Presentation 3
Presented on: Tuesday, December 18, 1984
Presented by: Roger Weir
Ancient Rome: Rome, Essenes, Alexandria, and the Book of Enoch
Presentation 3 of 54
Unknown Title
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, December 18, 1984
Transcript:
The date of December the 18th, 1984. This is the third lecture by Roger Weir in the Rome series.
...An observation by Carl Jung. And we'll use that as an entrance tonight. Jung notes several dozen times in his Collected Works that when he was exploring the psyche of his patients - and I think we can take Jung as a pretty viable psychiatrist. He had many thousands of patients in his lifetime, and he records dozens of times in his Collected Works that the patients come up with images from the past, that is, images that were current at times before the present. Now, this is a very peculiar state of affairs.
Come in. Make yourself at home. We'll wait for you, honey. There's a hot tea here. Take your time. So, we've begun to just mention Jung and Jung's work, his great voluminous work as a psychiatrist, his monumental Collected Works, and how he observes that involuntarily images from man's past come up in the psyche of people who lived in his present day. In fact, he noticed that they did not come up in random offerings, but always in patterns. This is something worth underlining that images from the past never occur by themselves. They always occur in patterns.
All right, the second observation. There is a definite connection, almost causal, between feeling and images at the base of every feeling. If we could get to it is an image which expresses that feeling. It could be a visual image. It could be an audio image, sometimes an image or smell, a tactile image, any of the senses, an image in terms of any of the senses generates feeling. We're making lists now. We're just making lists of observations of peculiarities. Images conjure up feelings.
Okay, a third point. We know from our experience with music in such forms that feelings are intelligible and that they are intelligible in terms of patterns. In Carl Jung's practice, as indeed in any psychiatrist or, quote, clergyman unquote, practice, any of the professional helpers of man have always noticed that the images that come up reoccur. So that the patterns are recurrent, that there is some language available to us if we could but learn it. One reason for going back into the past, in the comprehensive way in which we are doing. To use a colloquial phrasing, we are psychoanalyzing civilization. We are letting civilization tell us its story. And we've had time now to listen to the whole story of so-called Western civilization, except for two eras. We have not dealt with the Crusades. We're saving that and we have not finished the Hellenistic period. Now, the reason that we're doing this is because these images from the past are trans-personal. It doesn't matter who we are in the present. Man, woman, nationality, background, race, religious creed. It simply doesn't matter that those exigencies are extraneous to whatever organizing, patterning power is at play.
This is why Picasso could learn from African sculpture. This is why Henry Moore could learn from Mexican sculpture. No one has in the past ever gone through this process. No one has taken the pattern as it was revealed in human beings consistently through its cycle. Now there have been in our time ideational treatments of civilization. One of the earliest was by that great American writer thinker, Henry Adams, who we'll get to in 1985, in the Thursday night series. And he wrote a tremendously insightful essay called The Rule of Phase in History ["Rule of Phase Applied to History"] that there was a geometric progression of the patterning of civilizations. And the key for him was the way in which Gothic architecture structured stone, and it gave him the insight into the buttressing effect of epochal times and the constructing techniques that apparently millions of human beings, unbeknownst to themselves, build unconsciously over a long duration of time.
