The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides) (9 page)

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Authors: Anthony Esolen

BOOK: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides)
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I only ask to live, with pure faith keeping
 
In word and deed that Law which leaps the sky,
 
Made of no mortal mould, undimmed, unsleeping,
 
Whose living godhead does not age or die. (
King Oedipus
)
 
 
A city’s fate may hang upon a bad harvest or the whims of a madman with an army across the sea. But if its people forget wisdom, there will be no need to wait for weather or war.
 
 
 
They Had Hippies Then, Too
 
Like a dog, [Diogenes the Cynic] performed any bodily act without shame, when and where he chose. He obeyed no human laws because he recognized no city. He was
Cosmopolites
, Citizen of the Universe; all men, and all beasts too, were his brothers.
Gilbert Murray
,
Five Stages of Greek Religion
 
 
Chapter Two
 
ROME: AN EMPIRE OF TRADITION AND PATRIARCHY
 
I
n some ways ancient Rome, especially during the centuries of the Republic, was as politically incorrect a place as you can imagine. Our feminists, who consistently uphold the demands of a minority of well-heeled women against the common good, the family, and every freedom recognized in our Bill of Rights, would hate the patriarchy of ancient Rome, and not least because that patriarchy worked. Nowadays, gripped in our great national passion of envy, we demand all sorts of equality: economic, social, and political. We’ll destroy the family to attain this equality, and never mind the prisons that result. The Romans instead first sought the good of the family and the city. For the most part, they found that good not in leveling distinctions but in revering them. Let’s see how.
 
Guess What?
 
Patriarchy worked.
 
Gridlock, resistance to change, and other anti-democratic features helped make the Roman republic strong.
 
Tax hikes, slavery, and moral depravity brought Rome down.
 
 
Respecting your elders
 
You’re a small child growing up under the watchful eyes of your grand-father, his father before him, his father’s father, and a host of great-uncles to boot. But you won’t see them pottering about the garden, tending the fig tree, and telling stories. They have gone down to the shades, and are all the more potent for it. You see them every day, though. They stand upon the mantel above the
focus,
the hearth, where your family will take meals, talk, and gather for the holy rites. They are your household gods, these ancestors. When they died, their kin made a plaster or wax impression of their faces, or small figurines. In later centuries, a rich family might hire someone to sculpt their busts in marble. They are holy. They are the guardians of the family and of ancient traditions. They define for you, the child, what it means to be a Roman.
 
Such a religion, like Shinto among the Japanese, befits a strongly patriarchal society, with well-established lines of authority and a deep suspicion of innovation. Now, all societies, without exception, have been dominated by men; they have had to be, if they wanted to survive. But the
father
was central to Roman order. Not so in Greece, where the all-male club, at the
gymnasion
or the assembly, tended to shoulder aside the family as the ruling institution of civil life. The Roman head of household, or
paterfamilias,
possessed an astounding authority. His word was law. In the early days he could, legally, commit his children to death.
 
That was no idle power. Various Roman historians tell the story of one of Rome’s legendary heroes, nicknamed Torquatus, or “The Man with the Neck Chain,” because in the middle of battle he raced up to a gigantic Gaul, killed him, and ripped the chain off the man’s neck. This same Torquatus later led the Romans against the Latins. By then he had a son of his own, commanding a small company of soldiers. This son, using some independent strategy, or hankering after glory, broke the orders of the consuls and, challenged to single combat by a Tuscan nobleman, slew him. For breaking orders, Torquatus had that son executed. An army without discipline is no army. A city without an army will soon be no city. And a father who is not obeyed is no father.
1
 
In 509 BC, Lucius Junius Brutus freed the city from its last Etruscan king, but then learned that his grown sons were conspiring to return Tarquin to the throne. He sentenced them to death.
2
In the Roman imagination, the city was an extension of the family, and treason against the
patria
was tantamount to parricide. We see this identification everywhere, this rule by fathers. The historian Livy preserves for us the language of an archaic oath between warring factions: the legate entrusted to act for one of the sides in a controversy is called a
pater patratus,
a “father enfathered,” a father endowed with the full authority of a father.
3
The members of the Senate, a body that predates the establishment of the Roman Republic, are literally “old men,” seniors. They are the revered heads of the most powerful families.
 
This preference for a severe wisdom and the performance of duty, as opposed to the glow of a moment of individual triumph, is easy to see in Roman art. The Romans, who mostly looked down upon free men who competed in sports, did not idolize the young athlete. When they finally learned a little bit about sculpture, their tastes did not run to the buff bodies of nude youths, as in Greece. They preferred bald heads and jowls and warts and all, the serious busts of old men. What you see in a Greek youth sculpted in the golden age of Athens is the ideal of youth: a young man at the height of his strength, about to hurl a discus, or striding forth to throw the javelin; looking like a god, and enjoying for a brief moment the blessedness of the gods. What you see in the Roman bust of a jowled Cicero is hard public thought, experience, determination, responsibility.
 
 
 
Collapse of the Family, Fall of an Empire
 
Whether because of voluntary birth control, or because of impoverishment of the stock, many Roman marriages at the end of the first and the beginning of the second century were childless.
 
 
Jerome Carcopino
,
Daily Life in Ancient Rome
 
It is the mark of a society in decline, this living for one’s present. It accompanies feminism, since bearing and caring for children keeps women from donning helmets and play-acting at being legionnaires. Carcopino added:
 
The feminism which triumphed in imperial times brought more in its train than advantage and superiority. By copying men too closely the Roman woman succeeded more rapidly in emulating man’s vices than in acquiring his strength.
 
 
Sound familiar?
 
 
What is the politically correct line on such a society? If today’s assumptions are correct, what should we expect of ancient Rome? It must have been violent, ruled by despots, and oppressive to women. But Rome was none of those things.

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