Protests against international business are nothing new. Probably the wittiest, and certainly the most brutal, took place long before the first trashing of a Starbucks, way back in the early 1st century BC. This was a period when the Roman Republic, lacking a bureaucracy of its own, had opted to privatise the provincial tax-system — and huge conglomerates, complete with share options, board directors and AGMs, duly reaped spectacular profits. A spectacular whirlwind too, for in 89 BC, the entire province of Asia rose in revolt, and a year later, when the Roman commissioner was taken prisoner, he suffered a memorably hideous fate. ‘The Romans,’ pronounced his judge, ‘have only one abiding motive: greed.’ A ruling perfectly reflected in the sentence: for molten gold was poured down the commissioner’s throat, thereby fittingly serving to choke him to death on his own profits.
Although Stanley Bing, who has written an entire book comparing ancient Rome to a modern-day multinational, does mention this anecdote, the fact that he gives it only a single sentence, and even then manages to get the name of the victim wrong, powerfully indicates where his sympathies lie. Like God, he is very much on the side of the big battalions, and no one, of course, in their day, had bigger battalions than Rome. Indeed, Bing’s enthusiasm for the ancient world’s ultimate predator is right up there with Machiavelli’s, which is only fitting, since his book is essentially an attempt to provide a Wall Street CEO with a modern-day equivalent of The Prince. The result is a fast-paced, often funny and occasionally mordant re-casting of Roman history as a business parable, complete with world-conquering executives, stratospheric profits, and ultimate take-over by hairy corporate raiders. The lessons of business and of classical history, Bing cheerfully insists, are pretty much identical:
From the earliest Roman enclave of mud huts on the banks of a little backwater called the Tiber to the announcement that Apple is moving to an architecture based on the Intel chip, the key to eternal youth is the ability to transform.
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