History 5

We come to history five. And one of the first things that we would like to ask is what is history five. It means that this is the fifth in a sequence. And the sequence belongs in some subject called history. But we're not doing a subject education. We're committing ourselves to an inquiry. An inquiry is a completely different form from the instruction in a subject. In a subject, you will have a kind of a hierarchy of material that's amenable to an outline. But an inquiry has a process of give and take and always shuns the outline, that it is the ongoing process that creates the definition rather than the outlining. This is radical and radically different. And we talked from history one through four, of the tremendous challenge that the shift from a subject to an inquiry made in classical Greece. We looked at Thucydides history and saw that Thucydides history was formed in such a way that it was not a subject outline of the Peloponnesian War, but was an ongoing inquiry that rolled along in its process on character, as it were. It was the individuals. It was the individual character at that time, largely of men that Thucydides was interested in. And he would put speeches, likely speeches, into the mouths of these characters. And his history of the Peloponnesian War is not just a narrative, but is a setting for these speeches. Now, this is very similar to the jeweler's craft, where you will have the bezel that is the ring that will encompass the setting for the gem, for the jewel, the stone. But the jewel must be cut beforehand to fit that bezel. There are certain cuts of a diamond that fit with certain kinds of bezel. There are cabochon cuts that fit with a different of different jewels. And so this process of Thucydides in his history, this discovery of how a process of inquiry on a very high level created history. And that everything that went before Thucydides, including his mentor in many ways Herodotus, whose work is called histories. Thucydides is radically different. He is the first Greek to understand that in this process of inquiry, he must cut the jewel at the same time as to make the ring in its bezel so that they come together. This meeting together, and that the process of history has a setting in the way in which a conscious vision goes through the diffracting prism of great individuals. Not great because they're at the top of a hierarchy. Not great because they are at the center of an outline, a diagram, but great because the spread or the array of their ability to function was more ample than other people, given the flow of the process. That is to say that their conscious vision was able to play on a more expanded level to meet the higher vicissitudes of the process of history. And so in Thucydides Peloponnesian War, a man who changed sides several times, Alcibiades was one of the major figures. But the major figure in Thucydides was Pericles. Periclase because to Thucydides, Pericles made Athens a historical place more than it had ever been, though it had a great, distinguished history. And we talked about how the quality of Thucydides history, his process of inquiry, is set within a similar flow in the discovery of capacities of ritual drama to be transformed into Greek tragedy, or of ritual drama being transformed into Greek comedy, that comedy and tragedy are a conscious art form, whereas the ritual dramas of the villages and of archaic grace, of grace of most other cities or towns in Greece where mythological flows. They were flows that went by images that had feeling toned, evocative qualities whose meaning could be understood symbolically. But Greek tragedy, or Greek comedy, or Thucydides history, or Plato's dialogues, another form of inquiry, do not belong to the mythological narrative flow. They are not in that they are not concerned with images that interiorized by language that develop meaning into ideas exclusively. Yes, they do that, but their emphasis is different. The emphasis is how consciousness as a dimension changes the way in which nature works. That the process of nature is, to use a simple term, natural. And that the flow of experience in myth mimics that goes along with that, so that mythic processes are mimetic of nature. Mythologies always are looking for their models to the way in which the animals or the plants in nature. How do they do it? This is how we'll do it, and we'll add our little touches. One can become a member of the Bear Clan in a mythology, because you are affined to the way that bears are in nature, but in consciousness such a parallel is irrelevant. In fact, it is not the parallel that is relevant, but it is the juxtaposition of dissonance that is more of interest. That the process of conscious vision takes its cue from a proportioning, a ratio ING a juxtapositioning. And so consciousness has a critical capacity which mythology doesn't have, which nature doesn't exemplify, and that in terms of a really powerful development, critical consciousness is really magical. It's not the kind of magic where someone comes back to a mythic or a natural process and is able to influence them. It's that critical consciousness can be expanded to such an extent that its complexity rivals nature itself, rivals mythology itself. And so if one would find in Plato a certain myths, the myths are embedded into a process of inquiry whose purpose is considerably expanded beyond just simply delivering the myths. We come now to one of the most tragic developments in human history the founding of the Roman Empire. And the way in which the oligarchical power group around Augustus Caesar swallowed whole uncritically the Greek experience hoping, expecting, demanding that it just be fodder for their own purposes, that it be grist for their mill. And it proved to be indigestible. Even for someone as careful as Augustus Caesar. It became increasingly problematic. And after him, the whole line of the Caesars, the whole dynasty of the Caesars, literally went crazy. They became unable to even hold a stability of person, even a stability of mind. And within a very short time, within the space of a half century. The last of that dynasty, Nero, burnt Rome down so that he could build a new Rome. This is a suicide. This is a kind of a cultural murder. And it shows a deep flaw that was there in the indigestible city of the Greek seed, out of which the Roman civilization hoped to expand and build itself. So we come to a new historian, Tacitus, the greatest of the Roman