On Oct 9, 2009, at 8:27 AM, c b wrote:
Michael Perelman wrote:
I don't think that the Cato people are bad people...
Nor do I, though they name themselves after one of the worst people in
Roman history.
CB: ...Are there many good people in Roman history , besides
Spartacus ? The Gracchi brothers ? I guess historical relativity
comes in big time on that.
Of course such moral terms are relative, not only historically ("When
the felon's not engaged in his employment..."). Spartacus ("A
Thracian who was not a Thracian") became a great romantic rebel, but
little is really known about him personally or politically; and the
Gracchi brothers were leaders of the Popular party, radical in the
context of Roman politics at the time but responsible for some very
oppressive laws in the exploitation of the "allies" and provinces and
not that different in this from--say--Marius or Saturninus.
I think the greatest Roman political figure was Caesar, because only
he had the historical insight to envision the transformation of the
Roman republic from a closed corporation of Roman aristocrats and
usurers into a commonwealth of the urban upper classes embracing the
whole Mediterranean world--a fleeting possibility (which would have
opened the further possibility of a bourgeois, rather than feudal,
outcome from the inevitable decline of the slave mode of production)
destroyed when he was assassinated by a broad coalition of those
aristocrats and usurers precisely because they feared that his
projected campaign to end the Parthian menace to the Levant would have
succeeded and given him the power to carry through the program of
structural reforms that he had begun during his brief term as
dictator. I call Cato the Younger one of the worst not only because
he was the most militant leader of the most reactionary part of the
Roman ruling class and a prototypical yahoo, but because it was he who
almost singlehandedly (by defeating the attempt at compromise by the
moderates, such as Cicero, in his own party) plunged the republic into
a catastrophic civil war.
Otherwise, there are some--though not many-- Romans who seem to me to
be on the whole quite admirable. First of all, of course, the emperor
Julian ("The Apostate") who fought and lost the good fight against the
Christian gangrene. Intellectuals like Ovid and Cicero's friend
Atticus. And some great ladies of the late republic--Sempronia Mother
of the Gracchi, her granddaughter Fulvia Sempronia (who burned down
the Senate House after the reactionaries had murdered Clodius), and of
course Aurilia, Caesar's mother who brought him up not on an
aristocratic hill but in the midst of the Roman slums.
Shane Mage
This cosmos did none of gods or men make, but it
always was and is and shall be: an everlasting fire,
kindling in measures and going out in measures."
Herakleitos of Ephesos
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