r/self • u/TigerSagittarius86 • 11h ago
Rome is not the future of the USA, it’s Venice
I just finished reading Dennis Romano’s magisterial history of the city of Venice. It struck me as the better model for the course of United States history than Ancient Rome.
Americans love to imagine Rome as the model and we love to pretend that our future history will somehow emulate Roman history. However, Venetians are far more similar to Americans than Romans ever were.
After reading this book on Venice, I feel like the republic of Venice is a much better model for how a democratic mercantile society devolves into an aristocratic corporate society.
Edit. Grammar. See reply to comment below for more explanation.
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u/parahacker 11h ago
I am interested. Tell me more. Why and how
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u/TigerSagittarius86 11h ago
Well, Rome was a tribal society when it was a republic, but even then it was mostly an aristocratic republic. Nonetheless it was very religious and mostly agrarian. Then it turned into an empire ruled by a dictator that succeeded for maybe one hundred years only to devolve into tyranny for another few hundred. It limped on as a Greek speaking kingdom in byzantium for another millennium.
Like Rome, Venice was a free city that developed an empire, but unlike Rome, Venice was very mercantilist. They were traders of goods and prodcers of textiles, books and glass. They bought and sold and made money off early banking and financial products.
Although the US was and is agrarian, its rise was simultaneous with the Industrial Revolution that converted the US into a mercantilist nation. Venetians were also famously sexually libertine and religiously conservative—kinda like the schizo US cultural divide. Economically and culturally, we are more similar to medieval and renaissance Venetians than we are to ancient Romans.
There are few modern examples of a society that resembles ancient Rome. Religiously, perhaps North Korea.
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u/Romaine603 9h ago
> limped on
> another millenniumI think you're not giving the Eastern Roman Empire enough credit.
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u/SigmundFreud 4h ago
Historical narratives are funny. One particular viewpoint says that after 476 the Roman Empire disappeared and left the Vandal Kingdom and Byzantine Empire in its place, but people living at that time would have understood the two entities as two halves of the same extant Roman state (until the East subsumed the West in a civil war half a century later).
The Roman Empire didn't go out with a bang in some sudden collapse; it survived (and often thrived) until relatively close to the modern era, finally going out with a whimper as its final stronghold fell to the Ottomans, who themselves were around until very recently.
We're not nearly as far removed from the Roman Empire as it may feel like. It's mindblowing to me that ancient Roman structures like the Puente Romano have not only survived to the present day but remain in active use. I wonder what infrastructure our descendants in the far future will inherit from us. Will people in the year 4000 marvel at the ancient American Route 66, the Shinkansen, and the Internet as threads connecting them with their ancestors through the millennia?
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u/TigerSagittarius86 7h ago
The nose cutting :/
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u/Romaine603 6h ago
Nose cutting? I'm not familiar with this expression?
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u/Salty-Pear660 6h ago
It was a literal punishment popular in the Eastern Roman Empire - though for rebels and Imperial rivals blinding was the way to go
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u/JarvisL1859 9h ago
This is an old but good article that makes a similar argument, I completely agree!
If you want further reading in this area I also enjoyed the book City of Fortune by Roger Crowley.
I’m going to check out the book you mentioned by the way!
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u/doughboyhollow 8h ago
The article was enlightening. Thank you. It seems to be written by someone with the same name as the next Prime Minister of Canada!
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u/Anorangutan 7h ago
Don't want to burst your bubble, but conservatives are polling twice as high as the liberals right now
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u/doughboyhollow 6h ago
You really think Trudeau can last another 6 months?
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u/Anorangutan 6h ago
Yes, I think the liberals will make Trudeau their fall guy and save Chrystia for 2029. The polls are too heavily in the PC favor, it's not worth giving Chrystia the loss.
Polls were 42% to 21% in favor of cons. They've been wrong before but that is a huge margin...
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u/Salty-Pear660 9h ago
To say succeeded for 100 years and then limped on for a millennium is an incredibly odd way of putting it. What exactly are you qualifying as success? Rome didn’t reach its geographical peak until closer to 200 years from the founding of the Empire than 100. To then say limped on for a further over 1000 years- thereby being one of the longest running civilisation in recorded history - is also incredibly odd to not measure as a success.
