yes this is for the American-Roman comparison thread

tis a tight race, really

(as you can tell ive had no sleep)

the way i see it there's alot of thing in commun, but he are in the modern age we don't need a war to show the world we have fallen.

Something like the fall of th berlin wall was the "marker" for the end of the USSR. So as I said ealier slow economical breack down, but not a massive pool of blood...not in the US at least.

wo! 33.33% for all 3 well tight indeed.

i voted yes because all good things come to an end

the good thing ended in the 70's. I voted not as harch.

if we could just get 1 more person to vote....

nutrality...or what!

well, looks like ur winning kikuchiyo

oh, toe to toe.

o great, now im losing, badly

I think you should Bring arguments as how both relates like:

-Lots of war beyond the border
-growth of anti-americanism
and
-has lost it's economical swing of the 50's

i would like to bring up

-1Lots of war beyond the border
-2growth of anti-americanism
and
-3has lost it's economical swing of the 50's

right?

1-the war in Iraq is similar to Romans fighting in western Germania

2-LOTS of people around thw orld HATE us, bush or no-bush, (i hate bush)

3-a great loss of the economy in the U.S. is similar to loss of population and economy in middle Roman culture

P.S., when people argue about the things stated, use the number by it

see like that you'll get a wild fire started in no time.
***
for the yes but not so harsh:
-we're in the modern age and it's more likely to "pass on" the power rather then end in a war
-Countries like China and Japan are having the same (or bigger) economical boom that america had back in the 50's( we can expect them to reach and surpass american economical supremacy in less the 30 years)
-America didn't came up with a new economical idea since the "e-commerce" (huge flop!)

I am the one who started the " America & Rome " thread. America will indeed infact suffer the same fact as Rome sadly to say. But it will not be near as harsh, the U.S wont just fall off of the map like Rome did, it will see a slow decrease in economical growth, diplomacy trust, and general impact on the world.

The U.S will slowly but surely drift from being one of the worlds super-powers. Anti-Americanism is growing, just as Rome collected enimemes, small countrys ( i.e Afghanistan, and Iraq ) will begin taking shots at the U.S ( Terrorist attacks ) just as Goths, VisaGoths and other tribes began to sack Rome one by one.

Sadly we are in the decline right now, you can see it everywhere. Anti-Americanism, Job Loss, Econmoical Decline. You can see it everyday. Now it wont happen in our life our the next hundred, or two hundred years but its coming.

i could beg to differ, i would say from 50-100 years, so since im **, i would be 112 at the latest

looks like ive almost drooped to the status of a third party canidate...
GO NADER

edit-77th post is lucky, right?

i feel that america isn't what it used 2 b but i dont think that it will end so suddenly as 100 years. the us hasn't even been around for 300 years. although job loss is high tht shouldnt mean very much as job loss was extreme during the 1930's. the us declining doesnt seem significgant enough at the moment right now to say tht within 100 years the u.s. will have faded into history. and the value of th dollar dropping may actually add to our economy as it brings our currency to be worth less, allowing for companies to keep jobs here, becuase the comparison to say the chinese currency wont be so much of a drastic differnece if our dollar is worth less.

Hello,

I think that the fall of the U.S. will happen very quickly as someone said.
Things evolve much more quickly than they did in Roman time.

Anyway, how could you compare the U.S. with Rome ?
I'm not sure there is a link. As any society in nay time, the U.S. will fall and gradually be replaced by another society. That's where the comparison stops.

Olivier

[stereotypical remark] I can tell you are French, [/stereotypical remark]

What do you mean how can you compare them, read " America and Rome History Repeats "

(chef's voice) here we go again 33.33%

this is quite something, i haven't seen a race this tight.

right now im tied with no at 35.71-35.71, with somewhat lagging at 28.57

Voted "somewhat, but not as harsh".

I don’t think the USA will have a rapid decline.

It has the resources of almost a whole continent at its disposal and also has a relatively self contained economy (only 20% of its GDP is involved in international trade as opposed to say the Uk for instance which has 40% of its economy involved in international trade ).

