The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides) (12 page)

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Authors: Anthony Esolen

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Another anecdote will illustrate the point.
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The plebeians had been stoked to rebellion by their tribunes, just when Rome was vulnerable to the Volscians, their rivals in central Italy. Then Menenius Agrippa, a shrewd and eloquent senator, rose to settle them down. He compared the state to a body, with the rich—who seem to produce nothing, but consume everything—as the belly, without which the other members of the body could receive no nourishment. It’s a metaphor that reflects poorly upon the rich, but the people are swayed by it. They do not erupt in violence. Such scenes are repeated again and again in the histories that helped fashion the Roman imagination. We see it in Virgil’s famous simile, comparing Neptune’s calming the raging sea with the calming of the people by one man, one leader, marked by piety:
And just as, often, when a crowd of people is rocked by a rebellion, and the rabble rage in their minds, and firebrands and stones fly fast—for fury finds its weapons—if, by chance, they see a man remarkable for righteousness and service, they are silent and stand attentively; and he controls their passion by his words and cools their spirits: so all the clamor of the sea subsided. (
Aeneid,
1.209–217)
 
 
 
The point is that republican Rome survived. Neither the Etruscans, nor the Gauls, nor her Italian rivals, nor Hannibal, nor even her own strife between the classes, brought her down, until her victories and her wealth corrupted her, requiring an Augustus to set things in order again. Roman commitment to tradition provided a check on the power both of the wealthy and of the mob. Rome retained a dread of both tyranny and untempered democracy, and the bastion against both was that fatherly virtue of piety. The American Founders took the lesson, modeling their state not after Athens—for Athens fell too soon—but after the more stable, more unwieldy, more Stoical, and more agrarian Rome. It is why George Washington was called the Cincinnatus of his country, after the rather poor gentleman farmer who saved Rome, profited nothing, and returned to his land. He was not called the Pericles of his country.
 
Peace through strength
 
But weren’t the Romans warlike?
 
Yes, they were. They wanted to survive. A small consideration, easy to overlook.
 
They were not, for most of their history, aggressive. A strange thing to say, given that they rose from a village in the hills near the mouth of the Tiber, to the capital of the Mediterranean world and beyond. But it’s true. Until the late and decadent years of the Republic, when generals like Marius and Sulla commandeered professional armies loyal to themselves (for they, and no longer the Senate, paid them in plunder and land), Rome usually didn’t go forth to seek wars. But Rome also didn’t duck any, either. This conservative attitude calls for explanation.
 
Unlike most peoples at the time, Rome was not governed by a king who could increase his wealth, consolidate his authority, and win an immortal name by military conquest. The consuls served for far too short a time to conduct a war of any magnitude; besides, there were
two of them.
And, as Polybius notes, it was the Senate’s prerogative “either to celebrate a general’s successes with pomp and magnify them, or to obscure and belittle them.”
 
Until Rome was flooded by the wealth from the east after the Third Punic War (146 BC), the state depended for its economy and its political stability on the small landed farmer. This ideal is ingrained so deeply in the Roman mind that, even after the rise of the empire under Augustus brought in cheap grain from Egypt and undercut the Italian farms, the poets Horace and Virgil still look upon it with nostalgia, Virgil writing four stupendous poems, his
Georgics
, on farming, animal husbandry, winemaking, and beekeeping, always with an eye to the political and theological lessons they suggest. But people who farm have little opportunity for professional warfare.
 
The Romans expressed their deep conservatism by a reverence for limits: one of their more important (and unusual) gods was Terminus, god of boundary stones. This reverence extended to their oaths and treaties. Not that they didn’t
interpret
treaties favorably to themselves, and act accordingly. This they did most notoriously when they sought cause against their nemesis Carthage, picking the fight in the Third Punic War. But that reverence restrained them from engaging in the trickery they associated with Greece. Consider a story from the First Punic War.
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A Roman general named Regulus was captured by the Carthaginians and brought to Africa. The senate of Carthage charged him to return to Rome to present terms for peace. Regulus was to swear that, if Rome refused the terms, he would return to Carthage as a prisoner and be executed. The Carthaginians depended upon his oath, and figured that, since he might prefer living to dying, he would persuade his fellow citizens to accept the treaty. Regulus went to Rome, persuaded his countrymen to
reject
the treaty, and returned to Carthage, where he was tortured and put to death. Is the story true? There’s no evidence to suggest that it is
not true
. The Romans believed it, and held Regulus up as a model of Roman integrity and manhood. By contrast, they considered the mythical Odysseus, whom Homer calls “the man of many turnings,” a liar and a villain. “The inventor of impieties,” Virgil calls him (
Aeneid
2.233).
 
Rome won her wars and increased her territory. But it was centuries before she claimed control over Italy: as late as the fourth century BC, Gauls from beyond the Alps set fire to the city, assisted on their way by Gauls on the Italian side. But the real story in the Roman conquest of Italy is political, not military. That is, the Romans—unlike the Athenians—did something sensible after their victories over the Samnites, the Aequians, the Volscians, and most of the other rival states on the peninsula. They cleared out the few genuine enemies of peace, ruthlessly punishing those who led armies against them. Then they incorporated the lands into the Roman state, usually granting citizenship to the leading families, and extending citizenship, on evidence of good behavior, to the free men of the city.
They made them Romans.
 
