Tag Archives: Ancient Rome

Ab urbe condita

Ab urbe condita – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This coming Friday will mark the 2,776th anniversary of the traditional date for the founding of the City of Rome. Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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I find it interesting as an adult that my first understanding of my own religion, explained to me by my Mom when I was little, was that “we are Roman Catholics.” Even at that point, when I must’ve been no more than five years old, I knew what Rome was, I can remember my thoughts from that moment as clear as day: I pictured in my mind a map of the Italian peninsula descending from the Alps down into the Mediterranean. Whether that map was my memory of the globe in my grandparents’ home next to their collection of the 1979 edition of the World Book Encyclopedia, or of some other map I had seen I can’t say for sure. Rome, with all its antiquity, has had a hold over my imagination just as it has over the collective imaginations of those of us in the European and American orbits since its fall.

Several years later, after we’d moved to Kansas City, and I continued my schooling at St. Patrick’s in Kansas City, Kansas, I checked a book on Ancient Rome out of the school library. As I remember it, it was one of the few history books in color, most of them had been donated when the school first opened in 1949 and were by modern standards rather outdated. Still, I had this book in my bag that had a wonderful colored picture of the greatest extent of the Roman Empire in the reign of Hadrian during the 2nd century CE. I had looked over it several times already before this particular memory took place, but when one afternoon I was denied entry into an after school club, I think a geography bee club perhaps, I found myself sitting on the bench in front of the school’s office, reading that book.

My ancestors, the Irish Gaels, were never conquered by Rome. There were likely Roman merchants visiting the Leinster coast during the imperial period, after all the western boundaries of the Roman Empire were across the Irish Sea in Wales, but Roman influence didn’t fully arrive until after the Western Roman Empire had already collapsed in the form of missionaries like St. Patrick who introduced Christianity, the Latin alphabet & language, and fostered a new sense of European connectivity for my people that has never left. For me conversations of heritage are always complicated. Yes, I am an Irish American with roots going deep into that island’s past beyond what’s considered historical, but so much of the culture I’ve lived in and embraced comes from Europe’s classical past: from Greece & Rome, that I feel a strong bond if not in blood, then in civilization to those continental cultures.

When I teach Western Civilization or European History I, or whatever you want to call the intro class that covers European history from Bronze Age Greece to the Reformation, I make a point of trying to define civilization as being inherently tied to the concept of the city. Mapping civilizations is like charting the stars in the sky, with each city glowing bright like those lights in the heavens, at the heart of their own civilizations. In antiquity this ideal makes sense, for the city-state was the most common type of polity. Rome was a city-state governed by its own balance between an aristocratic Senate and an Assembly representing the rest of the People that in turn ruled over an ever growing empire of subjected peoples until at last it became too much for the standing political order in Rome to control and 150 years of civil wars lead to a Principate, rule by the Princeps, the First Citizen, in this case Augustus Caesar and his heirs and successors who we today know as the Emperors.

Today, I look at Roman history and see several ideals that every generation since its conception has espoused. On the one hand there’s the model of the Caesar as the best sort of leader. The Caesars who ruled Rome from Augustus’s elevation in 31 BCE to Constantine XI Paleologos’s death at the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 CE have their heirs and imitators in all the Kaisers, Tsars, and Emperors to rule in Europe and its erstwhile American colonies since, as well as in kings like Louis XIV, le roi soleil, who like Augustus fashioned himself the Sun at the center of all his domain. Yet on the other hand I see the republican ideal of citizen government espoused before the Principate, lauded by men like Cicero and the Gracchi yet never fully realized by anyone then or since. 

I would rather emulate that republican ideal of citizenship, refashioned in a modern sense with the blending of republicanism with democracy. The founders of the United States saw in their new republic a revival of the best of Rome, emulating their ancient heroes in law, government, and architecture. One needs only wander around the National Mall to find all the classical buildings one’s heart could ever desire to see how our new Rome on the banks of the Potomac has come to be. Yet in all honesty, as much as Washington fits this idealized model of a republican Rome reborn, with even the great headquarters of our Department of Defense across the Potomac beyond the confines of the capital in the Pentagon, not unlike Rome’s ancient Campus Martius, experience has taught me that the greatest modern inheritor of the symbols of the Roman Republic in its art & architecture can be found in Paris, a city whose grand boulevards and monumental architecture built during and after the Revolution of 1789 are alive with the symbols and spirit of Roman republicanism. This is in part thanks to one of the great Romanophiles of the last 250 years, Napoléon Bonaparte, whose reign as First Consul and later Emperor of the French sought to create a new Rome in his own day, albeit in the transitional model of Julius Caesar whose reign at least nominally sought to preserve the Republic yet established the foundations for the Empire that Augustus, his adoptive son, created.Today the meaning of the republic has changed so dramatically that I doubt Cicero or even the Gracchi would approve; and as much as I look up to so many of those old Roman republicans as people who I appreciate and enjoy reading, I firmly believe we’re better off without all the trappings of what was inherently a limited and oligarchical Roman Republic. I would rather live in a modern democratic republic, one where social welfare, tradition, and the markets were kept in balance. So, on this the 2,776th anniversary of the founding of the City of Rome, I’m worried to see the reactionaries among us pulling us backward toward that oligarchy that initially established our own Republic here on the far side of the Atlantic almost 240 years ago. The Roman Republic fell because its leaders misdiagnosed the sickness and killed the patient, ignoring the needs of the people for their own power & wealth. Rome continues to provide us lessons today. We should listen to them.

