The Beginnings of Rome
Presented on: Tuesday, December 4, 1984
Presented by: Roger Weir
Ancient Rome: Rome, Essenes, Alexandria, and the Book of Enoch
Presentation 1 of 54
The Beginnings of Rome
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, December 4, 1984
Transcript:
The beginnings of Rome. Are very difficult to understand, mainly because they're mysterious. And we're given this mystery when we're in the eighth grade or ninth grade, in Latin. And we're expected then to have understood and we never hear of it again. We can't understand the way in which Alexandria came to us until we understand Rome, because it came to us through Rome. So, we have to go back to the origins of Rome.
We have to understand something about the Roman character. You can tutor a mind, but you can only develop a character. You cannot change a person's character. They will be who they are, more or less. But they will not be someone else than who they are. And the difficulty is that all of the treasures of our understanding are given to us in a mental configuration, which is supposedly teachable. The Greek term for this was paideia - that one can teach civilization. And it's true that one can teach the mind to appreciate civilization. But you cannot teach a character to live out what it has learned. And so, character has to be developed rather than taught. And this is a whole different process. And when societies are successful, there is a developmental pattern that allows for people to mature quite distinct from the educational system, which tutors them to appreciate the content and the ideational values which they then enact through their activities. All this has been lost to us. We no longer have any sense of the value of character.
It was a casualty of the Second World War. But in order to appreciate the Roman character - which, because of its nature, put only a selected pattern of the Hellenistic mind into operation - we have to go back now and take a look at the beginnings. Ancient Italy had three distinct areas. As we come into it, in a historical sense, about the year 1000 BC, in the far south of Italy, the toe of the boot, and the major portions of the island of Sicily to the east of a line that you could draw from Syracuse to Palermo. The eastern two thirds of the island were actually Greek colonies. The emphasis is on colonies that the Greek peoples who were pioneers had gone out from the Greek mainland. First, they went to the Asian coast, the Ionian coast of what is today Turkey, and they founded a series of cities there. But the Ionian Greeks, like all pioneering groups, were trying to start a completely new life and breaking away from the old life, many of the pioneers were discontent; It wasn't all that it was cracked up to be. And so, they moved on. Or a great many of them, instead of moving east, moved west. And so, Sicily and southern Italy were colonized by the Greeks. They brought their wives, their children, their plants and shovels, and they came to stay. But they came to stay in a Greek way. They brought Greek culture, the Greek language, Greek traditions.
And in fact, because of the tremendous agricultural boom of ancient Sicily, the populations swelled. And because of the large fertile area in comparison with Greece, Sicily and southern Italy eventually became Magna Graecia, greater Greece greater in area, greater in population. So, the southern third of Italy was a Greek colony, enterprise. They did not mix with the native people and the Greeks slowly took over the enclaves that they established, which were fortified harbors. And they kept their ships, and they kept their ties via maritime relations with the rest of the Greek world. So, the southern third of Italy was Greek. The northern third of Italy was what we call Etruscan, that there were contacts of Greek traders, there is no doubt, but there were equally contacts of Phoenician traders. But the northern Italian peoples, who originally had been in the inner part of Italy, in the mountainous inner part. Sent delegations down to the coast to establish trading centers with the Phoenician and the Greek. And the ancient Etruscans are a combination of Phoenician, Greek and native northern Italian. Now the native Northern Italian that had been there had ostensibly come and mixed with the native population at some previous time in history. What that time was, no one knows. My intuition tells me that it happened in Minoan times, around 1700 or 1800 BC, but I don't have anything to give to you except the fact that my intuition usually is correct about these matters.
The language of the Etruscans is an unknown language. No other ancient people spoke that language, and we still have not deciphered Etruscan. No one knows how to read or speak Etruscan. It was not known at the time of the heyday of the Roman Empire either. So, the origins of the people, the Etruscan people who interchanged with the Phoenician and Greek traders is unknown. But we do know that by about 800 BC, large groups of Etruscan people had moved down to the seacoast and had founded very strong fortresses along the seacoast. The largest one was Tarquinia. Tarquinia, rather than being a fortified harbor, was actually a fortified citadel up inland a little bit - five, ten kilometers or so. So that was characteristic of an agricultural people rather than a maritime people. But the Etruscans also traded via the maritime routes apparently indiscriminately with Phoenicians and Greeks, whereas the Greeks in the southern part of Italy were almost exclusively Greek. And the western third of Sicily was Phoenician in time to develop and become Carthaginian. And the Phoenicians also had the northern coast of Africa. So, you had an interlocking of the Phoenician and Greeks coming into various areas. North Africa, Sicily divided, southern Italy divided, and in between the Etruscans in the north and the Greeks in the south.
