 was one of the great British imperial defeats of the First World War. I was trying to persuade the CIA officer that the burgeoning resistance to US rule in Iraq might have been prevented if Washington followed the example of Rome.

I was not recommending crucifixion. I merely asked if the Americans might have offered citizenship to the Iraqis whom they cared so much about, whom they had “liberated” from Saddam and whose “democracy” they were so keen to advance.

Just think about what would have happened in Baghdad, I told the American, if every Iraqi had been offered a US passport in 2003 – no insurgency, no war, no US casualties, only a desire on the part of every human being in southwest Asia to be invaded by George W Bush.

But this was not an idea, we both knew, that would recommend itself to the US president. He didn’t even want to give asylum to the Iraqis persecuted for acting as Arabic translators for his soldiers. The western powers were interested in the land – more especially, the oil – rather than the people. And so it remains to this day.

Minor ethnic groups counted for little under the Romans. Pompey effortlessly defeated a people living around Diyarbakir, whose province was called “Corduene” – quite clearly, the Kurds – whose people built good fortifications and, according to one Roman writer, possessed “naphtha” on their land.

But the Romans had no Abrams tanks and Bradley armoured fighting vehicles to refuel, so the naphtha (oil) was of little use. Pompey’s successors abandoned Kurdistan as they retreated from the Parthians at Ctesiphon in Iraq. If Corduene was a buffer zone against the Persians, it was treated with the same indifference as the Americans now treat the Kurds who live in almost exactly the same location today.

I was wandering through the ruins of the forum of ancient Rome in 2006. It was the year my fine classics professor, Malolm Willcock, died. He was, as I wrote at the time, the gentlest and finest of academics, who taught the ghastly Fisk Latin and Roman history in the second year of Lancaster University’s existence in 1965.

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It was Willcock who emphasised the brutal end of Crassus – my professor was originally a Greek scholar, so the ironies would have appealed to him – but his second-in-command at Lancaster was a young lecturer called David Shotter, whom I telephoned on my mobile as I stood a few metres form the real and original Roman senate house.

At college, he used to compare the surging of the Roman legions to the German Wehrmacht in the Soviet Union, a parallel he now preferred to mute. But he talked of “a Romanised place in time”, the creation “of a people with manic energy” – what a great expression for the Romans! – and “how conquest can be ferocious when it needs to be”. Americans might believe in the work ethic, but “manic” could scarcely characterise the people of the American empire.

Or could it? “Carthago delenda est,” the Romans would cry. Carthage must be destroyed. And its fields were sewn with salt just outside modern Tumis. “Make America Great Again” certainly found its way past the forum of Washington and between the mock-classical columns of the White House and the US Senate.

On that brisk, late autumn day in Rome, I asked Shotter what the Romans would have made of Iraq, its American soldiers under siege, its knife-wielding sectarian gangs slaughtering each other. The Roman army and its commanders, Shotter said bleakly, “would have found the place a pretty unacceptable situation”. His meaning was clear. The Romans would have put down any insurrection, whatever the cost.

For while the Romans gave us their laws, their language, their poetry, orators, gossips and what we’ll have to call, under the republic, a form of “participatory decision-making” (my words, not Shotter’s), they were undoubtedly cruel, inhumane, savage and bestial in their behaviour. Human rights as an idea, an ideal, a notion – a cause worth dying for – was as non-existent for the Romans as trains or aircraft.

Human rights, if you wish, had not yet been invented. And so we are thrown back to our old question about the Germans of the Second World War: how could a people of culture, art, music and law have descended into barbarism even worse than the Roman version? Was this just because an Austrian corporal wanted “to make Germany great again”?

Of course, the empires of modern-day history often have as little interest in human rights as the Romans. The mass bombing of Mosul civilians or Raqqa civilians or Afghan civilians or Lebanese civilians or Aleppo civilians or Gaza civilians leaves its victims chopped up and eviscerated every bit as much as the women and children of Rome’s enemies.

The difference is that we claim we do believe in human rights, that our enemies are the barbarians/terrorists who care nothing for their civilians, while we – who have and use the technology to destroy them – take unprecedented, unimaginable and puritan care to avoid or at least limit the number of innocents torn to shreds and gristle by our bombs.

There is, however, one other difference – which might soon cease to be a difference at all. Samuel Dill, the great Victorian and post-Victorian classicist whose social history of the early Roman empire managed to scorn the lusts of the ancients without ever explaining what they were – he was the son of an Irish Presbyterian minister and thus left us to look up Suetonius for the details – wrote very powerfully of Roman society.

It was difficult for us now to understand, Dill explained, “this lust of cruelty among a people otherwise highly civilised, a passion which was felt not merely by the base rabble, but even by the cultivated and human”. And then, in a remarkable sentence – oh, bring back the classicists of old – Dill adds: “From father to son, for nearly seven centuries, the Roman character became more and more indurated under the influence of licensed cruelty.”

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The word “indurate” was still in use in the mid-20th century – unsurprisingly, after the Second World War – but it has dropped out of fashion. We may have to bring it back. Because I suspect that present-day empires are reacquiring this doubtful quality. Callousness, harshness of mind and action, the acceptability of cruelty – think Guantanamo or any Middle East prison – lie comfortably now alongside infinite expressions of “security” and “stability”.

