Dio Cassius ( Roman History , 77.7) describes how Caracalla modelsed himself after Alexander the Great: “He was so enthusiastic about Alexander that he used certain weapons and cups which he believed had once been his, and he also set up many likenesses of him both in the camps and in Rome itself. He organized a phalanx, composed entirely of Macedonians, sixteen thousand strong, named it ‘Alexander’s phalanx,’ and equipped it with the arms that warriors had used in his... Read more
Kenneth Clark: “Facts become art through love, which unifies them and lifts them to a higher plane of reality.” Almost right, that. Right on the link between artifice (poetry, courtesy, ornamentation) and love. Right too on the unifying metaphoricity of art. Right too on the link of fact and art. Not quite right, it seems, on two points. First, on the (perhaps) implied positivism of the use of “facts,” for we never encounter bare facts (facts barren of love and... Read more
Peter Brown asks this question in the first essay in Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman World (Canto original series) and sensibly, following the lead of RA Markus, tries to let early Christians themselves answer. There isn’t a single answer. Early in the fourth century, for cosmological and other reasons, Christians were content to keep away from their pagan neighbors. As long as they didn’t participate in pagan rites, they were content to let the... Read more
Milbank often makes this point, but it’s huge: “Likewise the household, the site of productive provision, was not an arena of ‘politics’ and dialectical disputation, but of unquestioned paternal control. The Christian gothic ‘merging’ of oikos and polis , which as Ruskin in particular grasped, opened the question of virtue exercised within the material sphere of work.” For ancients, the sphere of virtue was political/military, and thus it was male and detached from labor. Slaves worked and made things; virtuous... Read more
Mediating institutions – those formations and associations that stand between the individual and the state – are essential for freedom, we’re often told. I agree with the aim, but have questions about whether the notion of mediating institutions gets at it. The main objection is that the theory appears to leave the two poles – state and individual – untouched. State remains state, individual remains individual, but now there’s a demilitarized zone between. That’s better than no demilitarized zone, but... Read more
The Aaronic blessing promises the “face” and “countenance” of Yahweh, and places the name of God on the people of God (Numbers 6:27). Psalm 44 explains these words of blessing. Yahweh’s hand drove out nations and planted Israel in the land (v. 2) because He shone the “light of [His] countenance” on them and was “gracious” to them (v. 4). Israel did not win by her own strength but bythe “name” of Yahweh drop down enemies. To be sent out... Read more
David Potter confirms Augustine’s claim that the foreign wars of Rome were an extension of a lust for domination and honor: Roman “thinking [about the outside world] involved terms such as gloria , the glory that was won in battle, the ability to compel a foreign people to do something. That which was to be preserved was decus , or ‘face,’ fastigium , dignity, or the maiestas , ‘majesty’ of the empire. Foreign peoples who challenged the gloria or decus... Read more
David Stone Potter again: “Homeric archaeology did not begin with Calvert or Schliemann. It was a feature of life in the second and third centuries AD, when ancient monuments were recognized as such and attached to the world of the poems. There is no reason to doubt that the scepter of Agamemnon that Pausanias reported as being the most revered object at Chaeronea in Boeotia was still there in the time of Philstratus, or that the spear of Achilles had... Read more
Potter again: “Not all gods stayed at home. In the centuries after Alexander the Great’s conquest of Persia, eastern peoples appear to have been drawn west in greater numbers, possibly because new centers of power such as Alexandria and Pergamon made the Aegean lands far more important than they had been in the past.” They brought gods wth them gods like “Zeus Hadad” who “was originally from northern Syria and was understood not as a local manifestation of the Greek... Read more
According to David S. Potter’s superb The Roman Empire at Bay: AD 180-395 (Routledge History of the Ancient World) , there was no such thing as Roman grand strategy. In part this was a limitation of cartographical technology: “Roman surveyors had the ability to draw very detailed maps of small areas. They did not have the capacity to draw accurate large-scale maps; rather they could measure the empire in terms of how far places were from each other along a... Read more
Leithart
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In