Tag: Roman Empire

Ancient European History – Part 3

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In H. G. Wells’ “The Outline of History,” He writes a couple of paragraphs at the conclusion of his description of the Fall of the Roman Empire.   He discusses the phenomenon of “Caesarism.”

“But while the smashing of the Roman social and political structure was thus complete, while in the east it was thrown off by the older and stronger Hellenic tradition, and while in the west it was broken up into fragments that began to take on a new and separate life of their own, there was one thing that did not perish, but grew, and that was the tradition of the world empire of Rome and of the supremacy of the Cæsars. When the reality was destroyed, the legend had freedom to expand. Removed from the possibility of verification, the idea of a serene and splendid Roman world-supremacy grew up in the imagination of mankind, and still holds it to this day.

Ever since the time of Alexander, human thought has been haunted by the possible political unity of the race. All the sturdy chiefs and leaders and kings of the barbarians, who raided through the prostrate but vast disorder of the decayed empire, were capable of conceiving of some mighty king of kings greater than themselves and giving a real law for all men, and they were ready to believe that elsewhere in space and time and capable of returning presently to resume his supremacy, Cæsar had been such a king of kings. Far above their own titles, therefore, they esteemed and envied the title of Cæsar. The international history of Europe from this time henceforth is largely the story of kings and adventurers setting up to be Cæsar and Imperator (Emperor). We shall tell of some of them in their places. So universal did this “Cæsaring” become, that the Great War of 1914-18 mowed down no fewer than four Cæsars, the German Kaiser (= Cæsar), the Austrian Kaiser, the Tsar (= Cæsar) of Russia, and that fantastic figure, the Tsar of Bulgaria. The French “Imperator” (Napoleon III) had already fallen in 1871. There is now (1920) no one left in the world to carry on the Imperial title or the tradition of Divus Cæsar except the Turkish Sultan and the British monarch. The former commemorates his lordship over Constantinople as Kaisar-i-Roum[274]; the latter is called the Cæsar of India (a country no real Cæsar ever looked upon), Kaisar-i-Hind.”

 

Mr. Wells had his finger on something.  There is a fascination, not with the reality of the actual Roman Empire, but with the fantasy of it as this just, omnipotent, supremely competent and efficient ruler and government.  Now as any student of that era knows this was an almost polar opposite of what the empire actually was.  The oligarchs who reaped the lion’s share of the benefits from the empire’s permanence were heartless creatures who thought of the poor (slave or free) as nothing but animals to be harvested in every way imaginable.

And maybe this gives us a clue as to what kind of government we’re supposed to have.  We’re looking for a system where the humans aren’t treated like animals.  The first thing that comes to mind is the evolution of Socialism and Communism as secular stand-ins for the Christian church.  The “love your neighbor” part of it puts us in mind of the utopian brotherhood that Marx and the other socialists touted as their goal.  But of course, we all remember how those experiments end; death camps, oligarchs (commissars) and bread lines.

The opposite is capitalism with a capitol K.  And we’re currently living through that right now.  And once again we get oligarchs.  But this bunch just send our jobs to China and tell us to stop having children to “save the planet.”  So somehow, we’ve got to figure out a third way.

 

Different thinkers have tried to come up with different ways to allow representative government to more satisfyingly express the needs and will of the people.  Robert A. Heinlein thought that the vote should be restricted to veterans of the armed services.  Some have thought that only people with children should be able to vote.  And, of course, women think they’re the only ones qualified to vote.  There have been schemes whereby the number of votes you have should be based on things like how much you pay in taxes or receive in government benefits.  In other words, the more you pay into the system the more you get to decide.

