Classics in Contemporary Culture

Glenn Beck: US and Rome

Under the George W. Bush administration, the "US = Rome" trope as it appeared in media tended to carry an anti-Bush message; under the Obama administration, the trope is still useful, from the opposite perspective.  Glenn Beck recently put forth some thoughts on the subject:

Now, if we knew our history, we would take lessons from once legendary civilizations that fell before us, because they all fall in the same way. The Babylonians, the Soviet Union, Germany, France — France during the French Revolution, hugely important to us today — and Rome.

This is a pattern I highlighted in my book "Broke," in the first six pages, we start go on to Rome because it's spooky how much we are doing like Rome.

Here's the bell curve of history. There's the expansion and the contraction. Regionalization, people come — people start coming together, the ascension into an empire, you start to grow, you mature, you become overextended, and decline, and legacy. It happens over and over and over again, same way.

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Former comptroller of the U.S., David Walker, explains and he knows because he'd seen all of America's books. In fact, he has served both to Republicans and Democrats and was frustrated with both of them, and that's why he left government service. He said, people have to know the truth. He knows how deep the rabbit hole is. He says, quote, "There are striking similarities between America's current situation and that of another great power from the past, Rome. The Roman Republic fell for many reasons, but three reasons are worth remembering: declining moral values and political civility at home." How are we doing on that one?

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Wait, is he saying that political civility caused the fall of the Republic? Aha--now I see the grand strategy for restoring the American Republic through the use of vitriolic rhetoric! It all makes sense now!

[Thanks to DPT on Classics-L.]

President or Pater Patriae?

Gene Healy (Cato@Liberty) writes about unwarranted public / media expectations of presidential responses to such things as the present Gulf oil spill: "...most of the complaints dominating the airwaves are far vaguer: centering on the atavistic notion that just by Obama traveling to the site, the magical force of Presidential Concern might cause the slick to recede." He cites himself citing I, Claudius:

In the BBC production of Robert Graves’ “I Claudius,” Emperor Augustus tells his wife Livia that the Senate had voted to make him a god in the Syrian city of Palmyra, and the people there had put a statue of him in the temple, to which they’d bring offerings in the hopes that the emperor would grant rain or cure their ailments. “Tell me Livia,” Augustus says, “If I’m a god, even in Palmyra, how do I cure gout?”

Augustus’s frustration is all-too-familiar to the modern president. He can no more “manage” the economy or provide seamless protection from all manner of hazards than Augustus could bring rain or cure gout.

Hydrocracy

The link between natural resources and cut-throat politics...observed by the premier Greek choral lyric poet?  Here's Bill Hatch at counterpunch.org, showing off some Latin & Greek-itude:

However, homo californiensis cannot change the weather any better than King Oedipus could. The San Luis – Delta Mendota water Authority uses as its slogan the first line of the first poem of the ancient Greek athlete-loving poet, Pindar: “The noblest of the elements is water.” Aside from the little chemical mistake, not made by Pindar, that water is a compound and not an element, the shrewd agribusiness water thieves of the west side of the San Joaquin Valley did not complete Pindar’s clause, “while gold, like fire flaming at night, gleams more brightly than all other lordly wealth …”

Rome Fell? Blame FDR!

Well, not FDR personally, but his pinko socialistic policies, definitely!  So argues Pia Varma in an article [p. 1; p. 2] in Glenn Beck's Fusion magazine...(as reported by MediaMatters).  For example, while considering what brought Rome to the point where Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, Varma highlights the importance of the Gracchi:

To make matters worse, in the middle of the Second Century B.C., two brothers with great political ambition came to power. The Gracci [sic] brothers emerged from the Populares Party. They understood that they could gain enormous amounts of political power by making grand promises and using propaganda and charisma to woo the Roman citizens. They promised grain at prices below market and, eventually, for free. They promised to redistribute land, and they put into place sweeping "New Deal" like social reforms, which increased the welfare state. Essentially, you name it, they probably promised it. As a result of these progressive reforms, farmers rushed to live in the cities for their free grain and slaves were freed in order to qualify for the dole.

