By Giuseppe De Ruvo
and Discord in a torn robe strides joyously
– Virgil, Aeneid, VIII, v. 702
This is our guiding thesis: the severity of the crisis of what remains of the American empire is indirectly proportional to its Romanitas. A comparison with 250 years ago would be merciless. But it is not even necessary to make such a comparison. It suffices to go back to 2020, when Limes – in an issue dedicated to “The Power of Myth” – listed six “kinships” between Ancient Rome and Washington. As we shall see, what seemed to be still standing at the time is now, at best, in pieces. Let us proceed in order and have a look at each of these “kinships”.
The first kinship, which was rightly defined in that issue of Limes as fundamental: ‘Ancient Rome and America can be viewed as world leaders in the art of assimilation. Never ethnic entities, they revolve around a relatively homogeneous original stock, not by blood but by sentiment’. This principle has been completely abandoned. Washington has renounced assimilation from two points of view. First: the nation, leaving aside the empire for now, is – for some parts of the MAGA movement that aims to make it great again – White and Christian, and therefore ethnically defined. The shift has been from way of life to identity – a Copernican revolution. An American is no longer someone who acts American, but someone who is American according to an arbitrary standard. The others – Mexicans, Chinese, and so on and so forth – cannot be assimilated. Worse: they are invaders, internal enemies.
Secondly, the original stock is not even remotely homogeneous. Compared to the American version, the global free-for-all is a pleasant disagreement between English gentlemen, punctuated by polite ‘if I may…’ and ‘I beg your pardon, sir’. In the city on the hill, it’s the law of the jungle. It is extremely rare to find two Americans who agree on what America is. It is even more difficult to find one who does not believe that those who think differently from him deserve the worst. The result: not only does the US fail to assimilate foreigners, but it is also incapable of assimilating itself because it does not know who and what it is. Civis americanus sum? The American identity crisis is precisely the impossibility of answering this question.
The second kinship: ‘Assimilation occurs by including different peoples and cultures in institutions fuelled by a mission that in both cases is postulated as ecumenical.’ For assimilation, see above. On institutions: they are no longer animated by any mission, let alone an ecumenical one. For those working for the government, primum vivere has kicked in, manifested in avoiding the axe of DOGE and, above all, of Russel Vought, architect of regime change. Is it universalism? Quite the opposite. We do not know how this hegemonic transition will end, but let it be noted that Donald J. Trump – after the globalist delusions of the late 1990s and the global War on Terror that followed the attack on the Twin Towers – praised the efficiency of the Arab way of life before the world. Perhaps tomorrow he will also recognise the greatness of the Iranian and Chinese ways of life. End of the end of history. Can you imagine Augustus celebrating the modus vivendi of the Germanics after Teutoburg? Olly, Olly, Oxen Free.
The third kinship: ‘This mission claims to spread freedom, justice and peace. These are fungible principles, open to interpretation, but highly appealing. They are indigestible to the autocracies of the East, both past and present.’ Five years later: America is no longer even trying. Trump wants the Nobel Peace Prize at all costs and boasts of having ended eight wars. Obviously, this is not true, and in the meantime, he is preparing for other interventions. A farce that risks overturning Marx, and turning into tragedy. After all, as Sumantra Maitra, an early Trump supporter still waiting for his green card, has pointed out, also in Limes: ‘People voted for Trump and got a second George W. Bush’. It is better to remain silent on freedom and justice, assuming, but not conceding, that they – especially the latter – exist in this world.
The fourth kinship: ‘Universality of law, albeit sensitive to customs: Roman law adapted to different climates and cultural inclinations, American law is superordinate to all other positive laws. Dura lex sed mea’. Here the matter becomes complicated and is worth specifying. The universality of Roman law was based on (iuris)prudentia, or the ability to discern its fields and possibilities of use on a contextual basis, thanks to a human-wisdom mediation that could not be reduced to mere functionalism. It was a device, as Aldo Schiavone notes, based on hegemony and the capacity for assimilation, primae conditiones of every pax.
The American case is slightly different. First of all, it would be wrong to think that Pax Americana was a never-never land for international law. Quite the opposite: this held true when international law was consistent with US interests. These interests, although perhaps not shared by all, could not be challenged because no one had the power to do so. It was more domination than hegemony. The result: with both hegemonic power and the capacity for domination weakened, ius americanum, disguised as international law, is being challenged everywhere. To the point that concepts such as free trade or free navigation – enshrined in cumbersome structures such as the WTO or various UN delusions – are openly denied by the US on the basis of the equally vague legal notion of national security. There’s nothing different from the past in this. Except that today Washington has stopped portraying its security interests as consistent with the good of humanity. Not for the sake of truth, but because it can no longer justify such an unsustainable and fundamentally flawed narrative, which presupposed the possibility of bending 8 billion souls to an impersonal nomos that was the same for everyone. It’s the ideology of governance. Iuris imprudentia.