There was a middle third in central Italy, who were literally bumpkins. They were the Cowherder; they were the shepherds. And these are the ancestors of the Romans. The Romans always prided themselves. And if you read some of the great speeches of, Cicero, the great orations of Cicero, when the Republic was being shredded by the powerful dictators of the time, he always appeals to the basic character of the Roman people as being a bedrock personage of the earth farmers. They are not politicians; They are not conniving people; They are basic, what we would call homespun. In other words, the portrayal of the Roman people is that they were like Midwesterners in our mentality: basic home-grown people who don't go on the seas, they don't go in ships, and they don't trust strangers. So, this middle third of Italy is the scene that we have to take a look at.
It's difficult for us to form an accurate understanding of that ancient time, not only for the reasons that I listed earlier, that we often receive this information when we're in the eighth or ninth grade and can't appreciate it, and we're never told again. But the difficulty is that the understanding of this ancient period was of great and momentous concern to the Roman Empire. And when the Roman Empire, in the guise of the Augustan Principate, that is, when Augustus established the Great Roman Empire about 19 BC, he commissioned the greatest epic poet of his day, Virgil, to write an epic about the origins of the Roman people. And that epic is the Aeneid. And Virgil took very seriously the task. He was not just to write a book. This would be to misunderstand the whole procedure. This was an authorization by the emperor of the world to write the metaphysical and aesthetic basis upon which power was claimed, and so it was.
The Aeneid is a state document labeled Top Secret, and all of the metaphysical understanding of the ancient world is brought together in the Aeneid. It is not a simple work. It is not, in fact, a Homeric epic. It is quite distinctly different. Virgil's is not an epic for great, brave warlords. It is an epic of civilization. It is an epic of how all the various strands of meaning that existed wherever they did in the world, justifiably led, and wove together and produced the Roman Empire. Therefore, the Aeneid is the navel by which the birth of the empire was tied in the legitimate birth of metaphysical understanding and world class power. And of course, it's all about the origins of Rome. And so, it is almost impossible to tell any other story than the story that Virgil told. The only competition that Virgil has on this score is the Roman historian Livy and Livy wrote an enormous History of Rome that filled some 30 or 40 volumes. In antiquity, 142 Roman books would be about 30 volumes of 500 pages each. Huge Livy. They used to call him in antiquity. And Livy lived at a time, he began his History of Rome in about 26 BC, so that he just barely antedates Virgil.
So, Livy and Virgil are the only sources that we have that are large enough, visionary enough to convey to us the kind of understanding that we're after. We don't wish to know just the battles. We don't wish to know just the facts, the data. We would like to have a vision. And the vision is important. What are those characteristics that were in the Roman character that unfolded themselves in time and made it possible for them to acquire the power and significance which they did? At one time, the world was truly Roman. By the time of Trajan, 117 AD, Rome spread from Ireland to the Caspian Sea and down into Africa and north to Scandinavia. If you had that terrain unified today, you would have the greatest power in the world.
So, we have to understand how this came to be, and it's the unfoldment of character for Rome that is important, not the development of the mind so much. Even though one of the characteristics of the Roman character is that they built their integrity upon concepts. But they always fortified their concepts by putting it into law. And the distinguishing characteristic of a Greek is that he can argue. And the distinguishing characteristic of a Roman is that he knows the law. Roman law is like the engineering of the Roman character. It's the specs, the basic blueprints for what was to come. But to have law, you have to have some understanding of justice. And for that, you have to have an experience of life that balances out. And so, when we come to Virgil, the protagonist of the Aeneid is Aeneas. And Aeneas is not a Greek but a Trojan. He has lost his side, has lost the Trojan War. Almost all of the Trojan warriors were put to death after the fall of the city of Troy. This was a matter of great shame later on in world history, which is why the Trojans are always singled out as interesting characters. They're like the Confederate States in the Civil War. They were the gentlemen who lost, and it was the hard-nosed Greek industrial north that won and decimated their land. Two Trojans - Two Trojan warriors survived because they had been peacemakers. It was well known that they were peacemakers. One was Antenor, and the other was Aeneas. Antenor eventually made his way with a group of people. You have to imagine now that maybe a half a dozen ships or so, women and children under the lead of one of these great warriors, and they made their way eventually around and up the Adriatic, and settled at the place which would become Venice. Ancient Venetia was actually a Trojan settlement somewhere around the year 1000 to 1100 BC.