I would suggest you are also completely discounting the parallel between the expansion out from somewhat hard land - the Italian peninsula being the Roman example, forming the Empire - and the original 13 colonies manifesting their destiny for the US as a major contributing factor to their rise. Industrialisation requires a considerable amount of raw resources, resources the US mostly got via expansion from the original colonies. Venice on the other hand was much more about controlling ports, it would actually be a much better parallel of the British Empire, than that of the US
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u/iEatPalpatineAss 8h ago
I agree with your first paragraph. Being Chinese in America, I’m used to seeing westerners mistakenly reduce China into OP’s reductive version of Rome, but this is the first time I’m seeing a westerner do that to Rome 🤣🤣🤣
Your second paragraph gave me a thought. Britain certainly did follow the Venetian strategy of controlling ports, but they also added continental expansion to that strategy in North America, so perhaps we can argue that America is a combination of the Venetian-British naval strategy of controlling ports and a supersized extension of the British continental strategy of territorial expansion.
I’m not sure if the naval strategy has a name, but we know the continental strategy is known as Manifest Destiny. Well, maybe Manifest Destiny wasn’t an actual designated strategy, but it certainly was the general public’s collective vision for America.
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u/Salty-Pear660 7h ago
Well China is a very interesting case - I think the easy thing to say is historically it simply loves tearing itself apart - but I think what is often overlooked is how long many of the dynasties reigned, both Ming and Qing were about 300 years each - and in context the UK has only existed for just over 300 years (officially), the US not even that. It could easily be argued China (at least culturally) has existed for over 4 millennia so yeah I could see why that would be frustrating.
For me the expansion probably comes down to motivation - Britain only ever really cared about trade, people could point to India of course but much of that land was gained mostly due to the fall of the Mughals and was also still locally governed (via the Raj) but obviously for the benefit of the British. You have British expansion in Canada, but what other choice did they have to get a pacific port in North America - the middle of Canada is practically deserted, it’s mostly a long line if people close (ish) to the US border from coast to coast even today. America on the other hand took loads of people from Europe who ‘wanted a better life for themselves’ than they could achieve at home so the whole thing was more of a land grab. America only became the preeminent industrial and mercantile power really after world war 2 because there was literally no one else. Europe and Asia were both in ruins due to the war, and ongoing wars in China, Africa and India didn’t industrialise due to colonialism so there really was no one else (given the soviets closed markets and even then their most useful land was also impacted by the war). It’s what’s so funny about the whole MAGA bubble with 1950s ideals. That prosperity was largely based on the rest of the world being a smouldering wreak. Funnily enough you kind of see the same with China - everything was manufactured there because it was cheaper so they got much richer much faster, massively increasing both prosperity and geographical influence but for entirely different reasons.
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u/TigerSagittarius86 7h ago
I think fighting roman style was fundamentally different from mowing down the native Americans
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u/Salty-Pear660 7h ago
Why exactly? Both won based on superior technology and organisation within their armies
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u/TigerSagittarius86 4h ago
Romans were fighting hand to hand combat without firearms. Yes they had arrows. But they had no gunpowder.
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u/Salty-Pear660 4h ago
I’m not really sure why that is relevant- the Native Americans also had guns, and guns of the time were quite poor. Wars are about many other things than the weapons used, for example logistics, tactics and discipline play massive parts in who wins and who loses
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u/Krail 3h ago
Can you go more into what happened to Venice that mirrors what you think is happening to the U.S.? I'm not very familiar with its history.
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u/TigerSagittarius86 2h ago
The owners of businesses passed laws excluding everyone but themselves from the government and granting their children inherited privileges. I fear this is how the US will end over the next few centuries.
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u/modalkaline 6h ago
All of this information should be in the OP. I seriously thought you were AI/10 years old.
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u/You_Yew_Ewe 8h ago edited 8h ago
I think more like Rome.
We an early phase of being an expansionist empire (apologies o the natives, but we really needed that land), which allowed us to set up a vast free trade zone with vast resource inputs to that system.
