|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Recently a trend on Tik-Tok had its fifteen minutes of click-fame. It seems that some women are asking their men how often they think about the Roman Empire. The usual suspect experts were consulted, and of course they conclude that this interest in Rome reflects modern males’ angst over, or nostalgia for a time when patriarchy dominated, and manly deeds defined the male sex––the original “toxic masculinity.”
There’s nothing wrong per se with thinking about ancient Rome. Since Edward Gibbon’s magisterial Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the history of Rome has been a cautionary tale of how great empires collapse. Given the abundance of empirical evidence––invasions of unvetted migrants, our geopolitical enemies’ increasing challenges, a looming fiscal apocalypse, and suicidal social and cultural corruption––our country may be experiencing Rome’s fate, making its history deserving of our attention. And one place to start is reading what one brilliant Roman thought about the then new empire.
There’s no greater witness than the poet Virgil, who came of age during the last years of the Roman Republic, a century when social disorder, civic violence, and civil wars between Roman generals and their legions were chronic. Virgil’s Aeneid (19 B.C.) tells the story of Rome’s beginnings in the invasion of Italy by Trojan refugees, and also explores the tragic costs of civilization, and the lofty idealism that some great empires have claimed to represent.
That theme is what makes Rome and its fate so significant for us Americans, who are watching a floundering foreign policy lurching between appeasement and half-hearted interventions abroad.
Virgil has several scenes that make Rome’s imperial idealism explicit. One dimension of Rome’s greatness was its virtue: not just courage, the most important virtue for every civilization, but also pietas, the duty and responsibility one owes to family, the dead, the gods, and Rome itself. Virgil’s hero Aeneas is known for this virtue, hence the honorific pius attached to his name.
Early in the epic, Virgil uses a striking extended simile to highlight the political importance of pietas. When Neptune calms the violent storm incited by Juno, who hates the Trojans, Virgil writes,
“Just as, all too often, some huge crowd is seized by a vast uprising/the rabble runs amok, all slaves to passion,/rocks, firebrands flying. Rage finds them arms/but then, if they chance to see a man among them/one whose devotion and public service [pietas] lends him weight,/they stand there, stock still with their ears alert as/he rules their furor with his words and calms their passion.” (Robert Fagles translation)
For Romans who had lived through the bloody chaos of the dying Republic, this scene would have been all too familiar. Note the idealism that all free governments are predicated on: persuasion should trump force, words should replace blood. But Virgil’s and his readers’ knowledge that such a scene of leadership had rarely happened in the decades-long death of the Republic, challenges the idealism.
This prizing of language over force has also characterized a century of our foreign policy of moralizing internationalism, the idea that non-lethal diplomacy can defuse conflict and restore peace. Only we predicate its efficacy more on rational technique and transactional negotiations, rather than on the virtue of a great leader. And that noble idealism has also failed, as we are witnessing today with the Biden administration’s feckless appeasement of Iran, making this idealism about diplomatic engagement yet another milestone on our road to decline.
The second, more important expression of Virgil’s qualified idealism comes when Jupiter calms down his daughter, and Aeneas’ mother Venus’ angry grief over Juno’s violence against her son and his fated future glory. The “father of gods and men” assures his daughter that the glorious civilization, the Roman Empire, will indeed happen: “Then will the violent centuries, battles set aside,/grow gentle, kind,” and force be replaced by laws and a higher civilization.
This “new world order,” moreover, as we’ve been calling it since the Versailles settlement, will create lasting peace: “the terrible Gates of War with their welded iron bars/will stand bolted shut, and locked inside the Frenzy/of civil strife will crouch down on his savage weapons,/hands pinioned behind his back with a hundred brazen shackles,/monstrously roaring out from his bloody jaws.” The Pax Romana that will rule the world, and that created the foundations of the West.