historians. We move from Thucydides to Tacitus. We move from someone who was looking at the Peloponnesian War as the greatest war up until his age, and trying to see that both sides made the war tragic because both sides burnt themselves out in prosecuting the war, which went on for almost a generation, more than a generation. And that, oddly enough, ironically enough, deeper, paradoxically enough, the greatest achievements of Athens as a civilization were in the midst of its breakdown, and that the most tragic figure in this was Pericles, and that the most tragic production of Pericles at this time was the building of the Parthenon. That the Parthenon on the Acropolis rock mass in the center of Athens became, for Pericles, his greatest accomplishment, and forever after has remained the architectural image of the power of the Greek ability to form itself, its civilization, into an art form. The Roman version of the Parthenon was attempted several times, but not completed until towards the end of Tacitus life, with the building of the greatest forum in Rome. It's called the Forum of Trajan, and this is the first volume of a big three volume study that the Getty Museum and the University of California Press put out. And what is interesting About the Forum of Trajan is that when you make it a building, as this building outlined in red, it looks very much like the floor plan of a Gothic cathedral, and that the transept is the Basilica Ulpia, which was the great central law court of the world. So that Roman law became the bar against which the entire world was crucified. And the Forum of Trajan was the most powerful urban center ever built, until it was superseded in Rome by its inheritor and the inheritor. Of the Forum of Trajan was the building of Saint Paul's Cathedral in Rome, completed by the great curving arms of the arcade of Bernini. How one moves from Saint Peter's and its Bernini Arcade back to the Forum of Trajan in Rome. Back to the Parthenon in Athens. Back to the pyramids in Egypt, and further back in history. The further that one goes back, the more we come to see that what these architectural sites embody is the coordinates and the locus, the place where all of the functions, the entire ecology of the functions of maturation Duration are expected to gather and that because one builds designs and builds, designs, builds and controls the focus, the center, the venue where the archetype of maturation takes place, one then has the right to dispense the laws, the rules, the authority, and to demand obedience. Now, this is a very powerful kind of a theme, and it comes down into the time that we just left the 20th century in such a vicious way as to be almost unbelievably violent. The terrible violence of the first century A.D. in Rome, which still seems gruesome to us still seems distasteful to us, has absolutely no fearfulness compared to the really nightmarish terrors of nuclear war. We are moving along a path where we're pairing books, and as we paired Benjamin Franklin with Thucydides, we're now pairing one of the great philosophers of the 20th century with Tacitus. We're pairing Hannah Arendt, and it is Hannah Arendt looking very beautiful as a young girl when she was first contemplating philosophy as her life and career, but grew into one of the most poignant thinkers of the 20th century. And we're using her book, The Human Condition. This is a copy of the little anchor paperback that I first read at the University of Wisconsin, and when it was new in 1959, I remember I had a I had a course with a Soviet specialist, John A Armstrong wrote a number of books on the Soviet government, and he used this in one of his courses. And I remember reading this book 42 years ago, and I remember being told by another professor there at the University of Wisconsin in the history department, a man named George Moss Moss, who was who was the great expert on Nazi ideology and how to stay clear of the entanglements of that kind of vicious game. Moss, who once in a lecture before about 700 people, the biggest Auditorium at the University of Wisconsin at that time was Bascom Hall. Three. B3 and with about 700 students in B3. Morsi stopped lecturing one day, took his glasses off, came around the podium and addressed us. He said, boys and girls, the difference between a revolution on the right and a revolution on the left. On the left, they will argue with you until you quit. On the right they will kill you. And he put his glasses back on and went back to the podium. He said, don't just stop with the human condition. Read her Origins of Totalitarianism that this is where instead of finding the nice tweezers and the scissors Zeus. To help you understand that you must tailor your thought critically. Reading this is like getting your first, uh, experience of a bomb raid, that there is such a thing as a devastating hurricane of understanding, and that it takes really something for someone to be able to brave that and to understand it, and then to write it truthfully and accurately. And Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism says. Just to give you a little quotation here. The point is that the a condition of complete rightness was created before the right to live was challenged. The same is true even to an ironical extent, with regard to the right of freedom, which is sometimes considered to be the very essence of human rights. There is no question that those outside the pale of the law may have more freedom of movement than a lawfully imprisoned criminal, or that they enjoy more freedom of opinion in the internment camps of democratic countries than they would in any ordinary despotism, not to mention a totalitarian government, but neither physical safety being fed by some state or private welfare agency, nor freedom of opinion changes in the least their fundamental situation of right lawlessness, the prolongation of their lives is due to charity, not to write, for no law exists which could force the nations to feed them. Their freedom of movement, if they have it at all, gives them no right to residence, which even the jailed criminal enjoys as a matter of course. And their freedom of opinion is a fool's freedom for nothing they think matters anyhow. When she was a young philosophy student taking courses from people like Edmund Husserl, taking courses from people like Martin Heidegger, taking courses from people like Karl Jaspers, her first investigation was on a curious subject, her doctorate