"Separation of powers, checks and balances, government in accordance with constitutional law, a toleration of slavery, fixed terms in office, all these ideas were influenced by Roman precedents.
John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams often read and spoke of Cicero as an inspiration to them. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, writing in the Federalist Papers in favor of ratification of the Constitution, signed their article with the name Publius Valerius Publicola, the first consul of the Roman republic."
"What does virtue mean? What is an example of a virtue to you, in your life, within your moral, philosophical, spiritual or religious system? ...
For a Stoic like Seneca, disaster might become an occasion for virtue because it gave an opportunity to press on living out one’s fate despite the hard circumstances, or, as the word in Latin can also mean, it became an occasion for bravery, fortitude, strength, and courage. ...
Most Roman virtues were practiced from “the top down”. That is to say, for the ancient Roman, virtue was largely about who had power over whom and how that powerful person (usually male and wealthy) used this power over others.
Some virtues simply could not be practiced by those with little power. For instance, the word “comitas” (politeness, kindness) was most often used of powerful people and their actions toward those under them. It was not a virtue that the “low man on the totem pole” could practice toward those above him. This was a virtue that “flowed down hill” so to speak. In other words, it presumed power."
"Titus first appears manifestly larger than life: The noble Roman soldier who vanquishes the enemy outside the walls returns home to restore peace in the city. . . .Titus embodies Romanitas, here defined as a military code of honor that encompasses the virtues of pride, courage, constancy, integrity, discipline, service, and self-sacrifice."
"The mos maiorum were the ancestral traditions, an unwritten code of laws and conduct, of the Romans. It institutionalized cultural traditions, societal mores, and general policies, as distinct from specific laws.
The eight cornerstones of mos maiorum were:fides — fidelity, loyalty, faithIt was partially typified by a respect for fathers and husbands and acknowledgement of one's subservience to them. One of the best illustrations of this tradition is found in the writings of Cato the Elder."
pietas — piety, devotion, patriotism, duty
religio — religious scruple, reverence for higher power(s), strictness of observance, conscientiousness precision of conduct
disciplina — discipline, diligence
constantia — firmness, steadiness
gravitas — seriousness, dignity, authority
parsimonia — frugality
severitas — strictness in the moral sense
"De Officiis (On Duties or On Obligations) is an essay by Marcus Tullius Cicero divided into three books, where Cicero explains his view on the best way to live.
-- 'Justice consists in doing no injury to men;
decency in giving them no offense.' "
"In the summer of 1992 or 1993, while cycling in western Europe .... I cycled with friends through Spain and France. We rode for more than two weeks with heavy saddlebags, going by easy stages similar in length to those of a Roman army on the march. More than once we rode over Roman roads and Roman bridges.
Descending from the Pyrenees into France, we stumbled across a Roman aqueduct and contemplated the genius of Roman engineering. ... a structure spanning a stream at a height of 75 feet, supported by eight round, unadorned arches of various heights but equal width. ...
The stream itself, lying below the banks where plants could grow, was useless; water does not flow uphill, and without irrigation, the banks of the canyon were a desert. Therefore, the Romans captured water from a small tributary, well upstream from the aqueduct. They channeled it in an imperceptibly sloping canal parallel to the canyon. ...
I know all this with certainty, because the aqueduct is still working, still carrying water from far upstream to the apricot orchards that grow today on the terraced banks of the canyon."
" '... would you like to know the most significant event in the history of freedom?'
- 'The American revolution?'
'A defensible choice, a close second even, but not mine. I would choose the moment when the Roman plebians required the patricians to write down the twelve tables of the law and put them where everyone could see them -- and thereby proclaimed the law supreme over the politicians. The rule of law is the essence of freedom.' "
Prince of Mercenaries
by Jerry Pournelle
1989; portions (I don't know which) published in 1975 and 1977
Ch 21, page 254 of the Baen Books paperback edition
Links are mine - ed.
"A plebeian named Terentilius proposed in 462 BC that an official legal code should be published, so that plebeians could not be surprised and would know the law.
Patricians long opposed this request, but in 451 BC a Decemvirate, or board of ten men, was appointed to draw up a code. They allegedly sent an embassy to study the legislative system of the Greeks, particularly the laws of Solon, possibly in the Greek colonies of southern Italy.
The first Decemvirate completed the first ten codes in 450 BC. Here is how Livy describes their creation, '...every citizen should quietly consider each point, then talk it over with his friends, and, finally, bring forward for public discussion any additions or subtractions which seemed desirable.' In 449 BC, the second Decemvirate completed the last two codes, and after a secessio plebis to force the Senate to consider them, the Law of the Twelve Tables was formally promulgated. The Twelve Tables were literally drawn up on twelve ivory tablets (Livy says brass) which were posted in the Forum Romanum so that all Romans could read and know them.
The laws of the Twelve Tables were not a comprehensive statement of all law; they are a sequence of definitions of various private rights and procedures, similar to a bill of rights."
"... James Purefoy is playing Mark Anthony in the hit TV series, Rome, and one of the things he said struck me as really rather illuminating. He said that the difference between us and the Romans was that they regarded weakness as a vice and what we would call cruelty as a virtue.
This cruelty-is-a-virtue meme pulls together lots of different things about the Romans that have never previously made proper sense to me. Basically, why were they such total and utter bastards, and at the very same time so amazingly smug about how virtuous they were? Did they like torturing each other, and even being tortured? Answer: no. But they did believe in it. They were not indifferent to pain. They believed in pain. They believed in inflicting it, and believed that being able to endure it was one of the highest virtues. A lot falls into place once you (by which I mean I) get that. ...
