The man from Tagaste

This week, I finished my reading of Confessions, by St. Augustine, described as the world's first autobiography.

I will not attempt to write a book review. The book was published 1,600 years ago and I am sure that whole libraries could be filled with the commentaries already printed about it. Plus, the latter half of the book was incomprehensible to me, reminding me forcefully, in paragraph after paragraph, of the severe limitations of my personal I.Q. number.

The logical next step is to read City of God, by the same. Logical, that is, for someone of my ilk who is either completely insane, a sado-masochist or an incorrigible optimist.

Some thoughts came to my mind that I will share:

Tagaste, birthplace of St. Augustine, is in modern-day Algeria. Scarely four centuries after Augustine, that whole region of the world was conquered by Islam and has remained in its orbit ever since. If Augustine had been born there in the seventh century A.D., rather than the third, would his astounding intellect have made history in the service of Islam, rather than Christianity? Would Christianity have gone down a different pathway without an Augustine to guide it from the Roman Empire into the Medieval Era? How different might Islam have been with him as its champion and a shaper of doctrine?

In City of God, Augustine will attack the premise of the day that the oh-so-recent sack of Rome (410 A.D., by Alaric, an event of huge pyschological impact, even though Rome's glory days were long gone and the heart of the Empire was now far east) was the fault of the Christian faith that the Empire had adopted.

It is not so well-known that the "barbarian Germans" who trashed the Eternal City, were in fact Christians. They were Arian Christians, believing that the Son was not equal to the Father. Arian (NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH ARYAN) and so-called orthodox Christianity waged war for centuries against each other for the title of true Christianity. The reach of Arianism extended all the way into China before it finally began to lose the battle.

I don't know everything about Augustine, obviously. I wonder how much time he spent in the contest between Catholicism and Arianism. I know he spilled quite a bit of ink attacking the Gnostic sect, Manicheism, that had once held his allegiance. If he had trained his cerebral guns on Arianism instead of Manicheism, would Christianity have been different?

Some historians consider Islam to be a sort of hybrid Christianity. After all, the faith accepts the New Testament and accepts Jesus as a prophet. However, anyone who has read the Quran, realizes early on that Islam fervently rejects the notion that God could ever have a son, let alone that such a son could be His equal.

Did Arianism help pave the way for Islam?


These are just a few of the questions now banging around in my mostly empty head.

Strange things from York

Ah, York.

Little northern English town that started as a Roman settlement, much later inspired New York in the New World.

In old York lately they dug up a bunch of old bones -- headless human skeletons -- while clearing for a housing development.

Experts think they have discovered a cemetery for Roman gladiators.

We are conditioned to think gladiator=Colliseum-in-Rome, but apparently those tough dudes ranged all over the empire to satisfy the blood lust of the citizenry. Even, apparently, to old York, as far from the Eternal City as one could get and still be in the Empire.

One of the items of forensic evidence is that something very large and carnivorous apparently chewed on one of the poor guys in his last moments of life.

To quote Michael Wysocki, an expert who studied the skeletons, for those who suggest these might have been your average daisy-push-uppers:

"It would seem highly unlikely that this individual was attacked by a tiger as he was walking home."

http://cbs5.com/watercooler/gladiator.graveyard.england.2.1738255.html

The Roman Experiment

There are three kinds of people in the world, politically speaking.

Firstly: Those who believe that the greater good is accomplished by reducing governmental power.

Secondly: Those who believe that the greater good is accomplished by increasing governmental power.

And thirdly, those who are just in it for themselves, who disguise themselves in whatever cloak of political rhetoric they need in order to achieve and cling to power.

Conservatives, at least of the United States type, align with the first theory. Different labels may be put upon proponents of limited government elsewhere.
Liberals (again speaking of the U.S.), align with the second.

At times, people of both the first or second persuasion charge each other with evil motivation. In reality, both of the first two types are, by and large, good people, trying to make the world a better place.

True evil belongs to that third type, which includes horrible human beings such as Pol Pot of Cambodia or Kim Jong Il of North Korea. I read that Kim has now thrown off all pretense of leading a communist utopia and instead adopted the motto of the old Roman emperors: Take care of the army and don’t worry about anyone else.

The critical problem with increasing governmental power as a means to achieve greater good, is that it is the surest way to empower that evil third type. Lenin’s Soviet framework, built upon the idealist Marx’s vision – Marx, who never built a gulag or oppressed anyone – was the perfect structure to support the monster Stalin.