Fifth kinship: ‘Inclusion, not persecution of the defeated’. Compared to five years ago, there is not enough data to make a judgment, because the US has not won any wars – however, we would point out that two relatively important wars have broken out and are still ongoing. In any case, we can only wait and see, hoping that we will not have to give an answer. However, we must ask ourselves a question: is it possible to include the vanquished if America is unable to end the wars it starts, something that Ancient Rome used to do? We leave this difficult judgment to posterity, limiting ourselves to pointing out that – in the event of a resounding American victory in a war with China – this would mean including precisely those Chinese whom part of the MAGA universe is currently trying to send back to their homeland by force. Even though they are more useful to America than many Americans.
Sixth and last kinship: ‘The golden rule dictates that empires must draw a material and figurative boundary to assert themselves’. After the collapse of the USSR, this kinship has probably been the weakest. The Americans rejected the boundary precisely because defining it would have revealed their imperial nature, which they have always sought to conceal, first and foremost from themselves. And then it was not necessary, as the world would become American. Today, paradoxically, the opposite is true: in the name of the Republic (“Make America Great Again”), the US has set itself a boundary, certifying that it is an empire, but renouncing the conversion of the planet to the American way of life. Perhaps there is a hint of Romanism in this choice. However, it is passive and undoubtedly unconscious, given that it is the world that is forcing the US to downsize following the obvious failure of the global America project. The result is that it is others who are limiting America, not America itself. Ecce mundus. Ancient Rome, by setting its own boundaries, generated form and order. Washington, schizophrenic and resistant to the concept of limes, produces – in a paradoxical attempt to limit itself so as not to suffocate – an exponential increase in entropy. Everyone is free. Empire of chaos.
Having concluded this survey, the picture appears anything but rosy. Of the six “kinships”, or similarities, only one (the fifth) remains intact, but only and exclusively because the US, in turmoil, has not (yet) had the opportunity to tear it apart. Far from being the daughter of Rome. The Romanitas scale registers a very high fever: Trump’s USA is not only post-Western, but post-Roman. Perhaps anti-Roman, and therefore anti-Western. This America – however much it professes to be in love with the Eternal City – is not even a distant relative. So we confirm our hypothesis: hegemonic transition, or the transition from American empire to x, means first and foremost de-Romanisation. Today of America; tomorrow, perhaps, of the world. There will be no Fifth Rome, so if we want to save what can be saved, we need to start again from the First. Certainly no longer capable of dominating the planet, but perhaps still capable of offering direction to this world gone crazy. Provided we love it without distorting it, trying to penetrate the mysterium of its power. And then offer it to the world. Maybe it won’t do any good, but we will have done our duty.
Rome teaches the world that being an empire is an art, not a science. It is the craft of hegemony, irreducible to mechanical superiority. It is the legacy of the patres. Indeed, of the pater par excellence, Anchises, who, before telling Aeneas that the Romans are destined to rule the nations, reminds him of a fundamental issue. Rome will have to regere populos, but this does not imply being supreme in everything. On the contrary, Anchises prophesises, ‘some will hammer out more softly breathing bronzes (indeed I believe), they will produce living expressions from marble, they will plead causes better, and will write down by means of a compass the motions of the sky and will tell of the rising stars’.
For those who believe that being children of Rome means absolute supremacy, these verses are a blow to the heart. Anchises clearly states that other peoples could be more technologically advanced (‘some will hammer out’) and better artistically (‘they will produce living expressions from marble’), philosophically (‘they will plead causes better’) and scientifically (‘they will write down by means of a compass the motions of the sky’). Yet, despite all this, Rome remains the teacher of nations because it masters the art of regere populos. And it must remember this – “memento!” – not only because renouncing this perspective would mean the end of the myth, but also – and above all – so that the people of Rome do not think that technical and scientific development and superiority are sufficient to exercise imperium. It takes a specific ars, which is unique to Rome and which, not surprisingly, Virgil expresses with the dative of possession (‘erunt tibi artes’). Others will have – or could have – science, philosophy and technology. But you, Rome, will have the ability to govern and to govern them: that is, to regere populos and harmonise the different artes in a system of hegemony that is truly sine fine.
