I remarked in my last blog on one of the items that I have been reading. It is a compact compilation of essays and letters of the great Roman statesman and orator, Marcus Tullius Cicero, titled ‘How To Run A Country: An Ancient Guide for Modern Leaders’.1 I have now come to the end of it, which end is on a poignant note. After a long and honorable life exhorting his fellow countrymen to practice ‘the old virtues’ - to live by honor and decency - Cicero comes to a conclusion, and of his life, thusly. It is a short, summarizing statement, that Dr. (Ph.D) Freeman has titled ’Cicero’s Epilogue: The Fallen State’. It reads, simply and briefly (and opening with a quote):
“‘The Roman state is founded firm on ancient customs and its men.’ - Ennius, Annales’
“The poet who wrote these words so brief and true seems to me to have heard them from a divine oracle. For neither men by themselves without a state based on strong customs nor traditions without men to defend them could have established and maintained a republic such as ours whose power stretches so far and wide. Before our time, the cherished customs of our forefathers produced exceptional and admirable men who preserved the ways and institutions of our ancestors.
“But now our republic looks like a beautiful painting faded with age. Our generation has not only failed to restore the colors of this masterpiece, but we haven’t even bothered to preserve its general form and outline. What now remains of the ancient ways of our country the poet declares we were founded upon? These traditions have so sunk into oblivion that we neither practice them nor even remember what they were. And what shall I say about the men? For the reason our customs have passed away is that the people who once upheld them no longer exist. We should be put on trial as if for a capital crime to explain why this disaster has happened. But there is no defense we can give. Our country survives only in words, not as anything of substance. We have lost it all. We have only ourselves to blame.”
The rumination of an old man at the end of his own days, his own tiredness from the battles reflecting in his outlook? But nonetheless true, for all that, as it turned out.2
And thus did Rome - the solid, virtuous state that was the Roman Republic - sink into ”oblivion”.
Lessons to learn there.
If there is still time.
—
footnotes:
1 Selected and translated by Philip Freeman. Occasioned by my having recently read the marvelous novel on Cicero’s life by the estimable Taylor Caldwell, titled ‘A Pillar Of Iron’.
Other material I am currently reading, that I lug around in my backpack for my edification in my outings to the local park for some time in the Southern California sun:
‘The Big Short: Inside The Doomsday Machine’ by Michael Lewis (a very readable report on the U.S. stock market crash in the fall of 2008. Which was already old news by then, to people who had eyes to see. And ‘Everything You Need To Know But Have Never Been Told’ by David Icke. An excellent summary of what the MSM isn’t telling us. Plus an assortment of issues of The New American magazine, a biweekly that I never get around to reading fully before the next one lands in my mailbox. I pick my reading for the afternoon as I am moved in the moment.
2 And what would our own “men” say about our own republic, and its outcome?? Washington. Adams. Jefferson. Madison. Jackson. Lincoln. Giants, all. On whose shoulders our own republic was built…but getting back to Cicero, and his day in the sun:
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