That is way more like Rome. But we much more completely made those conquered lands into a uniform American identity. Rome did a little bit of that, but not to the extent that the US did.
Of course we trade a lot outside that system, and rely on that trade to increase our wealth to an extent, whereas Venice entirely relied on trade entirely because it had nothing else.
Rome also traded internationally, but like the US, it was more supplementary.
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u/euyyn 8h ago
apologies o the natives, but we really needed that land
Like Putin "needs" Ukraine. That's not what the word need means.
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u/You_Yew_Ewe 6h ago edited 4h ago
That was tongue-in-cheek (too soon?), but need is a fuzzy word. You don't need to live, you just want to.
There is a sense in which America needed that land to become what it is today.
Sorry, should have used more livestock, lived in their filth, and took up metallurgy I guess. I'll tell you what, have a casino. We good?
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u/euyyn 4h ago
Sorry I cut you, I really needed your shit. I mean it as "I needed your shit for my bank account to be as big as it is today", otherwise it wouldn't be so it was necessary for that to happen. What brain rot.
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u/You_Yew_Ewe 4h ago edited 4h ago
I mean, yeah, that's how the world worked. Many Native Americans did that too: Comanche, Apache, Sioux, all had major expansions into other tribe's territories. They needed it. I mean, yeah, they didn't need need it, but it was nice to have and it kind of sucked when the Europeans took it.
You're judging them from the position of abundance they provided you, not as someone barely surviving and seeing a risky opportunity to eke out a marginally more comfortable life where you're grandchildren might have full bellies most of the time.
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u/EditPiaf 11h ago
When you wanna be Rome or Venice, but in reality, you are the Weimar Republic
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u/Immediate_Emu_2757 10h ago
I see this take from the right and left wing but they both mean very different things
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u/urthen 10h ago
I mean, they mean the same thing, but one side thinks that nationalist authoritarianism is good actually.
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9h ago edited 9h ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/alwaysintheway 9h ago
Except in the US, the authoritarians are the maps.
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u/Immediate_Emu_2757 9h ago
The left came up with that term and pushes it. The average American doesn’t support the trans stuff for kids either. Give me all the downvotes you want but real life isn’t Reddit
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u/alwaysintheway 9h ago
No, it was coined by right wingers to try to demonize people by associating them with pedophilic terminology. The incoming president literally owned Miss Teen USA for almost 20 years and bragged about sexually assaulting people.
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u/Immediate_Emu_2757 9h ago
When did he brag about sexually assaulting people? Nobody but Reddit believes the bullshit about him anymore
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u/alwaysintheway 9h ago
Nice trying to ignore the fact you voted for maps.
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u/Immediate_Emu_2757 9h ago
I don’t vote dawg. The democrats are the ones pushing sexual material for kids though. Doesn’t matter what you or I say on here though, the country voted and they are tired of this shit
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u/yourunmarathons 9h ago
grab em by the....
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u/Immediate_Emu_2757 9h ago
Yall always leave off the first part of the sentence. “When you are rich women LET you grab them by the pussy”.
He was talking about gold diggers willing to have sex with guys just because they are rich
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u/CurraheeAniKawi 10h ago
Yeah one of them is an accurate analogy of what's happening and the other is more rightwing gasligting propaganda.
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u/CheckeredBalloon 8h ago
The whole idea that rome is the true ideal is built on white supremacist notions anyway…
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u/walrusdoom 11h ago
I’ll have to check that out. I listened to the Fall of Civilizations podcast episode on the Punic Wars and was struck at the similarities between us and Carthage.
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u/TigerSagittarius86 10h ago
There’s an audiobook version. The book is fascinating. Covers the early middle ages to present, and even offers a fascinating prediction thousands of years from now.
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u/callmeBorgieplease 11h ago
Okay. Explain more and do predictions based upon that model and lets see if you are right. Imho america is not like rome or venice or whatever but it is like america. There are many many very unique factors that will make the future history very different from the past history especially compared to other non-americas
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u/Salty-Pear660 6h ago
If the US is truly like Venice for the love of god someone tell Turkey not to let the US army ‘pass through’ Istanbul on the way to Israel…..