This idealistic hope for the Roman Empire was expressed much later in Immanuel Kant’s 1795 essay “Perpetual Peace,” and Norman Angell’s 1914 prediction in The Great Illusion that global trade and the expansion of the West would make war obsolete. Both of these boons of our “rules-based international order” idealism of course have not materialized, any more than did Virgil’s predictions of Rome’s universal peace.
But notice how Virgil describes this peace as contingent not on material improvements and progress, but on great leaders controlling the permanent passions of men––greed for honor and wealth, vengeance for dishonor, the lust for power––passions that can be locked away for a while, but without virtue, fealty to the gods, and moral vigilance will break out again.
The third example of idealism that for Virgil will characterize the Roman Empire, takes place in the underworld, where Aeneas’s father Anchises, who had recently died, parades before his son the greatness of Rome with a procession of the souls of great Romans who will be born over the next 1200 years. He finishes with a statement of Rome’s moral destiny.
The Greeks may surpass the Romans in art, science, or oratory, Anchises concedes, “But you, Roman, remember, rule with all your power/the peoples of the earth––these will be your arts:/to put your stamp on the works and ways of peace,/to spare the defeated, but break the proud in war.”
These idealizations were not flattery of Augustus and his new empire. Virgil knew the cost in blood the creation of Rome exacted––not just from the enemies like the Gauls, a million of whom by his own count Julius Caesar killed or enslaved, but from Romans slaughtering Romans in a century of civil wars and civic violence. And he knew that Octavian had waded through blood to become Augustus.
But in the final lines of the Aeneid, Virgil shows the permanent reality of human nature that challenged his idealism. The last half of the epic describes the brutal wars between the tribes of Central Italy and the newly arrived Trojans, in effect a civil war since Romans would arise from the merging of the Latins and Trojans. The wars end with the death of Turnus, a leader of the indigenous resistance, at the hands of Pius Aeneas, who inflamed with vengeful rage forgets his father’s injunction “to spare the defeated,” and instead kills Turnus even as he kneels in submission and begs for mercy.
With this ending, we are reminded of Rome’s original sin of fratricide in its famous foundation myth, the murder of Remus by his brother Romulus. No matter how noble our intentions, how brilliant the civilization we create, how sophisticated and expansive the empire we rule, human nature never changes, and ruthless violence always must be the cost of our idealism.
Yet this probe of Roman idealism should not imply that Rome’s influence was completely malign. As the old saying had it, the Romans brought with them “peace and taxes.” Most of the lands the Romans conquered were scenes of endless wars and bloody competitions over power, resources, and slaves. Roman peace and her legions mostly put an end to that disorder.
But Rome also brought an advance civilization that was open to all, Roman or not: aqueducts, sewers, stone roads, arenas, theaters, magnificent temples and public buildings, villas, public art and sculpture, not to mention public laws and citizens’ rights. The ruins of all this civil and cultural infrastructure are still visible today, from Scotland to North Africa, the Danube to the Euphrates. And all these advances were defended with utmost ruthlessness, something our idealism today scorns and avoids.
This lesson in impossible idealism is why we should think about the Romans, for we still cling to the foreign policy idealism that has driven our foreign relations for a century. Our “rules-based liberal order” and technocratic hubris have claimed that through greater knowledge and material improvement, human nature also can be improved, and conflict resolve through diplomacy and global institutions.
Moreover, we assume that a complex diversity of peoples want to live just like us in a Pax Americana, once their illiberal and tyrannical leaders are neutralized. They will then embrace our political idealism of tolerance and unalienable rights, and discard their own ambitions for dominance and power. But those passions remain, and without a credible threat of force to deter them, they will erupt into violence against our arrogant tutelage. The Middle East since World War II illustrates this tragic reality, as does Russia’s brutal war against Ukraine, one fueled by Putin’s dreams of correcting the “geopolitical disaster,” as he described the collapse of the Soviet empire, and restoring the ethnic Russian Empire.
Thinking about Rome, especially through Virgil’s eyes in his brilliant epic, is not about “toxic masculinity” or “patriarchy,” but rather our own dangerous idealism that threatens our security and interests.
Thanks Bruce, great article!