We can argue about whether other notorious world leaders, past and present, were trying to build better societies or simply enjoying the spoils of power. I speak of Idi Amin, Fidel Castro, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Hugo Chavez, Nicolai Ceausescu, Saddam Hussein, etc. But can anyone seriously argue that any of the above preached, or preach, less government rather than more?

What has fascinated me in my study of the late Roman Empire, is the history that we don’t learn in school and how it relates to the above.

How much this entity, which survived for roughly five hundred years (if you count from the rise of Julius Caesar to the sack by Alaric and don’t count all the previous years of the Republic or the Byzantine Empire that struggled on in the east after the fall of the Eternal City), was a constantly changing, conscious experiment in human government.

How various Roman leaders, from Augustus to Diocletian, tried different and creative ways to balance power and address the needs of the people. How some of the most reviled of its rulers, such as Nero, actually started out with apparent good intentions but then succumbed to paranoia or power lust … because there was, ultimately, no one to stand in their way.

How gradually a hard-working society of independent-minded, mostly agrarian folk, with a relatively democratic system of leadership, degenerated into a an entertainment-crazed, urban mob demanding more and more hand-outs from their leadership, a mob which ignored national defense and a leadership which constantly added more and more planks to its pulpit of power and rarely, if ever, removed any of the accretions once each spasm of grumbling over their illegality had ceased.

We are fools to ignore the lessons that Rome taught by long and painful experience. Fools to think that world leaders today are cut from different cloth than the ones who once wore the purple toga. Fools to think that human nature ever changes.

The weird world of Rome on the decline

I have entered a new, unhappy era in my studies of world history.

***
Pertinax was a good man. It wasn't his fault that the Roman Empire had already begun its long slide into collapse. The golden Julio-Claudian era that brought Augustus and kin was long over, the silver age of the Flavians had also ended and then had come to a close the bronze years of the Antonines, ominously marred with the murder of Marcus Aurelius by barbarians, far from home.

Pertinax had rather humble origins for a Caesar. According to Wikipedia:

"Originally Pertinax made his way as a grammaticus (teacher of grammar), [how about that, Chase?] but he eventually decided to find a more rewarding line of work and through the help of patronage he was commissioned an officer in a cohort. In the Parthian war that followed, he was able to distinguish himself, which resulted in a string of promotions, and after postings in Britain (as military tribune of the Legio VI Victrix) and along the Danube, he served as a procurator in Dacia."

The Roman masses were coming to expect that their Caesars would bribe, amuse and feed them. And when it didn't happen, Caesars didn't live long. Thus, Pertinax, again from Wikipedia:

"On 28 March 193, Pertinax was at his palace when a contingent of some three hundred soldiers of the Praetorian Guard rushed the gates. Ancient sources suggest that they had received only half their promised pay. Neither the guards on duty nor the palace officials chose to resist them. Pertinax sent Laetus to meet them, but he chose to side with the insurgents instead and deserted the emperor.

"Although advised to flee, he then attempted to reason with them, and was almost successful before being struck down by one of the soldiers. Pertinax must have been aware of the danger he faced by assuming the purple, for he refused to use imperial titles for either his wife or son, thus protecting them from the aftermath of his own assassination."

Droplets today, an ocean tomorrow

First a trickle, then a torrent, soon a cataclysmic deluge.

For the last fifteen years or so, I have been reading the books of ancient Greece, the Middle East and Rome, in careful, chronological order. Today, I finished with Suetonius’ account of the first twelve Caesars. And when I closed that book, I closed an era.

Surely the last few authors whose works I have read, would never have imagined that the starveling Christians whom they mention only briefly – and that in derision, condescension or disgust, as a new, obscure, loathsome sect of half-wits – would soon become the leaders of the Western world, including Rome itself, capturing the political and religious allegiance of virtually its entire population.

Imagine, the Moonies or some even more obscure, despised modern cult, rising to lead the world in the lifetime of your grandchildren.

Having concluded Suetonius, I step ahead to the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, a late Caesar to whom one of those Christians, Justin Martyr, actually wrote a petition/book/apology. Justin is one of the earliest extant Christian writers, if not the first, outside of the new Testament canon and pseudepigraphical scriptural works. I know nothing about him beyond his name and that brief detail. That will soon change and I will come to know others as well.

“Pagan” Rome will soon be a memory and I will be firmly inside a new world of literature, a genre carrying me right up to the so-called Middle Ages. At some point, the literature of Islam will have to occupy my attention, too.

What a ride I am in for!

What privileges Caesar hath ...

