Quote of the Day (Tacitus, on an Earlier ‘Period Rich in Disasters’)

“I am entering on the history of a period rich in disasters, frightful in its wars, torn by civil strife, and even in peace full of horrors. Four emperors perished by the sword. There were three civil wars; there were more with foreign enemies; there were often wars that had both characters at once. There was success in the East, and disaster in the West…. Now too Italy was prostrated by disasters either entirely novel, or that recurred only after a long succession of ages; cities in Campania's richest plains were swallowed up and overwhelmed; Rome was wasted by conflagrations, its oldest temples consumed, and the Capitol itself fired by the hands of citizens. Sacred rites were profaned; there was profligacy in the highest ranks; the sea was crowded with exiles, and its rocks polluted with bloody deeds. In the capital there were yet worse horrors. Nobility, wealth, the refusal or the acceptance of office, were grounds for accusation, and virtue ensured destruction. The rewards of the informers were no less odious than their crimes; for while some seized on consulships and priestly offices, as their share of the spoil, others on procuratorships, and posts of more confidential authority, they robbed and ruined in every direction amid universal hatred and terror. Slaves were bribed to turn against their masters, and freedmen to betray their patrons; and those who had not an enemy were destroyed by friends.”—Roman historian and politician Tacitus (AD 56 – c. 120), The Histories (109 AD), translated by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb

Believe it or not, I felt a strange sense of comfort along with a shock of recognition as I read this passage from the first book of Tacitus’ Histories, amid a week marked by two horrible wars abroad and disorder in the party controlling the House of Representatives.

The recognition, of course, came with events eerily similar to those involving the U.S. in the first quarter of the 21st century, including a Capitol coming under assault from its own citizens, the refugees flooding the borders, the mocking of the sacred, and corruption, crime, and betrayal everywhere.

The comfort derived from the realization that other civilizations have experienced—and even survived—as much, if not more. The era covered in the great writer’s Histories extended from the chaos after the death of the emperor Nero in AD 69 to AD 96, the end of Domitian's reign.

But Domitian was followed by nearly a century in which “The Five Good Emperors” brought Rome to the height of its reach and influence.

Maybe then, as now, much depends on the credibility and stability of the leaders of the land.

(The image accompanying this post is The Course of Empire: Destruction, created by the English-born American painter Thomas Cole in 1836. It is the four in a series of five paintings tracing the rise and fall of Rome. The concluding painting in the series, if you want to know, was Desolation.

For a succinct analysis of what Tacitus can teach contemporary journalists about how “to hold those in power to account without jeopardising their respectability, and, ultimately, their credibility,” I recommend the “Tacitus, Rhetoric, and Reporting Power” post from the “Hestia” blog of Trinity College Dublin Classics.”)

Quote of the Day (Tacitus, on Roman Servility and Hypocrisy Under the Emperors)

“Meanwhile at Rome people plunged into slavery—consuls, senators, knights. The higher a man’s rank, the more eager his hypocrisy, and his looks the more carefully studied, so as neither to betray joy at the decease of one emperor nor sorrow at the rise of another, while he mingled delight and lamentations with his flattery.”—Ancient Roman historian Tacitus (c. 56 – c. 120 AD), “The Annals” and “The Histories,” translated by Alfred Church and William Brodribb

This passage, on virtually the first page I opened to in this volume by Tacitus, transfixed me. You can sense the barely contained anger at the opportunism, cravenness, and cowardice of his time.

Many of us will find such behavior all too familiar in contemporary Washington, particularly among GOP politicians, as they weigh, tremblingly, just how much distance they should put between themselves and a certain former President without incurring his wrath, or how much they can continue to do the bidding of the National Rifle Association without losing their self-respect.

(The image accompanying this post comes from the 1964 film, The Fall of the Roman Empire. Many would say that the empire’s collapse was presaged by its widespread corruption.)

Quote of the Day (Alexander Hamilton, on ‘Malignant Passions,’ Demagogues and Despots)

“A torrent of angry and malignant passions will be let loose. To judge from the conduct of the opposite parties, we shall be led to conclude that they will mutually hope to evince the justness of their opinions, and to increase the number of their converts by the loudness of their declamations and the bitterness of their invectives. An enlightened zeal for the energy and efficiency of government will be stigmatized as the offspring of a temper fond of despotic power and hostile to the principles of liberty. An over-scrupulous jealousy of danger to the rights of the people, which is more commonly the fault of the head than of the heart, will be represented as mere pretense and artifice, the stale bait for popularity at the expense of the public good. It will be forgotten, on the one hand, that jealousy is the usual concomitant of love, and that the noble enthusiasm of liberty is apt to be infected with a spirit of narrow and illiberal distrust. On the other hand, it will be equally forgotten that the vigor of government is essential to the security of liberty; that, in the contemplation of a sound and well-informed judgment, their interest can never be separated; and that a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidden appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government. History will teach us that the former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism than the latter, and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.”— Alexander Hamilton, “The Federalist No. 1,” The Federalist Papers (1787)

I wish that I were more in the mood to celebrate the Fourth of July in the traditional mode, with fireworks, flag-waving, and other outbursts of gratitude for liberty. But, more than ever before, I feel the need to issue a storm warning on what can happen—and that day does not seem so far off—when those freedoms are curtailed. I can think of few warnings more relevant than the one by Alexander Hamilton as the campaign to ratify the Constitution began in earnest 230 years ago.