thesis, republished here by the University of Chicago Press. Love and Saint Augustine. Not love as an Eros, but love as in Caritas. Human love. Family love, not agape. Caritas. The charity extended to one. And with Augustine. And it's interesting to note she in this reprint study the last chapter and it's a whole title is Existenz philosophy not with a C, but with a Z existence. One of the main themes of Jaspers and of the early Heidegger was the existential anvil, upon which thought is expected to refine the human Character. And that this then reflects back on the ability to have an authentic existence. One of the devastating realizations in the 20th century was that this ecology is impossible to carry out. The mind is not the source of critical consciousness. Critical consciousness is not in the symbol level at all. It's on the level of vision. And without vision, the people will perish. Because without vision, the cycle of maturation with its integral phases will come full circle and keep going in that circle automatically. It isn't that one. Then cycles and improvement through the minds ideas and is able then to go back and improve existence. There's a fatal flaw in that, that there is no differential consciousness. There is no vision. And out of that comes instead a devolutionary spiral that becomes refined and achieves the status of an ideology. And an ideology is a political circle which deems itself complete, that the entire maturation process is within its purview and those then that Administer an ideological pattern, expect that they are right and that any argument whatsoever is a heresy from the truth is a deviation from the right and should be punished. And that not just for infractions, but increasingly preemptively for conspiratorial possibilities of infractions. And so ideologies tend to be death camps, all of them. By their structure, it doesn't matter if you're a fascist or a communist or whatever, all isms end up in the same path, in the same pattern. The road to oblivion is paved with brilliant isms And so we're taking Hannah Arendt and Tacitus together to try to appreciate a deeper step into history, that our understanding of history is that it is a hyper conscious process. That whereas consciousness is a transformation of the mind, history is a transformation of the person, and the transforming power of the person is much more differentiated than the transforming power of the mind. We're used to saying and used to thinking. We've been taught that the mind is the arbiter and the be all. That transformation is a transformation of the mind. And this is an ideological stance And is flawed in many ways. It is the person who transforms and makes history possible, so that this is a very difficult issue. And we will see, as we get deeper into it, that one of the things that comes out of a sense of history, as we talked about a little bit last week, alluding to some of the writings around the mid 20th century about the process of keeping sequence in its accuracy, so that time is real and doesn't be subsumed into a game. Displacement science is only possible when someone has a historical process which is real. Other than that, one does science in a ritual way under the aegis of isms that control the funding. And one ends up again with a much embellished totalitarianism that we can ill afford. And so these issues are enormous. For the next four weeks, for the next lunar cycle, we'll take a look at Hannah Arendt and Tacitus. But we're going to deepen it. We're going to do like Emerald on the cooking show says we're going to kick it up a notch. We're going to go from Greece, from classical Greece to Augustan Rome to the Renaissance. And for the Renaissance, we're not going to take a Renaissance historian. I would have loved to have taken somebody like Machiavelli, who was really a very great man, not his prince, But I would have chosen Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy because the great competitor to Tacitus was Livy. But Livy was the Empire's man. He was famous and is famous, and always will be famous for his beautiful style of language. When I was at the University of Wisconsin, the great classics professor in Latin was Professor Edson. And I remember signing up for Roman history, and I didn't realize I had signed up for the four credit course, which meant that you had to write a very serious paper instead of just doing the exams. And so when it came time to receive my grade, the the Tas said, no, you haven't completed the course, you haven't done a paper. So I went humility in hand to the big professor. And he smiled at me and said, well, can you read Latin? And at that time I could. So he gave me his own copy of the Annals of Tacitus in Latin. He said, you read this. He said, I'll be in Florence for the summer. If you get your paper to me before I leave, I will read it, and I will grade you. And so I spent that summer of 1960 reading the Annals of Tacitus that we're taking as one of our texts in Latin. And the only other book I had up in the Sierra Nevada was Eric Hoffer's The True Believer. And so my mind at 19 was crushed with these great themes. And I kept staring off at the bears and thinking, they're not so bad after all. There are some really bad things that can happen to you. And needless to say, I got a very nice grade from Professor Edson, and so I still own and carry around the great Oxford Commentaries by Fernao on the Latin text of Tacitus and the Loeb Classical Library edition of Tacitus works. And you don't have to buy these. You don't have to read these. They're there. But he's very much alive. And just this past year, a woman named Ellen O'Gorman. Published by Cambridge University Press. Irony and misreading. In the Annals of Tacitus, a discussion of how Tacitus uses a language purposefully complex and blunt to scramble the expected narrative that you would have had by intellectuals, by the ruling elite being used to the kind of language that Livy used. Livy is famous for. How did they used to say it? The honeyed, milky lines of Livy the gorgeous, beautiful, suave, velvety phrases that accumulate and monumentally seem to be beautiful until you realize that this is like a Victorian disease of putting flocked wallpaper on top of flocked wallpaper, until you can't tell that there's even a wall there. To not let any space develop unfilled, that you have to fill everything with acanthus curlicues. And this is the Augustan style of the Roman Empire. Not to