We have found a dictionary of acceptance words: “collateral damage”, for example. But in its more insensate form, this “induration” surely expresses the mind of Isis, a machine-like cruelty which needs a cult or a religion to drive it, but which it then lives off – and lives by, since its enemies (us) are petrified by its malevolence. Ironically, we now react to Isis as the Romans once feared the Goths, Ostrogoths and Visigoths. If we don’t defeat terrorists in the Middle East, we used to say, they’ll be here, in the streets of New York and London. But they did come. Just as the Goths, Ostrogoths and Visigoths arrived in Rome.

In fact, the Romans recovered. And an awful lot of Goths became good citizens of Rome (for a while) but there were others crashing through the frontiers; and the legions began their wearying retreat across Europe, Asia and the Balkans. Goodbye Britannia. Goodbye Egyptus and Judea and Samaria. Goodbye Gaul. When Scullard wrote his monumental “From the Gracchi to Nero” in the 1930s, he felt that Caesar Augustus was an earlier version of Mussolini.

But a Mussolini who ruled over a world of what we might now call “diversity”. The Roman armies defending Berytus, for example, came from Gaul (France) and Macedonia. Even Gladiator – Russell Crowe’s fictional Roman general Maximus Decimus Meridius, it might be noted, was a Spaniard – regarded the empire as essentially fascistic.

Christianity – and we’ll ignore the Crusades here – changed all that, at least in theory. The eastern Roman world already spoke Greek rather than Latin – Berytus housed the greatest Greek-speaking law school of its time as well as the headquarters of the Roman Imperial East Mediterranean fleet. And you might find some faint parallels between the slow archaic religious division which broke Catholic Rome from Orthodox Byzantium, and the current drift of alienation between present-day, frightened Europe and the decaying empire of Trump’s America.

Today, we have the Saudis trying to persuade us that the Iranian empire (the Persian-Parthians of Roman history) is about to embrace the Arab world while the American empire, withdrawing from northern Syria in most un-legion like haste, still tries to project power by bombarding Arab cities and bases from the air. Maybe the old religious differences project a different vision. America and Europe may represent Catholic Rome while Moscow represents the breakaway Orthodox empire of Byzantium.

Israel’s legions may be local, but they are armed by Rome. The Arab world lingers on the frontier, armed too by Rome but distrusted by the imperial power. Their job is to keep the borders safe. If Islamists demand the end of Israel – Carthage, in this grim scenario – then all the little states must pay fealty to one or other empire. Or must Syria play the role of Carthage? Or Lebanon?

Like Gibbon, we are probably more fascinated by the fall of empires than their rise. Many Romans apparently suspected things were going seriously wrong when food supplies were disrupted from the Middle East – and then the imperial postal system began to falter. James Baker’s Iraq Study Group of 2006 reeked of imperial despair, the words “collapse” and “catastrophe” were embedded in the text of the former secretary of state’s lament for US policy in the Middle East.

Sentences of impotence doom empires. “The ability of the United States to influence events within Iraq is diminishing,” Baker lamented. There was a risk of a “slide towards chaos [that] could trigger the collapse of Iraq’s government and a humanitarian catastrophe”.

This was probably the key turning point in US imperial power in the Middle East, although it took another eight years before Isis walked into Mosul and destroyed much of the Iraqi army. There was another clue of American loss in the Baker report, although its predictions were woeful.

“Given the ability of Iran and Syria to influence events and their interest in avoiding chaos in Iraq, the United States should try to engage [sic] them constructively.” Well, Obama was to try – and overall, the Iranians may indeed be influencing events. But the scourging of Syria could never have been predicted.

Yet it would be absurd to suggest that US power could have controlled the Middle East any more than the Roman army could have imposed order. The British were constantly fighting the Mahdi or the Egyptians, the Turks and then the Iraqi resistance (in 1920) and then the Arabs and Jews of Palestine.

The people of the region resisted foreign rule – or became contaminated by it – both before and after the Prophet Muhammad. The Muslims eventually – in the 15th century – ended the rule of Byzantium. The Roman walls came tumbling down, just as the land of those Yemeni seamen who died in the Atlantic was consumed by fire six centuries later, its people immolated by weapons from the American empire.

Most empires leave behind them some small if distorted image of their presence. Fourteenth century Constantinople for the Romans – or Romania if you chance your arm – and the French overseas territories for Paris; Gibraltar, the Falklands, until recently Hong Kong – and Northern Ireland? – for the British. And Israel for the Americans, indeed for the west?

But now Israel is building its own colonies in the West Bank and creating a mono-ethnic society inside its international recognised boundaries – something the Romans would also have considered “a pretty unacceptable situation”, at least from the point of viability. The Israeli wall, of course, the Romans would have heartily approved of. Walls, roads and fortresses was second only to Latin as the language of their imperial power. Why, if only Hadrian had steel and prestressed concrete, the province of Britannia might have lasted longer – and would have remained part of Roman Europe for many more years.