 
 
Another Local Culture Squelched by Christianity
 
When the conquered man was thought to have defended himself bravely, the spectators waved their handkerchiefs, raised their thumbs, and cried, “Mitte! Let him go!”...If, on the other hand, the witnesses decided that the victim had by his weakness deserved defeat, they turned their thumbs down, crying, “Jugula!”
Jerome Carcopino
, Daily Life in Ancient Rome
 
 
Meaning, “Give it to him in the throat!” Those who decry the ascendancy of Christianity should ask what kind of society imperial Rome had become, empty of any religion which stirred the depths of human imagination and devotion. They might apply the lessons to ourselves, too.
 
 
That didn’t mean the people couldn’t keep their local gods. The Romans were too pious and practical for that. You never know when you have overlooked a deity, so it’s better to have the Rhegians praying to a god you don’t know about, so long as they also pray to the state gods. The results were remarkable. When Hannibal came marauding over the peninsula for fifteen years, he expected that most of the “allies” of Rome, the other old cities, would revolt. They did not. Fear kept some in line, but most had long simply identified themselves as Romans.
 
To put it simply, a Roman citizen was a
Roman
citizen. We now associate citizenship with geography. “I am an American” means simply “I was born within the borders of the United States,” and suggests very little about devotion. The Romans prized citizenship far more highly than that. Yet at the same time they were generous in bestowing citizenship upon conquered peoples, without regard for race or ethnicity or religion. None of that mattered. Being Roman was what mattered. So when Saint Paul’s enemies had him arrested for insurrection, he appealed directly to the emperor to try his case, as was his right as a Roman citizen. It is as if an islander in Samoa should invoke the name of the President, calling a halt to local proceedings. The centurion immediately ordered Paul’s safe conduct to the Roman governor, and thence to Rome. Paul was a diminutive Jew from Tarsus on the coast of Asia Minor. He probably never set foot in Rome till he was brought there under arrest. Yet a citizen is a citizen, and the centurions obey the rules.
 
After the fall of Nero in 69, only one or two of the succeeding emperors hailed from Italy. No one cared. Saint Augustine was born in North Africa in 354. He too was a Roman citizen. Was he black or Caucasian? Berber, or Semitic? We don’t know. No one cared to notice.
 
In short, when it came to governing conquered peoples, no one did it more efficiently than the Romans did, with remarkably little brutality (there are important exceptions: the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD). Their form of tolerance was simple. Swear loyalty to Rome and keep the peace, and they’d eventually make you Romans, with the same rights as anyone. You might enjoy a measure of home rule, if you abided by the law and kept the taxes coming in. But you wouldn’t be Spanish-Romans, or Parthian-Romans, or Greek-Romans. You’d be Roman Romans. Only one nation in the history of the world has managed to follow that wisdom consistently: the United States, until about 1970 (apart from its shameful treatment of blacks). After that, the numbers of illegal immigrants with no emotional ties to America grew, as the value of citizenship among the native people fell.
 
And the Roman armies, from the time of Augustus till the German takeover of the western empire in 476, brought considerable advantages to the frontier lands. I’m not ignoring the brutal efficiency of the army: when the Romans turned against the rebellious Jews of Palestine, they overran Jerusalem, destroyed the Temple, and plundered the Holy of Holies. That desecration is celebrated in relief on the Arch of Titus, near the Coliseum. Nor do I ignore how bloody army discipline could be. If a company of men had shown unseemly cowardice, their commander could order them to be “decimated.” The soldiers stood in a line. One tenth would be chosen by lot, to be clubbed to death by the rest. It was an effective deterrent.
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But at its height the Roman army numbered about 400,000 men, guarding a frontier stretching thousands of miles, from the walls behind the Roman outposts in Britain, to Gaul and Germany along the Rhine, across the passes of the Alps and into eastern Europe along the Danube to the Black Sea, from there beyond Asia Minor at the Parthian and Persian borders, circling south and west to Arabia and the Sinai, then across North Africa. They could not have done it without discipline. The Romans left little to the whims of their commanders. They had clear lines of authority, and clear military traditions. They pitched camp when it was time to pitch camp, and their camps were laid out in exactly the same fashion everywhere. They knew too that many men will be lazy and careless without the fear of punishment. In the Roman army you risked your life if you fell asleep on sentry duty, or if you failed to pass on orders to the next patrol. Also if you committed those deeds that would sap the morale of your squadron: “The punishment of beating to death is also inflicted upon those who steal from the camp, those who give false evidence, those who in full manhood commit homosexual offenses, and finally upon anyone who has been punished three times for the same offense” (Polybius).
 
Nor could the Roman armies have succeeded if they had made themselves hated wherever they went. Augustus ensured that the armies would be paid by the State, relieving them of the need to plunder for food. He also gave twenty-year veterans a pension and a parcel of land in the provinces. The result was that many non-Romans determined that serving in the army was a good way to gain modest wealth and the privileges of Roman citizenship. Increasingly, recruits were taken from the provinces, and veterans settled there. And in those provinces the armies did not merely eat, drink, pick up whores, and fight. They built roads, some of the most durable ever, with gravel foundations many feet deep, to prevent buckling under loaded wagons and companies on the march. They built aqueducts. They dredged harbors. They cleared mountain passes. They contributed manual labor to civic works that had nothing to do with an army’s needs: temples, theaters, places of government. They were an ancient Army Corps of Engineers.

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