I think about the Roman Empire every day 🙂
I used to think more about Ancient Greece, but now that I’m old and cynical Rome seems more appropriate.
The collapse of the western world is being orchestrated from above, the United Nations is the head of the beast.
The rule’s based international order is now called the 17 sustainable development goals. The World Economic Forum is the mouthpiece for Agenda 2030 and worldwide communism is the end goal.
I am betting that the WEF will usher in the Fourth Reich and not communism. Command economies just don’t ork.
There’s no real difference between the third riech and communism. National Socialism vs global communism.
There’s nothing wrong with moral idealism if it is based on a rational morality based on the facts of reality. There is rational moral idealism and there is irrational moral idealism.
It is not the fall of the Roman Empire that the USA should be compared to but Weimar Germany and Germany’s collapse into totalitarian Nazi insanity. The Nazis like the Muslims have their definition of what is morally ideal, the problem is that what they define as the moral ideal is anti-reality, anti-reason, anti-man, and anti-life.
“The totalitarian kind of “idealism” on which Hitler and Stalin counted, was virtually unknown during the Enlightenment or in the “bourgeois” nineteenth century. In our era, it became a cultural force, gaining armies of active defenders and millions of passive admirers, not only in Germany and Russia but around the world….
During the Weimar years, there were many opponents of Hitler eager to pit their version of the country’s ethics against his, men who demanded sacrifice not for the sake of the race, but of some other group. None of them challenged the basic premise of the German ethics: the duty of men to live for others, the right of those others to be lived for. From the outset, therefore, the opponents of Nazism were disarmed: since they equated selflessness with virtue, they could not avoid conceding that Nazism, however misguided, was a form of moral idealism.
The view that he was misguided did not cost Hitler many votes: it signaled merely a political dispute. The view that he was an idealist helped win him the country; it was a moral sanction which, in a different kind of era, he could never have hoped for.
Of all the Weimar groups invoking morality, the Nazis were the most fervent. Nazism, observes historian Koppel Pinson, “was in fact, the only large political movement in Germany that gave evidence of genuine idealistic, even though perversely misguided, sacrifice… All the idealistic will to sacrifice seemed to be concentrated on the Right. This not only gave the movement internal strength but also served to attract a wider and larger following.”
“National Socialism,” writes Pinson, “with all its moral nihilism, also knew how to appeal to the idealistic impulse for sacrifice,” So it did.” – Leonard Peikoff, “The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom in America”
Never forget that a muslim savage was made a NAZI SS General. It was the Grand Mufti of Israel Jerusalem al-Hussenni, Yasser Arafat’s egyptian uncle. al-Hussenni was the General in charge of the HANZAR division out of Balkan area. al-Hussenni got to visit the “death camps” so he could set some up in Israel. Pork eating NAZIs were OK for islamic exterminators.
Well..the enemy of my enemy….I guess they meant it.
Growing up among those who followed Hitler I can only agree. His followers were not lusting for murder and extermination of others, but rather feeling the need to save kinship and to become part of a greater family within which to find security and pride and a moral compass. A compass which they considered lost within the excesses of the Weimar Republic and the atrocities observable in the socialist paradise next door.
That reality turned out different many discovered too late.
We have a tendency to look at Hitler, Germans and Germany as cardboard cutouts. I am attempting to educate myself, but it is hard to get past the stereotypical “everybody I hate is Hitler” phenomenon.
Can you recommend a resource?
What, nothing about Lutheran Social Services and their ties to the Nazis in the 1930s? C’mon man it’s your fav go-to line when trying to insult me.
Your obsession with Nazism is the epitome of the adage “you hate what you truly love or admire”. Your desire to control people, your contempt for them, your messiah complex, your uncontrolled narcissism, along with all of your other personality disorders, are all indicative of a wannabe totalitarian.
If I may quote Kynarion Hellenis:
“Your slavish devotion to objectivism is the very example of a deluded and unworkable faith without evidence, Your religion would bring nothing but death and chaos, just like the French revolution which attempted to enshrine “reason” on the throne of Truth.”