And now that we've mentioned unconscious, we come back to Jung and note that Jung found again and again in his people that there were recurrent images from the Middle Ages, that somehow the medieval period in the psyche of modern man is extraordinarily fruitful. Which is a jump back. If we take time events of anywhere between 600 and 900 years. In fact, the medieval emphasis was echoed in Jung's estimation by a classical, late classical period. So that there seemed to be jumps backwards, increments of time backwards. You might take, as a rule of thumb, just for beginnings, about 600 years. That what seems to be unconscious for a man is actually structured, but structured in such a large way that we termed it unconscious because we don't have an ideational capacity to understand it. Our conscious minds do not think, in a scale appropriate to the patterning imagery of the so-called unconscious, and therefore it remains, quote, unconscious. But there are no limits to consciousness so that consciousness could be tutored, it could be educated. To, quote, expand itself so that it could entertain the patterns of the unconscious and thus the unconscious would become regulatorily clear. It would disclose itself as intelligible in a conscious mode. We would make the unconscious conscious by adapting our outlook to its scale and to its flow. And once we had the scale, we could then begin learning the language and with the right rationality, rationality, with the right scale and vocabulary, we could read ourselves, we could read the unconscious instead of reading it in terms of what comes out in dreams only, or in visions only, or in word association tests only. Instead of relying on the little hints and clues, we could go to the horse's mouth. This, of course, is an ethical idea for Jung, and all psychiatrists noticed a tremendous, wholesome regeneration of the individual, of the so-called personality when they recapture some of their past, when they acclimate, acclimatize themselves to the patterns of the so-called unconscious, that we get energy. Energy in the forms of feeling and vitality. So, we have before us a very interesting prospect, which we are of course working on now consistently.
The curative aspect of any analysis, of course, is the continuity of its application. This is the unfortunate truth. It's put in colloquial terms like you've got to want it badly in order to get it. But what it means is, you have to stick with it for quite somewhile before it shows any signs of becoming intelligible. But that there is definitely a break in the ice. And I can assure you that there are not only breaks in the ice, but there are whole waterfalls of insight that occur with this technique. And that once learned, it can be applied to any background whatsoever. And when we do, we discover that there are extraordinary threads of meaning running through human beings, threads of meaning. And that if we do not wind these threads of meaning up for ourselves and put them into meaningful patterns, they make us dance to their tune. Jean-Paul Sartre used to use the phrase "condemned to freedom." Man is condemned to freedom. He has to be free, or he will be at a terminal dead end. This is not some prophecy. It just is the nature of the case. And so, this whole procedure, this whole technique that we're applying ourselves to diligently is to discover the true scale and the correct vocabulary of our unconscious. We think that all this happened in the past, but actually it is very much alive still with us. And we're just cleaning the windows. All of these events are still in us.
So, we're not just being esthetes or dilettantes. We are, in fact, engaged in a very interesting endeavor. The key to it all, though, is to keep a consistency of mode. That's the whole discipline, as it were, in meditation. It doesn't matter how you meditate, as long as you keep the same mode, so that you learn the curves and ropes in a way which is familiar and recognizable to you. So, you know where you've been and you know what is going on, and you can recognize something new when you experience it and build a relation.
So, we've come to a point. We did come to a point about three weeks ago in the Alexandria course, where we had to consider Rome. That Rome was entering into the Hellenistic world, entering into the Alexandrian sphere of events, but coming into it with a very peculiar, different mentality. The Romans were extraordinarily different. They were radically different from any of the other Hellenistic people. All of the other Hellenistic people had Greek minds. Greek language. Even the Persians were like cousins. They were very close to the Greeks. They'd had contact for a long, long time. But the Romans were different. And the interplay between the Romans and the Alexandrians, is one of the great dramas of world history and one of the most revelatory episodes in unraveling the unconscious of contemporary man. And it's just as important if you're Chinese or if you're French. Because these patterns, these events, these styles, as it were, are universal and they reoccur in all of us.
The basic contrast is that the Greek experience of life was experienced as an individual. The Roman experience of life was experienced as a collective. The Greek man and the Roman state. So that our consciousness, when its full and wholesome, is rather like a Greek ideal. We are personally free, but our unconscious is only happened when we are collectively complete. And we have a real contrast. Because the patterning of our deepest feelings is to be companionable and express that through religious participation and cultural forms. But our conscious predilection is to break loose from them and go off by ourselves. This is a built-in tragedy because the better you become at bringing unconscious contents into the consciousness, the more this problem comes to the fore. And this is why there is never any end to psychoanalysis. They never tell you that when you start or before you start that this is a lifelong procedure. It will never end. This is the unending education. There is no such thing as a moment of cure and that's that more complex problems come up and you handle those, and more complex problems come up. Part of the built-in tragedy of this is conjuring up the oceanic proportions of the unconscious in terms of the personal, bite-sized consciousness of modern individuals.
