The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides) (10 page)

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Authors: Anthony Esolen

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Women enjoyed more freedom and higher esteem in the Roman family than anywhere else in the Mediterranean world, outside of Israel. The woman was the heart of the home, and the home was holy. Roman women did not have to endure being shunted aside for second and third wives: the Romans were monogamous, and, especially early in their history, they looked down on divorce.
 
The histories are full of accounts of noble women, like Cornelia, the mother of the reformist tribunes Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, or Portia, the daughter of the moralist Cato and wife of Brutus, or Cloelia, the woman who escaped from her captors by bravely swimming across the Tiber under enemy fire.
4
Greece was more male-dominated than Rome, but Rome was more committed to the rule by fathers, and that seems to have been a good thing for Roman women.
 
Despots? From the time they expelled Tarquin, the Romans abhorred one-man rule. Occasionally they did delegate dictatorial powers to a single man, as they did with Cincinnatus, the farmer who took command of the armies, defeated the enemy in a couple of weeks, and resigned his commission.
5
But that was for an emergency, and only for a specified term; and when the term was out the ex-dictator had to face the people, should anyone come forth to accuse him of abusing his authority. The Roman devotion to the family set up a strong buffer
against
the State, even as it helped to create the State. It is interesting to note how this buffer worked, because it helps explain why America’s founders established the checks and balances of its apparently unwieldy government.
 
Suppose I’m a Roman of the noble class, a patrician, and I want my son to be elected consul. I call in my markers. I’ve done many favors for the heads of lesser families: I am their
patronus
or patron, literally their sort-of-father, and they are my clients, literally the people who call on me for assistance. They repay me by supporting my candidates. Now if there were only one consul, we’d have a recipe for constant civil unrest; but the Romans relieved the pressure by establishing
two consuls
, parceling out the executive power month by month, by turns, for one year. Consider the disadvantages, if one believes that government should be a laboratory for, as Edmund Burke put it, “men who are habitually meddling, daring, subtle, active, of litigious dispositions and unquiet minds” (
Reflections on the Revolution in France
). The consul serves for one short year, and at that it’s a month on and a month off. It’s a system designed to prevent anything abrupt from happening; the more so, as one consul can veto the other. Then, when the year is out, said consuls may not immediately run for reelection. They become members of the Senate, a consultative and legislative body, and historically a brake on hasty measures.
 
Rome was set up to ensure precisely what is decried today: gridlock, infighting, and obstacles to “solving” problems—solving them, that is, by creating others that are new and worse. Our media buy wholesale the effete leftist line that we need to “put our differences behind us,” “get together and work towards solutions,” and fearlessly bring about some utterly undefined “change.” These notions, self-evidently good in the eyes of today’s media, were exactly the things the consuls and the Senate were created to block. The Romans had set up their government to prevent the newest ideas, however popular, from winning out over the traditional way of doing things and the wisdom of old men.
 
So we have a Roman state, suspicious of change, which still manages to change with the times, and survives and grows as a republic for
five hundred years
. And even after it lost a truly republican government, it continued in imperial form for yet another five hundred years in the West, and another fifteen hundred years in the East. It did so, unquestionably, with a lot of civil strife, but, during the centuries of the Republic, without any full-scale civil war
,
such as convulsed France twice in one century, England under Charles I, Spain under Franco, the United States in the War Between the States, and ancient Athens. It did so even though the geographical position of Rome made it vulnerable to attacks from north and south, and from the sea. Why?
 
Father knows best
 
One reason was that they understood the truth of a proverb that now we can only snicker at: father knows best.
 
We can’t underestimate the importance of the father and the family in the Roman mind. When the great national poet Virgil wrote to legitimize the rule of Augustus—the first Roman ruler to be called “emperor,” and the reinventor of Roman government after the Republic collapsed—he compared his saving his country from civil war to its founding by the legendary Aeneas, a refugee from Troy. But Aeneas is no swaggering warrior or privateer like Odysseus, taking twenty years to get back home to Ithaca. Aeneas is Roman at heart before he ever leaves Troy. He is called
pater Aeneas
and
pius Aeneas,
meaning Aeneas the father who performs his duty to
his
father, to his fatherland, to his household gods, and to the great gods. Now Virgil is a great and humane poet, not just a propagandist. He extends the definition of such piety to include humaneness and mercy towards those who suffer. Rome must obey the right. But the bedrock definition of piety remains fatherly duty and duty towards the father. We see a perfect picture of Roman piety when Aeneas, instructed by the gods, prepares to leave the burning city of Troy. He sets his crippled old father Anchises upon his shoulders, and takes his little boy Iulus by the hand, while Anchises carries the “household gods,” that is, the ancestral images.
6
It is a picture of being rooted steadfastly in time, taking nourishment from the past, and placing one’s hope in the descendants to come.
 