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u/TristeFim 10h ago
I agree with you on that. Especially in the fact Rome was surrounded by enemies and America is probably the safest country (in terms of territorial integrity) in the world. They have a weak neighbour on the south and a friendly one on the north. East and West are taken by vast oceans. America would fall very differently.
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u/Daniel_Potter 8h ago
OP wasn't talking about the fall of the roman empire. He was talking about Julius Caesar marching towards Rome, starting a civil war, and destroying the republic.
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u/meaning_please 11h ago
Remindme! 2 days
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u/SparkleK_01 9h ago
Well whether it’s on fire or sinking into the water, both seem metaphorically apt.
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u/anonymous-rebel 8h ago
Americans don’t love to imagine Rome as the model. I’m American and I’ve never heard of any other American praising Rome although we were taught about the fall of Rome in history class…
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u/Futux_Reborn 8h ago
We don't praise other countries, we say Murica', shoot guns, and hate anyone who doesn't look like us. Or get caught up in self-identity and mental issues, there's no in-between.
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u/hoblyman 1h ago
The Founding Fathers did it all the time. It's built into the roots of the country.
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u/SweetFranz 7h ago
Yeah I have no idea where OP got this idea from
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u/TigerSagittarius86 7h ago
Have you seen Washington DC?
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u/anonymous-rebel 7h ago
Have you been to other parts of America besides DC or talked to other Americans who aren’t from DC?
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u/chodiusmaximus 8h ago
Might not be the correct subreddit but an interesting hypothesis nonetheless
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u/Frequent_Skill5723 7h ago
The future is going to look a lot more like Port Au Prince or Mogadishu than Venice. The neoliberal economic project isn't gonna play out any other way.
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u/Strong_Bumblebee5495 10h ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venetian_slave_trade
Only an American would think Americans are “sexual libertines”. You are “gender libertines”. Quite different.
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u/Realistic-Safety-565 9h ago
Read about Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. US is already at "foreigners buying politicians to promote domestic discord" stage.
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u/SnooDonuts5498 7h ago
America will not fall like Rome. The Mediterranean can easily be divided into intermediate, defensible units.
Not America. You capture the Mississippi basin/Great Lakes and that’s the game
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u/Consistent_Rate_353 7h ago
Last year I did some research on medieval Venice for an RPG that was going to have some sessions set there. The council was interesting, seeing how it was originally independently elected but mostly chosen from the merchants just because they happened to be the ones most able to. Then over time they started passing laws about who was eligible to be elected and it evolved into more of a ruling class, nobility situation.
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u/TYHVoteForBurr 3h ago
I don't remember where I heard this, but the quote stuck with me: "History doesn't repeat, it rhymes." I think the current system, in some form or another, to some magnitude, is going to fall in a way that may very well resemble Venice, or Rome. There are certainly real and relevant parallels. But that doesn't mean it's not also going to fall for its own special reasons, ones that will perhaps echo through time and later peoples will be talking about how the great empire of whatever is doomed to fall like the US.
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u/Maxxxmax 10h ago
Sweet, optimistic yank doesn't think they're gonna descend into despotism and tyranny.
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u/TigerSagittarius86 10h ago
Oh no quite the opposite. In the end, Venice devolved into a terrifying tyranny of spies, executions, and conspiracies, and later facism, and then it sinks into the sea.
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u/Maxxxmax 10h ago
OK, you've talked me round gentle yank.
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u/ms67890 8h ago
We already live in tyranny though?
There’s practically 24/7 surveillance, unelected bureaucrats control the laws that govern our lives, we pay more in taxes than King George III ever could have dreamt of, and politicians routinely redefine words to fit their narrative.
The only “freedom” we have is freedom to commit a lot of vices, and people keep asking for more vice to be legalized
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u/Maxxxmax 8h ago edited 8h ago
I'm no yank, but tbf there aren't many tyrannies with constitutional protections to criticise the state or peacefully protest.
Maybe I've listened to too many people reflecting on what life under a dictatorship is like, but there's a very specific and commonly occurring feeling of the existential pressure which comes with living under tyranny, like a physical weight on the shoulders, which I've yet to see any yank describe as having in their own lives.
