The story begins like this.
The Ancient Romans build a temple to the god Janus Geminus in what will be the Roman Forum — before the torch of empire is lit, before the republic is formed — while Rome is still a lawless kingdom attempting to establish itself within the Etruscan landscape and only a few years after the fratricide that watered the rolling green hills with seeping crimson blood, that erected the walls, that set the ship on its brutal course. Janus Geminus is the god of doorways, beginnings and entrances and, as a result, we are less interested in the temple itself, but moreso the doorway, the entrance or rather: the gates.
The gates of Janus were better known to the Romans as the gates of war. When they were open, Rome was at war. When they were closed, Rome was at peace. It is widely accepted that the gates of Janus were closed only three times during the reign of Augustus, the first emperor of Rome, when he ushered in the dissolution of the republic under the Pax Romana. As Rome continued to conquer the lands surrounding it, the gates were only closed twice more. It’s possible that there were other closings, but scholars haven’t found enough evidence to come to any certain conclusions.
This type of problem is common, though, given the ancient historical sources — or rather, the lack thereof — that have survived the ages. The sources, often called histories, tend to focus more on pushing a narrative, rather than accurately portraying history: “The Great Benevolent Augustus,” “Roman Morality,” etc. — although one has to commend the authors for their willingness to accept and move past their personal biases. You see, there’s no difference between story and history in Italian; “Goodnight Moon” and my abandoned thesis could be classified with the same word: storia (derived from the Latin historia) — succinct, easy, indistinguishable. Perhaps this is the reason, then, that the Romans inserted dialogue into the histories they wrote hundreds of years after the events happened. Perhaps this is the reason that the Romans wrote histories that glorified annexation and annihilation; the destruction of thousands of years of physical and cultural heritage.
The gates are the only surviving imagery of the temple, outlasting the millennia after the Roman Empire in the British Museum (where else), Their likeness is portrayed on a coin minted by Emperor Nero sometime between 64 and 66 C.E., but the real gates and the rest of the temple have disappeared into time. It’s possible Mussolini paved over it, that the early Christians destroyed it or that its materials were mined to form a temple to a new god. The temple of Janus has been lost but the gates survive — the gates will always survive because war does not end.
Rome sustained itself through war, conquering other cities and towns after their own resources dried up, always looking for more money, more territory, more slaves, more trade routes. Its constant colonization and exploitation of neighboring countries filled the treasuries and provided slave labor to build the shining white temples we imagine when we think of Rome. People didn’t just lie down and submit to the Romans though; as the empire got bigger and bigger it invited more revolts — from Egypt and Syria to current Great Britain and Germany. To be constantly in the business of colonization, as the Romans were, they also had to be in the business of constantly quelling revolutions. In this way, for the Roman Empire’s existence to continue, the war could not end, and therefore, the gates could not be closed.
Many different countries have attempted to replicate Rome’s “success.” Imperial Russia laid claim to the moniker “the third Rome,” as a way to establish legitimacy and inherit a history of prominence and prosperity. America’s Senate takes inspiration from the Ancient Roman Senate, as does our coat of arms, proudly displaying the Roman eagle and olive branch, not to mention the Latin in our de-facto national motto. I mean, for God’s sake, the Capitol building is pretty much a giant Roman temple, complete with a cult statue of Liberty wearing a toga. So is it any wonder that America has taken up Rome’s legacy in that other, more grisly sense of the word?
When the Romans ran out of enough arable land to feed their population, they invaded Egypt, siphoning grain out of the Nile Delta and into the Italian peninsula under the guise of avenging Julius Caesar. Since 2003, America has dropped an average of 46 bombs per day, around the globe. We wage war on anything and everything: terror, poverty, drugs and even diseases. War is in our language, our culture, our very state of being. We use devastating terrorist attacks as reasoning to invade countries and assert dominance, taking land, money and natural resources all in the name of retaliation — of “Never Forget.” Our approach is simple: we tear into fraught international relations with all the delicacy and grace of a fascist sculpture in the name of oil, sugar or providing humanitarian aid, if you can believe it. And when that doesn’t work, we provide others with the means to do it for us.