Except she said it way more eloquently than I ever could.
And Koppel Pinson? Yeah, I don’t think I’ll be rushing out to a snooty West Side used book store to buy his book. Mainly because I don’t live in NYC and we don’t have snooty used book stores where I live.
Well, gotta go for now. I’m driving a friend to the clinic today to have a melanoma spot removed from his body. His wife can’t drive because she is recovering from hip replacement surgery. I think that’s called altruism. You know, helping a friend in need. I know that is a foreign concept to you.
He gets his history from Objectivist writers, so misses the true picture. That’s what irritates me, reading mangled history like that with obvious contradictions to the facts.
Koppel Pinson and Hannah Arendt were hardly Objectivist historians and they both noted in real time the fervent, manic, desire of the German people to altruistically sacrifice themselves for Hitler, race, and nation. And they were not the only ones to take notice.
“How little the masses were driven by the famous instinct of self-preservation,” observes Hannah Arendt, a lifelong student of the totalitarian phenomenon, noting the modern Europeans’ passive, unprotesting acceptance of disaster, their “indifference in the face of death or other personal catastrophes….” “Compared with their nonmaterialism, a Christian monk looks like a man absorbed in worldly affairs.” “The fanaticism of members of totalitarian movements.” she adds, so clearly different in quality from the greatest loyalty of members of ordinary parties, is produced by the lack of self-interest of masses who are quite prepared to sacrifice themselves.” – Leonard Peikoff, “The Ominous Parallels”
Wow, two more things I have to forget. Arendt and Pinson weren’t Objectivists. Further flogged by Little Lenny Peikoff.
And a big fat who gives a flying f… to that as well.
Do you ever operate in reality….real reality?
Probably so. But because of his obsession with Christianity and God hatred it’s way more convoluted than where the average totalitarian Objectivist atheist would go.
Chances are he goes way beyond what most objectivists are obsessed with. His focus on the imaginary Christian Dark Ages, cafeteria Christians, Lutheranism, Christianity paving the way for Nazism and Marxism, contempt for the Bible and Jews, and his Messiah-like narcissism indicate a deep seated pathology which may eventually erupt, as he realizes his dream of an Objectivist world order just isn’t going to happen.
It won’t be pretty.
Helping a deserving friend that YOU PERSONALLY love because he is a value to YOU, because he is important to YOU, because he adds value to YOUR life, because helping him makes YOU happy is NOT a sacrifice, it is not a loss for you but a gain, and therefore it is NOT altruism, it is an act of — RATIONAL SELFISHNESS.
Now, if you were to tell me I did not help my beloved friend because I had two choices, either I could help my friend or I could help a stranger get to the hospital, I chose to help the stranger. Now THAT would be a sacrifice. That would be an act of SELFLESSNESS, self-denial, self-sacrifice, and loss. You would be sacrificing your friend that you love for a stranger that you don’t.
“Sacrifice” is the surrender of a greater value for the sake of a lesser one or of a nonvalue. Thus, altruism gauges a man’s virtue by the degree to which he surrenders, renounces or betrays his values (since help to a stranger or an enemy is regarded as more virtuous, less “selfish,” than help to those one loves). The rational principle of conduct is the exact opposite: always act in accordance with the hierarchy of your values, and never sacrifice a greater value to a lesser one.
This applies to all choices, including one’s actions toward other men. It requires that one possess a defined hierarchy of rational values (values chosen and validated by a rational standard). Without such a hierarchy, neither rational conduct nor considered value judgments nor moral choices are possible….
If you exchange a penny for a dollar, it is not a sacrifice; if you exchange a dollar for a penny, it is. If you achieve the career you wanted, after years of struggle, it is not a sacrifice; if you then renounce it for the sake of a rival, it is. If you own a bottle of milk and give it to your starving child, it is not a sacrifice; if you give it to your neighbor’s child and let your own die, it is.