There’s one guy named Curtis Yarvin who believes we need a monarch who should be chosen and overseen in the same way that a company selects and oversees a CEO (Chief Executive Officer).  In some ways this is an interesting idea.  The concept becomes a little fuzzy when he tries to describe what the equivalent is to the Chairman and other members of the Board of Directors.  But he’s right in the sense that the leader of this country needs much more authority in order to get things done.  It seems pretty clear that our system of checks and balances between the three branches of government have failed to produce good governance.  The bureaucracy has become bloated and arrogant and need to be pared back radically.  The judiciary is a hornet’s nest of special interests and influence peddling as are the Houses of Congress.  And the stalemate between the Left and Right is maddening to anyone who wants this country fixed.  We seem to be at a dead end.

What’s the answer?

Ancient European History – Part 2

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In the first part of this essay, I stated that the Greeks and Romans utterly failed in their attempt at democratic or even representative government.  And that is demonstrably true.  Athens lasted less than a lifetime as a democracy and Rome was never anything but an oligarchy masquerading as a popular government.  Even when the emperor was the supreme power in the state somehow the plutocrats still got all the laws they needed to bleed the poor dry and prevent any least benefit for the people who made up the bulk of the empire.  So, yeah, Rome was a slave camp for everyone but the rich.

But how about us?  Have we improved on what the ancients had?  Well, we at least have eliminated slavery.  That is one absolute advantage.  And theoretically we have representative government.  In some sense I have a chance of someone who thinks the way I do writing the laws and enforcing them.  Okay, there’s something like that going on.  After all, look, Donald Trump is president for the second time.  He’s even been able to eject large numbers of Deep State ringers out of the federal government.  And he’s even been able to primary Republicans who vote against the reforms he’s pushing.  He has made some headway toward populist outcomes to some of the worst situations we live under.  He has been attempting to reverse unconstitutional laws and rulings like anti-white and anti-male discrimination.

But what we’re seeing is only the first steps.  And this is Trump’s last term.  Will more progress be made.  After all, even under the Roman Republic there were attempted reforms.  Tiberius Gracchus was a famous example.  He attempted to stop the patricians from robbing poor farmers of their land every time they were forced to fight in a war.  While they were in the army their families got into debt just to feed themselves and when they got home the government refused to forgive these debts in gratitude for their military service and these families ended up losing their farms to the greedy moneylenders who added these acres to their already obscenely large landholdings.  Gracchus attempted to bring these protections to a vote and was murdered by a mob for his trouble.  Interestingly Trump has already dodged two assassins already.  When J. D. Vance and the other republicans run for president in 2028, I hope their secret service protection is a lot better than what candidate Trump had in 2024.

So, yes, we have improved somewhat on the fairness of the government we have over the ancients.  But many of the same problems haunt us.  Graft, influence peddling, complete indifference for the working and middle classes and a bloated bureaucracy that swallows up enormous resources that should go to useful government projects like infrastructure and industrial planning that make it possible for businesses to expand and hire more people.

In the next part I want to look at whether the current method we use for selecting leaders which at least nominally is supposed to be based on Greek and Roman models is really the best method or whether some other structure would be better.

Ancient European History – Part 1

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Ancient History is fascinating.  Specifically reading about Europe from 600 B.C to 200 A.D. is fascinating.  The Greeks, the Romans, the Gauls, the Macedonians, the Germans, the Goths, the Scythians even the Persians all interacting (meaning warring against each other) while trying to figure out how to pass from a barbaric tribal social structure into a larger more sophisticated society.  And all this while competing against the more established states like Egypt, Phoenicia and Mesopotamia.

Now some never achieved this.  The Gauls and the Scythians ceased to exist as nations while still in the plundering raider stage.  The Germans and the Goths had to wait for the downfall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century A.D. before they could advance.  The Persians, Greeks, Macedonians and Romans all had their day.  The Hellenistic civilization and its several kingdoms and empires had its heyday after Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire in the late fourth century B.C.  Stretching from western India to Egypt this civilization lasted in various areas until the Parthians and Romans overtook it.  The last piece to survive was Egypt which Augustus took charge of after the death of Marc Antony and Cleopatra VII in 30 B.C.  Cleopatra was the last of the Ptolemies whose progenitor was one of Alexander the Great’s generals.  So, all together the Hellenistic civilization Alexander founded lasted three hundred years.  Of course, you could easily make the case that the Byzantine Empire was the extension of this Hellenistic civilization with a thin patina of Roman influence on its surface.  And that shrinking “empire” managed to hang on in the city of Constantinople until 1453 A.D.

