"What Power Has Law Where Only Money Rules?"

 

I've mentioned Gaius Petronius Arbiter a/k/a Titus Petronius Niger, author of The Satyricon, Suffect Counsel of Rome, courtier of Nero, on more than one occasion in this blog.  He's mentioned by Tacitus and others, so there's credible evidence he existed.  He appears as a character in the novel Quo Vadis, which formed the basis for a movie of the same name.

He was known as the "arbiter of elegance" in Nero's court and a voluptuary, but also was competent and vigorous in performing his public duties.  He eventually fell afoul of the Emperor, like Seneca, and took his own life in a most remarkable way, slowly bleeding to death by opening his veins but stopping the flow of blood using tourniquets to prolong his life while enjoying conversation and banter with friends and writing a description of Nero's misdeeds which he sealed and had delivered to the Emperor after his death.

I qoute him in the title of this post.  It's a perceptive statement by a fascinating man intimately familiar with the rich and powerful oligarchs of a great empire ruled by a meglomaniac.

The ancient Romans had a high regard for law.  They generated a vast amount of written law through the centuries.  Much of current European law derives from that of Rome.  A knowledge of law was considered essential to a successful career, and many prominent citizens acted as advocates (such as Cicero).

The Roman respect for law wasn't limited to written laws.  Romans also revered the mos maiorum, the unwritten code of the customs and traditions they considered peculiarly Roman, such as duty, respect and discipline, which governed the conduct of their ancestors.

When Petronius wondered whether the law had any power where money ruled (implying that it did not), he was therefore maintaining that money had profoundly corrupted and undermined Roman society; had in fact perverted it.  The power of money had changed what it meant to be Roman.

It's become a cliche that the United States is failing and falling as the Roman Empire did and for similar reasons. Like all clichés, it's too simple, but there are similarities.  The U.S. was founded in large part by lawyers.  The Constitution is a legal document--essentially a set of laws.  The rule of law was essential to its creation and forms the basis for its continuance.

It's rapidly devolving, however, because plutocrats have usurped the administration of the government and have no respect for the law to the extent that it serves to thwart their power and influence and the realization of their desires.

The Supreme Court has assured that the nation's government can be bought by sanctioning its purchase as a Constitutional right, and narrowing the definition of bribery, in effect holding that politicians may be paid in return for their services except in rare circumstances.

So we may well ask Petronius' question now, 2000 years after he posed it, and come to the same conclusion he did.

An Ancient Roman Perspective on Good Friday

Today is Good Friday.  It's been a long time since I've been in a church to "celebrate" the gruesome death which we're taught took place that day in the Roman province of Judea.  I wonder how it's celebrated by the One Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church these days.  If I recall correctly, proceedings in my days as an altar boy were appropriately solemn.  Are they still, or has the effort to make observances cheery and attractive resulted in a kinder, gentler version of the crucifixion? 

Even as idealized in El Greco's painting shown above, a crucifixion must have been a horrible death.  Just how the Romans crucified people is a matter of some dispute, but there's no doubt it took place.  Some question whether the nails were placed as depicted here; sometimes the crucified are shown as tied to a cross.  

Presumably, this particular crucifixion, if it took place as described in the Gospels referring to "Doubting Thomas," involved the use of nails as Thomas is shown the wounds which resulted.  Whether it took place is disputed by some, of course.  

Unless one is a Christian believer and accepts the Gospels, the story of the Passion, the death and resurrection, isn't immediately acceptable.  Some parts of it, though, seem credible.  By this I mean that based on information available, some of what is said to have taken place could have taken place, though very little.  We can conclude that if we take a Roman view, and make reference to non-Christian sources.

