The New Domus Aurea

 

The Emperor Nero may not really have fiddled while Rome burned.  After the great fire which devastated a large portion of the ancient city, however, he took advantage of the devastation to spend enormous sums to build for himself an enormous, extravagant and elaborate palace which came to be called the Domus Aurea, or Golden House.

Perhaps because he wasn't entirely certain the Roman people would know the huge structure was his, he also erected a 120' statute of himself adjacent to this palace.  Portions of this gargantuan edifice have been explored.  They've survived, although Vespasian did his best to bury the Golden House after the Senate and people of Rome finally had enough of the meglomaniac that was responsible for its construction.  In its place he built the Flavian Amphitheater, better known as the Colosseum.  The statue of Nero was transformed into one of the god Sol.

Nero at least didn't himself demolish the buildings he replaced with his monumental house to gratify his ego.  The great fire did that for him.  Now, unfortunately, someone Nero would have recognized as a fellow spirit has torn down part of a building having national significance to satisfy his own self-love by building a very large and unnecessary ballroom.

The ballroom will apparently dwarf the White House itself.  It will be 90,000 square feet; the White House itself is 50,000 square feet.  It will be as large as 1.5 football fields, and will accommodate 999 persons.  Why 999?  This assumes it won't be expanded, though; something almost to be expected.

One wonders what events requiring so much room will take place there.  Inaugural balls, presumably.  When are balls otherwise held?  One seldom hears of balls taking place, outside of Disney films and romantic novels.  If not balls, what?  Proms?  Weddings?  Conventions?

It seems this vast space will decorated in the same gaudy manner as the resorts Nero's fellow spirit has already developed.  Gold, apparently, will be everywhere.  Such an abundance of gold suggests a lack of imagination.  It also suggests a belief that an abundance of gold is necessary to demonstrate wealth and excellence.  Regrettably, that belief has already caused the Oval Office to appear cluttered and tawdry.

What prompts someone to mar nature or dignified historical buildings with such showy self-indulgence?  Some (including this writer) have noted similarities with the wealthy, boorish character of Trimalchio in The Satyricon. He decorated his large villa with frescoes and paintings of events in his life and tokens from his admirers.  He spoke almost exclusively of himself and his properties.

I suspect meglomania can be combined with a terrible kind of insecurity.  The sense of importance and power felt by the meglomaniac is diminished by a nagging fear that he is, in fact, inadequate and looked down upon by others.  And so the meglomaniac is desperate to glorify himself and make a mark on the world, and punish those who won't kowtow to him.

The fact that he is planning to construct a large triumphant arch in the Capitol is most telling.  Those who have done this or had it done for them were great military figures, though.  Does our Ozymandias plan to try and rival them?  Let's hope not.

On A Carousel

Oswald Spengler, a kind of historian and philosopher of the early to mid-20th century, wrote a book called The Decline of the West.  Being German, he was unable to keep himself from using words like "being" and "becoming" as he wrote what he called, modestly, his complete explanation of world history--the only true one, others being counterfeit.   It strikes me that his initially interesting insight that human history was organic thereby degenerated into a kind of mysticism.  He opined that we pass through inevitable and successive phases of time he described as "culture" and "civilization."  The latter is an aspect of decline.  In antiquity, Greece was a "culture" and Rome a "civilization."  The modern West he thought had entered into the "civilization" phase which he predicted would be governed by "Caesarism" much as Rome was after the Republic, for the next couple of hundred years.

I'm leery of efforts at constructing grand, all-encompassing explanations of complicated phenomena, but think there is an element of truth in the claim that our history is in some sense cyclical, which is to say that we repeat ourselves, swinging pendulum-like from one extreme of social consciousness to another.  I'm inclined to attribute this to an inability to learn and to think, however.  This isn't to our credit, but it generates optimism of a sort--we can at least imagine that the current fad for autocracy and sameness, and the repression of contrasting views and lifestyles, will dissipate in time, as we ride the carousel of our history.

