INTRODUCTION:
EMPIRE
Jerry Pournelle
We live in a modern and enlightened age: surely we are done with empire forever? Stories of future empires are no more than fanciful tales, stories for amusement, the worst form of escapist literature.
Perhaps. And yet—
Do understand. I do not despise “escapist” literature. As C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien once observed, it is jailers who are most opposed to escape. Good stories well told are reward enough in themselves. There is “escape” enough in this book.
However, we may also hope to learn something worth knowing. Humanity is a young species. If we are clever, and have a little luck, our line can last for billions more years, and settle the planets of distant stars.
This is no flight of fancy. We could today build ships to take us to the nearest stars. The ships wouldn’t be cheap: they’d have to be travelling space colonies, self-contained worlds. They’d need energy sources, meaning we’d have to solve the fusion problem, but that’s merely a matter of money and engineering; we don’t need any new science.
The journey would take hundreds of years. The spacefarers who leave Earth would not live to see the new stars close up. For all that, we could do it, and many now reading this could be aboard that first starship.
We can do that today. What will we do in a hundred years? In a thousand, when we will have spread through the solar system and space colonies are common?
Arthur Clarke said it first: If mankind is to survive, then for all but a very brief part of our history the word “ship” will mean “space ship.” We will spread through space. We will build a colony on the Moon: if we had a government of courage and imagination we would have that in time to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ voyages of discovery. As it is, it will take a bit longer; but we will go back to the Moon. We will settle other moons, and asteroids, and the planets; and we will go to the stars. Where mankind goes, government goes.
It is no idle thing, then, to think about what forms of government we will take to the stars. We in this enlightened age think we know; but do we? We are, after all, no smarter than our ancestors. We know more, but that’s quite a different thing—and we have forgotten much that we had best relearn before we pay dearly for what they knew and we don’t.
Imperial Stars examines the future of government: of wars and rumors of wars; of tumults and revolts; and of peace and rule and law and order among diversities of peoples and cultures and wealth. Through history the characteristic government that includes a multitude of races and peoples and cultures has been empire.
Empires take many forms. The Athenians established an empire and held it through their Golden Age of Pericles: through the age of Athenian democracy. Their suppression of Mitylene, and the siege and destruction of the neutral city of Melos, are among the most cynical and ruthless acts of history; for when the people of Melos pleaded that the gods would favor the cause of justice, and all the world knew that Melos was in the right, the Athenians said:
Of the gods we believe, and of men we know that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can . . . you know as well as we that right, as this world goes, is only in question between equals in power; for the strong do as they will, and the weak suffer what they must.
It is only in fairy tales that democracies always act from the purest motives, and never have imperial ambitions. Of course the democracy may not survive. The Athenian democracy was snuffed out and her empire dismembered after Sparta’s victories; we do not know what would have happened to the democracy if Athens had won. We do know that the Roman Republic gained an empire—and then became one, complete with emperor. Fletcher Pratt begins his justly renowned history of decisive warfare thus: “The Greeks had to go imperial to survive.” We like to believe that western civilization has more freedom of choice.
The forms of empire change. The day of empire has not ended.
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Empire. The very name holds power, even in this republican land and age. It conjures images of flags and drums, burnished shields and glittering banners; trumpets and courts and ceremonies: of Queen Empress Victoria and her captains and kings; of Claudius the Idiot, who became a god; of Alexander of Macedon, master of the world at thirty-two and dead a year later; of Charlemagne and Roland, Don John of Austria at Lepanto, Canute the Great, Constantine’s fiery cross in the sky.
It conjures memories of past glories. Recently I stood at the limes at Arnsburg: the outer limits of the Roman Empire at its greatest extent. As I stood in the watchtower and stared out into the German forest I fancied I could hear the distant sound of horns, the measured tramp of the legions, the clatter of hooves of the cavalry patrols. Behind me lay plowed fields and cities; ahead, to this day, is forest and waste. The borders of empire were the boundaries of civilization.
The late Herman Kahn once argued that the natural state of mankind is empire, and the natural size of an empire is the Earth: that empires grow until they encounter something capable of resisting them; and the only institution capable of resisting for generations is another empire. Republics by contrast are short-lived, and either succumb to the pressure of the empire on their borders, or transform themselves into empire in order to remain independent.
There is much essential truth in these observations. For most of history, most of mankind has either lived under imperial rule; or has wanted to; or has been locked in struggle with empire. It is true today. In this, the supposed age of democracy, both China and the Soviet Union have imperial governments. Both are expanding; between them they encompass more than half the populations of the world. Nor are things so stable at home. Many books, written by liberal and conservative alike, note the drift of the United States toward imperial forms. The President of the United States holds, with his red and gold telephones, control of more power than was ever held by any man throughout history.
Blessing or curse, savior or destroyer: the shadow of empire falls across the Earth even in this enlightened age.
But empire may be many things.
“Saith Darius the King of Kings, the Great King: By the favor of Ahuramazda these are the nations I seized beyond the boundaries of Persia; I ruled over them; they bore tribute to me; what was said to them by me, that they did; my laws held them firm. Media, Elam, Parthia, Asia, Bactria, Sogdiona, Chorasmia, Drangiana, Arnchosia, Sattagydia, Gandara, Sind, Armygian Scythians, Scythians with pointed caps, Babylonia, Assyria, Arnbiz, Egypt, Armenia, Cappadocia, Sardis, Ionia, Scythians who are across the sea, Skudia, petasos-wearing Ionians, Libyans, Ethiopians, men of Maka, Carians.