Part of the reason however that the USA is now a superpower is that it sat out of the two world wars for as long as possible while benefiting enormously economically by selling to the Western combatants. The USA doubled its GDP from 1939 to 1945. The Uk entered the war as the world’s biggest creditor nation and ended it impoverished. Where did all the Uk’s overseas wealth go? It largely flowed into the USA and kick started the US economy out of depression. In the future the USA might well find itself in the reverse position with other countries, notably the EU nations, benefiting enormously economically by sitting back and only selling at market prices and insisting that USA owned companies around the world are either sold at bargain, knock down prices, or in the EU itself liquidated to provide funds to pay for their “help”. Much the same as the USA did to the Uk from 1939 to 1941.

How sympathetic do you think Germany and France will be to the USA in the future if the US needs help? I don’t imagine many British people are too impressed with the UK getting dragged into Iraq either. Iraq is probably the last war the USA can count on the Uk’s direct help – and the Uk is probably the USA’s closest ally.

One thing to be remembered is that the USA is now a debtor nation to the rest of the world. America has been having a “free ride” since WWII by spending more than it produces and has got away with it because so much foreign investment has brought US dollars back into the US. This trend however is reversing and other countries are no longer investing as heavily in the US. Bad news for the US in the long term.

China also holds enough reserves of US dollars to wreck the US economy by selling them all at once if they wished. Japan also has huge, but smaller than China’s, foreign currency reserves so Japan could probably negate a lot of the damage China is capable of inflicting.

What will probably happen, in my opinion, is that in the next big “world war” the USA will find it has few friends and even fewer who are willing to jump in until direct participation is forced upon them.

i think im going to move, some where, in, Leichenstein*?

roman empire and America current say can only be compared in an economical sense.

Even then the dynamics of 2000 years ago dont fit with the current dynamics.

Military wis ethere is no comparison , i mena the only territory that america has forcefully invaded is Iraq which will become autonimous very soon ;-) yea rite i hear you call.

lol

America is building an econmic empire but with growing resentment especially in europe it may have a new european superpower emerging that along with china could challenge its supremacy.



Dunno about that .

However

With britain's economy soon to eclipse teh french and germans economy we are the domniant nation in the region , not to mention military wise we are stronger.

The EU need the UK and would not risk challenging the US without us.

America will NOT collapse nor disintigrate that simply doesnt happen in the modern era, perhaps lose its dominance thats all tho.

Hi, Method.

My profile indicates that I am French. Don't try to make me believe that you guessed that thanks to my so-called "stereotypical remark".
(Anyway, my English may have got typically French mistakes : Even then, it is not a matter of stereotype).

Thanks for the thread "Am and Rome history repeats" : I had, indeed not read it.

Bye
Olivier

why the need to insult people here???

well you cant really compare the two.

The only thing yu can say is that traditionally all empires fall.

The British, Spanish, Dutch, Portugese , French , Ottoman, Roman , Mongol.

Difference being that most of these empires didnt end with the destruction of the country itself like what basically happened in Rome.

Just a decrease in its ability to dictate to the world or enforce itself upon other nations.

Since america doesnt really have an empire then its cant really collapse, although economically as ive said it does have a new form of empire.

This in theory could collapse , but under what chain of events AND remember Rome was ruled by emperors who could not be elected , now everyone who knows me knows how i feel about george bush lol, but hes no Calico.

I dont feel that America would neglect the signs of decay as much as the pompous emperors of rome did.

Too say there will be a rapid decline is ridiclous, America is indeed weaking but it will not happen in anybody's lifetime. America is only three-hundred years old people.

Hedonism will be our undoing.

Agreed

This is foolish. The USA is not Rome. The USA is not China. The USA is not Atlantis.
The USA is the USA...

The only similarity between the USA and Rome is both used the eagle as a national symbol, and that they will both fall like all empires do, due to corruption or a leader keeping things running being killed, resigning, or being overthrown.

