Reflections of a stormy petrel

125 years ago, Theodor Mommsen gave crushing evidence to prove that no piece of Roman history - meaning the traditional history, as told by Livy, Appian, Polybius and the other ancient historians - before 380 BC, and few before 275 BC, were reliable. Theodor Mommsen was not only one of the greatest historians of ancient Rome who ever lived, but one of the most widely read. Every specialist since is familiar with his work. And in fact his powerful argument - first set out in an article in a magazine called Hermes in 1886 - has been expanded and proved again and again by many other scholars, in particular the Italian Ettore Pais.

Get it? No story told about Rome before 380 BC, and precious few before 275 BC, are reliable history. The matter is complicated by the fact that, while the stories are certainly unhistorical, the stages in political evolution they describe do seem to have happened as they are described. Rome started out as a monarchy of sorts; it was ruled by Etruscan kings for about a century; when the Etruscans were driven out, it became a republic. And there seems to be a basic reliability, in spite of numerous variants, about the lists of consuls and other officials that were handed down. But the history, the history itself, is not history. It is a bunch of stories. It is a vast, indeed amazing, body of legends.

This is perhaps more significant to me than to many of my readers, because, being Italian - and with family connections with the city of Rome itself - these are my heroic past. Italian children learn stories about Romulus, Numa, Tarquinius the Proud, or Furius Camillus, at school, like American children learn about Washington and Lincoln and Irish children about Brian Boruma and Daniel O'Connell. But the fact that these stories are all just stories struck me very forcefully.

Now when the Greeks came to look at the Romans, the one thing they did not find was a large body of stories such as they had, about various gods and their interactions with each other and with heroes who were themselves sons of gods and often hardly to be distinguished from gods. (Herakles, Helen, Menelaus and Diomedes, to mention only a few, received divine as well as heroic cult.) And not seeing the kind of mythology they were familiar with, they concluded that the Romans - these people with their enormous amount of "historical" stories and heroes - had no mythology.

The Greeks could be excused for this gross category mistake. Scholars ever since Mommsen cannot. That textbooks, and indeed scholarly investigations, about Roman origins, continue to be produced, in which "the problem of Roman mythology" is seriously argued and repeated, is inexcusable and an intellectual scandal.

bufo_viridis' suggestion that the Roman Republic must be seen as more aggressive than the Empire was not exactly what I meant either. So let me give you an overview of how I see early Roman history up to and including the Second Punic War; this, apart from anything else, will help to clear my own head with respect to subjects in which I am doing research, and provide a basis for future writings.

The first thing we have to remember is Mommsen's important discovery that practically everything that passes, on Roman testimony, for Roman history, until the fourth century, was in effect fabricated by Roman, probably patrician, writers, between 390BC and 275BC. Such is the fascination that Roman pseudo-history exerts on historians, that neither Mommsen himself, nor anyone - or almost anyone - since, has really drawn all the necessary conclusions from this shattering revelation; and to this day, we have historians seriously discussing the Etruscan and - even worse - Sabine presence in early monarchic Rome, although Dumezil has long since shown that the whole story of Etruscans and Sabines is not only a legend but a myth. All these things must, as a matter of sound method, be dumped; as must all the stirring stories of conflict between patricians and plebeians - all conveniently located before 275BC - and even, after Carandini's earth-shaking archaeological discoveries of the last twenty years, the famous story of the destructive Gaulish siege of 387BC.

Let us, instead, consider Italy as a whole. Rome, after all, only becomes important in Mediterranean and Western history when she becomes important in Italy. ( Read more... )

A couple of days ago, I reported on the worrying trends among the orthodox rebels in the American Catholic Church. One thing I mentioned was the unlovely sympathy of at least one or two writers in the Roman Catholic Faithful newsletter for Lefebvrite schismatics and their paranoid view of the world (e.g. Popes John XXIII and Paul VI were Communist sympathizers). Thinking about it, I think this has a bearing on the issue of how conspiracy theories come to be.

Roman Catholic Faithful arose, as a group, in areas where the intellectual and ritual malfeasance of the "liberal" infiltrators in the Catholic Church had reached epidemic proportion. The experience of genuine Catholics in those dioceses was of trying to push against a rubber wall, that always snapped back the harder you fought against it. It can, without fear of exaggeration, be described as an experience of persecution and conspiracy: those in power - parish priests, diocesan bureaucrats, vicars, bishops - coming together to deny the man-in-the-pew what was due to them as Catholics; and nowhere for genuine Catholics to turn, for the authorities just reinforced each other and excluded any opportunity of reform or even of orthodox practice (orthodox priests from before the era of current management were got rid of one way or another, and notoriously orthodox congregations left without a priest or even closed with the excuse of a "vocations crisis" which the establishment itself had engineered). No doubt the generation in power did not regard this sort of thing as a conspiracy, just as vigorous executive action to enforce a progressive attitude. But try telling that to the person who cannot even get a hearing!

So the founders of Roman Catholic Faithful experience something which is, from their point of view, pretty indistinguishable from a conspiracy. They feel smothered by a group of men in power who work hand in glove with each other to force on them things they do not want and deny them even the shadow of justice. Then it develops. These rebellious faithful go to Rome; and for some reason or another they are disappointed. And they come to believe what their own enemies have told them (I quote)): "Rome will let ten thousand priests be shot rather than hurt one bishop." It is nonsense, of course. But they have had such an experience of constant rejection and ignoring that they take it seriously.

What happens to the mind of these people? That they project backwards, into an imagined past, the conspiracy which they feel to exist (and which, in some manner, does exist - at least as a convergence of interests and beliefs that leaves no space for opposition) in the present. They feel that if a conspiracy exists, then it was born as a conspiracy. They do not realize that it is often objective conditions that lead to such convergences of interests and beliefs. And they do not believe that, in so far conspiracies may have existed, they may have been penny-ante items taking place locally, not vast things that involve the world. This is part of a patter of historical ignorance. To them, the Church at present is what they experience, there and then, in Springfield or Rochester or Albany; but the Church in the past is the Church of the Popes, one single entity existing in Rome. Thus they assume that the current state of their diocese has a chain of origins that begins in Rome. They ignore purely local factors: they know nothing of how their church was fifty or a hundred years ago, or how certain local events in places such as New York or Philadelphia may have affected them.

But the basic element is the retrojection of present experience into the past. This is how conspiracy theories are born. It is an aspect of a greater feature of human thought, that events always create their own prehistory in people's minds. Like those interpretations of Russian or German history where everything concurs to the ultimate result of Communism or Nazism. It is a state of mind that I find inimical to good history, but there are a lot of historians who consciously or unconsciously cultivate it.

...just to show the kind of thing I do in real life.

THE RABBLE OF LATIUM AND THE NOBILITY OF TROY

Virgil, homosexuality and “Latin” values


By Fabio P.Barbieri
( Read more... )