Athens versus Rome

On the website of the Dogs Trust, it says it was formed 123 years ago.  While this is impressive, it is somewhat misleading.  The National Canine Defence League (NCDL) was formed in the late Victorian era, not the Dogs Trust - that rebranding occurred in 2003.  Also the NCDL began life in 1891 at the first Crufts - now I know that calendar years can overlap actual years (King George III reigned from 1760 to 1820 but that constituted 59 years and 96 days) but as Crufts on its own website refuses to delineate the date beyond '1891' but this year's Crufts took place in March, so unless there has been a drastic change in scheduling over the past century and a quarter and in the absence of countervailing evidence, the dogs charity was founded 124 years ago, though why this (mis)information needs be on the home page (instead of the e.g. 'background' page) is another matter.
It throws me back to an article Joe Klein did on Time magazine's backpage.  He had come across Harold Macmillan's advice that Britain "should play Athens to America's Rome," though like Voltaire's "I disagree with what you say but defend to the death your right to say it," Macmillan may never have said it, as I cannot find reference to when, where or to whom he said it.  The former British prime minister did say, "these Americans represent the new Roman empire and we Britons, like the Greeks of old, must teach them how to make it go." and to Richard Crossman, we "are Greeks in this American empire. You will find the Americans much as the Greeks found the Romans—great big, vulgar, bustling people, more vigorous than we are and also more idle, with more unspoiled virtues but also more corrupt. We must run AFHQ* [Allied Forces HeadQuarters] as the Greek slaves ran the operations of the Emperor Claudius."
Anyway, like John Bolton (or Mr Pastry Face as cartoonist Steve Bell labelled him), the cantankerous George W Bush US ambassador to  the United Nations, Klein took umbrage at Macmillan's alleged both-ways patronising observation.  Mr Pastry Face fumed that 'flyover country' thought it could knock off 'rough colonial edges' through self-perceived 'superior suaveness'.  Klein, the author of Primary Colors (writing under a pseudonym, it was a close critique of Bill Clinton's first presidential election campaign) and infinitely more urbane than the Dubaya appointee, took issue on historical and geopolitical grounds.  His irritation burning on the page, he said that the roles should be reversed.  Britain was the Roman Empire, enforcing dominion over a quarter of the world through military means and America was Athens, a trading empire bringing civilisation and enlightenment to the known world, cultivating friendship rather than conquering others (tell that to the ancient inhabitants of Melos and the modern-day inhabitants of Grenada).
Put like that, the Dogs Trust faux pas doesn't seem so bad.  There are many American parallels with Rome - the dysfunctional political system, the overweening military - the US Navy has currently 325,000 personnel on active duty and a further 100,000 in reserve, ten times the size of the Royal Navy at the latter's height - that Eisenhower so feared the military-industrial complex, the ruthless approach to friends and foes, but above a claim to 'exceptionalism', the 'city on the hill', the final empire.  As Greece, Britain's age of geopolitical pre-eminence was over but its culture would still shine out, influencing the USA as much as the other way around and if you look at the repeated 'British invasions' of cultural, especially, musical icons, this is borne out.
Britain acquired an empire primarily to forestall others, first the French, then the Russians, finally the Germans.  This formed the basis of 'The Great Game' or, as the Russians called it, 'The Tournament of Shadows'.  It wasn't an accidental empire by any means but it came out of Palmerston's dictum "trade where possible, empire where necessary."  Rome's rise to greatness was to crush all of its rivals, where as Britain deliberately eschewed building a large standing army in the home islands and played European balance of power politics - you couldn't get further from a Roman empire if you tried.
If we are to compare Britain to Greece, one might look at other European vassals of the USA as Greek too.  The UK is Ptolemaic Egypt, heir to an old empire but much reduced and a willing collaborator with Rome.  France is Macedon, militarily proud and, with the Peloponnese under its thumb, a centre of great learning and culture in its own right.  Germany is Seleucia, driven by military reverses to be shorn of its eastern provinces and though truncated into modern-day Syria and Lebanon, still strategically important.  Spain is like Crete with a precarious economy and the Netherlands is like Rhodes, carrying so much trade in container ships that go through Rotterdam and far more gloriously in its past.  Russia is like the Carthaginian empire after the Second Punic War and America is like Rome approaching the end of the Republic but before Sulla marched on the Eternal City.  Imperfect parallels maybe but the power of Macmillan's apocryphal saying endures.