The first Secretary of the Treasury has not always been cited in a way that truly accounts for the contradictions in his life. Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator of the mega-hit musical Hamilton, recently released a video that riffed off one of his songs, "Immigrants (We Get the Job Done)" as a contribution to one of the most contentious debates of recent American history.

As the son and grandson of immigrants, I would love to enlist this Founding Father as a prophet of the energy and patriotism displayed by newcomers to America. But the Revolutionary War soldier who saw the French as comrades in his nation’s war of independence came to see them 20 years later as threats to American life.

But Hamilton remained consistent throughout his shortened life on the profound threat to republics posed by disorder, manifested in “a torrent of angry and malignant passions.” Like many of the other leaders of the Revolution and early republic (Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison), he had received a thorough grounding in Greek and Roman classics. He knew, from the example of Rome, how easily a republic could degenerate into an empire.

From the ancient Roman historian Suetonius, Hamilton would have learned how Julius Caesar  maneuvered within a Rome wracked by war and class divisions until he was left alone at the top of the state—and how Caesar’s increased appetite for power sparked further unrest (through his assassination on the Ides of March) and the effective end of the republic. According to biographer Ron Chernow, Hamilton’s papers are filled with “pejorative references” to Julius Caesar—and he likened Cabinet rival Thomas Jefferson to Caesar as a populist demagogue. (In time, of course, Hamilton saw Aaron Burr as an even more profound threat to American liberty.)

Fearing the lack of “a sound and well-informed judgment” among non-property owners, Hamilton foresaw dangers in a democracy. In particular, Chernow observes, “Hamilton fell prey to lurid visions that the have-nots would rise up and dispossess the haves. Men of property would be held hostage by armies of the indebted and unemployed.”

The American political system has evolved as a means of addressing that concern through a Jeffersonian education for all citizens, while still retaining a Hamiltonian “enlightened zeal for the energy and efficiency of government.”

But the constant unrest of the last generation—and the daily outrages from candidate and President Donald Trump—have resurrected Hamilton’s fear of someone given to “paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.” In seeing a system where no legislation gets passed or problems dealt with—where “the energy and efficiency of government” hailed by Hamilton has evaporated—voters last year chose someone completely outside the system, a billionaire blowhard with an unjustified reputation for getting things done.

Hamilton might have been dismayed, but not necessarily surprised, by this turn of events. From Suetonius, he would have known that Julius Caesar had solidified power by corrupting “all Pompey's friends…, as well as the greater part of the senate, through loans made without interest or at a low rate.” When it comes to political bribery, contemporary Washington exceeds ancient Rome--not to mention the Britain that Hamilton rebelled against--in ingenious new uses.  

Those seemingly least immune to the power of gold had yielded to the temptation with an even more sickly avidity than the lower classes, according to another ancient Roman historian, Tacitus: “In the decline of the Roman Republic, the consular, patrician, and equestrian orders, rushed headlong into servitude; the more illustrious the family, the more corrupt and eager was the individual.”

Octavian (later Augustus) Caesar, nephew of Julius and the ultimate victor in the power struggle after his death, institutionalized this neutering of the powerful by speaking respectfully to the Roman Senate while ensuring that little if any real power ever returned to it. His successor, Tiberius, with none of Augustus’ velvet fist, engaged in sexual perversity and paranoid pursuit of enemies, resting on a base of contempt for a Roman senate fatally addicted to its privileges.

“Ah, the wretches!” Tiberius gloated about his senators at one point, according to Tacitus. “They are eager to court their own servitude! They cry royalty, God bless it!”

Tacitus was scathing about this state of affairs: “Thus, even the enemy of public liberty was himself disgusted with the excessive subserviency of his base slaves.” He—and Hamilton—would have grasped the dangers of a political order that, in a time of uncertainty, remains blissfully supine before a petulant libertine terrifyingly possessed of unmatched economic, political and military power.

Quote of the Day (Suetonius, on the Death of Tiberius Caesar)

“Meanwhile, finding, upon looking over the acts of the senate, ‘that some person under prosecution had been discharged, without being brought to a hearing,’ for he had only written cursorily that they had been denounced by an informer; he [Emperor Tiberius Nero Caesar] complained in a great rage that he was treated with contempt, and resolved at all hazards to return to Capri; not daring to attempt anything until he found himself in a place of security. But being detained by storms, and the increasing violence of his disorder, he died shortly afterwards, at a villa formerly belonging to Lucullus, in the seventy-eighth year of his age, and the twenty-third of his reign, upon the seventeenth of the calends of April [16th March], in the consulship of Cneius Acerronius Proculus and Caius Pontius Niger. Some think that a slow-consuming poison was given him by Caius. Others say that during the interval of the intermittent fever with which he happened to be seized, upon asking for food, it was denied him. Others report, that he was stifled by a pillow thrown upon him, when, on his recovering from a swoon, he called for his ring, which had been taken from him in the fit. Seneca writes, ‘That finding himself dying, he took his signet ring off his finger, and held it a while, as if he would deliver it to somebody; but put it again upon his finger, and lay for some time, with his left hand clenched, and without stirring; when suddenly summoning his attendants, and no one answering the call, he rose; but his strength failing him, he fell down at a short distance from his bed….’