If you give money to help a friend, it is not a sacrifice; if you give it to a worthless stranger, it is. If you give your friend a sum you can afford, it is not a sacrifice; if you give him money at the cost of your own discomfort, it is only a partial virtue, according to this sort of moral standard; if you give him money at the cost of disaster to yourself—that is the virtue of sacrifice in full. ” – Ayn Rand
What a pile of gibberish. If I were to look at the world as you do, and had to stop and think every time I did something for someone, stranger or not I would eventually suffer from paralysis analysis.
The fact that you had to come up with 5, five, FIVE paragraphs to explain to someone who is sick of getting lectured to by you, shows me just effed up you are.
Maybe it is not sacrifice at all, no matter who you help. Rand really did a number on you. She single handedly caused you to devolve into a heartless, brain dead machine.
If you came across someone you did not know and he/she had been shot and bleeding out, and the hospital was just down the street, and it was up to you to get them there, you would waste time considering if it was sacrifice or selfishness. In any case the person would die and it would most definitely your fault. God forbid that you to sacrifice for anything or anybody.
If I may quote you once again:
*I don’t recognize any such absurdity as service to my country. I recognize a moral responsibility to my freedom and liberty and the freedom and liberty of those I love.* THX
Yeah….you might have to sacrifice something. Bottom line you love nothing and no one, but yourself. Is it any wonder why most folks think so little of you.
Damn it. I never read so much sh*t in such a small space!
If you ask me, and even if you don’t, I will say: “You are NOT normal”.
I will try not to read comments like yours, since I am “The Confused Mind”, and I do not need your stupidities to confuse me more.
So, I can’t be morally idealistic unless it comports with your definition of rational moral idealism, which of course it never will.
How can I possibly reach that high into the lofty rarified atmosphere of Mt. Objectivism where only the rational (which is truly the irrational), based on the teachings of our comment board guru, THX Bhagavad Gita, exists.
Geez, I feel so irrationally and immorally idealistic. Does this mean that only you, THX Bhagavad Gita, are rationally and morally idealistic.
I think I lost my mantra.
However, as David Goldman points out in “How Civilizations Die” we’re looking at not just the collapse of the U.S. but the fourth great collapse of Western Civilization, following the Minoeans, Classical Greece, and the Romans. Seems to happen about every 1500 years or so.
An atheist lecturing us about moral nihilism. It’s funny in a sad way.
Ayn Rand wrote fiction.
Ironically historian Koppel Pinson wrote a very interesting book published in 1934 titled “Pietism as a factor in the rise of German Nationalism”.
Figures you would know that. you are truly the “king” of useless information. Nice life you carved out for yourself.
Pietism has several definitions.
Adolph Hitler was an atheist, who tried to redefine good and evil.
Far be for me to disrupt the Tik-Tok matriarchal sisterhood’s limited ponderings but, yes, I do think about the Roman Empire more these days….and it has ZERO to do with reminiscing about a man-dominated society. Any actual students of history are clubbed over the head with the striking parallels between these societies and it only takes a look into the past to see America’s similarly bleak future on our current trajectory.
Even this woman thinks about it a lot, but she always has. It was a force of both good and ill, and it was the foundation of our Western culture. Any thinking person, male or female, ought to be reading and thinking about Rome a good deal.
Note that with no exceptions, matriarchal societies have been conquered by patriarchal ones. Every time. So feminizing our society is a sure recipe for suicide.
I’m won’t pretend I fully understood the article, but I do have something to add to the discussion. I recently read a quote by a, I think it was first century Roman. The contemporary writer thought the Empire was ruled by feminine hands
Octavian was ruled by his wife, and she was a really terrible person.
“Moreover, we assume that a complex diversity of peoples want to live just like us in a Pax Americana, once their illiberal and tyrannical leaders are neutralized. They will then embrace our political idealism of tolerance and unalienable rights”.