For some reason, the Roman Empire only lasted 200 years, according to this article, and yet it also survived to be destroyed again, I guess, by Diocletian:

Roman Emperors, such as Diocletian, began grasping at straws: regulating industry and trade, nationalizing businesses and fixing prices and wages. However, despite all the concerns from the more rational members of the Senate, Rome continued to collapse. Cicero had even warned, "The budget should be balanced. Public debt should be reduced. The arrogance of officialdom should be tempered, and assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed, lest Rome becomes bankrupt."

Ah, only Cicero didn't...

The peroration:

So there you have it, the breakdown of the Roman Republic (and maybe the breakdown of the American Republic) in a nutshell. We've modeled our government after Rome, we looked at the writings of Roman philosophers like Cicero and Cato to create our Constitution, we got terms like "senate" and "citizen" from Latin. We even designed our nation's capital after Roman architecture. And, in a way, Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin and others gave us the ultimate "mulligan" when they founded America. But they also warned us of what happened to Rome and urged us not to go in the same direction. And what did we do? Like sheep and cowards, we didn't listen, didn't learn from past mistakes and, eager for security and temporary quick fixes, have been voting ourselves back into bondage ever since.

American, wake up! We don't want to be Rome! Let's not forget that this shining city on a hill ultimately burned down with Nero fiddling away!

As our leaders in Washington stand at the bank of the Rubicon, ready to cross, we must remember Cassius's wise words in Julius Caesar when he said, "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves that we are underlings."

Too much to respond to, but the creepiest aspect is that (am I wrong here?) the last bit sounds like a call to assassination...Yikes!

An Ancient Osama?

Adrienne Mayor's new book is about the "terror" of the Roman world -- Mithradates VI of Pontus -- the focus and leader of anti-Roman sentiment in Asia Minor and beyond, the orchestrator of a massacre of 80,000 Romans and Italians, who struggled on and evaded capture or killing for quite a long time.  As is well known, "he died old..."  Mayor has a piece at HNN to give a brief account and connect Mithradates to the troubles of the present...Here's an excerpt:

The ensuing Mithradatic Wars dragged on for decades, with some of the biggest battles and highest casualties in all antiquity. A pioneer in asymmetrical, unconventional tactics, Mithradates’ fighting style perplexed the experienced Roman troops, luring them deeper into barren landscapes, and leading to mutinies, fragging, and desertions. Rome’s top generals won battle after battle, but failed to lay their hands on Mithradates. His uncanny ability to elude capture unnerved the Romans. Despite crushing defeats, Mithradates easily recruited new armies and allies. Today, US military commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan dread this phenomenon, called the “Tet Offensive effect,” in which an enemy gains support and morale in spite of massive defeat. “Somehow,” exclaimed the Roman statesman Cicero, “Mithradates accomplished more by being defeated than if he had been victorious!”

After decimating Mithradates’ forces, the frustrated Romans saw their prey slip away, rescued by pirates, sheltered by his allies, hiding out in rugged terrain, escaping over secret mountain passes—and then surging back with new armies. Mithradates was never short of cash: even when losing battles he paid his soldiers in gold, in contrast to the Roman legionnaires who had to live on whatever they could loot.

In the First Mithradatic War, Sulla defeated Mithradates’ forces in Greece, then declared his mission accomplished, letting Mithradates off with a paltry fine. Taking advantage of his victory, Sulla rushed back to Rome, already in the throes of bloody civil war. Seizing power as Dictator, Sulla oversaw the dismantling of the Roman Republic.

Sulla’s failure to pursue Mithradates allowed Rome’s eastern Hannibal to come back even stronger. Mithradates’ smashing victory in the Second Mithradatic War gave him control of the seas, dominated by his pirate allies, who now manned a thousand swift ships.

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Ultimately, betrayed by one of his sons, Mithradates, lost his kingdom and his life, in 63 BCE. But the Romans also lost something precious—government by “the Senate and the People (SPQR).” The Republic never recovered from the Mithradatic Wars.

Thucydides Revisited

John Timpane, of the Philadelphia Enquirer, reviews Donald Kagan's Thucydides:  The Reinvention of History -- in a nutshell, he agrees with the characterization of Thucydides but not with that of the Peloponnesian War, partly with a view to the lessons we should not be learning from history...  He takes issue primarily with the idea that the Athenians were 

But now hear the real reason Kagan dislikes Pericles' strategy: it "ran directly against the grain of Greek tradition, in which willingness to fight, bravery, and steadfastness in battle were essential characteristics of the free man and the citizen." Fight, if ye be men! Only when Athens got good and tough, he writes, did it hold on and "almost" achieve victory.