We know at least that Pontius Pilate (Pontius Pilatus, properly) existed, and was a prefect governing the province of Judea around the time in question.  This has been confirmed by the so-called "Pilate Stone" which is a damaged block of limestone found in Caesarea Maritima (modern Caesarea), bearing an inscription in which he is named as making a dedication to Augustus and Livia.  Caesarea Maritima was the Roman administrative capital of the province and so would have been where Pilate stayed and from which he governed.  However, he no doubt travelled to and stayed in Jerusalem from time to time and as appropriate, and it makes sense he would have been there at an important period of time such as Passover.

Tacitus refers to both Pilate and "Christus" when he writes of the fire which destroyed much of Rome while Nero was Emperor.  Tacitus relates that Nero sought to blame Christians for the fire, and also notes that "Christus, from whom the name [Christians] has its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus...."  So, there is a non-Christian source which, though it indicates Pilate was a procurator instead of a prefect/governor, states that such persons existed and "Christus" was put to death by a Roman official.

There seems to be no contemporaneous Roman account of the crucifixion, however.  Flavius Josephus makes a reference to it, and Pliny the Younger while a governor famously wrote the Emperor Trajan regarding how to treat Christians, but Josephus and Pliny, like Tacitus, wrote long after these events were said to have taken place.  By the time they wrote, Christians were known of and deemed suspicious and anti-social among the Roman elite.  No sources are cited by any of these writers, and what they knew may have been based on rumor, or have formed part of the "backstory" of the Christian faith for many years at that time.  For that matter, the Gospels were written decades later as well.

We have a reasonable basis on which to say that Pilate existed and was prefect/governor of Judea during the reign of Tiberius.  There is reason to think Judea was a difficult province to govern,  Herod the Great was a client-king of Rome, but the Jews were thought even then to be peculiar and the Herodian dynasty was known to be made up of people who wouldn't hesitate to kill each other as needed.  Augustus once remarked that he would rather be Herod's pig than one of his sons.  After his death Judea was split into smaller kingdoms, and Rome assumed rule of the area after the death of the last Herod, Herod Antipas, circa 39 CE.  The Jews revolted against Roman rule 30 years later.

Herod Antipas is the Herod referred to in the story of the death of Jesus.  Pilate supposedly sent Jesus to be judged by Herod.

So, there is a basis to believe Pilate lived and was the Roman governor of Judea.  We can probably infer that people were crucified while he was governor.  We have a single source which indicates one of those crucified was the "Christus" from whose name "Christians" has its origin.  That's a bit of stretch, perhaps, but it's arguably correct.  That would seem to be the most that can be said based on Roman, non-Christian sources.

From that perspective, we can plausibly infer that there was a person crucified under Pontius Pilate, presumably in accordance with Roman law or the authority of Pilate as governor, for some reason.  That person, if he existed, was decades later associated with the Christianity.  About three hundred years later Christians, of which there were several varieties, made up the ruling class of the Roman Empire.

If the death took place, it likely did so as part of a normal "day at the office" for Pilate, and would have been treated as such by him and his staff.  It probably wasn't even known of by other Romans.  Over the years the death, if it happened, became very important of course.  But again from the Roman perspective, by the time it became important, it simply didn't matter whether it took place or not.  

For someone who isn't a believing Christian, that seems the most sensible way in which to think of Good Friday, given the lack of evidence.  One can dispute with believers about whether the crucifixion took place, but it makes no difference.  It makes a difference to some of them, however, as it seems they hope to find some corroboration for their beliefs.  Perhaps "Doubting Thomas" has had more of an influence than has been suspected.

Amor Fati

It's odd that Nietzsche, who excoriated the Stoics in a frantic rant I referred to a few posts ago, referred often to amor fati,"love of fate."  He did so in such a manner as it appears to have been to him a kind of ideal state.

The phrase is a profoundly Stoic one, and acceptance if not love of fate is found in Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius and others of The Porch.  I'm tempted to say Nietzsche was indebted to the Stoics for the idea.  This may even account  for his anger at the Stoics.  So many of us come to hate those who benefit us, gratitude being a burden as Tacitus noted.  Nietzsche apparently also was inclined to refer fondly to the idea of eternal recurrence, another view held by the Stoics, though in their case this idea had a more cosmological meaning; the world would eventually perish only to begin again and have an unchanged existence, only to perish again and come to be again.

