Slave

Twinned with the first chapter, this takes up the subject of American slavery and its intricate connections to the political philosophies of Roman slavery. The subject here is both the racialized figure of the Atlantic slave trade and the metaphorized “slave” as the coerced and oppressed subject of capitalist modernity. Engaging with the fields of Black classicism and theoretical history, the chapter begins with the photography of Carrie Mae Weems before moving into a series of textual engagements with the Roman slave: Toni Morrison, Howard Fast, Ralph Ellison, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Robert Montgomery Bird all feature, amongst a host of other writers. The chapter argues that Rome has proved to be a way of suturing the embodied and contingent experience of American slavery and subjugation into a fuller apprehension of imperial sovereignty and its long-term conditions.

Among the Ruins

From the ancient past of Chapter 3, this chapter moves to the account of contemporary American travelers through the ruins and remnants of the ancient Roman world. Starting with Jhumpa Lahiri’s period living in Rome, and touching also on Thomas Jefferson’s account of antique ruins over two hundred years before, the chapter uses the potent image of the “ruin”—both as noun and as verb—to read American travelers in Europe as observers of empire’s recursive temporalities. Closer examinations of travel writing by William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Eleanor Clark, and Margaret Fuller reveal the ways in which the contemporary moment for each of these writers ends up filtered through the liberal observing subject via their confrontation with the materiality of an ancient empire, collectively registering the analogical history that the ruins of empire inculcate within the landscape.

{ Epilogue }

This short concluding chapter considers the direction of Roman analogies in American political commentary by returning—via Twitter—to the Iraq War and the newest narratives of America’s Roman comparisons. The book’s central arguments and ideas are summarized at this moment at the “end of American empire,” seeing historical time not as a line of progress, or a circle of repetition, or even as layers of experience, but as a constellation of points between American history and Roman antiquity. The Great Seal of the United States serves as a telling closing symbol of the temporalities generated by historical analogies, and the imperial shape of America’s Roman redux.

{ Introduction }

The introduction sets out the theoretical and historical stakes of the book. Opening with a cluster of Roman analogies stretching from the Iraq War to the American War of Independence, this chapter develops and explains the key questions that underpin the rest of the book. It offers extended rationales for its three keywords—empire, antiquity, and time—and makes claims for the methodological innovations it offers through its theorization of historical analogy. It situates the argument within the wider debates around temporality in American literary studies, postcolonial studies, and classical reception, as well as mobilizing its primary conceptual thinkers (namely, Reinhart Koselleck and Walter Benjamin). It closes by returning to the opening examples and putting the book’s main arguments into action.

Republic

This chapter is the first of two “foundations” that form the second part of the book. Starting with an analysis of the analogies drawn between Donald Trump and Roman emperors across the mediascape of 2016, it introduces the temporal and political relationship between the Roman and American republics, via the work of Hannah Arendt and Ian Baucom. It then moves backwards through American history, from the twenty-first to the eighteenth centuries, bringing in a wide range of American writers: Ursula Le Guin, John Williams, Upton Sinclair, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Louisa McCord, Mercy Otis Warren, and several others. Keeping the Roman analogy at the heart of its discussions, this chapter ultimately demonstrates the ways in which writers generate networks of coeval connection between ancient past and modern present in order to variously uphold and break down the seemingly contingent political, social, and racial logics of American empire.

Waiting for the Barbarians

The final chapter moves to the future-oriented narratives of American science fiction, broadly conceived as a mode of representation committed to the imagination of alternative lifeworlds. The chapter opens with the Roman fragments of Michael Crichton’s Westworld and the remains of New York City in late nineteenth-century dystopian fiction in order to outline the paradoxical relationship between historical representation and the imagination of an imperial (or decolonized) future. The chapter then moves to its three key writers, Isaac Asimov, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Samuel R. Delany. While each of them offer quite differently fantastical visions of antiquity’s place in the logics and aesthetics of the future, they all find connections through their employment of the ancient figure of the “barbarian” and its role in imperial philosophies and politics.

Dominion without End

The first of three chapters on specific popular genres, it considers the intimacies of religion and empire through a cluster of key texts that engage with retellings of the ancient Christian story. The chapter begins with Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, taking the compound of Romanized spectacle and Christianized moral economy as the basis of American imperial politics. Closer consideration of three texts, separated by 130 years—by Lew Wallace, Gore Vidal, and William Ware—generates not just local case studies of how assertions of ahistorical Christian moralism have been aligned with politically contingent American sovereignty, but forms an initial claim about how “Christian fiction” more generally theorizes a specific historical temporality both inimical to conventional ideas of progress and yet wedded to American civilizational superiority.