I think that this cruelty-as-virtue idea throws into particular relief the particular kinds of blunders that we now make. The basic Roman blunder, it seems to me, and judged by our standards rather than theirs, was that they were just too damn destructive. They killed too many people, shut down too many worthwhile rival civilisations, slaughtered too many of the extras in their version of Hollywood entertainment. ...
The virtue we aspire to is kindness, and in everyday life this usually works pretty well. But the vices of our civilisation are mostly also related to that aspiration, it seems to me, and now more than ever before. Even as Christian theology is now laughed to scorn, by me among many thousands, Christian ethics are triumphant in our civilisation as never before. But the underside of kindness is weakness, meekness, sentimentality, thoughtlessness -- niceness as a substitute for competence and for thinking it through (Paging Herr Doktor Nietzsche...). Instead of thoughtful and because of that all the more hideously destructive brutality -- the Roman vice -- we indulge in impulsive and frivolous orgies of unthinking niceness."
From "Mike", quoting Shakespeare, Richard III, nailing it:Many years ago, I saw an interesting comment from a Roman Catholic clergyman on the film Caligula (which features orgies [quite literally] of gluttony, hedonistic sex, violence, and cruelty. Or, per Salon's review by Daniel Kraus,"Conscience is but a word that cowards use,"Brock": "That's why chivalry is a better aspiration than unadulterated "turn the other cheek" kindness. The chivalrous are kind to the chivalrous, and 'get medieval' on the un-chivalrous."
Devised at first to keep the strong in awe:
Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law!"
"Bernie": "It was not that cruelty was a virtue, but rather that compassion was not. More, compassion was an emotion to be despised.
The Romans were not particularily cruel in their day to day dealings with one another or the subject societies, Roman rule was not onerous and nor was their law unfair, but but 'strength' was admired and mercy was simply not one of their strong points."
"When you think about it, this is right. The essential virtue of modern life is niceness and this seeps through into modern attitudes about all sorts of things. Weakness isn’t seen as shameful, it’s seen as OK or even virtuous, which is part of the reason we have a culture of victimhood where people who are victims or a member of an Accredited Victim Group (sic) often get given preferential treatment."
"The study of classics looks soon to cease in Britain. It is a trend that is more than a generation old, but if it continues, no state school will be teaching Greek within five years and within 10, Latin will have virtually died out. Only a few doughty private schools will continue the tradition, but even their candidates for Latin and Greek GCSEs are falling in numbers. ...Links are mine - ed.
Unlike the closure of university physics and geography departments that attracts so much criticism or the self-evidently disastrous collapse in the number of schoolchildren studying modern languages, the classics have no obvious contemporary resonance or usage. They are dead languages from a dead culture. Nobody in Britain studies rhetoric any longer as once they did in the Middle Ages. The world moves on and sometimes subjects just disappear for want of viability. ...
The reason why classics were so central in British educational life throughout the 19th century and the first half of the 20th is not because declining verbs represented a powerful means of grooming young minds. It was that the British keenly felt that the Greek and Roman civilisations informed their own.
They could see, in a way that we do not, how the values of Greece and Rome came through the Renaissance and Enlightenment into the experience, culture and aspirations of Victorian Britain. These were not dead words from a dead culture, but the fountainhead of what the British (and the West) should be. They should be studied and venerated as part of our account about ourselves. ...
Reading Ovid as I researched this column, I could see why both Chaucer and Shakespeare were such devotees. It is poetry that understands and celebrates the frailty of the human condition with a humanity and insight that is breathtaking -- and it is 2,000 years old. Everybody understands that the biology of their parents and grandparents is important in understanding how their own bodies are likely to work. There is no such readiness to want to get to grips with our past when it comes to culture, politics and values.
Yet the establishment of republican Rome in 509BC, its rise to dominate most of Europe, Asia Minor and the near Middle East, its transmutation into an imperial system in 27BC, its collapse in the West in 476AD and in the East, with the fall of Constantinople in 1453, is at the heart of the story of the West. The Chinese rightly boast about the antecedents of their civilisation, going back to 1030BC .... Europeans and Americans have just as much to boast about. The reason they don't is ignorance.
The chief explanation for Rome's phenomenal rise and greatness is that it was a vibrant republican democracy. ... at a time when the rest of the world's political organisation was based on primitive, authoritarian, divinely ordained monarchs like China's.
There are many explanations for Rome's subsequent decline and fall -- overstretch, disease, the embrace of the unmartial values of Christianity, the unstoppable rise of the German tribes in the north and Persia in the east -- but essentially I am with Arnold Toynbee. The transmutation of Rome from republic to empire was progressively to undermine the civic dynamism and, within its terms, commitment to liberty, political and social progress that had made Rome great. ...
Rome's debates -- and earlier debates by the Greeks -- about the best form of political organisation, about ethics and morality, about love and human relationships made us what we are. Without republican Rome, there would have been no Magna Carta, no tradition of civil scrutiny of government, no Shakespeare, no Christianity, no liberalism and no republicanism.
China's weakness, I argue in my new book (see the extract here), is that it has too-fragile traditions on which to build the institutions of accountability and scrutiny necessary for successful capitalism. The West has, for which it has to thank Rome. Until recently, this was understood by our politicians, intellectuals and educators. There will only be a renaissance in Latin and Greek -- and in the inspiration with which it is taught -- when this is understood again."
"Making comparisons of America to Rome have become trendy nowadays.... In fact, listening to these people has made me realize how little I know about Roman history, but now, after spending nearly three days of intense study, drinking and napping, I'm all set to properly pontificate in the debate.Strongly recommended.
I'd say that there seem to be seven major misconceptions that most syndicated columnists have about the Roman Empire:
Ralph Nader
Quoted
here