Highlights: The Story of Civilization, Volume III
Unpacking "Caesar and Christ"
I just finished reading Caesar and Christ: The Story of Civilization, Volume III by Will Durant. Chipping away at this series piece by piece: only 8 books to go!
My first thoughts:
If I had to describe Roman history with one adjective it would be “circular”. Reading about war and revolution again and again felt like watching a sine wave on a screen. Still, in all fairness, many important achievements were passed on from this empire: roads, architecture, language, law.
It is shocking to observe how much violence has been reduced in 2,000 years. One interesting paradox is that when all were united under Rome, civilization experienced violence beyond you and I’s goriest imagination.
Learning part of the history of Christianity was fascinating. It offered me new perspectives on how to interpret the religion—much like how understanding an author’s life adds depth and colour to the way one reads their works.
On Rome’s repetitive history:
“The Republic died at Pharsalus; the revolution ended at Actium. Rome had completed the fatal cycle known to Plato and to us: monarchy, aristocracy, oligarchic exploitation, democracy, revolutionary chaos, dictatorship.”1
My first violin teacher had a big sign in his studio that read, ‘NEW MISTAKES PLEASE!’. That’s exactly how I felt while reading about the systole and diastole of Rome.
The moment I had to set the book down to shake my head came when Octavian found his pretext to break the Second Triumvirate and wage war against Antony. He stoked public fear by claiming Antony, driven by his infatuation with Cleopatra, intended to move the capital to Alexandria. Ironically, this same fear—the specter of Alexandria and relationship with Cleopatra—had been the catalyst for Caesar's assassination just 13 years earlier. Two leaders undone by the very same conspiracy—or funnier still, the very same girl. How romantic!
One benefit of Rome's repetitive history is that it offered concrete, third-party examples of a key aspect of René Girard's mimetic theory: the idea that the institution of monarchy serves as a scapegoat mechanism to calm mimetic conflict within societies. I’m still working to understand mimetic theory, but the sheer number of assassinated emperors certainly strengthened the point on monarchy.
“The community satisfies its rage against an arbitrary victim in the unshakable conviction that it has found the one and only cause of its trouble. […] The return to a calmer state of affairs appears to confirm the responsibility of the victim for the mimetic discord that had troubled the community. […] Royalty is a mythology in action. […] If we will only examine it closely, we will see that the institution constantly offers new perspectives. Once we stop smiling about the sexual privileges and consider the phenomenon as one of transgression, the monarch suddenly becomes a condemned man who will die for the sins of the community, a ‘scapegoat’ in the accepted sense of the term. And in the end if the king is eaten, which also happens, he bears some resemblance to a sacrificial animal. One can see in him a kind of priest or supreme initiate whose office demands in principle that he sacrifice himself voluntarily for the community—in practice, however, he sometimes needs a little persuasion.”
- René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World
I was generally impressed and proud to see that Western civilization has solved most of the problems that plagued Rome. We get to focus our energy on building things instead of warring and protesting for a fairer system.
We are blessed with the privilege of making new mistakes.
“The real tax is society forcing otherwise productive people to pay attention to politics.”
- Naval Ravikant
On solved problems:
To revisit my earlier point about the dramatic reduction of violence over the past 2,000 years, this passage serves as a compelling illustration:
“If a slave ran away and was caught he could be branded or crucified; Augustus boasted that he had recaptured 30,000 runaway slaves and had crucified all who had not been claimed. If, under these or other provocations, a slave killed his master, law required that all the slaves of the murdered man should be put to death. When Pedanius Secundus, urban prefect, was so slain (A.D. 61), and his 400 slaves were condemned to die, a minority in the Senate protested, and an angry crowd in the streets demanded mercy; but the Senate ordered the law to be carried out, in the belief that only by such measures could a master be secure.”2
Not to sound crass, but this immediately made me think about engineering. First, you start with a design that you know will reach your desired goal, and only after you try something (“in the belief that only by such measures could a master be secure”) can you begin to simplify and improve your design. Unfortunately, for complex systems, it is impossible to think of the best solution on the first try.
Whenever I read about slavery, this paragraph from Adam Smith resurfaces in my mind:
“But if great improvements are seldom to be expected from great proprietors, they are least of all to be expected when they employ slaves for their workmen. The experience of all ages and nations, I believe, demonstrates that the work done by slaves, though it appears to cost only their maintenance, is in the end the dearest of any. A person who can acquire no property, can have no other interest but to eat as much, and to labour as little as possible. Whatever work he does beyond what is sufficient to purchase his own maintenance can be squeezed out of him by violence only, and not by any interest of his own.”
- Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776
What’s most astonishing about how Western civilization has solved so many past problems is that many of the solutions came from embracing starkly counterintuitive principles—chief among them, the foundational belief that individual freedom ultimately benefits the collective more than enforced collectivism ever could.
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”
- Adam Smith
Rapid fire excerpts:
On nostalgia:
“He [Horace] reminds the laudator temporis acti — the ‘praiser of times past’ — that ‘if some god were for taking you back to those days you would refuse every time’; the chief comfort of the past is that we know we need not live it again.”
On leadership:
“When great men stoop to sentiment the world grows fonder of them; but when sentiment governs policy empires totter.”
On the foolishness and creativity of youth:
“Tradition has given to Latin letters from A.D. 14 to 117 the name of Silver Age, implying a fall from the cultural excellence of the Augustan Age. Tradition is the voice of time, and time is the medium of selection; a cautious mind will respect their verdict, for only youth knows better than twenty centuries.”
The more history I read, the greater duty I feel towards the past. In his masterpiece about Rome vs. the Etruscans, Macaulay reminds us…
Then out spake brave Horatius, The Captain of the gate: 'To every man upon this earth Death cometh soon or late. And how can man die better Than facing fearful odds, For the ashes of his fathers And the temples of his Gods' - Horatius, by Thomas Babington Macaulay
Thank you for reading,
Tobias
All quotes in this post, unless otherwise stated, are from Will Durant’s book.
I should be clear that I don’t believe that unnecessary violence is a solved problem today, or that it ever will be. Few statements could be more foolish. But I do think we have been able to shed much of the ritualistic violence that was perceived as necessary to the maintenance of order, and there is undoubtably more progress that can be made in this direction.