The only other hero was Aeneas, and he and all of his followers went on a long trek through the whole Mediterranean area, looking for some place to be, and carrying with him a promise - from divinity since Aeneas was descended from Zeus, from Jupiter - carrying a promise that there should be some exquisitely special place for him. In the Aeneid, Virgil goes to great lengths to show how the great Aeneas, the Trojan warrior, was courted by the great Carthaginian Phoenician princess Dido, Queen Dido, and how there might have been a possibility of a merger of the Trojan remnants with the upcoming Carthaginian-Phoenician peoples, and this would have been a very formidable group. But instead, it was not the right place, it was not the right situation - the inner voice of the character of Aeneas. His destiny was not to be there. And so, leaving tearful Dido with great strength of character, pushing on, because by now you can see that one of the structures of the Roman character is to, as we would say colloquially, from the Nixon era to tough out one's destiny until one gets to the right place, no matter what a situation is, for good or for ill, if it is not right drive straight through. And so, the sternness of the Roman character emerges in Virgil's Aeneid, in the character of Aeneas, the sternness of the character, the manly sternness of a character, which means that one has to steel oneself by discipline to be ready for any test that comes along. Now, because this is such an overbearingly, one-sided, flat-sided characteristic of a human being, it's completely masculine.
It is little cause for wonder that all of the women on the Trojan side eventually are dead, evaporate, leave the scene so that there are only men, so that it's like a masculine arrow shot with sternness into the unknown, looking for a place to light to start a new future. But they carry with themselves, finally, as Virgil says, only their swords and ships, they are left with just these two implements of their stern manliness - their ships, and their swords. I want to take us now to the Aeneid, near the middle, in fact, exactly at the middle. You know, an epic is always balanced, the structure of a true epic. And the Aeneid is one is always of perfect balance. What comes at the beginning and what comes at the end are balanced. And as you come to the middle, you come to the fulcrum of the significance. And so, when we come to book six, there are 12 books in the Aeneid. Book six of the Aeneid is the most significant book in the Aeneid, and I'm using the Robert Fitzgerald translation. And here is a description of him, of Aeneas, of his character leaving Dido and heading for the unknown, heading for Italy. And the place that they will touch down in Italy is in the bay. What will become the Bay of Naples. But in the northern promontory that comes out from the Bay of Naples is a port which was called Cumae.
Cumae would be founded eventually about 750 AD. We're talking now in the Aeneid of somewhere around 1100 BC, but Virgil still identifies it as Cumae, and he will have the Sibyl, the prophetess, the mystical prophetess, the Sibyl of Cumae, as the personage, the destination that Aeneas will first meet when he goes to Italy. This is significant, and it needs to be underlined. The masculine consciousness that will have no part of feminine toning down of their sternness. The masculine consciousness meets the feminine unconsciousness. The Sibyls are prophetic, mystical women who cannot function in normal life because they are prone to be seized by visions from the gods. And so, there's this meeting at Cumae of Aeneas and the Sibyl of the origins of the Roman people coming as a masculine arrow shot at an unconscious feminine target.
Book six begins with just a few words about the tremendous wrenching of character for Aeneas to have to leave Dido and the pleasures of her, the luxury of the kingdom, and to have to face up to the fact that there is an unknown destiny that one must have. Virgil, put it this way. This is a very good translation. So, grieving and in tears, he gave the ship her head before the wind, drawing toward land at the Eubian settlement of Cumae. Ships came about prows, pointing seaward, anchors biting to hold them fast and rounded, sterns indented along the water's edge.
The men debarked in groups eager to go ashore upon Hesperia, an ancient name for it. Some struck seeds of fire out of the veins of flint, and some explored the virgin woods, layers of wild things for fuel, pointing out to what streams they found. Aeneas, in duty bound, went inland to the heights where overshadowing Apollo dwells, and nearby, in a place apart a dark, enormous cave, the Sibyl feared by men. There's a pause here for a second.