This is a decisive lesson. Rome did not become a military, technological or scientific superpower. It had to learn the art of government, an irreplaceable and deeply human practice, the main objective of which is not to tackle this or that problem, but to learn to observe the paths and deviations of states. This can only be achieved successfully if the various artes are systematised by that particular form of knowledge that Cicero defines as ‘civilis prudentia’, which is expressed primarily in a particular attitude towards reality. This must be respected, observed in its flow and never violated. As when playing a lyre, the strings must be touched lightly and gently, not violently and impetuously. The craft of power requires reflection. Not to lose oneself in the barbarism of intellectualism – who is more pragmatic than the Romans? – but to clearly distinguish between fas and nefas. In a world still victim to a certain cheap postmodernism – according to which whoever controls the narrative controls the world – and about to be filled with artificial intelligence in positions of command, civilis prudentia forces us to face reality, to observe the deviations of states and to remember that only in this way is it possible to regere populos.
Forget about AI, algorithms, Palantir and DeepSeek. Rome invented the human factor. Without this framework, other dimensions of power turn into inhuman factors of self-destruction. The apocalypse, which is talked about too much, is always a bit like suicide. Especially when this stance stems not only from an inability to govern the instruments due to a lack of civilis prudentia, but also from a clear feeling of being unable to govern oneself. There is, in fact, one element that unites the empires of our day, and which is perhaps the root cause of the geopolitical “everyone-against-everyone” situation we are experiencing. No one is at peace with themselves.
Rome was not always at peace with itself, of course. However, it never allowed internal discord to reach the point of destroying the state. What is more, Rome managed to survive at least three regime changes. It actively promoted them and emerged stronger as a result. Today, this would be unthinkable. In the Third Rome, if the regime collapsed, the state would also collapse. In America, this is already happening, in a spiral of self-destruction and regime change managed by amateurs, unfortunately compared by JD Vance to Rome’s late Republican phase. With the small detail that, at that time, Augustus managed to channel the chaos and transform it into power, co-opting rather than purging the senatorial aristocracy. In Washington today, the opposite is being practised and theorised. Purging the apparatus and co-opting people with no experience. More Catiline than Octavian. Ruin.
Rome is something else entirely. It is a model of creative destruction. For fifteen hundred years, the Roman people managed to evolve and reform their institutions when reality demanded it, always finding themselves exercising greater power than before. A masterpiece of negentropy, an exceptional exercise in civilis prudentia.
Before the Antichrist and the Apocalypse, Rome was katechon of itself. It managed to change its skin to keep its vital organs intact, absorbing chaos – not rejecting it – and organising its power to a higher degree of auctoritas. A threefold example that empires in turmoil should meditate on.
First. Rome was born out of fratricide, an immoral and unfounded act par excellence and an original sin that, anywhere else in the world, would have ushered in tragedy. Not in Rome, where Romulus’ violence in killing Remus was, almost miraculously, immediately reabsorbed into order. The murderer did not become a Cain, but a rex. Not a tyrant but a king. That is, the one who, having committed the supreme crime by breaking the limes, took upon himself the sacred task of enforcing that boundary. Reigning, in fact, does not simply mean exercising power, but – as Benveniste reminds us in his Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society – ‘regere regions’. Taking a virgin territory and giving it form. Reabsorbing the chaos of violence into a rational organisation of space. Rome transforms fratricide, the archetype of civil war, into an ordering principle that feeds on that violence. Rhōmē (Greek for force) in purity.
Second. Even the monarchy comes to an end. Tarquinius Superbus, rex impius, is violently sent into exile. His love for Lucretia is symptomatic of an inability to maintain order. Mores are lacking, therefore there can be no libertas. The last king of Rome can no longer regere regiones because he is incapable of regere himself. Normally, civil war should follow. Or, at least, a succession. Not in Rome. Chaos – and violence – are immediately reorganised into an order, that of the res publica, which gives birth to the populus. The people is not unified not by the figure of the king, but by the law and a sense of common belonging. In Rome, the people are not the sum of individuals, but ‘a multitude bound together by a common agreement (cum-sensus, feeling together) of law (ius)’. This, far from being mere law, is in fact an order of meaning, by virtue of which it is clear – implicitly – what can be done and what cannot. This is the remedy for Tarquinius’ immorality and arrogance. Cum-sensus, implicit, on what is fas and what is nefas, expressions that refer to a general principle, against which it is believed one cannot go without being reproached. Translated: no state can survive without a body of implicit rules capable of guiding communal coexistence. The res publica, much like the constitution, is precisely the totality of these rules, their intertwining. It is far more than a political model. Ver-fassung. It is the collective movement of inscribing oneself in a recognised order of meaning.