I don't buy that "almost" at all, which brings up another weak point. The real reason Athens lost everything, the real reason Pericles' strategy didn't work, is that it could never have worked. Nothing could. As Kagan shows, the 1,000 or so independent city-states of the ancient Greek world made up a massive, quivering, unstable network of contrariwise alliances - think the Cold War multiplied by 100. Even at best, Athens and Sparta both were occupied in mopping up rebellions, betrayals, troop requests from faraway cities. It's as if the United States had not one Vietnam but 30.

Pericles died of the plague in 429, two years into the wars. And as Kagan himself writes:

By summer 427, most of the conditions that would make possible an Athenian defeat more than twenty years later were already at hand: Athens was short of money, part of its empire was in revolt, the undefended coastal cities of Asia Minor were ready to rebel, and Persia stood poised to join the war against Athens.

Quite. Athens could never have won, not even "almost," in a world like that, and it didn't, collapsing in 407. Sparta didn't last too much longer, fading from supremacy by 362. These wars sapped both victor and loser.

Most of all, I lament Kagan's too-credulous celebration of the Athenian democracy. Rightly do we value Athens as distant grandparent of our democratic experiment, and Kagan is right: Athens was the boldest, strongest, most inclusive, most successful democracy in early history. Much to be admired.

But much more than 2,400 years separates us from the Athenian voters. As J.W. Mackail once wrote, ancient Greece is "rather a witch-goddess, only half-human, but also half-divine." Athens was both unlike its era and like, combining the heights of human aspiration and plain, flat savagery.

Interestingly, there seems to be evidence of ongoing editing...In the review as picked up by some other papers, the second paragraph above contains a funny solecism: "...As Kagan shows, the 1,000 or so poloi of the ancient Greek world made up a massive, quivering, unstable network of contrariwise alliances - think the Cold War multiplied by 100." This was corrected at the main paper, but not before other papers had received it...On the other hand, "Myteline" was not fixed...

Graveyard of Empires...Or Cauldron of Civilizations?

It's a little late for the "fact-check" on this one, but it's always been slightly irritating that when the perils of Western military involvement in Afghanistan are being discussed, Alexander the Great is usually cited as the earliest example for the ungovernability and instability of the region...the earliest instance of Afghanistan as the "graveyard of empires"...True, Alexander's empire did not long survive the conqueror's death, but then again, that does not really say anything about Bactria's resistance to foreign occupation.  One might as well take the same time period as a lesson about the resistance of Greeks to foreign conquest, or the resistance of glory-seeking military commanders to being governed by other glory-seeking military commanders...

A recent article in Victoria's Times-Colonist [thanks to rogueclassicism] provides a somewhat more detailed account of the efforts of colonization that continued past Alexander's death:

...Alexander established or re-established cities bearing his name across the lands through which he marched. One of those Alexandrias we know today as Kandahar.

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Some of his Greek warriors settled there, and established theatres and wine-houses. Greek-style democracy, with its freedoms, took hold in some cities where peace could be assured and the honour of defeated enemies could be trusted....

(Along with some bizarre statements that betray a lack of understanding of history, especially considering that the focus is supposed to be Afghanistan here:  "Alexander's order, of course, didn't survive long after his death. His empire was broken up; Greek-style democracy where it existed was stamped out eventually by Roman conquerors"--and some material that could provide grist for a discussion of "glory" vs. "honor" in ancient and modern times:  "It wasn't honour that forced George W. Bush as commander-in-chief to send American troops to Afghanistan, and it's not honour that has forced Barack Obama to reinforce them. Terror started this enterprise; fear keeps it going.")

But the real "sticks-in-the-craw" misunderstanding is that no one ever seems to know about the Greco-Bactrian kingdom that existed long after Alexander himself...even though material about it is freely available on the internet:

When the dust of revolt settled in 312 BCE, Bactria was part of the Hellenistic empire belonging to one of Alexander's generals by the name of Seleucus. Though part of the Seleucid Empire, Bactria experienced some degree of sovereignty with its own governor and it had a strong economy of its own, even minting local coins.