Thus, the prospect of an aging, scatter-brained and astonishingly self-centered snake-oil salesman becoming president once more need not terrify us, and it may be hoped that no permanent harm will be done to the nation.  The recent, relentlessly clownish, convention might merely be a tawdry circus rather than a horrifying glimpse of things to come.  

But assuming we survive the upcoming election as something resembling a Republic, what kind of a nation will we be?  We already are an oligarchy, or more properly a plutocracy.  Our legislators are for sale; the justices of our high court look for handouts and appear more and more like panhandlers wearing black robes.  What do we call a nation governed by gluttons and hoarders?  I don't think Aristotle came up with a term for a land of Trimalchios.  

We must emulate Montaigne, who wrote: "Not being able to govern events, I govern myself, and if they will not adapt to me, I adapt to them."  We must become nations in ourselves.  Not like the silly so-called "sovereign citizens" who live in a fantasy world much like a roleplay game, but rather as individuals mindful of their own interests and seeking peaceful co-existence with others but taking intelligent steps and making intelligent decisions for their own protection.

Trimalchio Ascendant

We all know Trimalchio.   He is an unforgettable character in a surviving portion of the Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter, friend, for a time, of the Emperor Nero.  A former slave, now a freeman, of enormous wealth who is holding a great banquet his friends and those beholden to him attend.  These lavish dinners were serious business to the Romans.  You were, almost literally, nobody unless you were invited to one hosted by the high and mighty, the notorious, the famous. 


Trimalchio's dinner is described in detail, as is Trimalchio himself.  The dinner is many-coursed and remarkable in its excess.  It may be that Petronius' detailing of the dinner and the conduct of Trimalchio, his slaves and friends, served to inspire the belief in Roman decadence which many of us hold so dear, and which has been depicted in various films.


Trimalchio is described as self-important, boorish, arrogant, ignorant, loud, verbose, without breeding or taste.  His ego is astounding.  He even treats his guests to an enactment of what he has decreed will take place at his own funeral; naturally a very grandiose affair, solemnly acting his part as his revered corpse. 


He's referred to with some frequency by authors who lived after Petronius, who died by his own hand when condemned by Nero, spending his last moments, it's said, elegantly and savagely relating the Emperors various faults to those in attendance.  The parties held by Scott Fitzgerald's Gatsby are compared to Trimalchio's feast, for example.  It seems he comes to mind whenever the defects of the very rich and wasteful are in evidence, particularly the newly rich who haven't yet learned to display their wealth with a degree of taste and class.


Alas, he also comes to mind, to my mind in any case, whenever our president-elect is mentioned or appears before me on my TV, PC or smart phone.  He is ubiquitous of course; our technology makes him so, certainly, but he is responsible himself for his omnipresence because of his various invariably silly or smug or angry or sophomoric tweets when not in the public eye, his blatant self-promotion, his stunts, his propensity for overstatement, the enthusiasm with which he extols his many virtues and denigrates those he feels fail to do the same or oppose him in some fashion.  He seems incapable of ignoring any slight, real or imagined.


He won't be a dignified president, I think.  He'll likely be what he's shown himself to be in the past:  a showman, a salesman, a kind of carnival barker and insult comic.  Not what one wants as a president, but as we like to say these days, it is what it is.  He'll schmooze when it serves his purpose, and sulk when things don't go his way.  If he's wise, or if his handlers are, he'll be content to be a kind of figurehead, wheeled out to condemn or praise or make prepared announcements while his people do the hard work of government.  This seems to have been how he's handled his businesses, in fact.  If this is how it will be, he may be safely ignored or become a kind of character in a TV series whose statements are always suspect and whose missteps are mitigated by those surrounding him.  He wouldn't be a serious figure.


