Narrates the political career of Cicero, whose hopes of preserving the Senate’s hegemony ran asunder on the monarchical ambitions of Julius Caesar and other contemporaries. Rising to power by means of his lawyerly skill, especially as an orator, Cicero was a modestly successful consul but was subsequently banished from Rome. After ingratiating himself with two of the Triumvirate to gain his return, Cicero again fell to the wayside. During this time, he sought to evaluate and popularize the Greek philosophers, thereby gaining lasting relevance in the West. He was then judicially murdered. Everitt’s treatment is a biography not a study of political philosophy.
Italy (Rome)
2. Beard, SPQR (10 Feb 2019)
Sketches the political and sociocultural history of Rome from its putative foundation in 753 BC to 212 AD, when the granting of citizenship to all of empire’s residents changed the empire’s character. This resolution to the question of basic civic rights, a continuing issue since the state’s acquisitive nature engendered cultural ferment, was more important than the doings of the Julio-Claudian dynasts (the ‘biographic tradition’ of historiography). Over the fifth and fourth centuries BC, the Conflict of Orders gradually more or less replaced rule by wealth (i.e., generally by birth) with merit, the highlight being the establishment of the Twelve Tables law code in 451-450. The effect was to establish ambition and competition at the heart of the social order; political reform was typically radical action (e.g., distributing land, offering subsidized wheat) justified as a return to past practice. Meanwhile, Rome’s expansion was built on willingness to incorporate defeated enemies into its army and society, and to manumit slaves, both unlike any other ancient society. Despite the primary political traditions of libertas and republican governance, the logic of the empire created the emperors: the scale of responsibility (e.g., territory, resources, population) could not be managed by a deliberative senate. Augustus, though inscrutable, created the dynasty’s template, but failed to solve the problem of succession. (Meanwhile the senate lapsed into a legislative body.) Making use of archaeology, Beard undertakes lengthy excursions into common life, sometimes betraying Whiggish assumptions, much as she earlier discusses the city’s founding traditions. In the Julio-Claudian era, there were few attempts to impose social controls. Local elites cooperated, doing Rome’s work by adopting its culture even as they retained local traditions. Christianity was the one religion which could not be adopted (suborned) by the empire. In conclusion, Beard holds that Rome’s treatment of basic matters of political philosophy, for example in the conflict between Cataline the radical demagogue and Cicero the traditionalist, remain fundamental to contemporary Western society. But her heart really lies in the sociology of a pre-modern empire and perhaps too its applicability to the 21st century.
3. Hamilton, Roman Way (17 Feb 2019)
Literature is the best way to understand ancient Rome: its writers reveal the people’s spirit and values. The Roman way was close to modern Romanticism, premised on sentiment, and its leading lights illustrate simple but grand ideals, in contrast to the austere classicism of the ancient Greeks. The first evidence of Roman-ness is the comedy of Plautus and Terence, who preceded modern Westerns, for example in the division of roles between male and female; Aristophanes and Menander left no imprint. The poets Catullus, passionate and forlorn, and Horace, dispassionate and effete, also establish modern tropes. Later authors — Livy, Virgil, Seneca, Juvenal – are romantic, reacting in part to the ugliness of the empire’s corruption and the city’s sprawl. (Cicero’s letters evince the quotidian affairs of the elite.) Stoicism was a second-rate Greek philosophy turned precept for religious action (of a sort) and seedbed of Christianity. While the Greeks stood for harmony and moderation, Romans preferred discipline and absolutes. Its citizens perpetually sought to return to bygone days of the individual initiative sufficient for military conquer or settlement. The ethical complications of administering an empire were, paradoxically, more the bailiwick of their predecessors.
6. Hughes, Rome (3 May 2019)
A breezy sketch of Roman history intertwined with trenchant art and architectural criticism, culminating in the sad observation that the Eternal City lost its leadership of the visual arts after World War II. Rome could not have ruled without concrete for its buildings, roads, and aqueducts, the projection of power. Greek culture captivated the Latins, which adopted its gods for purposes legitimacy and succession. Yet piety (i.e., ancestor worship) was the highest praise of a Roman; only Victorian England’s certainty of divine assent for White Man’s Burden is comparable. Augustus (r. 27BC-14AD) refurbished the Roman state’s governance; Constantine (r. 306-337AD) revamped citizenship by allowing Christians to be tried in church courts. Losing to the Goths at Adrianople (378AD) shook Roman confidence like nothing since Cannae six centuries earlier. Skipping ahead to the Renaissance (which started in Florence), the new forms of architecture recalled classic Rome, then hidden by ruin and overgrowth in a town reduced to 25,000 inhabitants. The style was ‘truth of representation’ as well as a faithfulness. After the Council of Trent (1543-68) kicked off the Counterreformation – don’t argue with Luther, show superior emotion and intensity – Sixtus V (from 1585) created the basis of modern Rome with rebuilding, shaping the Baroque age of religious art. Thence to neoclassicism, a noble simplicity, calm grandeur. To again jump ahead: the Futurists despised the authority of Roman tradition, seemingly an underappreciated milestone in the postwar loss of primacy (in an aside, Hughes suggests no city has been so compromised by the auto). Hughes opines Rome’s energies were spent, its classicism no longer inspiring to emerging artists. Coda the ‘freedom’ of abstract art leads to monotony, because over time there’s no anchorage to the real world. What really underpins variety is a connection to things as they appear; the world is sufficiently full of wonder.