Megalopolis’s bad history

The Roman Republic is a lazy analogy for the modern political condition.

Though the refrain “Drain the swamp!” might be a favourite of Donald Trump’s, Cicero made the rhetorical overture first, circa 43 BC. I am glad this has not been made known to Francis Ford Coppola, whose recent film Megalopolis finds the denouement of the Roman republic a perfect allegory for the fate of modern America. The weight of this metaphor may have driven him over the precipice.

Megalopolis transcribes the story of Catiline – an ambitious politician who tried and failed to seize the reins of the Roman republic from the consul Cicero – on to New Rome (a city that looks suspiciously like New York). In Coppola’s reimagining, Catiline is no pernicious demagogue but a visionary whose genius is hobbled by the narrow-minded patrician establishment. The film’s antagonist, the mayor Cicero – subtle – represents these conservative men, hamstrung by the past, staring at history, begging it to stop.

Citizens of New Rome read Tempus magazine (Novus Statesman hasn’t yet reached this universe); Madison Square Garden is now a hippodrome; people wear gladiator sandals and are fond of quoting Marcus Aurelius. Over the four decades and roughly $120m (£90m) it took to realise this project, Coppola arrived at one firm artistic conclusion: subtext is for cowards.

Megalopolis seeks to warn by way of analogy: America is just as vulnerable to the throes of populist mania as the republic was to the braying mob. The stifling conservatism of elite institutions clears the path for a charismatic political leader, who will marshal the disparate anxieties of the people and plunge the nation into a dictatorship. If we fail to heed these lessons – a tale of elite avarice, truculent plebeians, conservatives against progress – then the democratic fate of the West hangs in the balance. O tempora…

Rome’s imperium, at its widest extent in AD 117, stretched from Africa to Britain, Iberia to Persia. Far more impressive is that it has reached from the marbled halls of Rome in 63 BC to the Swiss Cottage Odeon on a Saturday afternoon in 2024. Rome is the favourite landing zone for the auteur in search of a heavy-handed metaphor; the ancient world a mandatory cipher for modern anxieties.

An early version of The Great Gatsby was titled Trimalchio in West Egg, transfiguring Jay Gatsby into the Roman author Petronius’s symbol of decadence and Latinate nouveau-riche. Last year a BBC documentary, Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator, made the contemporary preoccupation with the republic’s demise even more literal. Tracking the rise and fall of one of the most famous Romans, Labour’s Shami Chakrabarti said: “I think the Caesar story really is a wake-up call.” When the Senate was burned in 52 BC by an angry horde, it was, according to Professor Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, an episode “as terrifying as the spectacle of the Capitol being invaded by an angry mob under Trump”.

The West has made Rome the protagonist of history. It’s not hard to understand why. First, the US is a young country that has to find grounding in another’s distant past. So closely did the founding fathers model their nation on the strictures of the republic that Washington DC looks like a Potemkin Rome (Gore Vidal’s grandfather once said it will “make wonderful ruins”). The Capitol derives its name from Rome’s own Capitoline Hill; Congress’s upper chamber is called the Senate. There is a Roman-ness baked into America’s DNA.

Second, examination of the classics has formed the basis of elite schooling for centuries: the study of Virgil and Ovid was a necessary condition for the development of “gentlemanly” and “liberal” education, an area of expertise for 17th-century philosophers like John Locke and 20th-century poets such as Seamus Heaney. Boris Johnson – more a self-conscious philhellene than a son of Rome – is fond of rattling off lines from the Iliad. Elite cultural production is groaning under the weight of classical reference because the elite world-view has been forged by it.

Accounting for a trickle-down effect, we are left here: Tempus magazine as a visual gag, Mayor Cicero the patrician stick-in-the-mud, the decadent and drunken elite partying in togas across Megalopolis’s scene-scape. There is perhaps no other product of history – except Nazi Germany (which also features in Megalopolis, of course) – invoked as lazy shorthand for the modern political condition more frequently than Rome.

The problem naturally arises that analogies are rather bad explanatory devices. First, a world with institutions such as Nato and the European Union, replete with Enlightenment values, does not resemble the one that preceded such concepts. The bloody battlefields of Latium and the classical forum – structurally and ethically foreign propositions to today – are unhelpful places to seek modern morality plays.

But the one thing worse than a badly rendered analogy is a deterministic one: rather than Megalopolis offering a warning, perhaps it simply reinforces a teleology. If decline and fall is written into the nature of Rome, then in forcing the view that its politics are identikit to our own, we might just be encouraging our own demise.

[See also: The battle after Brexit]