The Curia Julia, meeting place of the Roman Senate, begun by Julius Caesar in 44 BCE, finished by Augustus in 29 BCE, restored under Domitian in 81-96 CE, and rebuilt under Diocletian, 284-385 CE. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.
“It is no easy thing to overthrow a democracy, and harder yet to replace it with an autocracy. The social institutions of any society possess a massive inertia which, unlike governments, cannot be changed overnight.”
— The Sons of Caesar, by Philip Matyszak.
Bust of Julius Caesar, Vatican Museum
“By a mixture of personal charisma and political skill, the Caesars convinced the Roman people to relinquish their democratic rights in exchange for an implicit promise that autocratic rule would be in their interest.
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The Tsars and the Kaisers who used the name of Caesar are gone yet the pernicious example of Caesar and his heirs continues to convince many that effective autocracy is superior to a dysfunctional democracy.
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In effect the Julian-Claudian dynasty hijacked the government of Rome and turned the state into a personal possession. And they did this so effectively that the civil war which followed the death of the last Julian-Claudian emperor was not about whether to restore the Republic, but about who should now rule their Empire. To achieve this, the Julian-Claudians had to overcome the checks and balances built into the Republic by its founding fathers.”
From The Sons of Caesar: Imperial Rome’s First Dynasty, by Philip Matyszak
“It is no easy thing to overthrow a democracy, and harder yet to replace it with an autocracy. The social institutions of any society possess a massive inertia which, unlike governments, cannot be changed overnight.”
— The Sons of Caesar, by Philip Matyszak.
“The survival of an autocracy depends on the visible exercise of power by the autocrat himself; a democracy may be run by an abstract administrative entity (though even here figureheads are required), but an autocrat has to be seen to be actively in charge. Hence it is particularly important for him to embody the authority of the supreme purveyor of justice. A correlation has been made between the increasingly harsh penalties under the Empire and the absolutist trend in Roman government; so too the emperor is free to devise ingenious methods of ridding his empire of undesirable elements, inflating his charisma by the reincarnation of myth.”
From “Fatal Charades: Roman Executions Staged as Mythological Enactments,” by K.M. Coleman. In the Journal of Roman Studies, Volume 80, 1990.
Music: Guilt By Association Volume IV: 1966 — Various artists
Creativity: The Path of Least Resistance — Robert Fritz
TV: Grantchester — Daisy Coulam
Not-So-Ancient Inspiration: “The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”
Martin Luther King, Jr., from Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, with thanks to Rene for the reference.
Children’s Picture Book: Mr. Particular — Jason Kirschner
Fiction: Red April — Santiago Roncagliolo
Memoir: The Bridge Ladies — Betsy Lerner
Documentary: My Italian Secret — Oren Jacoby
TV: Occupied — Karianne Lund, Jo Nesbø, Erik Skjoldbjærg. Netflix.
Writing: The Clockwork Muse — Eviator Zerubavel
Not-So-Ancient Inspiration: “The bad thing about all religions is that, instead of being able to confess their allegorical nature, they have to conceal it; accordingly, they parade their doctrines in all seriousness as true sensu proprio, and as absurdities form an essential part of these doctrines we have the great mischief of a continual fraud. Nay, what is worse, the day arrives when they are no longer true sensu proprio, and then there is an end of them; so that, in that respect, it would be better to admit their allegorical nature at once. But the difficulty is to teach the multitude that something can be both true and untrue at the same time. Since all religions are in a greater or less degree of this nature, we must recognise the fact that mankind cannot get on without a certain amount of absurdity, that absurdity is an element in its existence, and illusion indispensable; as indeed other aspects of life testify.”
Arthur Schopenhauer, from “The Christian System” in Religion: A Dialogue, and Other Essays, (1910) as translated by Thomas Bailey Saunders, p. 106.
Valerie Block 