Remember now that Apollo, Apollo is the ultimate metaphysical focus of the Greek mind. All of the ecstatic experiences, all of the horrific, terrific experiences, all of the wisdom experiences lead out from the human being, but that they are unified in a transcendental focus, which is presented by the god Apollo. That is, the formed presentation of that focus is Apollo. The uninformed presentation of that focus is Dionysius, so that Apollo is truly a god of the highest order. His communication, then with human beings has all of the ecstatic, terrific, and wisdom rolled up into one. It's not separated at all. So that the Delphic oracle or the Sibyls, they were all women when they opened themselves up as mouthpieces for the god Apollo. They experienced ecstasy, terror, and wisdom all at once. It was braided together into a unity. So that's what's happening here. Aeneas, the man of stern consciousness, is now coming to the woman. Not like Dido, a woman who unifies life energies, but to a woman who unifies, who expresses the unconscious energies, because it is only through her that he can visualize what he must do, where he must go.
So, this is what is happening in the Aeneid at this point. And nearby, in a place apart, a dark, enormous cave, the Sibyl feared by men in her, the Delian god of prophecy, inspires uncanny powers of mind and soul, disclosing things to come. Here, Trojan captains walked to Diana of the crossroads wood and entered under roofs of gold. And then he will go on. Virgil will go on to disclose of how this was built. The Cumaean Sibyl Palace was built by Daedalus, and the reason for using Daedalus was to indicate its antiquity. That is to say, it was not built by the Greeks. It was built by people who preceded the Greeks. Daedalus was from the Minoan Mycenaean civilization. Thousand years before Solon ever made the laws for Athens. In other words, Virgil is saying that Aeneas enters into a place that was already 800 or 900 years old when Aeneas was there, a thousand years before. Virgil is writing this, he's saying, this is of exquisite design, because Daedalus is the one who built the labyrinth. Also, that kept the Minotaur so that it is exquisite. It's a labyrinth, though, that keeps not a minotaur, but keeps a sibyl.
And men fear the Sibyl. She is not of life. She has this divine energy which will electrocute you in many different ways. But Aeneas must go to that. And so, after this description here. Let me see - I have to skip over here - here it is. The priestess called them to her lofty shrine. The cliffs huge flank is honeycombed, cut out in a cavern, perforated a hundred times, having a hundred mouths with rushing voices, carrying the responses of the Sibyl. You see, it's not just a simple cave, but it's honeycombed. So, this is weird. Echo. Infinite echo. Here. As the men approached the entranceway, the Sibyl cried out, now is the time to ask your destinies. And then the God. Look there. The God. And as she spoke, neither her face nor hue went untransformed. Nor did her hair stay neatly bound. Her breasts heaved. Her wild heart grew large with passion, taller to their eyes, and sounding now no longer like a mortal. Since she had felt the gods power. Breathing near, she cried slow. Are you in your vows and prayers, Trojan? Aeneas, are you slow? Be quick! The great mouths of the gods house. Thunderstruck will never open till you pray. And so, of course, Aeneas quickly gets the sacrifices arranged and sets them out. And all this time he is trying to keep control of the navigation of his destiny in the midst now of not a sea of ocean, but a sea of possibility, because the goddess can tell all future time you see, and also all past time.
So now Aeneas is adrift on the ocean of possibility, and he's trying to keep control. And she says to him that the God takes pity on him of Troy. Grant that the fortune of Troy shall have pursued us this far only, and all you gods and goddesses as well, who took office at ilium. And our pride, at least at last, rightly, you may spare Pergamon's children, most holy prophetess, for knowing things to come. I ask no kingdom other than fate allows me. Let our people make their settlement in Latium. With all Troy's wandering gods and shaken powers, and he falls silent. And then Virgil says, but the prophetess whom the bestriding god had not yet broken stormed about the cavern, trying to shake his influence from her breast. Well, all the more he tired her mad jaws, quelled her savage heart, and tamed her by his pressure. In the end, the caverns hundred mouths, all of themselves unclothed, to let the sibyl's answers through. Through this labyrinth of possibility, if one can hear with determination, the answer can be picked out. But if one only hears the cacophony, one is lost forever. You see, this is what is happening here is not a children's book at all. And she tells him, you now are quit at last of the sea's dangers, for whom still greater are in store on land. The Dardani race will reach Lavinium country.