give you any individual personal space that you will notice that it's not covered. We want to cover the entire tapestry of life from birth through death into the afterlife. We want to cover everything from hell to earth to heaven and God also, so that you don't have to do any thinking for yourself. We've handled everything. You just enjoy the fruits of our authority. And as long as you behave, things could work out for you. It's a very devastating thought. Tacitus in the Annals points out one of the Underlying important things to Augustus Caesar was to open the portals of the Temple of Janus. Janus is the two faced god faces to the past and faces to the future, and that this two faced God is sort of the mythological image of an early sense of history, in the sense of a kind of a mythic laissez faire that people are free to do what they like to do because the world is at peace. And the Temple of Janus originally was built by one of the first powerful kings in Rome, not by Romulus and Remus, but by Numa Pompilius. And Numa Pompilius is famous because he's the one that starts the tradition of Roman law. It is the codification of the rules of behavior and comportment by Numa. That was the criteria upon which then the temple of Janus, with its double portals, would be closed if there were a state of war of the Roman people with anybody, and if there was a Pax Romana, a universal peace, then the doors of the Temple of Janus could be opened, and since they were both opened, it meant that there was a free concourse that anyone could go through. That past and future were both open to the present. It's a beautiful image. It's wonderful. From the time that Numa Pompilius built them, the doors of the Temple of Janus were never closed for almost 800 years. And so Augustus Caesar, as a sign of his great world power, was to make. Sure that there was no opposition anywhere in the world, and therefore. It would be at peace, and he could open the doors of the temple of Janus. He tried twice before he finally got them open a third time. Little skirmishes would break out, and he would become so incensed that he would send a couple of legions to a little tiny town someplace on the German frontier, and he would just obliterate it the Roman way, eventually. And the empire was that we will not have any trouble if there are no troublemakers. And deeper we will not have any trouble if troublemakers have no traction for making trouble, so that we do not control their ability to have swords, but we control their desire to use swords in any other way than for common defense. For a mutual agreement that this Pax Romana is for everyone. Towards the end of his life, Augustus opened the doors of the Temple of Janus and thought that he had achieved his his greatest achievement, and so he ordered a temple built. It's called the Ara Pacis Augustae, and it was put in the center of the Forum Romanum of the Roman Forum that Augustus had been building on. He was in charge of Rome for almost a half century, and he built many beautiful buildings and the Ara Pacis. Augustae Pacis means peace in Latin. The temple of the Peace of Augustus Caesar and in the temple it was like a square box building, and there was a frieze around the outside of it, and the frieze, as usual ritual models would have. It showed all the great powerful people of the Rome of the time, coming in sculptured frieze to worship into the Ara Pacis Augustae, and inside was a frieze wall that had at the center of it um tellus mater Mother Earth, looking like a voluptuous Mother Earth mother figure, almost the kind of figure you would have seen in the Mexican murals of Siqueiros holding a little Cupid like child and surrounded by all the fruits of life, the cornucopia of the peace of Augustus. But. The temple of Janus doors could not be closed. And when Augustus died, his adopted son Tiberius Caesar took over. And in a short while, Tiberius's reign turned into a nightmare. And after Tiberius came Caligula, who was such a nightmare that he was killed after three and a half years. And after that came Claudius. And they hoped that Claudius would somehow right things. And it fell apart even further, because the power was not in the hands of the Emperor. It was only apparently in the hands of the Emperor. As long as Augustus was alive in Tiberius's reign, it was apparent that he could only maintain his personal limited position by terror, and with Caligula, that illusion completely vanished, and by the time of Claudius coming in, it was apparent that the real power was the ruling oligarchy that used the emperor as the front man. And when Claudius went from the scene and Nero came in his insanity Of burning Rome down is directly linked to his fear and his perception that it was the powers of people who owned all these buildings that were hemming him in, and he wanted to level them. And after Nero, the Caesars ended their dynasty, and a completely new group came in the Flavian dynasty. And the Flavian dynasty was founded by a seed of miracles, of making the lame walk and the blind see by the new Roman emperor Vespasian in Alexandria in Egypt. The miracles normally imputed to Christ were imputed to Vespasian around 69 A.D. in Alexandria, and he became emperor on that basis from that said, because the oligarchy wanted him to believe that he carried the magical powers that Augustus had, Augustus had hoped he'd had, and none of the Caesars were able to gender together, and they hoped that Vespasian would do a reconstruct of the Roman Forum, among other things, which he did. But he discovered very quickly that there was one set of powers. There was one place, there was one architectural seed of great power that the Romans had not been able to co-opt. That was the great Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem. And so Vespasian had his oldest son, Titus, destroy it completely. Let's take a break and we'll come back. Hannah Arendt. Her book The Human Condition, published from the University of Chicago Press in 1958, and right away in her prologue, in the very first topic sentence of the very first paragraph, she says, she writes. In 1957, an Earth born object made by man was launched into the universe, where for some weeks it circled the Earth. According to the same laws of gravitation that swing and keep in motion the celestial bodies, the sun, the moon, and the stars. To be sure, the man made satellite was no moon or star, no heavenly body which could follow its circling