The Sack of Washington is an excerpt from Cullen Murphy’s Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America in which he argues that increasing privitization is akin to ancient Rome’s increasing corruption. I don’t agree with him, but he does share some interesting history:
A little more than 50 years ago, the Oxford historian Geoffrey de Ste. Croix, a radical thinker and formidable classicist, decided to take a close look at the change in connotation over five centuries of the Latin word suffragium, which originally meant “voting tablet” or “ballot.” That change, he concluded, illustrated something fundamental about Roman society and its “inner political evolution.”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.”