Put that anxiety away, but there we'll wish they had not come. Wars, vicious wars, I see ahead and Tiber foaming blood. You'll have them all again. There'll be another Achilles. Someone got us born that you will have to fight. And again, another woman suffering a marriage, making strangers again, all over again. In other words, she's saying to him. The shape of the destiny that brought you to this impasse was such of a powerful impress upon time and destiny and character that it has to be gone through again in its parallel, and that only by doing that will you be freed of that tragedy, and can you then develop so that you're going to have to face exactly the same situation that you faced before, only this time it will not be you being stormed by the Greeks in your city, but you will have to storm someone else's city. And this time the marriage is going to involve you, not somebody else's son. In other words, you're going to have to drink the dregs of your destiny, and that's the only way you're going to come through. And when you do that, the future that is ahead of you. Is endless wars, vicious wars. But she says, never shrink from those blows. In other words, even though as far as she can see into the future, there's nothing but war, never shrink from those blows. And so, we have to we have to set Virgil aside for just a minute here and come into this from another angle.
The God of war was Aries, called in Latin, Mars. And Mars is one of the three great gods of Rome. The other, the second great god, of course, is Jupiter, who was Zeus. Jupiter and Aries, Jupiter and Mars. And the third great god of Rome is Quirinus, who is almost unknown. They never tell you, do they? And we'll get to him. But notice that all the great gods of Rome are masculine. It's a characteristic. The second thing we have to come in with here, one of the important Romans that we will get to, Numa Pompilius, is the one who constructed the temple of Janus. And the temple was actually a huge gateway. The whole temple was just a huge gateway, like the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. And it had two sets of doors. The whole temple was just a parallel set of doors. And those doors in this temple of Janus - Janus is the god who looks both ways at once, past and future. And when those doors are shut, the Roman people are at peace. And Numa Pompilius built the temple of Janus and closed the doors. And they were closed for about 40 years in his reign back about 650 BC. Augustus Caesar, in the time of Virgil and Livy, says that he was there, personally closed the doors of the temple of Janus after defeating Mark Anthony at the Battle of Actium. This was 31 BC.
In all those centuries, the doors of the Temple of Janus were closed only once before, at the close of the First Punic War. So, in almost 700 years of history, the Romans were at war only three times - were not at war only three times. So, you're beginning to get an appreciation now of the Roman character that sticks in the craw. The Sibyl tells him, "I see nothing for you but wars, vicious wars." But you must not shrink from those blows. It's like the myth of Sisyphus, right? Having to roll that rock constantly up to the top of the mountain and constantly is going to roll back down. If you have a failure of nerve, if you refuse to do it, you are finished. You have to do it. And so, the Roman sternness of character is not just the, the, um, stamina of farmers who bear up under the weather and bear through hard times. It is the metaphysical stamina of a people who were told before they began by the prophetess, the Cumaean Sibyl, that they will always face this condition. So, if they're going to live, they are going to have to live in this mode. They are going to have to arm themselves and train themselves forever. Incidentally, this character was passed on to Christianity. Buried within the Christian character is this Roman militant sternness. This is where it comes from. Never shrink from blows.
Boldly. More boldly. Where your luck allows. Go forward. Face them. That if you do this, you will always win, that eventually you will always win no matter what the odds are, no matter what the situation, if you accept the challenge, you will always win. Even though the challenge brings more war, you will prosper. Well, one can see with our kind of progressive, logical minds that we have been trained with that this Tudors won to an inevitable Armageddon. Because success can only breed more wars bigger. Can you understand the tragedy of the Roman character? I don't have a slide of it here, and I'll try and find a photo again. I had a beautiful, uh, picture once from a life magazine. It was a photograph of a Roman general, greenish bronze. And when you looked at it, you could see in the face the strength of the character. And only when you got closer and you looked in and saw the eyes and saw the pathos and the expression of the eyes, that you really understood the Roman character from the outside, they're unbeatable. Oh, when you look into where the focus is human, there's nothing but pathos. Okay. You know, with Roman theatre, there's a lot of Roman comedy, you know, you don't get Roman tragedy very much. You get learned intellectual tragedies with Seneca. The reason you don't get tragedies is because they lived interior tragedies that would have made the Greeks scream. And to them it was an everyday affair.