The comparisons don’t end there. Rome saw itself as a peacekeeper and civilizing agent. America has taken up this torch, especially during and after the World Wars. When the Romans couldn’t justify the colonization of a neighboring territory, they attempted to provoke battle in order to invade. America did something similar in the Spanish-American war, utilizing the terrible, most likely accidental, tragedy of the U.S.S. Maine explosion to wage war on Spain, and take control of the former Spanish Imperial colonies and Hawaii. Today, despite being a nation that quite literally stands for “liberty and justice for all,” we rule multiple colonies throughout the world — we just don’t like to call them that dirty, dirty word. Despite being a peacekeeping, civilized nation that encourages democracy, when anti-US-intervention socialist governments were established in US-controlled Latin America, we tore them down in bloody coups. The Romans at the very least had the courage to call their invasions and annexations what they really were: imperial actions.
The story ends like this. America holds the torch of empire, for better or worse. It burns so brightly that other countries and other cultures are engulfed in the flames, so all that’s left behind is a mangled, melted mess of people who are ostensibly American but do not feel American. The gates of war are closed, but they are never closed; bombs continue to drop and battles continue to rage but because Americans live largely unaffected lives we all continue acting as if the gates are closed.
As long as I can remember, my parents have had a subscription to The New York Times, so there’s been a thick newspaper on my doorstep every morning for years and years. In the last 16 years or so since I learned how to read, I can’t remember one newspaper that didn’t have one mention of war somewhere in the world, and its implications for America. In recent years, I’ve read hundreds of articles and headlines about war: famine due to the civil war in Sudan, horrific conditions in Ukraine, 39,569 dead in Israel and Gaza and counting — all prolonged, whether historically or presently, by American military might. Seeing the pictures and reading the stories has all been so horrifically disgusting that I often find myself moved to tears.
Yet for the past few weeks or so, I keep finding myself falling asleep during action movies — the rat-a-tat-tat of simulated gunfire or the clash of sword on sword lulling me into dreamless sleep. That type of violence is so foreign to me, so wholly unreal, that it’s safe enough to fall asleep to. Life in the center of the empire is just one luxury after another, and in our coddling we have grown desensitized. My country has been at war, one way or another — for my entire life and my biggest concern currently is networking for my post-grad job. This is the America we live in — it is a classic Schrodinger’s box experiment, except that the cat is always dead.
But does the story truly end here? Rome once seemed like the pinnacle of human achievement and civilization, what with all those shining white temples and gleaming mosaics and it too came to an end. Today, walking through the Forum and other archeological sites, what you notice isn’t the glint of marble in the sun — most of that has been appropriated into the Vatican museum or repurposed in the facade of one of the many churches lining the streets. No, what you notice is the grass growing over the edges of the bricks, the wildflowers coiling their way between the legs of statues, stray cats sunning themselves on giant slabs of stone — stone that ordinary humans haven’t touched in years.
The Forum, once the bustling, fashionable, prosperous, bloody center of the biggest empire the world had ever seen can now only be described as serene — well, serene and touristy. But if you’re good at blocking out tourists, or perhaps you just own a great pair of noise-canceling headphones like I do, the Forum seems tranquil, a testament to the fact that nothing is permanent, that Goliath does fall. All is not lost, the Forum seems to say. The world will keep spinning — imperfectly, terribly, beautifully. The future will not be kind, but it won’t be unkind, it just will. The best and worst parts of humanity will always exist together: both will survive, and both will be forgotten.
Maybe the gates will finally be shut, if only from the amount of rubble we will dump on them. Maybe they won’t. But the story begins with the gates of war being open. As long as every day we work towards peace, as long as we invest in diplomacy, in stabilization, in equality, in one united global community, well, the story doesn’t have to end there.
Statement Associate Editor Lucy Del Deo can be reached at ldeldeo@umich.edu.
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