Imperial Washington

A kind of privatization, Murphy argues, occurred in ancient Rome as well -- and at least one highly respected historian believes it did the empire in.

That historian is Yale's Ramsay MacMullen, author of "Corruption and the Decline of Rome." MacMullen's argument (even in Murphy's condensed version) doesn't lend itself to easy summary. But in essence, he says that for government to be effective, its will must be transmitted with minimum friction or "misdirection" -- and that the insertion of private interests into the equation inevitably dilutes effectiveness.

"Everyone says, 'Yeah, I'll do more or less as I'm told, but I'll make a buck as I do it,' " is how MacMullen puts it when reached at his Connecticut home. The result, over the empire's final hundred years or so, was that Rome's "force could no longer be focused."

The differences between Rome and the United States are great, the professor cautions. But Murphy, he thinks, is careful not to push his analogies too hard and has identified "points of similarity" that are well worth contemplating.

"I agree with him. They look bad for America," MacMullen says.

'It Invites You to Imagine'

There's plenty more to see on the "Are We Rome?" tour. But it's time to wrap it up.

Sure it's tempting to linger near the Zero Milestone marker on the Ellipse, the symbolic place from which American roads are measured. This little-known equivalent to the "all roads lead to Rome" milestone is a great place to talk about how living in "the most powerful city in the world" produces what Murphy calls "a form of myopia" that makes one underestimate the rest of the world.

It would be useful, as well, to hear more about fundamental ways the two capitals differ. A huge one, for Murphy -- "you just can't stress it enough" -- is that the United States remains a democracy. It is not yet "a place where you have a million people on subsidy and one thousand elite patricians living in their gardens."

"Maybe we'll get there someday," he says. For now, however, "there's still a big tiller called vox populi that can make the ship go one way or another."

Speaking of differences: Murphy has one last stop he wants to make.

It's at the East Building of the National Gallery, and it has to do with something he's referred to already: The difficulty of observing, in a city as new as Washington, the humbling effects of time.

He walks a few yards to the right of the entrance, to a particularly sharp-edged corner in the marble wall. It's unusual enough so that the human impulse is to reach out and touch it. As a result, it is worn and discolored in a way that reminds him of the paving stones in Rome's Via Sacra, which are filled with ruts created, over centuries, by the wheels of carts.

"It invites you to imagine," Cullen Murphy says, "what's going to be happening here."