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Thinking of Rome, Elitism, and the Power of the People

04 Wednesday Feb 2015

Posted by thinkingliketheancients in Thinking Latin

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democracy, Juvenal, latin, philosophy, rome

I have always found Juvenal and his Satire to be an accurate depiction of a civilization at the edge of collapse. Perhaps I am being a bit of a fatalist, but I cannot help comparing our times to the old, old times.

…iam pridem, ex quo suffragia nulli vendimus, effudit curas; nam qui dabat olim imperium, fasces, legiones, omnia, nunc se continet atque duas tantum res anxius optat, panem et circenses.
…in the beginning, in which we never sold suffrage, we poured out pains; although, that those who used to give at that time right to rule, power over the people, legions, all things, now he limits himself, and so much, for two things he anxiously prefers – bread and the circus.
…al principio, en el cual el voto nunca había sido vendido, nos preocupabamos; pero el que en aquel momento daba gobierno, poder sobre el pueblo, legiones, todo, ahora se limita tanto por dos cosas a las que opta, pan y circo.

Juvenal, writing during the end of the 1st century and the early 2nd, had no more quintessential words than these. I love, first and foremost, how much it takes to say the same thing in English that the Spanish and Latin can so succinctly and accurately say. That is a whole different kind of post, though; I shall remained focused today.

Writing in a Empire that had not long ago been a Republic, Juvenal satirizes the current state of the Roman citizen. It was true. Free grain and gladiatorial games had become everything that senators, princeps, and emperors, needed to control the people. Long gone were the days of the Gracchi, who sought fair grain prices. Long gone the days of Flaccus, Marius, Caesar, and the true Tribunes of the Plebs. It was that period, in particular, that Juvenal recalled, his iam pridem. Two hundred years earlier the tribunes elected by the populous were sacrosanct. The people took pains to make it so in the fifth century BCE. They had been protected, against the elitist wishes of the Patricians, by their voters. The people had given control of the senate to their representatives. Something the Patricians would have to put up with for four hundred years. It makes me wish it had all turned out for the best; that Romans had found a way to allow their upcoming Plebeians to rise beyond the glass ceiling that Rome avoided but still existed. This power of the vote, which was never sold, was the key to Roman success.

Effudit curas was Juvenal’s call to arms. In the past the citizens of Rome pured out cares, and by doing so they also poured out cures. The words are cognates for a reason. To care for something is to cure it, to bring it up from its fallen state and allow it to be better, physically and spiritually. No longer did the citizens take care of Rome, it was allowed to run rampant, unchecked, over the very people who, through their involvement, had made themselves a cure to the ills of the elite. Nam, he writes, introducing a cold and harsh reality, qui dabat; who used to give… the verb, in the Imperfect, indicates something that used to happen but, also, something that is still in the process of not happening. Rather than using a Perfect here, Juvenal is reminding his audience that this problem is just as much an ill of the current people as it was a problem of those living in the near past. ‘Those who’ can only refer to them, the people.

That the people had lost their way by virtue of being driven into the ground is obvious. They used to know what it was to give power. Imperium was key to the ancient kings, the later Consuls, and even the latter Emperors. It was the right to rule, literally expressed; the very right (ius) without which no Roman could lead other Romans. The senate granted only the rights to religious rule; without the people, there were no legitimate rulers; thus , fasces, legiones, they were omnia (all) dependent upon it.

Time, so well expressed in this quote by Juvenal, takes us from the beginning, passing through a very shady middle, and arriving at a painful end. “Now” he says, as if he stood in a theater and pointed down at the ground, using some kind of Ablative of Time in Which. He doesn’t need it. The Adverb takes care of itself. The audience is forced to see itself now, in the now. That qui comes back to haunt us, it points its ancient finger at us, shaking it in our collective faces. The Reflexive Pronoun tugs at our Roman robes, begging us to listen, for we content ourselves with just two things. Continet is a very interesting verb, it literally means ‘to limit’ as in by virtue of boundaries. When we are content, we have quite literally set a limit for ourselves in order to reach some esoteric happiness. We have betrayed, in a way, our goals and find ourselves content with whatever has been achieved. Our self-limiting is evidence of our laziness, lack of self-confidence, of trust in our capabilities and potential. We are self-contained, self-retarded. The people has limited itself, Juvenal says, to those to things with they so much and so anxiously now crave.

Panem et circenses.

In the beginning, with the murders of the Gracchi and the great supporters of the people in the 1st century were committed by the patricians, Rome had shed tears, but also revolted. In the middle, when Caesar was murdered by the elite of Rome the people cried, but the revolt was easily quenched. Then, at this juncture in time, as their supporters had been turned into advocates for the elite, the people sought neither tear nor revolution, the free bread they were being given and the entertainment for which the rich paid were enough. The people had been silenced, gradually, over two hundred years.

There is no greater exempla gratia from Rome than this, no better metaphor, no higher form of understanding passed down from father to son: If we do not come together, as a people, we will be destroyed by those who, elected by us, have taken power and advantage from our very hands.

Salvete!!