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The Constancy of the Modern

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If we can learn anything from history, it is that our story has always been acted out and subsequently recorded by people, not unlike us. Each successive generation has done their part to immortalise their greatest tales through stories, both oral and written, into the collective memory of society. As time has passed, each generation of historians has endeavoured to best tell these stories of their predecessors in a way which their own generation can well understand. To the historians of the Renaissance, the millennium immediately proceeding their own time quickly gained the pejorative name the Dark Ages, while its architecture was equally appallingly disparaged as Gothic.

To the Renaissance and subsequent Enlightenment historians, the time to hearken back to with all glory was that of Classical Antiquity, of Greece and Rome. The intervening millennium in between the Fall of Rome in 476 CE and the rebirth of classical learning in the Italian city-states in the late fifteenth century was merely a setback in the onward march of human progress. It was a setback defined by religious fervour and superstition, when science was equated to wizardry and the light of literacy confined to only a select class of clerics and aristocrats.

Each generation of historians has strived to understand the past both in the light of their own times and in the understanding of how those in the past understood themselves. Yet for the analytical nature of the study of history in our present scientifically-centred age to be properly propped up, contemporary historians must continue to classify and divide history into particular periods, places, and categories. Political history must remain distinct from cultural history and social history, while the aforementioned Renaissance must somehow be understood as different from the Medieval period that came before it.

What is most striking is the division of the discipline into broad spans of time, particularly concerning European history. One has a choice of diving deep into the past with Ancient history, a concentration primarily focused upon the Mediterranean world from the earliest communities to the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE. Or perhaps one would prefer to study Medieval History, focusing on Europe during the ten centuries between the aforementioned fall of the Western Roman Empire and the eventual fall of the Eastern Roman Empire in 1453.

Or, if that does not suit one’s fancy, one could try one’s hand at Early Modern History, covering the period of time between the turn of the sixteenth century to the French Revolution. While modern, this period still has its fair share of the medieval about it to make it more remote. Then there are the modernists, those whose focus is squarely on recent European history, the stuff that has happened since the fall of the Ancien Régime in 1792 and the rise of modern European liberal democracy through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

What this model of understanding European history is founded on is the old Renaissance understanding that Europe will always be dominated by the legacy of Rome; therefore all European history must be understood in relation to the glories of the Roman Empire. The medieval is a giant leap backwards in the ruins of the once great imperial edifice, while the rise of modernity marks the return of European society to its former Roman glory. The other thing that this model is focused on is we modern man. Since it was first devised in the seventeenth century, this understanding of history has always held modernity as the pinnacle of human achievement, at least to that point.

The term modern itself comes from the Late Latin modernus, an adjectival modification of the Classical Latin adverb modo, meaning “just now.” Modernus in turn developed into the Middle French moderne by the fourteenth century, indicating that something similar to our understanding of the present time as modern was in use as early as what we would now call the Late Middle Ages. True, to my generation devices like the digital tablet, electric car, or the ability to make videocalls are decidedly modern, our grandparents could equally have said the same fifty years ago for the television, jet airplane, and IBM 7080 computer were equally modern to their own time. Likewise for our great-grandparents the very idea of a subway, car, or airplane on its own was incredibly modern.

The way I see it, the term modern is the hour hand on the clock of time; it is the pointer that marks where we are on the cycle that is human history. Just as Edward III was a modern monarch for his own time so too Elizabeth II is for ours. Likewise, while Geoffrey Chaucer may well have been seen as a modern writer for his day and age, working into the late hours of the night in his rooms within the edifice of London’s Aldgate, so too someone like me is all too modern for my own time. Though I write so often about the past, and do my best to draw connections between what has been and what is present, I cannot help but understand the people, places, and things that have already come and gone through the lens of my own times, of my modernity.

Therefore to define ourselves as modern is not to make us anymore unique than our predecessors. Rather, to do so we not only continue on the legacies of their respective modernities, and write our own story, always utilising this most constant of chronological labels.