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As more cities were founded, the Greek population of Bactria grew. Waves of immigration from the Mediterranean filled the new urban centres, which closely resembled those of Greece proper. Though a frontier, Afghanistan was not wilderness.

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The strong local economy of Bactria eventually allowed a local governor, Diodotus, to take the power of rule. He proclaimed himself king of Bactria circa 250 BCE, though it is uncertain if he did so by buying himself an army of revolutionaries or by simply controlling enough wealth that the descendents of Seleucus did not wish to anger him by protesting.

Out of unstable conditions and the ambitions of powerful men emerged thus the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom. And in that state of flux the kingdom remained for its entire century of existence.

Thus, certainly a region that enjoyed and prized local autonomy, but not one that was simply a place where Greek / Macedonian imperialistic efforts were doomed to failure.  For more, see F. L. Holt, Thundering Zeus:  the Making of Hellenistic Bactria (1999)--from which a few sentences are particularly apt:

Yet this state came to rival in size and significance all others of its day, including Antigonid Macedonia, Ptolemaic Egypt, and Attalid Pergamon...The thought of great Greek cities in those sandy wastes boggles the modern mind, but in antiquity this diverse land yielded through irrigation a myriad of grains, grapes, pistachios, and other products...Through bitter winters and blazing summers, generations of adventurous Greeks won their living from this land...Bactria therefore exemplifies fully the character and achievement of the Hellenistic Age, that remarkable but risky legacy of Alexander's last breath at Babylon.

But that's less of a cautionary tale, I guess...

Cheery Thought for the New Year

At least it isn't the beginning of the Dark Ages!  So argues Bryan Ward-Perkins (uncontroversially, I hope) in an opinion piece in the Financial Times:

As we face an uncertain and worrying New Year, we can at least console ourselves with the fact that we are not living 1,600 years ago, and about to begin the year 410. In this year Rome was sacked, and the empire gave up trying to defend Britain. While this marks the glorious beginnings of “English history”, as Anglo-Saxon barbarians began their inexorable conquest of lowland Britain, it was also the start of a recession that puts all recent crises in the shade.

The economic indicators for fifth-century Britain are scanty, and derive exclusively from archaeology, but they are consistent and extremely bleak. Under the Roman empire, the province had benefited from the use of a sophisticated coinage in three metals – gold, silver and copper – lubricating the economy with a guaranteed and abundant medium of exchange. In the first decade of the fifth century new coins ceased to reach Britain from the imperial mints on the continent, and while some attempts were made to produce local substitutes, these efforts were soon abandoned. For about 300 years, from around AD 420, Britain’s economy functioned without coin.

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For two or three hundred years, beginning at the start of the fifth century, the economy of Britain reverted to levels not experienced since well before the Roman invasion of AD 43. The most startling features of the fifth-century crash are its suddenness and its scale. We might not be surprised if, on leaving the empire, Britain had reverted to an economy similar to that which it had enjoyed in the immediately pre-Roman Iron Age. But southern Britain just before the Roman invasion was a considerably more sophisticated place economically than Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries: it had a native silver coinage; pottery industries that produced wheel-turned vessels and sold them widely; and even the beginnings of settlements recognisable as towns. Nothing of the kind existed in the fifth and sixth centuries; and it was only really in the eighth century that the British economy crawled back to the levels it had already reached before Emperor Claudius’s invasion. It is impossible to say with any confidence when Britain finally returned to levels of economic complexity comparable to those of the highest point of Roman times, but it might be as late as around the year 1000 or 1100. If so, the post-Roman recession lasted for 600-700 years.

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So...don't worry, be happy!

[Thanks to Bread and Circuses]

Chimera, Chimeric, Chimerian, Chimerical

...are all real words.  In a New York Times op-ed from this past Sunday, however, Niall Ferguson and Moritz Schularick cite their own coinage, Chimerica, and speculate about its potential demise:

A FEW years ago we came up with the term “Chimerica” to describe the combination of the Chinese and American economies, which together had become the key driver of the global economy. With a combined 13 percent of the world’s land surface and around a quarter of its population, Chimerica nevertheless accounted for a third of global economic output and two-fifths of worldwide growth from 1998 to 2007.