Rome became corrupt and fell apart, And the USA is long overdue to what is coming to it... Sure we got some great things from the USA, like certain music, movies, or art... But we need to know when to let go and bid farewell.

There are no other similarities...

Leadership of Rome:


Leadership of the USA:



Citizens of Rome:

Citizens of the USA:


Army of Rome:


Army of the USA:

Enemies of Rome:



Enemies of the USA:

Athenian, here is an article from the Guardian - Boston's WBUR radio station titled a special on US imperial power with the Latin tag Pax Americana. Tom Wolfe has written that the America of today is "now the mightiest power on earth, as omnipotent as... Rome under Julius Caesar".

But is the comparison apt? Are the Americans the new Romans? In making a documentary film on the subject over the past few months, I put that question to a group of people uniquely qualified to know. Not experts on US defence strategy or American foreign policy, but Britain's leading historians of the ancient world. They know Rome intimately - and, without exception, they are struck by the similarities between the empire of now and the imperium of then.

The most obvious is overwhelming military strength. Rome was the superpower of its day, boasting an army with the best training, biggest budgets and finest equipment the world had ever seen. No one else came close. The United States is just as dominant - its defence budget will soon be bigger than the military spending of the next nine countries put together, allowing the US to deploy its forces almost anywhere on the planet at lightning speed. Throw in the country's global technological lead, and the US emerges as a power without rival.

There is a big difference, of course. Apart from the odd Puerto Rico or Guam, the US does not have formal colonies, the way the Romans (or British, for that matter) always did. There are no American consuls or viceroys directly ruling faraway lands.

But that difference between ancient Rome and modern Washington may be less significant than it looks. After all, America has done plenty of conquering and colonising: it's just that we don't see it that way. For some historians, the founding of America and its 19th-century push westward were no less an exercise in empire-building than Rome's drive to take charge of the Mediterranean. While Julius Caesar took on the Gauls - bragging that he had slaughtered a million of them - the American pioneers battled the Cherokee, the Iroquois and the Sioux. "From the time the first settlers arrived in Virginia from England and started moving westward, this was an imperial nation, a conquering nation," according to Paul Kennedy, author of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.

More to the point, the US has military bases, or base rights, in some 40 countries across the world - giving it the same global muscle it would enjoy if it ruled those countries directly. (When the US took on the Taliban last autumn, it was able to move warships from naval bases in Britain, Japan, Germany, southern Spain and Italy: the fleets were already there.) According to Chalmers Johnson, author of Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, these US military bases, numbering into the hundreds around the world, are today's version of the imperial colonies of old. Washington may refer to them as "forward deployment", says Johnson, but colonies are what they are. On this definition, there is almost no place outside America's reach. Pentagon figures show that there is a US military presence, large or small, in 132 of the 190 member states of the United Nations.

So America may be more Roman than we realise, with garrisons in every corner of the globe. But there the similarities only begin. For the United States' entire approach to empire looks quintessentially Roman. It's as if the Romans bequeathed a blueprint for how imperial business should be done - and today's Americans are following it religiously.

Lesson one in the Roman handbook for imperial success would be a realisation that it is not enough to have great military strength: the rest of the world must know that strength - and fear it too. The Romans used the propaganda technique of their time - gladiatorial games in the Colosseum - to show the world how hard they were. Today 24-hour news coverage of US military operations - including video footage of smart bombs scoring direct hits - or Hollywood shoot-'em-ups at the multiplex serve the same function. Both tell the world: this empire is too tough to beat.

The US has learned a second lesson from Rome, realising the centrality of technology. For the Romans, it was those famously straight roads, enabling the empire to move troops or supplies at awesome speeds - rates that would not be surpassed for well over a thousand years. It was a perfect example of how one imperial strength tends to feed another: an innovation in engineering, originally designed for military use, went on to boost Rome commercially. Today those highways find their counterpart in the information superhighway: the internet also began as a military tool, devised by the US defence department, and now stands at the heart of American commerce. In the process, it is making English the Latin of its day - a language spoken across the globe. The US is proving what the Romans already knew: that once an empire is a world leader in one sphere, it soon dominates in every other.

