Vanity Fair has published an excerpt from Cullen Murphy’s upcoming book Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America

The excerpt traces the ways that America, much like Rome centuries ago, is privitizing government functions and what outcomes we can expect if we continue on course.

But I was really intrigued by the following two passages. Murphy notes that Geoffrey de Ste. Croix decided to trace the change in connotation over five centuries of the Latin word Suffragium which orginally meant “voting tablet” or “ballot”:

The original meaning went back to the days of the Roman Republic, which had possessed modest elements of democracy. The citizens of Rome, by means of the suffragium, could exercise their influence in electing people to certain offices. In practice, the great men of Rome controlled large blocs of votes, corresponding to their patronage networks. Over time Rome’s republican forms of government calcified into empty ritual or withered away entirely. Suffragium meaning “ballot” no longer served any real political function. But the web of patrons and clients was still the Roman system’s substructure, and in this context suffragium came to mean the pressure that could be exerted on one’s behalf by a powerful man, whether to obtain a job or to influence a court case or to secure a contract. To ask a patron for this form of intervention and to exert suffragium on behalf of a client would have been a routine social interaction.

Now stir large amounts of money into this system. It is not a great conceptual distance, Ste. Croix observes, to move from the idea of exercising suffragium because of an age-old sense of reciprocal duty to that of exercising it because doing so could be lucrative. And this, indeed, is where the future lies, the idea of quid pro quo eventually becoming so accepted and ingrained that emperors stop trying to halt the practice and instead seek to contain it by codifying it. Thus, in the fourth century, decrees are promulgated to ensure that the person seeking the quid actually delivers the quo. Before long, suffragium has changed its meaning once again. Now it refers not to the influence brought to bear but to the money being paid for it: “a gift, payment or bribe.” By empire’s end, all public transactions require the payment of money, and the pursuit of money and personal advancement has become the purpose of all public jobs.

Looking back at the change, from ballot box to cash box, Ste. Croix composes this epitaph: “Here, in miniature, is the political history of Rome.”

Murphy then looks at the simialr change in the word franchise:

The activities of government are, in effect, being franchised out. You can’t help lingering over the concept of “franchise,” wondering what a latter-day Geoffrey de Ste. Croix would make of it. Like suffragium, the word originally had to do with notions of political freedom and civic responsibility. Derived from the Old French word franc, meaning “free,” it later came to be associated with the most fundamental political freedom of all: to exercise your franchise meant to exercise your right to vote. Only much later, in the mid–20th century, did the idea of being granted “certain rights” acquire its commercial connotation: the right to market a company’s services or products, such as fried chicken or Tupperware. Today, to have a franchise on something is in effect to have control over it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 24th, 2007 at 2:28 pm and is filed under Books, Language, Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.