We called it Chimerica for a reason: we believed this relationship was a chimera — a monstrous hybrid like the part-lion, part-goat, part-snake of legend. Now we may be witnessing the death throes of the monster. The question President Obama must consider as he flies to Asia this week is whether to slay it or to try to keep it alive.

The cartoon art accompanying the column, however, seems to be a hybrid of King Kong and Polyphemus, not lion, goat and snake...But of course the scientific use of the term Chimera is also attested; in fact it's in yesterday's Times:

A geep is not actually an offspring of the sexual mating of one sheep and one goat; rather, it is an animal resulting from the physical mingling of very early embryos of the two species and thus has four parents — two sheep and two goats. The scientific term for an animal with mingled cells from two species is chimera.

Yet another kind of Chimera?  Just look at the Oct. 30 edition:

If history is a guide, then the recent suicide bombings in Baghdad show that the insurgency in Iraq is far from over.

Contrary to much of what is written and said, victory is not near and the notion that the “surge” of troops was some great, decisive military action that set the stage for political reconciliation is a chimera.

It was a chimera for the French in Algeria that their bloody counterinsurgency there defeated Algerian nationalists.

After the war, which lasted from 1954 to 1962, a myth started to build in the French Army and then found its way into American Army thinking, where it lives on today, that the French military operations defeated the insurgents.

Not true. In fact, the Algerian insurgents chose to lay low while the French Army and people impaled themselves on the political problems of colonial rule. In the end, President Charles de Gaulle ordered the French Army out of Algeria in 1961 and Algeria got its independence.

Wow...imaginary monsters, coupled with references to myth and self-impalement!  That's why they call it the paper of record.

Final question:  Which of these meanings was the "Chimera Investment Corporation" thinking of?  One hopes it's not a place where, with Jonathan Swift, one might say, "Rise by merit to promotion; Alas! a mere chimeric notion." [Thanks to OED for that one.]

A Colossal Something-or-Other

The latest on the FYROM vs. Greece front (or is it the Greece vs. FYROM?  Well, the latest scuffle seems to be the former):  A 72-foot high bronze statue of Alexander the Great and Bucephalus is now in production in Florence...to be set up in the center of Skopje.  The comment from the EU is nice and terse:  the project is "not helpful."

Greece worries that FYROM has designs on the province of Macedonia and is increasingly suspicious of its propensity for renaming airports and highways after Alexander. The statue is the latest insult, provoking the Greek Foreign Ministry to ridicule it as "inversely proportional to seriousness and historical truth."

Underlining their tie to Alexander, Greeks voting by Internet last month elected Alexander as the greatest Greek of all. The yearlong poll organized by TV station Skai gave the conqueror 127,011 of the 700,000 votes cast. Runner-up with 103,661 votes was George Papanicolaou, who invented the pap smear test for cervical cancer.

Thessaloniki, capital of Greece's province of Macedonia, has long had a statue of Alexander, and in January the Greek and Iraqi governments agreed to put up a statue of the conqueror near the port city of Mosul, at the battlefield where he crushed the Persian army in 331 B.C.

Meanwhile, Macedonia's prime minister, 38-year-old Nikola Gruevski, is pushing ahead with his plans to honor Alexander astride his horse, Bucephalus. The 22-meter- (72-foot-) high statue in bronze is being molded in Florence and will go up in 2010. Along with a church and another dozen statues of historical figures, the bill will total euro10 million ($14 million), in a country where monthly wages average $440 and unemployment runs at 35 percent.

Many Macedonians fear the project will stoke ethnic tension. Some ethnic Albanians are saying any new church in the square should be matched by a mosque.

Meanwhile, on the Iraq (Mosul) connection (!!), PR at Classics-L comments:

For the Sunni-dominated (in a Kurdish area) city of Mosul to erect a statue to Alexander to commemorate his victory over the Persians at Gaugamela has some frightening ethnic implications, given the historical connections between Persian culture and Iraq's Shi'ite populations. We'll leave unspoken the whole idea of celebrating the liberation of Nineveh from a foreign conqueror by a foreign conqueror and what that may imply about what the current Mosul government would like the US military to do.