We can hope for that, in any case.  We already see a rather extensive about-face on his part.  He blithely ignores the promises and claims he made before the election; his nominees are avidly taking positions contrary to those he's taken.  He will say, it seems, most anything that appears to be advantageous at the moment and then do the contrary if it appears to be advantageous later. 


So perhaps we'll be fortunate, and can watch Trimalchio do what he does now as we watched him as a character in a story told by an ancient author well-acquainted with those like him who were rich and powerful in his time, and having watched will be sadder, but will survive to be wiser.

Send in the Clowns

Yes, I know, they're already here.

Although it's difficult to assess whether the politics of our Glorious Republic is comedy or tragedy, the efforts of the relentless categorizer Aristotle notwithstanding, there's something laughable about this presidential election.  I wonder if the plethora of clowns running for that sublime office is a kind of affirmation by fate that our elections have caused whatever gods may be to despair of us entirely.  Since we are beyond saving, why not turn our national politics and governance into a kind of farce, something entertaining if nothing else.

The cast is impressive in size, although the characters are stock.  The venal, disingenuous, unlikeable Clinton; the big-mouthed,  pompous ass Trump; the holy-roller Huckabee; the scatter-brained, disturbingly named Rand Paul; the oleaginous opportunist Cruz; the youthful, handsome and vacant Rubio; the excitable, apparently vindictive, Christie; the dully passive-aggressive Walker; the odd, emotional Graham; the unexciting leftover Jeb Bush; and the others, thus far unnoticeable, with the exception of Bernie Sanders, who seems to suffer from nothing more than being old in age and an old-time liberal.

And soon, perhaps, Vice President Biden may join the race.  That would be like Leslie Nielsen's Frank Drebin running for the office.

How can an intelligent, responsible individual make a choice among these undesirables?  It is not, if it has ever been, a process of choosing the best or most qualified person.  It has become an exercise in determining who is most likely to do the least amount of damage to the United States and its people, and even to the world given our propensity to rush into problems and places where angels fear to tread. 

There are of course intelligent, responsible individuals left even now here in God's favorite country, and it's likely some if not all of them vote.  But it's not at all clear that they will have any significant impact in deciding who becomes president.  We (and other, less favored, people) enjoy comparing our nation to ancient Rome, which in a way is appropriate as we borrowed so much of its form and architecture.  We have not quite made it to the point where the presidency can be bought in the way Didius Julianus bought his place as Roman Emperor, but we clearly have reached the point where money is of paramount importance, a direct if not the sole cause of success in our elective politics.  For this we must thank our Supreme Court, which decided that hurling any amount of money at our politicians in the hope if not the expectation of favors is perfectly fine in the law.  Only bribery of the most blatant kind is prohibited here in the home of the free and the brave.

We may still hope, however.  Didius Julianus reigned for only a matter of weeks, and was disposed of by the Praetorians he paid.  The auctioning of the Roman principate was shown in a Hollywood spectacular, called The Fall of the Roman Empire by someone who was its seems unaware of the fact that the empire continued in the West for another three centuries or so after that memorable event, and in the East for another thirteen hundred years, more or less.  I recall Christopher Plummer playing Commodus in that film as something of a cruel but cheerful lunatic.

But who can be said to be even the least likely to do harm to us among this rogues gallery?  We can expect such as Clinton and Jeb Bush to play the tired old game of Washington politics in a predictable if not effective manner, but the ascendancy of that caricature of a boorish rich man, the Trimalchio of our time, is it seems a sign that many have soured on business as usual, or have at least concluded that if we must suffer through it we may as well have someone who, being rich and only concerned with being rich, doesn't care about what he says or thinks.

Is it possible that Trump's popularity may indicate that we all now recognize our politicians are pandering hypocrites, ready to do or say anything to be elected and remain elected, which is to say ready to do the bidding of their paymasters?  Or indicate that we are for other reasons sick of what has become a sham?   If so, it may perhaps be a desirable development in its own peculiar way.