I cannot help to think of the supreme idiocy of flying the rainbow flag at the embassy of Kabul, just days before the disaster. Or in front of the Vatican in Rome, just days ago. Imagine how the multitudes around the world are happy about America pushing their insane post-modern ideology, pressuring African and Arabic States to accept homosexuality and third-wave feminism, openly bullying even those allies that resist such craziness, like Hungary or Poland. Mutilating their own children. Turning the cities around their militay bases abroad into giant brothels.
I don’t see any pietas in that.
The American rainbow flag at the embassy in Kabul was stunningly ignorant then comical.
Children are mutilated in the ME and Europe and now in the USA daily.
Someone, someplace said, “they know not what they do.”
I wish I was young again and taking your course in Roman history & literature. Thanks. For decades I’ve read Cicero as I’m philosophically minded; and our founders held him in high esteem. The founding fathers viewed the fall of the Roman Republic as an object lesson as they tried to construct a more durable republic.
The lesson concerning imperialism & faulty idealism is something few of our conservative friends understood 20 years ago. During the Cold War we seldom did “nations building” & were often accused of supporting dictators, as if liberal democracy would be flowing over the earth if it weren’t for our inordinate fear of communism. We now see how wrong that criticism was … I hope.
Just a thought. Rome began its decline when it ceased to be a republic and became an empire, and the rule of law was replaced by rule of decree. Does this sound uncomfortably familiar, or is it just me?
Nobody in their right mind would ever accuse the Romans of faulty idealism and America is not an empire it’s a sphere of influence. Rome didn’t fall because it conquered everywhere, It fell because success diluted it. America likewise won’t fall because of “faulty idealism”.
Learn that and you’ll learn a real lesson.
Mary Beard thinks about Rome all the time, not that I know her.
She’s much more fond of them than I am and once publicly debated BoJo in favour of Rome vs. Greece.
Tik-Tok tends like this are just indicative of the stupid media space which we now inhabit which really is worthy of the last days of Rome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meet_the_Romans_with_Mary_Beard
The Romans would have been no better than the Persians without the fact that they absorbed Greek culture and Greek philosophy into their own culture. Without the Greek influence the Romans would have been just one more ancient tyranny like any other.
As just one example, Roman mythology is 99% Greek mythology translated to Latin.
The Romans were essentially brutes, their saving grace was Greek culture super imposed upon their brutishness. But the Romans never quite got the hang of it, they never quite understood the value of the life of the mind. That’s how difficult and rare it is to successfully transfer the love of learning and the love of curiosity about the world, the love of thinking, the love of the mind, from one culture to another. All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.
“This shared fundamental philosophy of supernaturalism and faith drove both Jews and Christians, in differing forms, to war against the secular Greek philosophy that went on to dominate the Roman Empire. The Greeks, after all, having been conquered by the Romans militarily, had responded by conquering the Romans culturally. “The Greeks had faced the same problem as the Jews with Rome,” explains Paul Johnson. “They had solved it by submitting physically and taking the Romans over intellectually. Culturally, the Roman empire was Greek, especially in the East.” – Andrew Bernstein
As Ronald Reagan once said….”It’s not that you are wrong about everything….it’s simply that you know so much that isn’t true”
I guess that is why the Greeks were so obsessed with little boys.
Yeah, Constantine proved what a supernaturalist wuss he was at the Milvian Bridge.
I was with the author up until the last paragraph. I think it was Biden policy that compelled, or forced, or maybe just inspired, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. I also believe that a peace settlement will take place (assuming a nuclear conflagration does not precede it), and that the key element will be the impossibility of Ukraine’s entry into NATO.
America the Depraved.
No more America the Beautiful.
America the Depraved and Corrupt.
No more America the Beautiful.
Rome fell too., even with all their power, all their power and might, they fell from within.
Virgil – subject of scholars through the ages – like most poets, was a
dreamer. Even while he was aware of and immersed in bloody social
chaos all around him. Still, the world without dialogue and diplomacy
among opponents might easily descend into ubiquitous “endless
wars and bloody competitions over power, resources and slaves”
which the Romans mostly ended.