The Romans had their run from about 600 B.C. to 476 A.D.  And they did manage to leave their mark on Europe in a big way.  The Romance languages are spoken by a big chunk of the world population and the influence of Roman concepts in law and politics is immense.  So, these tribes from the dawn of real civilization in Europe had a great influence on us in the West.

But in a real way their political institutions were all resounding failures at providing their people with good governance, stability or a satisfying life.  Both the Greeks and the Romans attempted to create republics that provided the citizens with some say in their government.  Athens was a democracy.  Rome had popular elections (in a limited fashion) of their leaders.  But in both cases these civilizations eventually regressed to some form of monarchy.  The Hellenistic states had dynastic kings.  Rome had its emperors that were sometimes dynastic but during the most successful eras successors were selected by the reigning Emperor based on merit.  And in fact, since essentially the emperor was a military dictator, the legions were the ultimate arbiter of who was a successful emperor.  So, Julius Caesar or a Trajan would be beloved by his conquering legions because they would be showered with the spoils of conquest.  Whereas, an emperor without any military ability like Caligula or Commodus would end up assassinated by the Praetorian Guard in favor of someone more competent.  Perhaps military competency was the basis for picking their head of state.  A case could be made for that.

So, the question has to be asked, have we progressed since the ancients?  Is our government superior to the Greek and Roman states.  Let’s see what I think in Part 2.

Thoughts on the Fall of the Roman Empire – Part 2

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There was a lot of good discussion centering around slavery and its negative effect on technical innovation.  After all, why would you need automation to increase the effectiveness of farming or other industrial work if you can just buy another thousand or even ten thousand war slaves for use as laborers on your farm or in your copper mine?  Sure, they cost something but not much and if you keep them starved to the edge of death you don’t even need to feed them much.  Just replace them with younger, stronger slaves.

Of course, every once in a while, the slaves will produce a Spartacus who decides to burn the whole thing down but that’s what the legions are for anyway.  And crucifying a few thousand slaves along the Appian Way is a good reminder of who’s boss.

But even slavery is not the whole story.  When the majority of Romans were plebians living on family farms, and these same farmers were the citizen soldiers who were legionnaires when an enemy threatened, there was a patriotism that made the Romans the greatest military force of their age.  They might lose twenty or thirty thousand men against Hannibal and then come back and field an army just as large from volunteers who served to protect their nation, their families and their homes.

But the patricians who ran the senate were greedy and selfish and after a soldier returned home from war, he stood to lose his land because he would default on the debts that he couldn’t pay off due to his absence and loss of harvest.  These patricians would scoop up these small farms and then use their connections to obtain the defeated enemies as slaves and outcompete the remaining small farmers who couldn’t match the efficiency of the large plantations.  And in addition, the patricians eventually discontinued the practice of plebians obtaining conquered lands as colonists.  The patricians turned these foreign lands into even larger plantations for themselves.

So eventually these landless plebians ended up as a discontented rabble living on the bread and circuses that the emperors provided in Rome.  And eventually they ended up in the armies which was the profession of last resort.  So essentially the Roman elites eliminated the middle class.  And eventually that reduced the effectiveness of the legions too.  And finally, manpower was so depleted through destruction of the actual Roman citizens that the legions more and more were populated with barbarians from the fringes of the empire.  So much so that by the fourth and fifth centuries the Franks, Germans, Goths and other pastoral peoples in Gaul and the northern border were the legions.