In fact, this leads very quickly to a mistrust of the unconscious and of nature, and leads to instinctive defensive movements against growing, against being educated and it comes out in all kinds of surreptitious ways. And of course, among the cleverest ways are those who promote it verbally and do everything they can to sabotage it. And it happens again and again. When you get behind the corridors of power, you will be surprised to find how many so-called great educators, presidents of colleges, are anti-intellectual. Why are the educational systems all balled up? Because the administrators want it that way. A lot of the faculty want it that way. One has to shed a lot of tears and do a lot of yelling in the wind before you realize that this must have some kind of rationality, some kind of pattern to itself. And of course, the comprehensive mode of approach that we have been talking about answers to these problems precisely. And with the amplified conception and deepened perception of having relived through this material in somewhat a methodological way, we notice in ourselves a growth of real toleration. One of the first signs of education and growth, a real feeling of toleration. So, all of these are preliminary words, rather long, preliminary, just to let you know that the process that we're involved in is extremely efficacious. And I've been at this about 20 years now, and I can tell you that it just is amazing what actually becomes perceivable and conceivable.
So, we have to go back now to the early Romans. We've gotten them up to the founding of the Republic. We saw the early period of the kings. We saw the four kings. We saw Romulus, who, warlike for 37 years, brought in all the ruffians he could find, all the convicts, all the tough guys, the pirates. Those were the original Romans. There were mostly masculine cutthroats. So, when they wanted women, instead of going out and addressing them like, well brought-up men would, they figured out a way to pull a heist. They invited everybody to this big phony celebration, and they took this, the Sabine Daughters and of course got them pregnant right away. And after a couple of years, they'd had children and they weren't quite so eager to go back, especially when the Romans said, well, you can bring your parents and live here too. We'll take care of everybody. We'll feed you all, put you all up. So, at the first almost four decades of Rome, was this robber band a highly successful. And then we saw how they exact opposite to Romulus.
Numa Pompilius came, and for 43 years he was the second king of Rome and brought in religious institutions. And Rome was at peace for so long, for 40 years, proverbial 40 years, that their neighbors began to think of them as milquetoasts. They'd come in out of the wilderness. They'd come into the Promised Land and become very good citizens. They were what we would call in Damon Runyon's language marks anybody who was hard up could go in and raid a Roman house and take what he wanted. They wouldn't respond. They were busy being disciplined, religious, peaceful.
So, the third Roman king upset this whole system. Tullius Hostilius and Romans became voracious again, only this time, instead of just beating the pants off the enemy, they started tearing down cities and moving whole populations into Rome. And so, the next king, Ancus Marcius, extended Rome all the way to the sea, some 2530 miles away, took Ostia. So, the urban condition. The name of Livy's History of Rome is called Ab Urbe Condita (Towards the Urban Condition). Meaning by Livy's time that the whole world was a potential Roman city, that anybody was a potential suburb for the city of Rome, because the city of Rome had become a universal state in the mind of man. That there were no limitations. As long as you could march there, you could add it to the city. This is a very, very huge idea because it becomes, in another four centuries, the idea of the city of God.
So, we're dealing with potent dynamite here because all this actually occurred. And what's more sobering is that it actually is still occurring. That's the sobering part. It's like a straight shot of the unconscious really wakes you up. We experience it as fear or anxiety, very often because of the defensive, conscious mentality that we have set up to defend ourselves against intrusions from it. I feel jittery. I feel anxious. It's just a vibration coming through, but we experience it as something against us. A lot of this comes from a habitual structure so large that it seems to us to be universal, when in fact it's just on the scale of historically civilized experience. About 3000 years long and about a 10th of the planet wide. We just didn't ever know that.