path for a time span that to us mortals, bound by earthly time lasts from eternity to eternity. Yet for a time it managed to stay in the skies. It dwelt and moved in the proximity of the heavenly bodies, as though it had been admitted tentatively to their sublime company. This event, second in importance to no other, not even to the splitting of the atom, would have been greeted with unmitigated joy if it had not been for the uncomfortable military and political circumstances attending it. And so, in a very deep way, yet another critical consciousness was reviewing an epochal penetration of limitation and reading this in 1959. I was fortunate enough to be surrounded by perennial graduate students who were much older than me and kept directing me to other things, and one of them read to me in French, and I had to have it translated into English because I couldn't hear French very well. An essay by Teilhard de Chardin on the spiritual repercussions of the atomic bomb that had been written in 1945, in which he says, something fundamental in the universe has changed. And so to hear. The 20th century had a peculiar kind of historical milieu, to use the French term. And that milieu was at the same time as leading us into a future. It was at the same time exposing us to an undertow that would not only obliterate that future, but would obliterate the past as well. The rewriting of history is notorious as a theme in the 20th century. The greatest rewriter of history was Livy and Livy's great monumental history, written as a way in which Augustus Caesar and his oligarchic group could Recover the kind of Rome that they could transform into their empire. The very title of Livy's history tells it all. Towards the urban condition. In Latin or in English, it means. All of this led to the Rome that we now enjoy as the central place of authority in man's world. And that we date the city from its founding. It's Romulus Remus founding, and now we have reached 750 years of experience, and we will last forever, because we are now changing the Roman Republic setting of the city to a new form the most comprehensive political form ever made on the planet. And it was called the principate, the Augustan Principate. Augustus did not like himself styled as an emperor. His uncle Julius Caesar favored the title dictator and ensured that what was given to him was finally dictator for life. Augustus, on the other hand, much more wily, having a group around him, much more experienced politically and economically than that group surrounding Julius Caesar, Julius Caesar was ill advised to accept for himself. In addition to being the great general of the Army and the great leader of the party that made him dictator, he also assumed a third position, which in Latin is called the Pontifex Maximus. He became the Pope of Roman religion. In addition to everything else. So that, as he used to be distinguished on the battlefield as one of the most courageous fighting generals of all time, because he wore red boots to identify him, anyone who wanted to shoot an arrow or take a chance with a sword could tell that this was Julius Caesar. But in addition to the red boots. He now wore a purple cape and the purple is the Royal Cape. The Cape of Aristocratic authority. But in addition to the red boots of the military and the royal purple cape, he wore a laurel wreath of a god, and he was called by his own command Divine Julius. And he was killed for this. He was killed because he became too powerful, too fast, too large, even for the oligarchic power groups, who were outstripped by Julius Caesar's ability to penetrate through and command the archetypal symbols and their attendant mythologies for his symbolic program of his doctrine of his ism caesarism. So that later on, after the Caesar dynasty fell with Nero, the political term Caesar did not mean the ruler. The political term Caesar meant the ruler to be the inheritor, the heir apparent, but not the emperor. Because of a fashion styled by Augustus. He refused to get caught in the same bind that his famous uncle had gotten caught in, and so he styled himself not as dictator but as first citizen princeps. As Napoleon later would style himself First Consul. Yes, we're all going to have a chance to speak. But you will hear me first, and then you will decide how you're going to speak after having heard me. So that this alignment of authority by a consensus, intimidation, by a sociological fearfulness, is much stronger than having clear cut rules and boundaries, because it is an authority that belongs to co-opted process rather than integrated process. It is not commanded ultimately by symbols, but commanded ultimately by ritual, by ritual forms. And so the source of Roman Empire power is on ritual imperial forms. The number one form was the Roman law, and Roman law became the basis upon which the architecture of the Great Forum of Trajan was put in the very center, the power center of classical Rome, some 850, almost 900 years after it had been founded in the first place. Tacitus, who lived through it all. He was born about 55 A.D. Nero came into power about 54 A.D., and Tacitus lived into the 100 20s. We don't know when he died. He was extremely powerful in himself. He was like Thucydides. He was also a general. He was, towards the end of his career, powerful enough that he was made governor of the province of Asia. His wife's father was the governor of the province of Britain, Agricola, and all during his young manhood, all during his early maturation. Tacitus was famous for his silence. And when he broke his silence, it was because the last of the Flavian dynasty, the second son of Vespasian, the first son being Titus, that we talked about the Titus who had been given orders by his father to ignore the fact that very strong Jewish legions had helped Vespasian gain power. That Titus was directed to commandeer Judea as a province, and to severely lay siege to the city of Jerusalem with the specific task of dismantling the Temple of Solomon. On the surface, as one would expect, you would read an anti-Semitism, but what it was essentially in the deepest way was a jealousy of power, of uncorrupted power. And to understand it, it takes just a very simple thing that we learned in this country during the Watergate investigation. If you want to find out what's really happening, follow the money. All Jews from the time of the Second Temple on paid tithes to the Temple in Jerusalem After