When Atilla finally invaded the western empire, it was Frankish legionnaires and even generals who resisted him most effectively.  But at this point, the jig was up.  The barbarians realized that the empire was a paper tiger.  Its citizens were downtrodden serfs who couldn’t or maybe wouldn’t take up arms to defend their “nation.”  Being ruled by a Roman emperor or an Ostrogothic “king” was a matter of complete indifference to them.  In point of fact the barbarian could probably provide better protection and possibly the taxes would be lower if the imperial bureaucracy ceased to exist.

So, whether the Romans could have produced more defensible borders against the nomadic Eurasian pastoral peoples, whether Huns, Alans or even the westernmost tribes like the Goths and Vandals is probably immaterial.  If a nation doesn’t have a population willing to defend its homeland, then it is as good as done.

And this was known all the way back in the time of Aristotle.  Strong states had a large prosperous middle-class.  Because this is the group that produces children and believes in the value of the nation.  Not the very rich and not the desperately poor.  Rome committed slow suicide when it allowed the patricians to destroy the plebian farmer/soldiers.  Because the early Romans so thoroughly defeated the neighboring peoples it took five hundred years to produce new enemies to tear down the rotted corpse of Rome but by the time of Marcus Aurelius the damage had already been done.  It just took three hundred more years for Atilla to show up and prove to the Germans that there was nothing there to stop them.

As a footnote I think it’s interesting to see that our modern-day patricians (elites) are busy destroying the working and middle classes and importing migrants to act as cheap (slave) labor to replace them.  What a brilliant plan.  But not very original.

Thoughts on the Fall of the Roman Empire – Part 1

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I have a copy of the first volume of H.G. Wells’ “The Outline of History.”  And in a real way the Roman Empire is the center of the book.  His descriptions of the civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia and Greece are all sort of a set up for Rome.  And in a real way Rome is the basis for discussing Medieval Europe but also as a point of comparison, China, India and the Islamic world.  And this is not to say that Wells had a romantic or idealized conception about the Roman republic or empire.  Far from it.  He goes to great lengths to explain why even at the height of the Pax Romana; the something like two hundred years from Augustus to Marcus Aurelius that the people of Rome, with the exception of the truly wealthy, were profoundly and justifiably miserable.  And I can see his point of view.  I only have to remember that renegade Roman citizen from Greece that Priscus wrote about, who willingly joined up with Atilla the Hun, to realize how the fall of Rome was probably an improvement in the fate of Europe as a whole; though maybe not for the inhabitants of the areas that descended into chaos in the fifth century.

Among the many short comings of that civilization, Wells counts a lack of scientific curiosity as one of the most damning.  He singles out the fact that a working steam engine was created in Hellenistic times but the Romans never took this knowledge and harnessed it in the way that modern Europe did in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with such inventions as the locomotive.

He further produces as evidence the Romans’ complete neglect of geography as a tool for determining the advantageous borders of their enormous empire.  For instance, if they had realized the outline of the North and Baltic seas and the distance to the Caucasus Mountains and the Caspian Sea, they might have realized that conquering Germany and the Slavic tribes would have produced a shorter and more defensible eastern border than the one that allowed the Huns to stampede the German tribes into the western empire and effectively destroy their civilization.

As for this last claim I have my doubts.  This would have required the Romans to occupy all of Eastern Europe, up to and including Poland, Ukraine along with parts of southern Russia and Iran.  In defense of my ancestors, I would remind Mr. Wells that those areas are very, very much colder than Italy.  Getting Roman colonists for these Hyperborean locales would have been a real stretch.  But let’s assume that the emperor Trajan at his height was aware of the geographical imperative to conquer these areas and that he had made it happen.  What then?

Would the Roman legions and the citizens have repelled the Huns when they came crashing into this Eastern border in the fifth century AD?  Well, that’s the question.  It has been stated that by 180 AD the empire was weakened by a series of plagues that reduced population but also because the downtrodden peasants refused to have children under the onerous conditions they lived under.  This seems to fly in the face of the archeological evidence of bustling cities and far-flung trade with India and even China that sent enormous quantities of silver and gold eastward into Asia from Roman coffers.