I doubt, though, that Nietzsche himself was ever a lover of fate. His end was grim enough it would have taken a Stoic Sage to bear it happily, but it would seem Nietzsche was far too discontented with life, with people, to love fate, condemned as he was to a life of seemingly endless disappointment.

The idea of love of fate, acceptance of fate, strikes many as objectionable.  It's thought to foster a submissive, passive nature and is reviled by some as promoting, or at least ignoring, injustice.  Self-styled radicals and revolutionaries, primarily those who lived in the 19th and early 20th centuries, like to refer to it as being a bourgeoisie attitude--unthinking acceptance of the status quo.

It is not, however.  It is an expression of the Stoic doctrine that one shouldn't allow oneself to be emotionally or mentally disturbed by matters not in one's control, but it is in the way of emphasizing the equally Stoic doctrine that one should rightly make use of what is in your control, i.e. one should be virtuous.  Acting rightly would include acting against injustice, to the extent one can.  In the one case, the Stoic is not controlled by things, events and people who are not in his/her control; in the other case the Stoic uses what is in his/her control for good.

This is something generally ignored by critics of the Stoics, who often seem to buy into the idea that Stoics are cold, unfeeling, and unmoved.  They prefer to see only one facet of Stoicism and fail to give it what it is due.  But it is a persistent misconstruction of Stoic doctrine.

Stoicism is certainly not a Romantic philosophy, and followers of Romanticism (like Nietzsche, at least sometimes) tend to despise it.  This may be due to the fact that it is thought to espouse the repression of emotion while the Romantic revels in it.  Stoicism does indeed teach that we should live according to nature, which is to say reason; among the ancients nature was infused with the Divine Reason and we shared in it.  The Romantics of course were reacting against what they saw as too great a reliance on reason, and were often embarrassingly maudlin or zealous in extolling and expressing their emotions.  But again, this is to misunderstand Stoicism, which teaches only the dissipation of bad emotions such as anger and hate.

It is also I think to misunderstand reason, and the Enlightenment, and science, and we see this in those intellectuals who may be considered the successors to the Romantics as well as the religious zealots and fanatics who plague us today.  The successors of the Romantics question not only whether we should be reasonable but whether we can be, and denigrate science and reasonable assessment as mere narratives no more worthy of respect than myths.  The religious mistrust science and reason because neither will support their beliefs when those beliefs are put to the test.

So, science and reason are set upon by both these groups, and they or, better yet, the Enlightenment are blamed for everything from the Holocaust to the teaching of evolution in our schools to crime.  The narrowness of vision and arrogance of such as the "New Atheists" and in earlier times the logical positivists serve to empower these reactionary views.

As a result of anti-reason and anti-science, we may well be living in a world of the kind Yeats wrote of, where "the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity."  It seems something to be expected where reasonable judgment and conduct are considered no more worthwhile than any other kind of judgment or conduct, and where the words of books written thousands of years ago are considered to be the words of God, which others cannot be allowed to question.

No Bread, No Circuses

The history of the Roman games (ludi) makes a fascinating study.  We're all too ready to draw comparisons with imperial Rome, which still haunts us after all these years, perhaps with good reason (the haunting I mean, not the comparing).  But they're fascinating in themselves, and don't serve merely as an expositive device on which to pontificate regarding the ills of our time.

It is the growth of the games that is astounding.  Not merely the growth in their scope and their expansion to all provinces, but in their number.  Initially a part of religious festivals, they became the means by which the people of the empire were placated, or at least kept relatively calm and complacent, even compliant.  There came a point when most of the year was made up of days devoted to the holding of games of one kind or another, for one reason or another, and this does not even account for the special games put on by the emperors in connection with triumphs or in honor of various favorites and family members.

