Headline, August15, 2013

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Ramsay MacMullen's subject is ''the diverting of governmental force, its misdirection.'' In other words, how does it come about that the word and writ of a  powerful central government lose all vector and force?

Serious challenges to any society can come from outside factors  -environmental catastrophe, foreign invasion. Privatization is fundamentally an internal factor. Such deficiency of purpose occurs in any number of ways.

It occurs whenever official positions are bought and sold. It occurs when people must pay before officials will act, and it occurs if payments also determine how they will act. And it can occur anytime public tasks  -the collection of taxes, the quartering of troops, the management of projects- are lodged in private hands,  no matter how honest the intention or efficient the arrangement, because private interests and public interests tend to diverge over time.

Let's start with how the Roman system worked during the many centuries when it actually did. By modern standards there were not a great many officials or bureaucrats in Rome until late in the empire; the administration and the well-being of the capital and all other cities and towns depended on the talents and the largesse of the upper classes. A memorable passage in Jerome Carcopino's Daily Life in Ancient Rome describes what happened every morning soon after Romans woke up:

All around the city clients visited their patrons, and each was alert to the other's needs. On these rare mornings, when you find yourself enjoying a leisurely breakfast at a posh hotel, do stop to enjoy the breakfast convergences at tables all around you as an elite remnant of the old Roman dynamic. But to get Rome right you'd have to extend the scene to every suburban Hotel. every neighborhood diner; you'd have to see these relationships governing every business transaction, every trip to the doctor's office, every college application.

The patron-client relationship was so pervasive that it helps illuminate not only Rome's actual social architecture but also, frequently, its way of conducting foreign affairs. The term ''client state'' came into being for a reason. As Julius Caesar fought his way through Gaul, he brought tribal chieftains over to his side and described their professional loyalty to him  -and thus to Rome- as those of a client to a patron.

Patronage spilled over into communal adornment; it was in fact inseparable from it. The Roman magnates competed with one another to endow the capital with improvements. Rome's wealthiest class, the senatorial aristocracy, constituted by one estimate two-thousandth of 1% of the population; then came the equestrian class, with perhaps a tenth of a percent. Collectively these people owned almost  everything. To correlate just one modern day example : The world at large, like the Americans, are well aware of the nation's worsening income inequality.

In a broad sweep, Those at the top 1% earn nearly 50 times more a year than those in the bottom 20%. The average C.E.O earns more than 400 times as much as a typical worker. In Rome, the gap between the elite and everyone was on the order of 5,000 or 10,000 to 1. The expectation in Rome was that affluent citizens, as individuals rather than as taxpayers, should provide for community needs. Did the city require another aqueduct? New roads? A stadium? Some magnate would provide it  -in return, implicitly:

For a measure of public power, and, of course, for ample public recognition Inscriptions on countless marble fragments attest to such generosity, an early version of   ''Brought to you by.....................''

The Roman system was a remarkable contrivance. But it contained the seeds of its own....destruction. For one thing, it fostered an expectation that ''others''  would always provide. If public amenities came into being through private munificence -

And if these in turn serve to enhance private glory  -then why should the public pay for their upkeep? This way of doing business  -''did not work for the common benefit of the overall urban fabric,'' writes one historian, much less nurture a sense of common purpose and shared responsibility. And the author adds,  '' I've seen the same mind-set at work within my state, Massachusetts, in hardscrabble mill towns whose

Philanthropic founding families have departed......, where local tax payers resist the idea that support of libraries and hospitals must now rest with the community as a whole. Moreover, even at its most uncorrupted, the patronage system was greased by small considerations: ''It was a genial, oily, present-giving world,''   Ramsay McMullen wites.

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With respectful dedication : The Developed World & The Developing World.

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