“The people were so much elated at his death, that when they first heard the news, they ran up and down the city, some crying out, "Away with Tiberius to the Tiber;’ others exclaiming, ‘May the earth, the common mother of mankind, and the infernal gods, allow him no abode in death, but amongst the wicked.’ Others threatened his body with the hook and the Gemonian stairs, their indignation at his former cruelty being increased by a recent atrocity.”--Suetonius, The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, translated by Alexander Thomson, revised and corrected by T. Forester

Before I took an ancient history course in college, I had vainly hoped that this would be my chance to read classic authors such as Livy, Suetonius and Tacitus. No such luck. Our class made do with one of those anthologies containing ancient manuscript excerpts, extracts from laws, commentaries from modern historians on subjects broad (Roman economics) and arcane (fine or not-so-fine points of Roman law), and the like—but little with the juice of the human beings who lived through those times.

Of the ancient historians we did hear about, my professor did not think much of Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, better known as Suetonius (c.71-c.135). “A gossip,” he warned us. If we wanted to read any ancient historian, it should be Tacitus (ca. AD 56-117), who was a good deal more reliable, he said.

“Of course he’d say that,” noted a friend who, unlike myself, had received a pretty thorough grounding in the storied ancient Greeks and Romans at his New York prep school. “Anytime a historian is actually fun to read, they say he’s a gossip.”

It might be tempting to cede the field to my professor and to view Suetonius as the imperial Roman equivalent of the editor of the New York Post’s Page 6 section. But a funny thing happened when I compared the “gossip” with the “reliable historian” on Tiberius Caesar (pictured here, in a bust from the Louvre), who succeeded stepfather Augustus Caesar as emperor.

Both Tacitus and Suetonius agreed on the basic outlines of the reign and death of Tiberius. Both historians had only the most limited knowledge of a small sect then arising at the eastern end of the empire, but when one considers the transgressions of the ruler of the greatest power in the Mediterranean during the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth, it is perfectly understandable why so many believed that this man crucified at age 33 represented a fundamental and necessary break from an empire and emperor characterized by corruption, caprice and cruelty.

It might even be argued that Suetonius provides a more substantial base on which to judge his account than Tacitus. There are no footnotes, to be sure (how did they ever do without them?), but there are enough details to help you decide whether a) Suetonius’ overall judgment was correct, and b) his anecdotes were too outlandish to be believed.

Let’s start with a subject always sure to excite readers: sex. (I’ve come to the conclusion, by the way, that high-school Latin classes would be hopelessly oversubsubscribed if students didn’t have to struggle with Julius Caesar’s Commentaries and instead were told there was this other book out there, but it was too dirty to read. Think how quickly they'd learn then Latin just to get to the “good parts”!)

How does Tacitus describe Tiberius’ retirement to Capri, in The Annals of Imperial Rome? “His former absorption in State affairs ended. Instead he spent the time in secret orgies, or idle malevolent thoughts.” Better than simply stating he gave himself over to sensuality, but it’s hard to know what to make of this charge.

In contrast, Suetonius makes unmistakably clear the nature of at least some of Tiberius’ practices (e.g., swimming sessions in which the emperor indulged in pederastic tendencies). We now know why some would regard the emperor as dissolute.

Or take the description of the emperor’s death. Tacitus offered a single explanation (i.e., he had been “smothered with a heap of bed-clothes and left alone.”). Suetonius, as seen above, suggests three possibilities on how the emperor met his end, none of them very happy.

As for how Tiberius ruled, the two authors agreed more closely on events, though they differed on what this meant about their subject. Both depicted the emperor as an occasionally able administrator. But both were at some pains to catalogue his cruelty as time went on.

For Suetonius, it seemed like a barely perceptible descent into paranoia and madness, as the largely largely unsociable Tiberius grew increasingly concerned with stamping out rebellions against his rule. In contrast, Tacitus saw no real evolution of character; the emperor was always engaged in “cunningly affecting virtuous qualities.” But with the disappearance of a couple of key individuals in his life, “fear vanished, and with it shame. Thereafter he expressed only his own personality—by unrestrained crime and infamy.”

Quote of the Day (Tacitus, on “History’s Highest Function”)

“This I regard as history's highest function, to let no worthy action be uncommemorated, and to hold out the reprobation of posterity as a terror to evil words and deeds.”— Gaius Cornelius Tacitus (ca. 55 AD-ca. 120 AD), Annals, Book 3