This is precisely what is lacking in the West, and particularly in America. In our part of the world, everything must be regulated because there is no shared sense of community. So everyone creates their own rules in their own image and likeness. It is the end of the res publica. There are only individuals, private citizens, who arrogate to themselves the right to define what is fas and what is nefas. This applies to Wokists and traditionalists alike. Despite their opposing views, both aim to achieve a res privata. Here, in response to this dissolution of society, the Roman Republic offers a counter-model, where clarity of mores does not imply conservatism. Everything can be contested. Revolutions can also be made. Provided they are a public and not a private matter. It would be called politics. For the Romans, it was an art. For us, it is a whim.
Third and last. The res publica also collapses. This time because of civil wars. But it is precisely at this point, in the state of emergency of stasis, that Rome gives the world its greatest lesson. Imagine you are on the eve of the Battle of Actium. The Civil War cannot fail to appear to you as the end of the world, the triumph of chaos and the explosion of the republic. The rhōmē reigns supreme and breaks through every ordo. There are two possibilities for the victor: either to try, in every way, to repress force with force or to accept becoming its slave. In either case, it would have been finis Urbis. Whoever took command would have had to play catch-and-release with potential unrest, chasing reality and giving up on governing it.
Octavian’s greatness lies in having managed to escape this choice. Recognising the omnipresence of the rhōmē, Augustus resisted the temptation to repress it and did the opposite. He absorbed it. He exercised civilis prudentia, grasped the crux of the chaos, verified the aspirations of the various powers and, in the end, channelled the violence into the form of an empire, appropriately disguised as a republic. This is the lectio perennis of Octavian Augustus. When chaos becomes the norm, the real suicide is to try to stop it from unfolding. You have to go along with it, learn to navigate the stormy waves. Above all, do not ignore it by superimposing on it irenic or artificial images of an order that simply does not exist. The categorical imperative, as august as it is evangelical, states: ‘Do not resist evil’ (Matthew 5:39). Who knows if Peter Thiel, now a parody of himself, keeps this principle in mind in his theological-political delusions. We fear not.
In short, if you are Rome – or want to be Rome – you cannot detach yourself from rhōmē. You must make it your own. And then increase it. Unlike the rex, the Augustus does not rule (regere). Rather, he increases (augere) power through imperium, that is, through the mechanism capable of governing violence and directing it towards the enemy. But only when necessary. A perfect balance between form and force, expressed on a geopolitical level by the determination of the limes of Elba and on an artistic level by the works of the Saeculum Augustum. Think of the Aeneid, where in many places the lyricism of the verses is interrupted by a fulmen in clausula cruento. Sanguine. Sealing the ability of poetic form to internalise what is usually removed. This is the Pax Romana, rightly known as the century of Augustus, or rather, of the one who increases. A form full of strength.
This, then, is the teaching of Rome. Being Roman is a form of practice, by virtue of which one recognises that one does not act in a vacuum, but within a field of forces that must be recognised, absorbed and, if possible, channelled. It is the humility to admit that there is meaning in the world with which we must confront ourselves and find a compromise, even if we do not like it. This is a crucial lesson not only for today’s empires, but also for those states and mini-states that make Manichaeism their sole banner. They are convinced, especially in Brussels and Strasbourg, that dividing good and bad, peace and war, merciful and cruel is a useful exercise. The legacy of Augustus teaches us not only that it is not, but also that if we want to survive in revolutionary times, we must abandon absolutes and begin to live with contradictions.
Only in this way is it possible to regere populos. Peace and violence, order and chaos, clemency and cruelty. Ancient Rome was characterised by this ability to inhabit the grey area that divides opposites, mediating between them and rejecting any irresolvable antinomy. In this way, it opened itself up to the possibility of reinventing itself, a conditio sine qua non for truly being sine fine. At the root of all this is not science, but Cicero’s civilis prudential, a very human art that requires us to start from reality, which is always contradictory, and not from the coherence of ideas, which is usually fictitious. Republic and empire. Order and chaos. Form and force. Violence and peace. Being heirs of Rome today means hating black and white.
We do not know who will come across our message in a bottle. It may never even reach its destination. Even because there might be nobody to receive it. And yet it was our duty to try. We owe it to our City and its history, pulled from all sides and betrayed everywhere, unjustly treated as any other political model. Rome is not this. It cannot be and it will never be. And so, faced with the real possibility of a post-Roman reality, we echo the words of the last great American Romanist: H.P. Lovecraft. In a letter reprimanding one of his students for not studying the classics sufficiently, he pauses to reflect on what a world ruled by machines rather than civilis prudentia would mean to him. Lovecraft, as always, does not mince his words. If Roman wisdom fails, he claims, it might as well be that there is no world. We agree. Adding that hell is nothing more than a world without Rome.
Translated by Dr Mark A Sammut Sassi