the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, all Jews still paid tithes and they went to Rome. They went to the great civic buildings that made up the Forum Romanum. And it's the Foro Romano that is the center architecturally, of the Roman Empire. And it is the great huge power plazas that they made. Augustus made a forum. Then it was tried by Vespasian. Then his second son, Domitian, tried to redo one of the forums. And then finally, when Trajan came in, Trajan redid it in a style that remained the image of power for about a thousand years. Was the most uncontested powered architectural monument, much more than the pyramids, much more. The pyramids commandeered the Nile River. The Forum of Trajan commandeered the world from Ireland to India. All of the great Roman roads, every Roman mile had a marker and a number on it, and all the Roman markers went down in numbers as they approached the city, and there was one single stone that had the numeral one on it. And the beginning of the Roman Forum. All roads lead to Rome. Whatever you do in your life, your communication, your transportation, your mobility is because of our roads and they all start at hour one. We are the authority of the unity of the world and there is no way to contest it. And the only thing standing in the way, since all of the other mythological and religious significance had been co-opted, they had forgotten to co-opt the Jews, and the temple was destroyed not because of anti-Semitism, but for a ferocious desire to have a completed power grasp. So much so that the central symbol that was in the Temple of Solomon, not at the center of the temple, not in the Holy of Holies, but in the inner vestibule, was the great menorah. You now see nine spoked menorahs, but the classic menorah is seven. Seven candles for the seven lights of heaven together. And that great menorah, which was so huge that it could only be transported on an elephant, was taken as the jewel of power. Co-option by Titus to Rome. And when he had his triumph in Rome, the very first thing after himself was the elephant bearing the menorah. And we know this because they made a frieze of this triumphant march and put it on the Arch of Titus, which still stands in Rome today. And on the keystone of that arch leading into the Roman Forum, is the sign that we have taken the last great symbol that was left out. And we have it all now that everyone owes obedience to our authority on political, on economic and on religious grounds. And they assume that everyone would recognize the validity of this. And the fact that there were human beings who didn't was insanity to them, was crazy to them. How can they contest our authority? And Tacitus, in his great histories, not only the annals, but the histories of Rome, tried after his great silence during the reigns of Titus and Domitian. Titus reigned for two years and died of a fever. And then Domitian came in for 15 years, and the last 12 years of Domitian's reign is called the Terror. It was a reign of terror because he became progressively preemptively protective of his magical authority, and anyone who was the least bit possible of disturbing it was commandeered. And he finally found the most powerful secret figure who was uncorrupted by Roman power, and he had him arrested and brought to Rome before him. And that man was Saint John, the writer of the gospel, the writer of the apocalypse, the Book of Revelation. And when Domitian faced Saint John in about 90 A.D., he brought to bear all of his magical Roman Auctoritas and Gravitas and Saint John by that time was not anyone who had any fear anywhere, and it bothered Domitian in a way that he couldn't put his finger on it. And so he became superstitious that he must not kill this man, but he must punish him in the most archetypal way. And so he used the ancient Roman punishment. What is the worst thing that can happen to you? Not death in Rome. The worst thing is banishment and exile, especially to a useless place. The one figure that Augustus Caesar had taken umbrage to was banished to a little rocky coast off on the shore of Crete. And when Tiberius assumed power, he made it even worse. He banished him to a rock off the coast of Crete, so that the Roman sense of banishing one in exile to a wasteland, to the archetypal dead end of the earth was the worst thing that could be. And so Domitian had Saint John banished to an island in the Aegean called Patmos. And Patmos was absolutely good for nothing except as an archetypal banishment place, because the rocky shape of Patmos is like that of a great ship, not very big, but a large ship. And so Saint John was banished to a ship that would never go anywhere. And he was left there, And it was on Patmos that he wrote the Book of Revelation. He wrote The Apocalypse, which in its imagery is a book set within a book. He was carrying an apocalypse that had been written by John the Baptist, and he surrounded that by a expanded apocalypse, so that there is a double apocalypse in there. It's the ancient Jewish apocalypse from John the Baptist was not a Christian. He was a Jew, delivering the same kind of insight that the teacher of righteousness 150 years before him, had set down when in 160 BC. A couple of hundred years before people like Nero and people like Domitian tried to terrorize people. A Hellenistic king named Antiochus the Fourth took over Jerusalem, took over the temple, and tried to make it a Greek temple. He put a statue of Zeus in the Holy of Holies, and it was in direct disobedience to worship as a Hellenistic polytheist in the temple that led to the founding of the Essene Qumran communities, to the Jewish remnants that refused to compromise God before man's authority. And so the apocalypse within the apocalypse of the Book of Revelations is John the Baptist continuation in a direct, integral vision of that origins that you find in the Teacher of Your righteousness. Only Saint John lived about another 90 years after that, and included the expanded context that the problem wasn't any longer, that Rome was the toughest of the Hellenistic kingdoms, but it had become the Roman Empire. It was on a different order. A kingdom is a mythological shape. A kingdom. A king belongs to mythology. But the Roman emperors co-opted mythology for symbolic, doctrinaire ideological purposes. They used kings like you would use pawns. That the Roman Empire was a proliferation of an ideological stance that considered itself the final end game of all human