The games became more and more frequent, and also more and more expensive.  Those arranging the games, senators, nobles, even emperors, regularly went into debt in doing so.  But it would have been unheard of for anyone to decline what became a duty as well as necessary if one was to obtain a high place or a desired end.  The games were an essential facet of politics and government.

Juvenal came up with the phrase that is the basis for the title of this post:  panem et circenses.  He was complaining (that's all he did, really) that in his time all the people of Rome cared for was bread and circuses, unlike their ancestors who were full of civic duty. That was all the people expected from the state, according to Juvenal, and he may well have been right.
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It's fair to be skeptical of the claims made by Juvenal and others (e.g. Tacitus and Suetonius) regarding the depravity of the Roman people and nobles, and of their emperors.  We're not certain when Juvenal was born or died, but it seems he lived during the time of the Flavian emperors, and perhaps even into the reign of Trajan.  It may not be the case that great hordes of gladiators, animals and criminals were killed on a daily basis in the arenas, or that the emperors took a personal delight in the wholesale slaughter they sponsored.  One can easily believe most anything said about Caligula, but this becomes problematic with the "good" emperors like Augustus, Vespasian, Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian.  Marcus Aurelius is said to have deplored them, but he attended them nonetheless; he was expected to do so.  He is known to have annoyed the crowd by attending to the business of the state while at the games.  Surprisingly, it seems Domitian tried to curb the excesses of the games.

Nonetheless, the games can be said to have been characteristic of Rome, and their ubiquity and frequency establish their importance to Roman society and culture.  It's likely that all but a few enjoyed the games.  As the emperors were judged in part by their willingness to openly appear at the games and openly enjoy them, it may be that the games served in a peculiar way as a kind of bond between the emperor and the people.

Now, shall I do what I tend to deplore myself, and refer dolefully to the bread and circuses of our time?  It may surprise some to learn that I think we have nothing like them now.  It may be that we're simply not there yet.  Our politics are certainly money-based, and it is becoming more and more expensive to run for and obtain office.  Naturally, our politicians inevitably become more and more reliant on and beholden to those who have the money to give them. 

However, our politicians don't seem inclined to spend much money on the people, at least for the purpose of feeding them or amusing them, and are in this sense different from the politicians of ancient Rome.  They are, though, quite willing to spend money to persuade them, even to fool them, as the politicians of Rome certainly did--but the politicians of today need not do so by feeding them or amusing them.  That is no longer necessary.  For now, in any case.

The avidity of the masters of ancient Rome to spend great sums in feeding the people and holding games for their entertainment indicates not merely that they were manipulative.  It also indicates that they respected and feared the people.  They were the mob, and it was always possible that they would become angry and violent.  The games were in a sense an expression of the power of the people.  The people were a force to be reckoned with, even in an autocracy.  The emperor controlled the legions, true, but only those who ranked above centurions could be considered the aristocracy of the empire; the rest were its subjects, like those attending the games.  They could be relied on only to a certain extent.  The legions came to name their own emperors and revolt when they saw fit; they were to be feared as well, and shrewd emperors took pains to keep them happy as well as the people.

It is an interesting thought that the politicians of our time may not fear us as the politicians and rulers of ancient Rome feared their people.  I refer to the politicians and rulers of the United States.  We haven't demonstrated the capacity for fury and violence the people of the Roman Empire were known to display every now and then; perhaps because we're not as bad off as they were.  No doubt this is a good thing, but it may be that the trade off for this is a certain disregard in those who govern us, and those who govern them through money.  They need not concern themselves overmuch with seeing to it we are fed and distracted, or do so only sporadically, at election time.  Of course, we don't look to our government to entertain us as the Romans did, though there is much amusement to be found in the antics of our politicians.  We have other things to distract us.

As noted, we constantly compare ourselves to ancient Rome.  As far as I am aware, however, we have not done so to note the care taken by the great of that time to keep the people happy, amused and content.  There may be a lesson to be learned in this for the high and mighty, as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.