The Romans under the first four kings, then grew in power so that they became a likely plum. And the next three kings were Etruscans, Tarquin kings, the three Tarquins. And they took over because, the first two because of a woman - Tanaquil, the great mystic Etruscan wife of the first Tarquin Priscus [Tarquin the Elder]. And she saw the whole thing in an augury as an eagle swooped down and took her husband's cap off and flew up, flew back down, and put his cap on his head, and she said, "that's it. That's the sign." Because divination in the ancient world was very often an augury. Telling by birds. By the actions of birds. Now, there was a kind of divination that went to inspect the entrails of sacrificed animals. But that kind of divination was more in terms of what would be called human justice. But augury, the birds, was divine justice, divine justice, which was different. That is to say, for the Roman mind now, divine justice and human justice are different, and the techniques of determining it are different. And so, the social setup allowed for a massive gulf from the beginning between things that belong to man and things that belong to heaven.
There was no priest class per se for the Romans. There were a few positions in the state, in the Roman state, in the kingdom, in the Republic, in the Roman Empire. There were a few positions pontifex positions, but they were positions which had been set up legendary wise by Numa Pompilius to help the state to run. The religious power for human affairs, rested with the man of the family, the pater. In fact, the term was paterfamilias because he was the father of the family. But he wasn't just the father of his own children. The family wasn't just his wife and his children, or even their children's children and his grandparents and parents. But the Roman family structure was enormous. It was expanded largely by a state called the clients, as well as slaves, as well as friends, as well as people who were conquered and came in and owed them favors and everything stuck on, so that the paterfamilias of the Roman family might have hundreds of people for whom he was the nominal religious head. And when he died, he passed on this capacity to someone else, usually a man, usually a son. Not always the case. So that in time the really aristocratic Roman families became the centers of thousands of people and some of the Roman clans. The guns were truly enormous.
The really famous aristocratic families like the Melian and the Julii were extraordinarily famous. Later on, we will see that Julius Caesar claims that he is the ultimate paterfamilias for the Roman people. And you will have very good genealogical claim for it. We have already seen the power that Scipio had. And he considered himself a paterfamilias of such enormous extent that the Roman people should be grateful for his kindness of letting the family enjoy the fruits of his victories. You remember the accusations of bribery against one of his brothers, and he went before the Roman Senate, and he told them that he had had kingdoms in his hand and turned them over to the city of Rome. Why would his family need a few hundred thousand sesterces and tore up before the Roman Senate the charges, and threw them on the floor and walked out?
It was the first indication that they were going to be human beings larger than the state, that they were going to be persons whose conscious scale of activity used the Roman might, as if it were but a personal tool. And it paved the way for a cosmic man that the Greek church from Christ was the only time that could be applied to the scale on which he moved. Because he moved not only on a worldwide scale, but on a scale that went back in time to include all time. And this simply put the Romans to such an extent that it took 100 years or more for that to sink in. And when it did, the Romans became Christians, like melting butter, because the conditions had already been set up, the unconscious had been formed to receive that ideational scale and model and pattern. And when it was precipitated in the right way, it went fast. The only difficulty, of course, is that a lot of pretenders after that attempted to do the same thing for themselves, with limited consciousness, with no credentials. And this produced the medieval world. And so, a lot of the unconscious hang ups that come up in contemporary man that use medieval imagery are merely showing the bruised area, not the root area where the energy really comes from, but just the part in the development where it got bent and bruised. And of course, that's the first thing that comes up when you start to cure yourself. The sword began to ache. So, you treat them. But the real cause of the swords are deeper in the body, more omnipresent. And so, we have to go back all this way in order to understand.
Now, the curious thing about augury is that there were two rules that applied universally to augury. The first rule was that the efficaciousness of the omen was as reported, and not as it necessarily was in fact. That it was the report of the omen that was the basis of the interpretation and not the event itself so that you had to be careful who saw this omen? And you had to be extremely careful about who interpreted this omen. So, very often they were different people. Very often there were professionals who trained themselves to see things as they were. And this is the beginning of the whole memory technique of the Roman classical world, quite different from the Greek. The Greek memory system is an extremely different technique. But the Roman reported to us in one of Cicero's great books, a book which, like most of Cicero's books, bears the title of a letter. In this case it's called, Rhetorica ad Herennium. And the classic Roman mnemonic technique is in there. And the key to it, of course, is the Latin phrase loci et foci. The locus in terms of a coordinate, three-dimensional system, and a focus. So that you had a three-dimensional graph and you had focuses. And if you put all that together, you could train yourself to record almost infinite detail. The rediscovery of this mnemonic system was one of the great treasures of the Renaissance and the old Italians like Ficino and Giordano Bruno mastered this [camillo?], and they turned it into the Renaissance stage. And it was exactly in this form that Shakespeare took it and used it to describe the whole variety of human character.