Suetonius, writing circa 120 A.D. about the Caesars of Rome, had horrible material to work with. Drunk with absolute power, the men about whom he wrote were disgusting, bloody and often, downright insane.

And yet, I found this passage about Claudius Caesar (reigned 41 to 54 AD) downright funny:

"No matter where Claudius happened to be, he always felt ready for food and drink. One day, while he was judging a case in Augustus' Forum, the delicious smell of cooking assailed his nostrils. He descended from the Tribunal, closed the court, and went to the dining room of the Leaping Priests in the near-by Temple of Mars, where he immediately took his place at the meal he had scented."

At the halfway point in a Very Long Book

Reading Plutarch, a great Roman writer of the first century AD, for all these months, leaves me with a full storehouse of knowledge.

But just as dining only on Porterhouse steaks, as tasty as they are, would soon grow tiresome, I am tired of Plutarch. I am tired of Rome in general.

I want to explore the rise of Islam and the Middle Ages, and begin to pair my reading with the art and music of each era, immersing myself as deeply as is possible in the world of each writer. That has been rather difficult with Ancient Rome.

Last night, I reached the halfway point in Plutarch’s "Lives," page 460-something. It is not a good sign when one notices something like that, even worse when one is relieved to finally reach such a point.

Why not just do the sensible thing and stop reading the book? First of all, I never
made any claims to be a sensible person. Secondly, having taken notes on what I have read, I now have a wealth of information to which I can refer back, on what this man wrote. I can access these notes for the rest of my life. His wisdom belongs to me – I have earned it. Since I am a writer, too, that is important to me.

Thirdly, I am finally reaching a point in the book where Plutarch leaves off discussion of obscure and petty ancient dudes and starts talking about luminaries such as Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar.

Of Rome, Plutarch, Judaism and Christianity

It is from the later Roman writers such as Tacitus that our almost universal modern disgust for the Empire derives -- for they wrote of the Eternal City as a cesspool of blood, filth and horror the likes of which the world had never seen.

Thus writes Edith Hamilton, famed Classical scholar -- then She drops the bombshell: One man was different. One revealed that not all Rome was lechers, leeches and lunatics. That one was Plutarch.

I shall of course learn more of this man as I wade into his "Moralia."

But instead tonight, I read another chapter in "Constantine's Sword, the Church and the Jews," by James Carroll.

Interestingly enough, both of my choices in reading tonight touched upon the same subject: Rome.

Rome, Carroll writes, may have been the world's first true totalitarian state -- and in the century-long war it fought against the Jews, it may have killed nearly an equal percentage of them per capita as Hitler's Final Solution.

Rome's political genius was to exploit the existing tensions within a conquered people -- a strategy used millenia later by the British Empire. Carroll blames modern inter-Irish tension, Pakistani-Muslim tension and even the Arab-Israeli tension upon this strategy. (I might add the Sunni-Shiite hatred in Iraq.)

This Rome did within the religious-political landscape of the land of Israel, in which Essenes, Saducees, Pharisees and Zealots -- Jews all -- contended against each other.

Into this mix was born another Jewish sect, the followers of Christ. The apparent anti-Semitic slant of their early writings, the Gospels, is actually, Carroll says, anything but. It is simply Jews contending against a different faction of their fellow Jews, as Pharisees might have written against Saduccees. From that seething kettle stirred by Rome to its own advantage, two groups have survived -- and they are, Carroll says, siblings, of the same womb: today's Judaism and Christianity.

After the Christian-Jewish breach was complete, and these facts were forgotten, the consequences would be tragic.

When in Rome ...

In the September issue of Food and Wine magazine, columnist Elizabeth Gilbert considers the modern Roman mindset, in a piece entitled "Sidewalk Rage."

While others in the West have a "Cartesian mind," she says -- they go from point A to point B and get enraged at anything in their way -- the denizens of Rome are different.

"The classical Italian mindset .... meanders, pauses, stretches out its legs in the sun and takes the long route," Gilbert says.

She gives for example Her Italian friend, who felt perfectly comfortable one warm Roman day in pushing his chair into the middle of a sidewalk the better to enjoy his repast of fried asparagus. No passing Italian pedestrians minded or said anything -- only a German tourist.

I wonder how this mindset -- quirky, romantic, leisurely - fits with the ancient Rome I have been studying -- the drilled and disciplined Imperial legions, the code of laws, the great machine of Roman civilization that once stretched from Britain to the hills of Hungary.

Can a people change so much, a whole cultural mindset shift like that?