Reading Tacitus' Annals of the History of Rome [aka, The Annals of Imperial Rome] of the reigns of Nero, and so forth, is the biggest tragedy that you could conceive of. So, he has told us at the beginning that you will have to fight, and if you accept this challenge indefinitely, you will prosper and you will always win. But in this once more he says to the Sibyl, I know that you speak from Apollo, but I wish to also speak to the dead. My father is dead, and I know that this cave has a connection with the underworld, and that because of your powers, you could enable me to go down and speak to the dead. And I could then form my own decision as to what I should do. So. And this is showing the masculine conscious control of the situation, even though he is talking to this Cumaean Sibyl, he still has this masculine, sensible attitude. The cave writes Virgil. The cave was profound, wide mouthed and huge, rough underfoot, defended by dark pool and gloomy forest. Overhead flying things could never safely take their way. Such deadly exhalations rose from the Black Gorge into the dome of Heaven. The priestess here placed four black bullocks, wet their brows with wine plucked bristles from between the horns, and laid them as their first offerings on the holy fire, calling aloud to Hecate, Supreme in heaven and Erebus. Others drew knives across beneath and caught warm blood in bowls.
Aeneas, by the sword's edge offered up to night. The mother of the humanities and her great sister. Earth. A black fleeced lamb, a sterile cow. To thee. Proserpina. Then for the Stygian king he lit at night new altars, where he placed over the flames entire carcasses of bulls and poured rich oil on blazing viscera only seen just at the light's edge. Just before sunrise, Earth rumbled underfoot, forested ridges broke into movement, and far howls of dogs were heard across the twilight. As the goddess, nearer and nearer came away, away the Sibyl cried, all those unblessed away. But you and his stay she flung her. Self wildly into the cave mouth leading, and he strolled boldly at her heels. You see, she enters, because the only way she can enter is to fling herself wildly. The only way he enters is boldly pacing himself behind her. Do you see the contrast? Incidentally, when Virgil was dying, he felt that he hadn't polished the Aeneid enough, and he ordered it burnt. And his great friend Horace, the great Roman poet, stopped the servants of Virgil from burning the Aeneid. The reason for being so picky was not small, because the book was personally commissioned by Augustus Caesar, the most powerful man in the world, in fact, the most powerful man who had ever lived in the world in terms of worldly power. He was it. And when Augustus received the Aeneid from Horace, he pored over it and had it read out loud publicly in Rome.
And when he realized that Virgil had achieved what he had expected, that's when he built the Ara Pacis Augustae, the Temple of Peace, in the middle of the Roman Forum, and placed in it all of the sacred esoteric images that the Aeneid had brought together. And of course, the major esoteric image - there was the portrayal of Tellus Mater (Mother Earth), who then has Augustus and his wife and all of his family surrounding her as her family. Very, very esoteric. So, she flings herself wildly and he strides boldly. Gods who rule the ghosts, all silent shades and chaos and infernal fiery stream and regions of wide night without a sound. May it be right to tell what I have heard. May it be right to tell. And fitting by your will. That I described. The deep world sunk in darkness under the earth. You see, Virgil is looking up in the Aeneid and addressing Augustus. Is it sacrilege for me to tell what I have seen in the other world? Now dim to one another in desolate night. They walked on through the gloom. Through [Decies?] homes. All void and empty realms. As one goes through a wood by a faint moon's treacherous light when Jupiter veils the sky and dark night blots the colors from the world. So, there's this voyaging then into the realms of emptiness, nothingness.
I'm going to skip over now. He realizes that he is going to have to accept this. And when he comes out of the underworld, Aeneas is assured that if he takes his men and they land at the middle of Italy, near the mouth of the river, which will become the Tiber, that they will there have a chance to develop themselves. So, they go ashore, and I'm shifting over to Livy now. They go ashore there, and they are met by an armed encampment. Livy tells us here that the King Latinus came hurrying up from the town and the surrounding country to protect themselves from the invaders. And then he says there are two versions of what happened next. One of them is that there was a fight in which Latinus was beaten, and then he came to terms with Aeneas and gave him his daughter in marriage. And another is that the battle was about to begin when Latinus calls this conference, and he asks who these people are. He asks to talk to the leader, and when Aeneas tells him that he is the son of Anchises, who was the king, one of the great generals from Troy, and that he has descended himself from Jupiter. That King Latinus realizes that these are destined men. He has had a dream. And so, he bestows his daughter upon Aeneas - and his daughter is named Lavinia. But Lavinia was betrothed to a great warrior named Turnus.