That rootedness in the past, and that firm trust in the perpetuity of one’s line, can help us distinguish Rome from Greece, from the imperial governments of Persia and Egypt, and from the follies of our day. Unlike the Persian, the Roman in the days of the Republic never bowed before the glory of a self-styled King of Kings. He was a free man. His family too, though it might not be influential, was holy. Each family possessed its own
genius
or guardian spirit, passed along from one head of the family to the next. The State, a cooperative of families, could not breach the sanctity of any family without setting the precedent for its own destruction. The notion that a State could intrude upon the hearth and wrest the children from the authority of their parents, as is called for in Plato’s
Republic
and as is the precondition for every modern socialist state, would strike the Roman as barbarous and blasphemous.
 
Unlike the Greek, the Roman never conceived that the State was just the creation of men, to be altered at will. It was holy—as was the family or clan. As such, it could resist the surges of popular appetite or willfulness. Several times Rome came close to breaking up, but did not. The people’s fundamental reverence prevented it. Once, early on, the plebeian families, the commoners, grew sick of their high-handed treatment by the patricians, from whom the consuls were then chosen. So they threatened to destroy Rome, not by fire or sword, but by walking away.
7
They packed their belongings, just when Rome was threatened by the Volscians; but the Senators agreed to compromise, and Rome survived. And at a time when Rome was struggling for supremacy against nearby Veii, a powerful Etruscan port, the tribunes of the people complained that it was too great a burden upon the farmer-citizens to remain deployed through an entire year, “no longer allowed even during the storms of winter to visit their homes or see to their affairs” (Livy, 5.2). The people suspected that the protracted war was a plot by their noble rivals to keep their numbers down in the assemblies. But the senator Appius Claudius rose to remind the people that it was for this very reason that pay had been voted for military service, and that it made no sense to break up the camps and entrenchments now, only to have to establish them all over again in the spring. The heart of his speech, though, is an appeal not to money or self-interest or practicality, but to union, despite rivalry and strife:
 
What [the tribunes] were afraid of then, and what they are seeking to destroy today, is—obviously—concord between the orders—between nobility and commons—as they are convinced that it would contribute more than anything else to the collapse of the tribunate. They are like dishonest tradesmen looking for work—it suits them best if there is always something wrong in the body politic, so that you can call them in to put it right.
 
 
 
Tell me, which side are you tribunes on? Are you defending or attacking the commons? Are you for or against our soldiers in the field? (5.3)
 
The reader will be able to think of examples in our time, when party politics instructs people to hope that their own nation will be defeated. But the Romans cleared their heads and decided that if you are going to fight a war, you had better win it. They maintained their positions around Veii, and won their most significant victory before the Punic Wars against Carthage.
 
The early Romans were assisted in their political endeavors by a personal asceticism. At least before they conquered the Greek world in the second and first centuries BC, Roman men and women despised lavish displays of wealth, sumptuous meals, or an unseemly desire to gratify one’s lusts. They considered it effeminate and enervating. Instead, their lives were granted meaning by family duties and patriotism. That latter virtue is hated by the politically correct, even as they pay lip service to it. True patriotism is the enemy of all utopias, the enemy of socialisms that bury the local community and the family, the enemy of a world controlled by technocrats and bureaucrats. It’s the enemy of a “multiculturalism” that reduces culture to cookery and clothing, and replaces deep beliefs and old customs, “prejudices,” with new-and-improved prejudices—against the family, against faith, and for the all-powerful State and its octopus arms called social services.
 
It’s also the enemy of the opportunism or crass utilitarianism that men fall prey to when they are persuaded that neither our forebears nor our descendants mean anything to us. Here is an anecdote from the struggle against Veii. A schoolmaster in the Veian village of Falerii, hoping to curry favor with the Romans, led his boys out on a walk, as was his daily routine, only this time it was straight into the Roman camp and the headquarters of the consul, Camillus. The teachers gave the boys over and declared that, since they were the sons of the Falerian elders, the town was now in the hands of Rome.
 
 
 
Virgil the Chauvinist
 
Woman’s a thing forever fitful and forever changing.
Virgil’s
Aeneid
 
 
Say that now, Virgil, and you’ve lost your job.
 
 
But Camillus spat upon the offer, claiming that Rome and Falerii, though political and military enemies, were bound by a common humanity. “We have drawn the sword not against children, who even in the sack of cities are spared,” said he, “but against men, armed like ourselves, who without injury or provocation attacked us at Veii” (Livy, 5.27). So Camillus had the treacherous schoolmaster stripped and bound, and gave the boys sticks to flog him with as they beat him back into town. Seeing this, the people of Falerii, impressed by Roman honor and decency, decided to unite with Rome rather than continue in their alliance with Veii: “We admit our defeat, and surrender to you in the belief—than which nothing can do more honour to the victor—that we shall live better lives under your government than under our own.”
 
The patriot is not the man who does whatever he wishes, even if it is for the apparent advantage of the country. Honor and mercenary calculation are different things. To illustrate, here’s another favorite story of mine—and it hardly matters whether it’s only a pious legend, since it was the sort of thing that defined for the Roman boy what it meant to be a Roman and a man. The Romans have just thrown off the yoke of Tarquin the Proud. Wishing to return to power, Tarquin enlists the aid of another and more powerful Etruscan, Porsena, who lays siege to Rome, preventing anyone from getting in or out. He aims to starve some sense into them.

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