Presidential Libraries and Imperial Temples

I've been thinking a lot about Rome lately - the Empire, not the miniseries (though I could watch episodes on my Continental flights). I've been toying around with an old, old idea I had (sometime in Middle School) about the nature of large empires to go through relatively predictable cycles on their path through history towards their ultimate demise. This was, as far as I can remember (and prepare the eye roll dear friends), the first idea I had for a Ph.D. dissertation, sometime around 8th grade. The idea was to track the great (Western) civilizations - Babylonia, Persia, Greece, Rome, some combination of France and Germany, Spain, England - and make sweeping generalized comparisons (as is my wont), ultimately to shed light on thoughts about American strategy for today and our collective future. It was an idea, I realized a little later (I think - not so sure on causality on this one) that Asimov had played with in the Foundation novels - a fun little parlor trick.

As I think about Rome, I imagine Rome c. 200 CE, moving away from the Pax Romana and towards a long decline, highlighted by prosperity and occasional imperial pride but defined by decadence. I wonder if the Muslim world - as it was for Rome's inheritors, the Byzantines - will be our Germanic tribes poring over the Alps and laying waste to our countryside. I wonder if, centuries from now, the Eastern Coast of the United States will fall, but the West Coast, once a colonial backwater, will thrive for another millennium before succumbing to a different enemy. For however much hope I have in Obama - and, let's be honest, the news makes the excitement of Election Day feel like a lot more than three months ago - it's hard not to feel like the stakes are too great, that charting our path between the straits might be too difficult. I, of course, lack any historical perspective on how it feels to move through crisis, and must remind myself that even the great period of Roman hegemony was defined by one sick and demented emperor after the next, that Nero makes GWB look good and Caligula makes Clinton look like a prude.

But it was on this note, as I was lying in bed this morning reading this fascinating and generative article in TIME about Bush and other Presidents post-presidency, that the parallel struck me. The article mentions, almost in passing:

But it is the rare modern President who retires to his farm and his library, unless by library we mean a multimillion-dollar monument to his vital role in world history.

After Julius Caesar's death he was deified by the Senate - literally, turned into a god. Tamar and I visited the ruins of one of his temples, placed prominently in the Roman forum near the sacred hearth of the Vestal Virgins (כאילו - להדיל - קדש הקדשים). But as the name Caesar shifted in meaning, from a last name to a title that would be in usage still two millennia into the future, so too did the act of deifying the emperor after his death, an act that, to the dying Republic, was anathema. Becoming a god in the Roman pantheon upon one's death brought Rome close to the theocracy of Egypt, yes, but it did something far more dangerous - it assumed that, merely by having acceded to the purple robe of the imperium, one was somehow merited to greatness. Kind of like a Presidential library, implying somehow that you are worthy of a museum, of a body of thought, of an archive by succeeding in a process to get to a position, not by the degree to which you navigated that position well. Once, American Presidents were defined by their actions and history was allowed to play a role in our judgments. Once, if you merely guided the nation through four or eight years of decent prosperity without any major historical hiccups that are, for the most part, outside of our control, then you were sent off into the rest of your career as a Roman consul during the heyday of the Republic. This was a world where Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun were, perhaps, more famous and important than the man who sat in the Oval Office. But that world is gone, a victim of our national success and phenomenal wealth.

And so I wonder if, someday, the ruins of presidential libraries will be like the ruins of imperial temples - testaments to futile attempts at immortalizing the mortal, at lending credence and import to an office instead of the actions of its holder.