“Saith Darius the King of Kings: Much which was ill done, that I made good. Provinces were in turmoil, one man smiting another. By the favor of Ahuramazda this I brought about, that the one does not smite the other at all, each one is in his place. My law, of that they feel fear, so that the stronger does not smite nor destroy the weak.”
This was no idle boast. Darius the Great King had brought more than a quarter of humanity under his rule. This was Empire, the greatest that had ever existed, and Darius sat supreme at the top of it. His word was law; his messengers carried it everywhere. So he boasts, and so it was.
More important is what Darius boasts. Contrast his inscription with one found in Elam by Darius’ predecessor:
“I Assur-bani-pal, Great King of All Lands, took the carved furniture from these chambers; I took the horses and mules with gold-adorned bits from the stables. I burned with fire the bronze pinnacles of the temple; I carried off to Assyria the god of Elam with all his riches. I carried off the statues of thirty-two kings, together with the mighty stone bulls that guarded the gates. Thus have I entirely laid waste to this land and slain those who dwelt in it. I have laid their tombs open to the sun and have carried off the bones of those who did not venerate Assur and Ishtar, my lords—leaving the ghosts of these dead forever without repose, without offerings of food and water.”
Assur-bani-pal has come to conquer and destroy. Those not of Assyrian lineage may expect no more than slavery and death. Contemporary accounts say that lands the Assyrians passed over suffered “the death of the earth.” Assyrian armies left little but waste. Not so the Persians. Darius the Great King has come not to destroy, but to rule; and by his rule shall all benefit, Medes, Persians, Scythians, and Ionians alike. It is the difference between mere conquest and Empire; and long after the King of Kings, Great King, was no more than blowing dust, the memory of his empire remains and flourishes. Cyrus the Great found no mean place in the Bible; and to this day there are those in Iran who wish he or one like him would come again.
The Imperial theme runs long through Western history. We first glimpse it in the Hittites, those strange Indo-European peoples who settled in what is now Turkey. They brought iron weapons into the Bronze Age; they also brought the notion of Empire: the remarkable idea that Hittites and Hurrians and Luwians and Carians might all retain their own gods and customs and kings, yet all serve the same Emperor. They had other odd notions: they believed that kings and emperors were not exempt from right and wrong; that restrained by no man they yet ought to be restrained by law.
We see that notion again with the Achaemenians: Cyrus the Great and his descendants, who forged what we in the West call the Persian Empire. Though their history was written by their enemies, the people of Aryana, Iran, land of the Aryans, come off well in both the Hebrew and Greek accounts. Persian nobles were taught to ride, shoot the bow, and speak the truth. Cruelty was no part of their heritage. Neither was racism: the Persian Empire brought in as citizens Aryan and Semite alike, and if all were subject to the King of Kings, Great King, they were not merely subject alike, but subjects under their own laws and customs.
Alexander of Macedon marched the length and breadth of Persia. He married the Great King’s wife and daughters. He defeated the Great King in every battle, until the Great King’s own guards slaughtered the man who had once ruled a quarter of the world. Alexander married ten thousand of his Macedonian soldiers to Persian wives. And, of course, in the end the Persian Empire conquered both Alexander and Macedonia. What matter that a Macedonian sat on the Peacock Throne? He was addressed as King of Kings, Great King; scribes and scholars advised him; the Ten Thousand Immortals with golden apples on the hilts of their spears guarded him; and woe to the sturdy Macedonian peasant who dared approach the Emperor as any Macedonian once had the right to approach his King. The King of the Macedonians was but a man. He who sat on the Peacock Throne was King of Kings, Great King . . .
The Persian throne endured to this generation; and who can say that the ayatollahs will last forever?
And finally we come to the Empire that shaped all our lives: Rome. Rome, whose citizenship was so valuable that Paul of Tarsus had only to say “Civis Romanus sum” to be freed of the jurisdiction of the provincial governor and sent to very Rome for his appeal to be heard. Rome, whose peace lies through our history and legends. Rome, that gave rise to our longings for world government.
We long for world peace and order. We also prize freedom. Yet we know: enduring peace among a diversity of peoples has so far come only from empire. True, the United States has attempted a different experiment: to forge a nation of states. It is also true that the United States has been, and many think can survive only by continuing to be, a melting pot. Empire preserves diversities; democracy erases them. And it has been a long time since we heard serious talk of states’ rights in this land.
The Roman Empire was born of republican conquests. Conquest and external enemies alike required that the old Roman army of the citizenry in arms be replaced with professional soldiers: a standing army of legions.
The Emperor was born of the Roman Army. When there are no legions there is no need for an Emperor. Yet the very nature of empire breeds the need for soldiers: how else can the empire be held together? And the larger the government, the more likely its need for soldiers: we may write constitutions for a world government, but if we ever achieve one in reality history says that it will be imperial.
History can be wrong. Perhaps we will evolve new forms of government; or find new ways to make old ones work. It certainly can do no harm to speculate.
Herewith fact and fiction about governments and empires of the future.
Jerry E. Pournelle
Hollywood
Spring, 1986