What is the truth?  I’ll give my opinion in the second part.  But feel free to give your ideas in the comments.

Guest Contributor – Milo Mindbender – 10APR2024 – End of Empire

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Manipulation by our “betters” is a long standing tradition, ever since the first gathering of hominids there was a Bernie Sanders/Karl Marx to tell people what they were owed for the privilege of being in charge, and the penalty for being productive. When the Roman empire stopped expanding, and became unworthy of defending by Roman citizens, they were forced to hire the barbarians as mercenaries, and began to play games with the currency.
The practice of embedding veterans into captured territory, and wedding them to the natives, producing a new generation of Roman soldiery to take up arms for the empire, and reducing rebellion because no father in law wanted to destroy their grand children’s inheritance.
This stopped with the ceasing of expansion by the empire. We have now reached the point in our history where we are at the limits, defined by our neighbors, and the global community, of our expansion, and now begins the first stage of ossification. We have a citizenry that no longer is learning to love our country, believes JFK got it backwards with ” Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”, emotionally crippled, sexually confused, and financially abused. Debasement of our currency was inevitable, it just seems that we get to live through the cashing of the checks our government wrote.
The hiring of barbarian mercenaries has begun as Los Angeles has just graduated a class of LEO cadets , that are here illegally, not legally allowed to own a firearm, but are now sworn police officers, a judge in Illinois just ruled that citizens must have FOID cards, but illegals can not be required to obtain them. I have no problem with “Dreamers” enlisting in the military to earn their citizenship, and actually encourage such programs. They come out of the shadows and are then legal, complete with the Responsibilities and privileges that come with citizenship, but draw the line at creating an armed organization that has less loyalty to the US, the. Constitution, and the people of the US than the agencies we already have in our borders.
I don’t always agree with Michael Weiner/ Savage but his statement that “Any country that doesn’t protect its borders, language, and citizens is not a country anymore” rings true.

Ah Really, Aurelius?

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So here I am in the ems.  And next up (almost) is Marcus Aurelius Antoninus.  Yes that Marcus Aurelius.   And really, I’m a big fan.  Holding back the fall of the Roman Empire for almost twenty years is nothing to sneeze at.  I guess he does have to take a hit for being Commodus’ father and all.  I mean he really should have had him put down before he passed but it’s tough for a father to be objective about his kids.

And I like a lot of his quotes.  They are quite enlightened.  But I think sometimes he goes too far.  For instance:

“Everything that happens is either endurable or not. If it’s endurable, then endure it. Stop complaining. If it’s unendurable . . . then stop complaining. Your destruction will mean its end as well.”

“Your destruction will mean its end as well“?  What the hell!

I mean he was a military man.  How about fighting against both the endurable and the unendurable?  Can’t we ever push things out of fate’s hands?

Well, anyway, he’s going to donate several weeks of quotes to the site so I’m grateful.  But I think there should be a limit to just how much silent resignation even a stoic has to exhibit.  Now I know he was basically an Italian so I can’t claim an exemption based on my lineage.  But I can tell you over the last eighteen centuries there has been a precipitous fall off in stoic tendencies among his descendants.  Most Italians like nothing better than to complain loud and long about just about everything happening around us.  You might say it’s our defining behavior.

I’ll end by saying I’m glad I didn’t have him for a boss.  He probably would have continuously lectured me in soothing terms to endure the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and eventually I would have gone mad and murdered him.

Well anyway, his first quote will be January 14th (showing up the night of Saturday, January 13th).

And he really should have made Russell Crowe emperor.  It would have solved a bunch of problems.