Using the classical Roman mnemonic system translated into a theater, the Globe Theatre was a memory training school to educate man, to bring up the archetypal unconscious elements to the consciousness of man in a way which was commensurate with his understanding capacity. He didn't know he was becoming cosmic sized. It's just that they started running into each other. And when you see a Shakespearean play, very often the lead characters, the protagonists, are real universal human beings, and the problems they run into are the problems you would run into if you were suddenly feeling that you were two miles high and everybody else was still five feet high. Egotistical problems, problems of arrogance and pride and so forth. Sometimes funny, sometimes tragic, sometimes just historically interesting.
Now, the augury then had to be established by someone and however they established it, that was it. So, the report of the omen, the way in which the omen was phrased and described, was all important. This is why the Romans and later on, the classical world in general, never poked into prophecies to see whether the legitimate actual occurrence was there, because the report was the only thing that was of concern to them. And later on, when augury shifted from birds to writing prophecies at the time of about the first century BC, instead of watching flights of birds, they started to read the mystical utterances of sages and seers, and those sacred writings bear the title today of The Sibylline Oracles. Most of them. And so, Augustus Caesar would collect all of the pages, all of the leaves of The Sibylline Oracles, and it was a state crime punishable by death to withhold any of them, because he wanted to bring all the loose ends of reality into one place.
Otherwise, you don't have a way to tie the umbilical cord of the past clean enough to give the birth to a new man. And the only way a new man can be born is to bring the past together in an integration and leave it in some safe place consciously. It's the only way to step free and be new. This is why what I mentioned at the beginning, Virgil's Messianic Eclogue, the Fourth Eclogue, is about the new man, the new golden age that was dawning just beginning to dawn. He wrote that about 30 BC.
Now the second part of augury, aside from the fact that whatever was reported, that was the omen. The second part, the second law of augury, was that it had effect only as long as you recognized the connection. If someone refused to see the omen, if someone refused to hear of the omen, if someone refused to hear the interpretation, it had no binding effect, that there was no religious effect whatsoever. And so, the extra honest, the second honest is that you have to communicate effectively what the omen was and what the interpretation was to those concerned. They have to get the message. If they don't get the message, the message has no effect whatsoever. This is why prophets and visionaries shout on the street corner. They don't care whether you hear it or not. They've delivered you the message. Like a good summoner, he summoned you to the court of the universe, and he doesn't really care what you think of him or whether you believe it or not, because he knows that as long as he's delivered the message to you, you've got it. You're it. The tag game is on.
Remember at the beginning of Moby Dick where the old, mad seaman accosts Ishmael and Queequeg and tells him what's going to happen? Then he says, well, never mind. He says, I'm just. I'm just crazy, right? I'm just a crazy. Good day to you. Good day to you. Because he's already delivered the message. The arrow is already there so that if someone has heard that kind of a message, if you're at all aware or intelligent or sensitive, you will do something about it, because you will realize that there's no longer any problematical about it. You can't get away from it now, and the expectation that you could is the essence of pride. It's the essence of what the Greeks called hubris - to think that you could evade your destiny. Now, the Greek idea was that your destiny was yours, whether you knew about it or not. It didn't have to be communicated to you, but the Roman mind believed that it had to be communicated to you. This is why the Roman Catholic Church was a proselytizing instrument. Mankind had to get the message, or it was ineffective for them. Or as the Greek mystical mind was that the message was there known or not? What's the phrase Jung put in? In Greek or restore called or uncalled the god will be there. For the Romans you had to know, otherwise it wouldn't be applicable.
