Djelloul Marbrook

Instead of grinding axes for moneybags, here’s something useful a think tank might do. Rent a loft near Capitol Hill—just to keep in mind how full of it Congress is—and simulate imperial Rome circa 135 AD.

Judea is no more. It’s Palestine now. Its citizens have been dispersed, setting the stage for tragedies reverberating to this day, as great tragedies do.

Hadrian, the emperor (117-138), is entertaining intimations of mortality, and in this morbid state he makes a decision as momentous as Constantine’s decision many years later to Christianize the empire. Indeed Hadrian makes a decision that might have precluded Constantine’s. He calls his legions home. From Britain, the Danube, Parthia, Egypt, Africa, Spain and even Gaul. He returns them to the senate and retires to his villa in Tibur as emperor emeritus.

Now what?

Well, we’ve set up economic computer models, agricultural models, military models, religious and social models. It might be a good time to invite Rep. John Murtha, Sen. Harry Reid, John Edwards and Sen. Barack Obama to the loft for some serious blue-skying. No point inviting The Prez et al, because we know they think Hadrian is off his meds.

Maybe someone like George Soros could spare a few dimes for this project. Who knows, it might help society more than financing the ambitions of another bloviator?

It’s also time for a little required reading. So everybody involved in the project, which would cost much less than a bomber, is asked to read Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian as a primer, a way of appreciating the excruciating parallels between us and the Roman imperium.

We don’t have a clue to the consequences of Hadrian’s amazing act. But we didn’t have a clue about Iraq either. Just about the only historic comparable that comes readily to mind is the dissolution of the British Empire after World War II. The historic irony that comes most easily to mind is our postwar policy of condemning the British, French and Dutch
empires while launching our own economic imperium.

We use computers to make weapons, to advance medicine and science, so why shouldn’t we use them to boost us out of the political Pleistocene with such speculative researches? What would have happened if Hadrian had renounced the imperial dream? Could the Roman military-commercial complex have been redirected? Would chaos have ensued? Can answers be found?

What would happen now if we, the American people, not the betrayers we’re electing to the right and left, renounced dominionist dreams and returned to our republican roots? What would happen if the Congress took back the right to make war and fashion trade agreements?

Hadrian, the real Hadrian, died thinking he had done an astounding thing. He had given the world the philosopher-king Plato had envisioned in his Republic—the Stoic. Marcus Aurelius. And Marcus left us his Meditations, which has enjoyed a faithful readership down through the ages.

Could we not leave our children a decision at least half as brilliant as Hadrian’s?

—DM