institutions. It would never be displaced because anyone that would seek to displace it. Would merely imitate it and thus fold back into the original anyway, that there was no other way to handle this structure other than the way that they had handled it, because they had come to it in this sort of ball teaming way of century after century after century of warfare and assimilation and conquest. And it just didn't occur to them at all that there was such a thing as a transformation of consciousness out of the integral circle completely, that there is such a thing as a vision that transcends those forms completely, That they are no longer trapped in any kinds of circles, no matter how magical, how political, how economic. Because consciousness is different from somebody's idea of it. It's different from the images mythologically that one would have it. It's different from the ritual forms of objectivity. You can't put consciousness in a can. And that consciousness as an energy, as a differential energy that goes out rather than stays in, goes out at a exponential rate when it's run through the prism of people who have achieved a kind of spiritual personality At their spiritual personality is like a jewels that diffract the energy of consciousness even more, and that history is that kaleidoscopic energy. And so one doesn't command history on an imperial level at all. Imperial commands are irrelevant to the energies of history. They're already irrelevant to the energy of consciousness. The key to John's use of language is the difference between the gospel and the apocalypse. At the same time as he's writing the apocalypse is when Tacitus begins writing his historical works, and right away the Tacitean style comes into play. He uses a quality of language, which is so blunt that what you get in the sentences is not the flow of sequential meaning that accumulates additionally into an idea, but you get the cut off kaleidoscope of so many facets to what you're saying that what comes out of it is a multidimensional perspective, not a single angle of vision, but a whole splay of kaleidoscopic possibilities, so that one begins to understand that this language frees one to be even more free, and goes directly against runs in a different mode to the languages of imperial co-option, so that Tacitus use of language Itself is a mode of developing human freedom. And when it comes time for him. To open up, he writes in this way. This is at the beginning of his histories. We're going to use the annals. But here's how it is. At the beginning of his histories, he broke a silence of a lifetime and broke in. In the year 96 he published his first two books, and within about ten years he published The Histories, and another ten years he published the Annals. We only have about a third of the histories left. We only have half the annals left, but enough to see what he was doing. And we have the beginning of the histories. He writes, I propose to begin my work with the year when Servius Galba was consul for the second time, and Titus Vinius was his colleague. Many historians have dealt with the 820 years of the earlier period, beginning with the foundation of Rome, and the story of the Roman Republic has been told with equal elegance and independence. After the Battle of Actium, when Augustus Caesar decimated the ships of Mark Antony, and as the true beginning of the imperial command after the Battle of Actium, when the interests of peace were served by the centralisation of all authority in the hands of one man, that literary genius fell idle. At the same time, truth was shattered under a variety of blows. Initially it was an ignorance of politics which were no longer as citizens concern. Later came the taste for flattery, or conversely, hatred of the ruling house. So between malice on one side and servility on the other, the interests of posterity were neglected. But historians find that flattery soon incurs the stigma of slavishness and earns for them the contempt of their readers, whereas people readily open their ears to slander and envy, since malice gives the false impression of independence. From Galba, Otho, and Vitellius, I have experienced nothing either to my advantage or hurt. I cannot deny I was advanced by Titus and still further promoted by Domitian. But those who lay claim to unbiased accuracy. Must speak of no man with either hatred or affection. I have reserved for my old age. If life is spared to me the reigns of the deified Nerva and of the emperor Trajan, which afford a richer and safer theme for it is the rare fortune of these days that a man may think what he likes and say what he thinks. And so, in a very curious way, a very paradoxical way. Irony is one of the chief characteristics of Tacitus. He's a speaking. He's writing Constantly of the mad nightmare that happened because authority was centralized in Rome. And yet it's not that one has to disband central authority, but one has to change the nature of the way in which persons live and use their powers within that structure. Trajan, who under whose reign the Roman Empire was the largest that ever got, hardly ever went to Rome. He was always out someplace else. And when it came time for the old Trajan to turn the reins of power over to his successor, his successor was a grand, And gorgeous kind of a character named Hadrian who built the most fabulous villa of all time. But Trajan said to Hadrian, you will rule as long as you don't go into Rome. Don't go to where the center of power is. Use the power out of that centralization, but don't commandeer it, because it will co-opt you, because the power does not come from you. It comes from SPQR. It comes from senatus populusque Romanorum. It comes from the Senate and the Roman people. It is the heavily complex, laden tapestry of Roman law, distributed throughout the entire structure of the lives and beings of these millions of people. That is the real fabric of power. And if you try to command it at the center, it will rot you out. So don't go there. Stay away from the centers of power. Yes. Build them. Have them. But don't go there. Don't be there. And so Hadrian spent all of his reign traveling. I don't think he ever went to Rome. And Hadrian, more than just Hadrian's Villa, is famous for Hadrian's Wall in northern England and Scotland. His wall was assigned that we're not going to push Roman power any further. But Hadrian's Wall is like the Great Wall of China. It's a symbol that we are so powerful