The Foreign Service Journal, March 2007

military superpower — was dealt a profound psychological blow by a dar- ing terrorist attack on its very heart. Its port at Ostia was set on fire, the consular war fleet destroyed, and two prominent senators, together with their bodyguards and staff, kid- napped. Like al-Qaida, the pirates who committed this aggression were loosely organized, but able to spread a disproportionate amount of fear among citizens who had believed themselves immune from attack. So great was the ensuing panic, in fact, that the Romans were willing to compromise their centuries-old rights in return for promises of security. Taking advantage of the opening, the greatest soldier in Rome, known to us as Pompey the Great, was able to manipulate the Senate into passing a law (the “Lex Gabinia”) that gave him nearly unlimited authority and resources to pay for a “war on terror,” which included building a fleet of 500 ships and raising an army of 120,000 infantry and 5,000 cavalry. Such an accumulation of power was unprece- dented, and there was literally a riot in the Senate when the bill was debated. Once Pompey put to sea, it took him less than three months to sweep the pirates from the entire Mediter- ranean. As Harris dryly noted in a Sept. 30, 2006, New York Times op-ed piece laying out the parallels: even allowing for Pompey’s genius as a mil- itary strategist, the suspicion arises that the pirates could hardly have posed such a grievous threat in the first place, if they could be defeated so swiftly. But it was too late to raise such questions. Pompey stayed in the Middle East for six years, establishing puppet regimes throughout the region, and turning himself into the richest man in the empire in the process. Less than a decade later, Julius Caesar was awarded similar, extended military sovereignty in Gaul and, like Pompey, became immensely wealthy and used his treasure to fund his own political faction. In 49 B.C., the system collapsed completely, Caesar crossed the Rubicon — and the rest, as they say, is history. Perhaps the parallel Harris pro- poses here is a fallacy, or perhaps the Roman Republic was doomed for other reasons. Or both. Still, Im- perium makes a compelling case that the disproportionate reaction to the raid on Ostia unquestionably has- tened the republic’s collapse, weak- ening the restraints on military adventurism and corrupting the political process. To use a favorite State Department locution, only time will tell whether the United States is repeating that fatal error. Steven Alan Honley is the editor of the Journal . 86 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / M A R C H 2 0 0 7 B O O K S Imperium functions well both as a work of historical fiction and as a political commentary on our times.