Good and Bad Emperors

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Last week when I was railing against Joe Biden’s regime, I compared him to the Roman Emperor Tiberius.  Now this wasn’t meant to indicate a great similarity between these two politicians.  It was only to indicate that at a certain point in their careers each one was a debauched old man in charge of a great empire whose heir was a lunatic.  Honestly, the comparison is grossly unfair to Tiberius.  In his younger days Tiberius was a highly skilled and successful general who conquered several important provinces along the periphery of the empire.  By comparison, Joe Biden’s greatest achievement was getting hair plugs.

But it does bring up once again the comparison of the period at the end of the Roman Republic and the beginning of the Empire with our own time.  The end of the Roman Republic was a tumultuous century of greater and greater outrages against the Roman citizenry.  By the time the Caesars ended the farce all that remained was a plutocratic oligarchy harvesting the Roman citizens as legionnaires to conquer the rest of the world for use as slaves on Roman plantations.

But those legions were successful enough that they allowed the corrupt, mismanaged, Empire to expand for another two hundred years and after that to at least survive for another three hundred years.

And how about us?  Will the corpse of the American Republic, hijacked by the managerial mandarins of the federal government in association with the corporate oligarchs continue to rule the Global American Empire for its own half a millennium?

I guess that’s the quadrillion dollar question.  Based on the looks of Joe Biden you might say that five hundred days might be more realistic than five hundred years.  But let’s not be too hasty.  Currently our government is still masquerading as a representative republic where elections decide who is in charge.  A place holder like Joe Biden whose name is still familiar to those who remember him as a senator and vice president might be a very good way to begin the transition to the imperial model.

And after all most emperors aren’t necessarily “good emperors.”  You got Augustus and (arguably) Tiberius in the good column.  Then you get Caligula.  With the right public relations team even Caligula can last a few years.  So, with the right press secretary and national press Joe can survive.  Kamala, on the other hand is more in the Incitatus category.  Like Caligula’s horse, she is just a bridge too far and cannot pass the smell test.

And right in line with this common-sense limit no one is speaking of Kamala Harris as a realistic successor to Joe Biden, either in 2024 or afterwards.  The powers that be are respecting the instinct for self-preservation that still exists in the American populace.

But we could end up with an actor like Gavin Newsome or Elizabeth Warren or even AOC (God forbid.)  So, it’s well within the bounds of possibility that this empire could sputter along almost indefinitely with cretinous puppets in charge.  But what could shorten the span of time of the empire is military disaster.  All the way up to around 180 AD the legions provided a reliable bulwark against the incursions of the external enemies of Rome.  Germanic tribesmen and Persian armies alike still had to reckon with a relatively well-trained and professional army that could be brought to bear against an enemy.

Unfortunately for us this same military preparedness doesn’t seem to be available any longer.  But at the same time, the bluff is still being used to attempt to intimidate the other powerful regimes.  So, the spectacle of the Middle Eastern retreats (especially the rout from Afghanistan) is a recent indicator.  And now the bluster toward Russia and China rings quite hollow.

A true military debacle would be the catalyst for a much quicker loss of prestige and possibly the destabilization of the oligarchy that currently calls the shots in America.  After all, if we can’t even hold off medieval goat herders like the Taliban then why exactly would we allow the IRS and the FBI to treat us like slaves?

So, I guess my thought is that the American Empire can last practically indefinitely as long as it retains the competency that maintains it as a great power.  But if its military prowess declines then so does its ability to coerce the American people to knuckle under to its tyrannical demands.  The outcome of Biden’s saber rattling against Russia and China may be very instructive concerning the future of our oligarchs and their junta.

And by the way, where is our Caesar?

16MAY2019 – American Greatness Post of the Day – Our Modern Satyricon – VDH

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Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist by training so it is perhaps unsurprising that he finds the analogies between Petronius’s Satyricon and the cultural rot of our own age.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/05/15/our-modern-satyricon/

But I still praise him for the accuracy of his point by point comparison.  Comparing the present age to post-republican Rome has become a common trope but Hanson points out just how accurate it is.  Nothing new here, just the scholarly expertise of the author pointing out the exactness of the analogy.