But it is not just specific tips that the US seems to have picked up from its ancient forebears. Rather, it is the fundamental approach to empire that echoes so loudly. Rome understood that, if it is to last, a world power needs to practise both hard imperialism, the business of winning wars and invading lands, and soft imperialism, the cultural and political tricks that work not to win power but to keep it.

So Rome's greatest conquests came not at the end of a spear, but through its power to seduce conquered peoples. As Tacitus observed in Britain, the natives seemed to like togas, baths and central heating - never realising that these were the symbols of their "enslavement". Today the US offers the people of the world a similarly coherent cultural package, a cluster of goodies that remain reassuringly uniform wherever you are. It's not togas or gladiatorial games today, but Starbucks, Coca-Cola, McDonald's and Disney, all paid for in the contemporary equivalent of Roman coinage, the global hard currency of the 21st century: the dollar.

When the process works, you don't even have to resort to direct force; it is possible to rule by remote control, using friendly client states. This is a favourite technique for the contemporary US - no need for colonies when you have the Shah in Iran or Pinochet in Chile to do the job for you - but the Romans got there first. They ruled by proxy whenever they could. We, of all people, should know: one of the most loyal of client kings ruled right here, in the southern England of the first century AD.

His name was Togidubnus and you can still visit the grand palace that was his at Fishbourne in Sussex. The mosaic floors, in remarkable condition, are reminders of the cool palatial quarters where guests would have gathered for preprandial drinks or a perhaps an audience with the king. Historians now believe that Togidubnus was a high-born Briton educated in Rome, brought back to Fishbourne and installed as a pro-Roman puppet. Just as Washington's elite private schools are full of the "pro-western" Arab kings, South American presidents or African leaders of the future, so Rome took in the heirs of the conquered nations' top families, preparing them for lives as rulers in Rome's interest.

And Togidubnus did not let his masters down. When Boudicca led her uprising against the Roman occupation in AD60, she made great advances in Colchester, St Albans and London - but not Sussex. Historians now believe that was because Togidubnus kept the native Britons under him in line. Just as Hosni Mubarak and Pervez Musharraf have kept the lid on anti-American feeling in Egypt and Pakistan, Togidubnus did the same job for Rome nearly two millennia ago.

Not that it always worked. Rebellions against the empire were a permanent fixture, with barbarians constantly pressing at the borders. Some accounts suggest that the rebels were not always fundamentally anti-Roman; they merely wanted to share in the privileges and affluence of Roman life. If that has a familiar ring, consider this: several of the enemies who rose up against Rome are thought to have been men previously nurtured by the empire to serve as pliant allies. Need one mention former US protege Saddam Hussein or one-time CIA trainee Osama bin Laden?

Rome even had its own 9/11 moment. In the 80s BC, Hellenistic king Mithridates called on his followers to kill all Roman citizens in their midst, naming a specific day for the slaughter. They heeded the call - and killed 80,000 Romans in local communities across Greece. "The Romans were incredibly shocked by this," says ancient historian Jeremy Paterson of Newcastle University. "It's a little bit like the statements in so many of the American newspapers since September 11: 'Why are we hated so much?' "

Internally, too, today's United States would strike many Romans as familiar terrain. America's mythologising of its past - its casting of founding fathers Washington and Jefferson as heroic titans, its folk-tale rendering of the Boston Tea Party and the war of independence - is very Roman. That empire, too, felt the need to create a mythic past, starred with heroes. For them it was Aeneas and the founding of Rome, but the urge was the same: to show that the great nation was no accident, but the fruit of manifest destiny.

And America shares Rome's conviction that it is on a mission sanctioned from on high. Augustus declared himself the son of a god, raising a statue to his adoptive father Julius Caesar on a podium alongside Mars and Venus. The US dollar bill bears the words "In God we trust" and US politicians always like to end their speeches with "God bless America."

Even that most modern American trait, its ethnic diversity, would make the Romans feel comfortable. Their society was remarkably diverse, taking in people from all over the world - and even promising new immigrants the chance to rise to the very top (so long as they were from the right families). While America is yet to have a non-white president, Rome boasted an emperor from north Africa, Septimius Severus. According to classicist Emma Dench, Rome had its own version of America's "hyphenated" identities. Like the Italian-Americans or Irish-Americans of today, Rome's citizens were allowed a "cognomen" - an extra name to convey their Greek-Roman or British-Roman heritage: Tiberius Claudius Togidubnus.

There are some large differences between the two empires, of course - starting with self-image. Romans revelled in their status as masters of the known world, but few Americans would be as ready to brag of their own imperialism. Indeed, most would deny it. But that may come down to the US's founding myth. For America was established as a rebellion against empire, in the name of freedom and self-government. Raised to see themselves as a rebel nation and plucky underdog, they can't quite accept their current role as master.

One last factor scares Americans from making a parallel between themselves and Rome: that empire declined and fell. The historians say this happens to all empires; they are dynamic entities that follow a common path, from beginning to middle to end.

"What America will need to consider in the next 10 or 15 years," says Cambridge classicist Christopher Kelly, "is what is the optimum size for a nonterritorial empire, how interventionist will it be outside its borders, what degree of control will it wish to exercise, how directly, how much through local elites? These were all questions which pressed upon the Roman empire."

Anti-Americans like to believe that an operation in Iraq might be proof that the US is succumbing to the temptation that ate away at Rome: overstretch. But it's just as possible that the US is merely moving into what was the second phase of Rome's imperial history, when it grew frustrated with indirect rule through allies and decided to do the job itself. Which is it? Is the US at the end of its imperial journey, or on the brink of its most ambitious voyage? Only the historians of the future can tell us that.

Empires or countries fall all of the time. Egypt, Mayans, Aztecs, Persia, Incans, Carthage, Ottaman, Babylon, Romans there are literally hundreds and hundreds - it is a fact of history.

What is the most common cause of an empire or country to fall?
Over-population and loss of fresh water.

I dont think that the U.S would have a defeincey of water for a very long time, and that was a very good read

The US does not have ewnough Fresh Water, there trying to get it from us (Canada).

And the US is modeled after the Romans, Its a Republic, it has a Senit etc. Its the most powerfull Nation on this planet in terms of its Military etc.

~Thanato

yea, im winning(yes) 39.39%

i loved "Somewhat but not as harsh" because it is just kind of hard for a country as huge and as powerful as the USA to collapse and have the same fate as Rome, don't forget the different timeline between them.

I'd be intrested in the source for your statement that the US is trying to buy water from you (Canada)

America is trying to buy water from our fresh water lakes. If you vote you should be aware of this issue.

America will not suffer the same fate as Rome. There is a world economy, a United Nations, and a global community. Such did not exist in the Roman world.

Although, Rome never really did "fall". The Western Empire fell, while the Eastern Empire lasted well into the middle ages (I think the sack of Constantinople occured in the 17th century). It merged so much with other cultures that it lost its Roman identity, while at the same time passing on that identity so far down the line that we can't seperate ourselves and our culture from Rome today.

I am still quite interested in a source for this statement. I have been trying to locate some information on the internet. The only information I have found is relative to the Great Lakes, which of course border both the US and Canada. And does not appear to be an event where the US is purchasing Canada's water.

Do Thanato or Pete Vanderzwet have a source?

i would like to pop in and say, i think america will decline and fall rapidly, i want this to happen because i do not want amercia to have a long bloody civil war
i.e. 1960-1965

i would also like to purchase fresh canadian water

yeah, America will never die..we are awesome and you all know it..Rome just sucks

no it aint , u idiot we suck, face it, america is horrible, stupid

nope! why don't you move to Rome sonny if ya like it there so much..NO GOOD MUSIC..N GAY PPL..good luck