Thinking of Themistocles, Defiant Speeches, and the Saving of Democracy

20 Tuesday Jan 2015

Posted by thinkingliketheancients in Thinking Ancient Greek

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ancient greek, Athens, democracy, speeches, Themistocles

Themistocles, one of the greatest politicians of the ancient world (if not of all time) found himself on an island once, surrounded by men with cities to defend. These men, with Athens burning only a few miles from them across the narrow gap of Salamis and also with their own navies at stake as they feared Persian retaliation, threatened to leave the alliance after the sack of Athens. A Corinthian had put down the Athenian statesman because he was now a man without a city and without land, unworthy of calling himself a free Greek. The Spartan commander, in disdain, proposed that Corinth and Sparta should defend the Isthmus of Corinth and forget Attica altogether. According to Plutarch (Them 11.4) Themistocles replied:

ὦ μοχθηρέ, τὰς μὲν οἰκίας καὶ τὰ τείχη καταλελοίπαμεν, οὐκ ἀξιοῦντες ἀψύχων ἕνεκα δουλεύειν, πόλις δ᾽ ἡμῖν ἔστι μεγίστη τῶν Ἑλληνίδων, αἱ διακόσιαι τριήρεις, αἳ νῦν μὲν ὑμῖν παρεστᾶσι βοηθοὶ σώζεσθαι δι᾽ αὐτῶν βουλομένοις, εἰ δ᾽ ἄπιτε δεύτερον ἡμᾶς προδόντες, αὐτίκα πεύσεταί τις Ἑλλήνων Ἀθηναίους καὶ πόλιν ἐλευθέραν καὶ χώραν οὐ χείρονα κεκτημένους ἧς ἀπέβαλον.

Ō wretch, indeed, we have come down and left behind us our houses and our city walls, not deeming it worthy for the sake of such lifeless things to be enslaved; but we still have a city, the greatest in Hellas, our two hundred triremes, which now stand ready to be made assistants to you on account of your own prerogative; but if you go off and betray us for the second time, straightway many Hellenes will learn that the Athenians have won for themselves a free city and a territory that is far better than the one they cast aside.

Herodotus (61.2) reported that Themistocles threatened the Corinthians with invasion; the Spartans, as we see above, with abandonment. I have always been curious though, as to the manner of Themistocles’ speech, here. It is a reminder, not an insult, that first escapes the mouth of Themistocles. The vocative form of μοχθηρέ indicates both the addressing of the man directly, and his plight for aid. One who is in such plight, especially when needing aid from the ones he is insulting, should not be the one barking orders. You need us, says Themistocles with his very first words. Further, he also states that the Athenians, who have lost everything, are not the buildings they lost nor the riches contained there in. Athens is its people. A people that would not become enslaved by virtue of their possessions, as the Corinthians and Spartans would if they resorted to defending their homes. I love the use of καταλελοίπαμεν, because the preposition κατα is attached to the verb. Literally meaning ‘down’ attached to ‘leaving behind’ it represents the fall of Athens, the descent of its citizens to the lower levels of the sea, the very journey the body of Athens has made, and the very pain they are experiencing. They have not only left the city behind, they had to descend from the very symbols of its power located in the heavenly acropolis to the lowest pits of hell. Low had they fallen indeed, the Athenians, in their descent.

The word Themistocles (or Plutarch) uses for ‘lifeless things’ is ἀψύχων, literally meaning ‘without breath,’ and which by that time meant the soul. He demonstrates, with that usage, that it was worth more to save the souls of the Athenians than the things which they treasured. Again, because the citizens were the city, not the other way around. It may seem natural to us to say, ‘ya, citizens are the state;’ but to the Corinthians and the Spartans the state represented its citizens. It is a show of democratic thought seldom understood by Sparta and Corinth, that individual citizens mattered. In Sparta, the citizen gave it all for the state, it was merely a moving part in a grand clock; to Athens, the citizen was everything; the citizen was the god of the city-state. Thus, Themistocles asserts, Athens was alive and well, still the greatest of Hellas, for it lived contained within the 200 triremes of the Athenians. It was not a bold claim to make, not even a controversial one, that without Athens the allied forces had no navy to speak of.

The touch of the master came when Themistocles said Greece would learn, should Athens be betrayed again, of the greatness of the land represented by the 200 triremes and the souls of the people that had been saved. Corinth was flat-out threatened with destruction, Sparta with separation. Both the Corinthian and the Spartan leader backed down and decided, there and then, that it was best to have Athens as an ally and to recover its lands than have it run, amok, in the Peloponnese and eventually to southern Italy. I can still, even now, picture the hand gestures of the Athenian general; his pointing at the Corinthian, his description of the way down from Athens and the glory that it was. I can hear his belief in Democracy, the power of the people, and the breathing-individuals that composed it. I smile when I think of the Corinthian and Spartan commanders looking at each other and realizing, in the end, that they had no power over a man, and a people, that had lost every thing, but saved every one. I’d like to think it went something like this…

It is no wonder that in the next Olympic games where all of Greece gathered to honor Zeus, as bored spectators waited for the games to start they arose as they heard the sound of roaring applause; they saw Themistocles, walking into the stadium, and they too begun to applaud and cheer for the man who had not only recovered Athens, but also saved all of Greece by virtue of his intelligence and defiance.

Themistocles is the great forgotten hero of the Greco-Persian Wars, and the true savior of democratic thought.

Athens, Democracy, and Truth

17 Friday Oct 2014

Posted by thinkingliketheancients in Thinking Like the Ancients

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Athens, democracy, isocrates, metics, parthenon, Plato, thetes

How Athenian Democracy is viewed today has much to do with scholars in the early 20th century. Unfortunately or, in my case, fortunately, many misconceptions have arisen that make us question the true validity of a system that begun in 509 and had imploded by 327. What is appreciated about Athenian Democracy is its intent to become representative of all, not its process which, already discussed by Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, and Isocrates, amongst many others, cannot work for cities beyond 10,000 people.

Slaves, women, metics, thetes…they were all excluded even from the Radical Democracy of Pericles’ time. Most countries have a Roman Republic method of Democracy, especially the United States. It was a much better system, but with the spirit of Democracy at its heart.

Check out this article by Ancient History Encyclopediasafe_image.php

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