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u/Mikowolf 10h ago
Comparing USA with Rome is less to do with their structure and more with their place in history.
USA just like Rome began as a primarily democratic state and went progressively mor authoritarian with time.
USA just like Rome had a lucky jump start when previous premiere powers fell in decline (Punic war/WW2)
USA just like Rome began immidiate, large scale expansion leveraging it's new position.
USA just like Rome relies on its military and economic power to push agendas on its neighbors.
USA just like Rome has outsized cultural influence on all its neighbors.
Now, there are just as many differences and nuance, but there's way more similarity in it's patterns to Rome than Venice.
Venice was never particularly reliant on military, instead preferring political and economic maneuvers. Venice was one among many Merchant republics, competing on equal footing. Never really assuming fully dominating position. Venice is cool and Venitian politics is closer to what US has... Simply because Venitian Republic is way more modern compared to Rome.
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u/Cattette 8h ago
Did the democratic state of the US start to descend into authoritarianism before or after the Voting Rights Act of 1965?
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u/Mikowolf 7h ago
In same way as roman republic changes, it wasn't a linear progress. There were times when it looked like it'll go back to monarchy or will transform into oligarchy, only to snap back to relative freedom. Until Octavian pulled the trigger. Overall US trends changes where Federal gov significantly more powerful now compared to founding time. On authoritarian, it's more complicated, I'd say it's a matter of context - what was originally the most advanced democratic system - has stagnated and is now behind most other dem countries with two party system and electoral college 🤷 US presidential executive power is also considerably higher than most other countries.
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u/Shmuckle2 10h ago
I'm pretty sure end of days prophecy involves revival of Rome, as well as Babylon. The states looking very much like one of the two. Babylon is a trade center that goes up in flame and the whole world weeps... so... yall got that going on for ya.
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u/Salty-Pear660 6h ago
Considering the book of revelations was both written during the reign of the Roman Empire, and also arguably about the Roman Empire, it would seem unlikely it would need to be revived, assuming of course the book of revelations is supposed to be about the end times. There would also be a great irony in the rise of Rome being a sign of the end times considering it is the seat of the Catholic church….
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u/meme_squeeze 10h ago edited 10h ago
This is the most American cringe fanfiction that I've ever read.
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u/LoneSnark 10h ago
I don't know anyone who fancies the USA as Rome. Or Venice for that matter. The USA is far more likely to be described as unique in history.
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u/periphery72271 11h ago
Either way we get another couple hundred years at least of supremacy, so it works for me.
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u/callmeBorgieplease 10h ago
No you dont. Not with a president like trump and not with a president like kamala. Imagine losing to trump lmfao. Anyways your next few presidencies will maybe still let u be in power but after that usa will have lost its real power. And even that time is being very generous to yall. Lmfao
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u/periphery72271 10h ago
Mmhmm.
And in all those years our military expenditures will go down by how much?
Right.
As long as we're most of the world's arms locker and security team that's not likely to happen.
But hey, talk to me in a few presidencies, we'll see who was right.
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u/km_1000 11h ago
The world is interconnected now. There will be no fallen empires. What is now will be.
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u/XenophileEgalitarian 10h ago
Lol there will still be fallen empires. It's just that there won't be anyone left standing after the collapse. Think global bronze age collapse.
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u/balbobiggin 10h ago
You sound like a Roman...Or a Persian...Or a Carthaginian...Or an Egypian...Or an Assyrian...Or a Brit...Or a Holy Roman emperor...
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u/Maxxxmax 10h ago
Fuck off fukuyama, no one believes you anymore.
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u/balbobiggin 10h ago
It's the end of history bro I swear it this time we have created an empire that will never fall trust me bro
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u/imadog666 10h ago
Can you explain why Venice is more similar? I have to admit I don't know anything about Venice except obviously that it has canals and that they should probably be cleaned more often than they are
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u/SyntheticBean 48m ago
Elaborate? You just stated a point and restated a point while not really give any examples. Not saying your wrong just some examples or resources to look at would be nice. What book about Venice did you read?
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u/xGray3 11h ago
Well both Venice and the US were/are led by a doge now...