One is reminded though of tough American Presidents
Teddy R. and Reagan with their mottos: “Speak softly but carry a
big stick!” and “Trust – but verify”. Short on groveling and lofty
idealism – long on common sense and realism. Virgil’s mistake was
thinking people are basically good and well-meaning. His fellow
countryman, Cicero – older but who lived during Virgil’s lifetime –
had a more realistic understanding of the covert treachery in the
hearts of other men. If only Virgil could have known that an
excellent example of the revered ‘pietas’ would be anyone of
Hitler’s Nazis.
I really like this article because it makes your mind gallop in
unfamiliar directions. I think if Virgil lived today, he would make
a fine Lib.
Bruce,
Thank you for the memories. Spent couple hours roaming the foothills of early fall colors in the sunny & un-woke Rockies. Eating lunch & reading your thoughtful piece was a simultaneous desert. Growing up in Prague under the bloodthirsty godless & barbaric Soviet claw, my early heroes were Ivanhoe, Rob Roy, Odysseus, Jason, Heracles, Hector, et al. My fave are playful Metamorphoses by Ovid, Satyricon by Petronius (have the fragments) & Dante’s Divine Comedy (Virgil walks w/ him through Inferno & Purgatory). Later came Abraham, Daniel, Joseph (in Egypt), Joshua, Isaiah, Moses & Christ.
The classic Greeks preceded Virgil by centuries – he knew it – Iliad & Odyssey ~800 B.C., Greek settlements in Italy & Sicily ~600 B.C. Hannibal crossing the Alps w/ elephants 218 B.C., etc. Octavian w/ his Pax Romana was a good guy. After him it went downhill. Tiberius was a creepy pedophile on Capri. See parallels BTW Augustus/Reagan, Tiberius/Klinton, Caligula/obaMao & Nero/Pepe Chicom Bidon (not a typo 😉
The Tik-Tok wenches are woke & ignorant. The Aeneid is not just a travelog & war, but a love story (queen Dido of Carthage) & sibyls – powerful female seers. There is Fate & Divine interventions galore but that may exceed their IQ.
Last but not least, always win over our female sport fans by mentioning how civilized were the Romans. The Coliseum had 2-3X more ladies restrooms than men. They knew 2000 y ago, ladies gotta sit down. In that regard, our mega-stadiums are barbaric. Sorry lads.
Would only hope that the US won’t be sacked by the red Chinese Han ethnicity vying for hegemony. Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt—”These are the tears of things, and our mortality cuts to the heart” After all, Roman empire lasted almost another 500 years after Virgil. We’re nearing 250th of the Republic – still a new kid on the block.
The tragedy of the State of the Union is not teaching ethics, mores & civics in most (~95%) US schools. That includes Judaeo-Christian teachings. How could American parents let the woke regressive marxist radicals & unions take over our schools. Can’t wrap my old coconut around that. I didn’t let them brainwash our daughter. Taught her to think.
Memo to the fibbing pseudo-scholars who spew crap like ‘1619’ or (b)lack Cleopatra. She was Greek (Macedonian), so, maybe not snow-white like the Circassian (Caucasus) ladies but not more than light olive-toned skin. Definitely not black! The commies & nazis rewrote history, too.
And the barbarians at the gates.
Bruce, all was very good until you botched the current Putin issue, You lace basic observation, Ethnic cleansing of the Russian’s in Eastern Ukraine due to their desire to rejoin Mother Russia was the start and end of it all.
Like Quebec ‘attempt to separate from Canada, But the English Government influence change the Vote percentage the attempt. No longer 50% plus 1. As was also done in Ireland by dividing Ulster from ( counties into 6 and # to vote with the rest of the country, which cause the “Irish” civil was. Thank you.
Idealism is nothing more than pacifism. It is looking at human nature through color glasses. No one will ever be able eradicate greed, envy and pursue of power from life. Life is survival of the fittest. It means to protect one’s interest by all means. Including killing your enemies