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December 16, 2004
The Roman Way
I have been brushing up on the classics recently, specifically I listened to the book on tape versions of Edith Hamilton’s The Roman Way and The Greek Way along with The Conquest of Gaul by Julius Caesar over the past two months. As much as I like the Greeks and how much our society idolizes the Greeks for their love of play, art, and thought, I think our society is much more like the Romans. I am sure many others have made these points before but the Romans were so practical and competent about everything. There are some areas like our love for sport where we follow the Greeks, but the Romans loved sport too. In other areas like tragedy we are way off the Greeks. The Romans did not invent many new great ideas in religion or philosophy, but they were good at building stuff and had a very legalisitc and orderly culture that would slap together whatever worked from other cultures. The thing that impressed me most about the Romans in The Conquest of Gaul was how orderly they were outside of Rome and how quickly they could build things when they needed to, even when away from any supply base in the middle of some barbarian forest. From Caesar’s description of his troops and their enemies it does not seem like they were braver or better at fighting, but that the Romans planned better and followed orders.
Lileks had his take on the same question today, ”So why do we like the Romans? They were nasty bastards, after all, casually cruel, indolently sadistic when it suited them, tyrannical and arrogant. But they were civilized. At least for the time. They’re familiar. They had stadiums, plumbing, buildings whose visual vocabulary can be found in any American town, sculpture that looks startlingly vivid and real, and laws. (Too many laws, I suppose – and that bred an attitude towards the law that also seems familiar.) All other empires give off a strange and foreign whiff – the Egyptians come close, but their theology and architecture doesn’t resonate with the Western heart, and it doesn’t help that they wrote with pictures that make anyone channel their inner schoolkid and hum the snakecharmer ditty: “na na na, na, na. Nana nana nana na.” The other eastern empires had their odd gods with elaborately braided beards and lion bodies; the Aztecs et al are stuck in a Discovery Channel hell, with some historian attempting to decode inscrutable friezes about severed penises and human sacrifice while the soundtrack plays mournful pan flutes. They’re all very interesting. They’re all quite fascinating. But I think if you asked most people “of all the empires in human history, which would youn like to –“ “Rome,” they’d answer, before you finished the question. Oh, it would be different than we expected; you couldn’t begin to count the things you couldn’t anticipate. But you suspect – or hope – that you’d figure it out quickly. You could learn the ropes of Rome. You could pick up what you needed to know. If Western Civ is Mac OSX, Rome is DOS. Different interface, but you’re still using qwerty.... “Pompeii” is about a volcano, yes, but it’s the finest novel about plumbing you’ll ever read. I’m not being sarcastic. The hero is the local official in charge of the water supply for the cities around Pompeii, and most of the book concerns his efforts to fix a break in the aqueduct. It’s a brilliant move – the politics of Rome may be fascinating and amusing from a distance, the amphitheater diversions appalling, but by GOD they were engineers of the finest sort, and to learn how they did what they did is truly a delight.”
Posted by Pete at December 16, 2004 01:32 PM
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