So, all of this precipitates a civil war. And because we're running out of time, of course, the Trojans win. Aeneas has a son named Ascanius. In some renditions, he is the son of Lavinia and himself, so that the son is a blending of the two people. But actually, Ascanius was born before they came there, and that's why, after Aeneas died, his son Ascanius took a group of the population from the town which King Latinus had and went up onto a ridge and founded a community called Alba Longa. And on this ridge, there were 13 generations descended from Aeneas. And in the 14th generation - this is important, it usually isn't pointed out, but in the Hebraic tradition 14 generations is a cosmic cycle. Jesus is the 14th generation from a descendant of King David, who was the 14th generation, then from Noah Abraham in the 14th generation. The man who takes the throne usurps the throne, does not want his sister to have any progeny, and so he makes her consecrated to the goddess Vesta. And he builds a little temple, and she is supposed to remain a virgin and tend to the fire of the goddess Vesta. She becomes the first Vestal Virgin, and her name is Rhea Sylvia. Sylvia refers to woods. There was a Silvius in the third or fourth generation, from Aeneas, who was born in the forest, and they called him Silvius of the woods. And her name is Rhea Silvius.
Rhea, of course, is the Latin name for the ancient goddess of the earth - Rhea is a Gaia. So, the ancient goddess of the earth, who is fertile in the woods, is the esoteric meaning of Rhea Silvia. She is the first Vestal Virgin. And this is why the Vestal Virgins were so important in Rome. If you remember from one of the Plotinus lectures, when one of the Egyptian seers came to Rome around about 250 AD, and they wanted to conjure up Plotinus guardian spirit, and they had to find sacred ground in the city of Rome, and the only sacred ground in the city of Rome: within the temple of the Vestal Virgins. All the rest of the city of 3 million people was so unsacred and corrupt that it couldn't be used.
So, the tradition of the Vestal Virgins. Very powerful. You have to understand now we're talking about the Roman character, about the stern manliness, and about the need to have feminine purity as a balance to it, but a feminine purity that has access to divine powers, divine voices. The Virgin Mary must be a virgin, and she must have a direct link with divinity. There could not have been a Roman church, otherwise they would never have accepted it. All of this is very important, but Rhea Silvia then becomes pregnant and gives birth to twin boys. And of course, there are two views. One is that she has been raped and therefore she has violated her sacred trust, and she must be killed, and the boys must be drowned.
But the other version is that she has had intercourse with a god and the boys are divine. Well, the king ordered the two young twins to be thrown into the Tiber. The name Tiber, incidentally, comes from Tiberius, who was one of the ancient kings. One of those 14 along the line. Another one of the 14 was Avernus - the Aventine Hill named after him. But it happened to be, or because the gods wanted it to be, a time when the Tiber was flooding. And so, the King's henchmen left the bundles of the two boys, the two little babies alongside of the rising Tiber. But it was flood water only, and they didn't drown. Notice the mosaic touch here. Moses along the Nile River, the two boys who will become Romulus and Remus along the Tiber River.
It's interesting. And they were saved because a She-Wolf came down and saw the little babies there, and began licking them, and offered her breasts to the two little babies. And this strange sight drew the attention of a man named Faustus. And he's the one that came and rescued the two little babies and took them home and had he and his wife brought them up, and they became Romulus and Remus and the two boys, because they were descendants of Aeneas, because they have godlike qualities hidden in them. It's like the fairy tale now. We're always organizing the bumpkin boys from the shepherds to do certain things, and when they finally grew into young manhood, they organized them into Robin Hood type bands that stole from the rich and gave to the poor. And this caused great consternation. And of course, they were beset upon to be captured. And I have to curtail the story somewhat; all of it is so interesting. Remus dies in the fighting, and Romulus is left by himself, and Romulus gives his name to the city that he founds, which is Rome, 753 BC, and he will be the first ruler of Rome for 37 years. And Romulus was a great warrior, and constantly in Livy, if you wish to read it. In the early history of Rome, there are all kinds of interesting stories about how Romulus develops this masculine sternness. In terms of that is, the individuation of the masculine sternness is in terms of military prowess. He designs tactics, and ruses, and battle stratagems which had never been seen before. He also sets up a series of 300 knights who have horses who are arranged in hundreds of men. Centuries, they were called, and they were the basic protectors of the King Romulus. And so, the first Round Table, as it were - the first cycle of knights - are the 300 knights of Romulus.