that we're going to keep them out, let them perish. Let them be barbarians on the other side. We don't care about them. It's a power that is truly insidious and therefore imperial. We don't have to conquer them. They're not important. They're extraneous to the world. So we non acknowledge them. And the wall is the defining boundary within which human lives will have a meaning. And outside of it, it is truly barbaric. For the Greek, the sense barbarian was somebody who didn't speak the Greek language. For the Roman world, it was a political, religious idea that anyone outside was banished, was in exile. They were not free. They were in exile. So that one comes to the powerful doctrine of excommunication. We don't have to kill you, because when you're banished from this, you are banished forever. Death is but something. A phase of this life. This is eternal. This is a damnation so that you understand that history over the last several thousand years has been suffering under an enormously powerful commandement. It was done by every means possible to make it stick. To make it take not just the flesh and the bones, but the nerves. Everything were co-opted in this, and it still has its impress today. Ellen O'Gorman writes, page 179. Her beautiful book, Irony and Misreading in the Annals of Tacitus in the conclusion entitled The End of History, and she writes. A sharp disjunction is drawn between the past oleum, when liberty and Principate were irreconcilable. The Latin term is dissociable. The dissociated liberty and the empire are dissociated. And nerva's present. That's 97 AD, when the distinction between them collapses. And they are mingled. The Latin term was mis curiate. They are mingled into a state of unity. In other words, imperial power. With the ascension largely of Trajan, Nerva was there for just a year, and then Trajan came in and really made it stick. The Roman power is no longer on a solid basis, but is on what we would call in physics a plasma. It's another state of matter. It doesn't depend upon definitions of solidity to be certain. A plasma is certain as long as everything is functioning within its matrix. And the plasma matrix for the new Roman power in Trajan's time was a use of Roman law as a new kind of religion. And that's why. It looks like a cathedral. The overall plan of the Forum of Trajan, or rather, that's why cathedrals look like what they look. Because they're stamped out by this form. They're all stamped out by this form. And one of the most disconcerting things in the Renaissance was to realize that the center of the Roman Catholic Church's power was a church called Saint John Lateran, which was based on old Romanesque architecture, which didn't have these kinds of qualities. And so it had to transfer its power to a new construct that had the architectural archetypal accoutrements of this power form. And when we get to the Renaissance in three weeks, when we get to Jacob Burckhardt, the civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, we'll see that one of the most peculiar things about the Renaissance was that it was a time of great ideological tyranny, of clever assassinations, by preemptive poisoning as much as great art and fantastic philosophy that both of them are there at the same time, because both of them are there. The one because of the Roman digestion process of power, and the other because of the indigestible, esoteric Greek quality that wouldn't go away. So the Renaissance in Italy will have an esoteric Greek basis. That's incommensurate with the Roman power bases, and it becomes a real issue in the Renaissance. Um. Once upon a time. There were figures in the academic world who realized that there were moments to stand and be counted. And the greatest, uh, Roman historian in Britain at the time was Ronald Syme, later Sir Ronald Syme. And he. I'll bring next week his big two volume tome on Tacitus, The Greatest Study Ever Done, and another book, Ten Studies of Tacitus, like a little adjunct to it, but his great book was called The Roman Revolution, and it was published at Oxford, and it was published in June 1939, just a few months before World War II began. But anyone who had the historical acumen of a Sir Ronald Syme understood that he was writing about the origins of the kind of power that the Nazis were using again in remarkably the same damn way. And so, Sir Ronald writes in here. The subject of this book is the transformation of state and society at Rome between 60 BC and A.D. 14. It's composed around a central narrative that records the rise to power of Augustus and the establishment of his rule, embracing the years 44 to 23 BC. So it's only a 20 year period. It's only one generation where the real focus of it was, Incidentally, has quite a curious thing that at the end of this time period is when Mary, the mother of Jesus, is born. She's born in 23 BC. The period witnessed a violent transfer of power and of property. That is a very powerful theme at the time. Great historians in the 1930s were beginning to understand that the industrial change that had happened in the early 19th century was a revolution, because not so much that there was a transference of property from someone to someone else, but that the powers of generating property were so much larger that those who rich would become richer at a much faster rate, and those who were poorer poor would become poorer at a much faster rate, so that the Industrial Revolution brought in an automatic exponentiation of the economic class system, and that while it seemed on the surface that a middle class was being generated by the Industrial Revolution, it was secretly preparing an oligarchic rule of massive international corporations over a 99.9% population who did what their credit cards and computers will tell them to do. And so historians in the 30s clustered around trying to write books to wake people up. And Symes Roman Revolution was the best of the lot. The best Roman historian was named Rostovtzeff Offset. Mikhail Rostovtzeff, who was a great friend of one of the founders of sociology, Pitirim Sorokin. Rostovtzeff and Sorokin grew up in Saint Petersburg at a time of the Bolshevik Revolution, and saw firsthand what really goes on. And it was Dostoevsky's great double volume that we used to use in the 50s, one just called Greece and the other called Rome, and he didn't merge them together in something called Greco Roman, because they were parallel tracks that never merged. More next week.