So, we get this peculiarity to the Roman psyche. All of this religious activity was split. There was human justice and divine justice, and the human justice was often controlled by the paterfamilias, so that the man who was the head of a large Roman aristocratic family had all of this capacity in his hands. So, when those heads met together as the Senate, they literally held the power. Most of the Roman history books say that the real power in Rome was the Senate, and the Senate ruled because of custom. I mean, everybody obeyed them because of custom. Well, you can put a capital C on custom. In fact, you can kind of embroider that on the page because you can see that custom for the Romans is everything. It's what is real. If you're going to go against custom, you're going to tear up your own fabric of your being. So, it's very strong. The reoccurring patterns. The reoccurring patterns are the proof of the pudding in terms of custom observation.
Now, the Tarquin kings were brought down by the rape of a young girl named Lucretia. Have you ever read a poem called The Rape of Lucrece? Who wrote that poem? The Rape of Lucrece? Shakespeare. Yeah, because he was looking at what we're looking at as a young man. He learned to see in a cosmic way because he went over what we went over what we're going over right now. Coriolanus. All of these people are early figures in Rome. The last Tarquin, King, Tarquin the Proud, Tarquin Superbus, drunk with his young princely friends out at a military camp. They were bragging about beautiful girls. And somebody bragged about Lucretia, who was a young, sweet virgin. And Tarquin the Proud couldn't stand the fact that he was king, and he couldn't have her. So, he took her by stealth one night, and this was made public immediately. And it brought the king down. And the very same pattern happened again later on in Roman history, almost exactly the same way. Another rape and another crash. This time, though the sequence, even though it played itself out with the same archetypal motion, had evolved. The spiral had taken a turn, and a new wrinkle in the Roman mind was made when the Tarquin kings fell.
The Roman Republic was established. The man who established it was Junius Brutus, and he became extremely famous - a legendary figure in Rome. And notice now the archetypal happenings. The man who ensured the last Tarquin king to be killed and deposed so that the Republic could be established, was named Brutus.
Now, the second rape was after the Tarquin kings had fallen. They were replaced in the power structure. There were no more kings in Rome. They were replaced by consuls. Two men were appointed for a period of one year. They could be reelected, but they had to be re-elected. Who were they elected by? They were elected by the Senate. What was the power structure in the Senate? Everyone was represented except the slaves were not represented and the lowest plebeian class was not represented. I think I mentioned to you that Numa Pompilius had put six classes of Romans, five classes who could vote, and one the sixth class, like the untouchables, who could not vote. But the classes two, three, four and five had a total of 95 votes, and the first class had a total of 98 votes. So that very often, if the first class would vote unanimously, there was no need to consult anybody else. So, you had, in effect, a gratis kind of an open society, but in effect a very limited aristocratic setup - 98 men could run the whole show. So that the appointment of consuls came from their midst.
Well, this went on for about 300 years. But then it became apparent that Rome was getting so large that the ancient legal structure set up by Numa was getting to be ineffective. And so, they appointed a committee one year, about 451 BC of ten men. They were called the Decemvirs. And the ten men were set up to rewrite the Roman constitution. And they were given unlimited power, and there was no right of appeal.
Now with the consuls, because they were often aristocratic appointees, the plebeians, who were not patricians, who were not really technically represented in the Senate, had had their own people, the tribunes, who were defenders, champions of the people, and they could veto the edicts of the consuls. They couldn't make things on their own, but they could say no, so that the people had a check against the patricians. Their tribunes could say no. And so, they had to confer with each other before they made edicts in order to get anything done but the Decemvirs. The Council of Ten had absolutely no appeal, and they were set up for one year. I lost the place, so I'll have to just tell you this. The Decemvirs could not help themselves because the pattern, the power short circuit was already in place by 451 BC. They turned to each other and said, we have got it made. Nobody can appeal to our decision, and the ten of us together have got it made. And so, they decided that they were going to just hold power indefinitely. And whereas the first year they had done their work and they made up ten tables of laws, probably one for each man, ten for ten, but they hadn't been approved by the Senate. