Rome on the potomac: like it or not, America today finds itself an imperial power committed to maintaining an empire. The only question is what kind of empire?

• Author: Merry, Robert W.
• Position: The United States - Cover Story

It was around 88 B.C. when the king of Pontus--Mithridates VI, sometimes called Mithridates the Great--decided he had had enough of Roman influence in his region, of Roman meddling in his affairs, of the whole gamut of Roman arrogance and imperial pretensions. He vowed to destroy the Roman presence in the eastern lands that he felt should be his to dominate. He waited patiently until his western nemesis became preoccupied with a bitter civil conflict upon the Italian peninsula, and then he struck with a force and vengeance characteristic cultural wars.

Mithridates of Pontus is removed from us by a couple thousand years of time, but the locus of his kingdom is removed from present-day Iraq by only a couple hundred miles of distance. And the story of Rome and Mithridates is worth pondering today as the story of America and the world of Islam unfolds. Americans today, judging by the public prints, seem preoccupied with the question of whether they stand at the threshold of empire. The subject has received cover treatment in one form or another in such diverse publications as Time, Newsweek, the New York Times Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, National Journal, U.S. News & Worm Report, Foreign Affairs, the Weekly Standard, and Mother Jones. What's more, these explorations make clear that the issue scrambles up the country's political fault lines in entirely new ways. Both the intellectual right and the intellectual left are split on the issue, while the vast political middle appears open but wary. Depending on how things go during the next few years, a major new political alignment could be in the offing.

In the meantime, post-9/11 events seem to be taking on a power of their own, impervious to the pronouncements and denunciations of public discourse. Indeed, with American might planted firmly upon the soil of the Muslim heartland, the American Empire may very well be at hand, with the only major question being: What will it bring--to the world and to America? Answers may lie in the antecedents of history, starting with Mithridates of Pontus.

BIG PLANS

He was a cagey and ruthless ruler, which he had to be to survive the intrigues and treacheries of court life in Asia Minor. He inherited his throne at age eleven but fled almost immediately to avoid being killed by his own mother. He lived in the wild as a hunter, "dressed in skins," as Will Durant described it, and returned only when he was big enough and strong enough, at age eighteen, to depose his mother and have her killed. He subsequently slew his brother, three sons, and three daughters (or so the Roman historians tell us) to ensure his hold on power. And he developed a practice of ingesting small amounts of various poisons every day to build up immunity and thwart any would-be stealthy assassins among his intimates.

Mithridates harbored big plans for his kingdom, located in what is now Turkey, on the southeastern shores of what is now called the Black Sea, not far from what is now the Turkish-Iraqi border. With a mercenary army, he captured Cappadocia to the south, then conquered Armenia to the east, then stretched his sway around the eastern and northern shores of the Black Sea.

But his ambitions were not slaked because to his west lay Bithynia, and Bithynia controlled the Hellespont, linking the Black Sea to the Mediterranean--portal to vast and lucrative markets and a strategic leverage point in the region. He could crush Bithynia in a week's time and take that economic and strategic prize except for one thing: Rome. Bithynia was a Roman client state and thus untouchable. When he had marched into Bithynia a few years before to involve himself in a dynastic dispute there, Rome had ordered him out. After he complied, the Roman proconsul in the region, one Manius Aquilius, encouraged the new Bithynian ruler to invade the Pontic lands.

That was the last straw for this eastern potentate. As Durant puts it, "Mithridates felt that his sole chance of survival lay in arousing the Hellenic East to revolt against its Italian overlords." He expanded his army to nearly 300,000 men and took Bithynia. He built up a navy of four hundred ships and destroyed the Roman presence in the Black Sea. He "liberated" Greece from Roman dominance. And then he unleashed a pogrom on Roman and Italian citizens throughout the region, slaughtering more than 80,000 and confiscating their property. As a demonstration of contempt, he poured molten gold down the throat of Manius Aquilius.

Of course this bloody development shocked Rome, which promptly set about sending an army to Asia Minor to thwart Mithridates' ambitions. But then things began to go awry as foreign policy imperatives disturbed old domestic political fault lines. The two greatest generals of the day--Gaius Marius, savior of the Republic against the Germans but now old and physically reduced; and the sly Lucius Cornelius Sulla, an earlier and grander version of Tony Soprano--each wanted to command the expeditionary force. Worse, each represented a major faction in the ongoing political struggle of the day--Marius, the populares, who wanted political power distributed more widely throughout society; and Sulla, the optimates, who wanted power held firmly in the hands of the old patrician families. As this persistent rivalry heated up and the factions became increasingly enraged, the tectonic plates under the surface of the Roman polity shifted dramatically. In the ensuing civil war, many precedents of the ancient republic were shattered: For the first time, a Roman army marched on Rome; for the first time, the six-month dictatorship allowed in the constitution to meet civic emergencies was usurped for an indefinite period; and at one point, a victorious faction unleashed a "proscription" upon its political enemies, marking them for death. And slowly the Roman republic, nearly four hundred years old and one of the greatest civic achievements in the history of mankind, ceased to be.

THE AWESOME THING

Nobody in our time and our country can envision our own republic descending into such internal chaos and violence. But foreign adventures tend to have unintended consequences both at home and abroad. And in recent months, as America built up its own expeditionary force and went to war in Mithridates' old neighborhood, the country found itself asking whether America was moving inexorably toward empire, in the tradition of Rome or Great Britain-and whether such imperial ambitions could affect the course of our domestic politics. "Why should a republic take on the risks of empire?" asked Michael Ignatieff of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government in a provocative New York Times Magazine piece entitled "American Empire (Get Used to It)." He added: "Won't it run a chance of endangering its identity as a free people?"

The Ignatieff piece, which he later described as "cautionary," combines with numerous others to suggest there's a wide body of sentiment among thinking Americans that their country is indeed moving into an era of world hegemony that could legitimately be...