Romulus dies a mysterious death. He actually never dies, but there is this tremendous storm, and the clouds descend to the earth, and when they rise up again, Romulus is never seen again. Livy says, take your pick. Was he torn apart by his men, or was he lifted up to heaven? Now this whole idea of a hundred, a hundred centurions, a hundred horsemen. Also, Romulus arranged a hundred members of great families, and they were called frats or centuria. Later on, the origins of the Roman Senate are here - 100. Why a hundred? The cave of the Cumaean Sibyl had 100 mouths reflect this fullness, this roundness of hundred carrying through. When Romulus is taken away, they have no king. They have no way to elect a new king. And so, the senators, the hundred men, decide that they will every five days elect a new man, and the Senate will run the city of Rome. And this was called the first interregnum, and it lasted for one year. And the people of Rome were absolutely disappointed in this. They wanted a king. And so, the Senate decided that they would let the people elect a king. If the people would let the Senate confirm who they elect, either approve or disapprove. And so, this first political balance between the patricians and the plebeians is struck for the succession to Romulus.
Now the population of Rome has been built by Romulus in a very strange way. He took an area between the Palatine Hill and the Capitoline Hill and made it a sanctuary that anyone fleeing from anywhere for any reason could take refuge there. And so, over a very short period of time, runaway slaves, people running from crimes, people just wanting to get away, adventurers all took refuge there. And so, the population of Rome was built up and made huge and a masculine population by the most energetic of the men of that day in that area. But they had not sufficient wives. So, Romulus had to make a huge ceremony. They were going to have this pageant, this festival, and they invited all the neighboring peoples to come to it. And when they came and festivities got going, the Romans stole the young girls and made off with them and drove the parents and everybody away. And then Romulus, according to Livy, went around making peace and saying, you know, this is going to be a very great city. We are guaranteed, you know, by my lineage and by the forefathers, by Aeneas and everyone. This is going to be the greatest city in the world. So don't take it so hard. And later on, of course, they let the parents of the girls, after they had babies come and live in Rome. And so, the population of Rome was swelling all the time.
So, the plebeians chose a man who was the complete opposite of Romulus. His name was Numa Pompilius, and Numa was a religious genius. And after 37 years of Romulus and this tremendous military buildup of the city of Rome, Numa Pompilius was for 43 years the king. And he's the one that developed all of the religious ceremonies of Rome. He realized in order to keep the people at peace, that they would have to become involved with yearlong festivals, that the population would have to be divided up into interesting ways. And so, Numa Pompilius is the man who develops all of this.
I'll give you a little bit of this. This is from Livy. He's the one that set up the solid basis of law and religious observance. These lessons, however, could never be learned while his people were constantly fighting war. He well knew was no civilizing influence. And the proud spirit of his people could only be tamed if they learned to lay aside their swords. Accordingly, at the foot of the Argiletum, he built the Temple of Janus to serve as a visible sign of the alternations of peace and war - Open. It was to signify that the city was in arms closed, that war against all neighboring peoples had been brought to a successful conclusion. Then he goes on to say how, since Numa Pompilius the doors of the Temple of Janus had been closed only twice, but for 40 years under Numa Pompilius, 40 years, two generations there was no war. And so, the Roman people built up then a civic structure. They did not change their warlike ways. They could not change their warlike ways. But what they did is they built up a civic form within which that energy could be expressed. And so that the city of Rome became distinctly different from all the other cities of its day, in fact, all the other cities that have ever been made.
Rome is unique. It is a professional military machine which is expresses itself in terms of a city. It's difficult for us to imagine, but this will carry all the way through. The Roman Empire will be the personal property of the citizens of the city of Rome. The Vatican must be in Rome. It is the Roman Catholic faith and is the personal property of the citizens of the Eternal City. And if you are a citizen in that city, you own that function. All of this comes at the time of Numa Pompilius, who reigned for 43 years. I think he reigned until about around 640 BC. So, all of this that I've been telling you happened before Solon ever made any of the laws of Athens. You have to understand that the Romans thought of themselves as ancient. They were not Johnny Come-latelys at all. It was over 500 years between Romulus and Scipio Africanus. So, you're beginning to get a sense of the vastness of the time involved. It had been 500 years between Aeneas and Romulus. So, we're getting a sense here of vastness.
Well, let's pause here and next week we'll take up where we left off, and we'll take it forward.
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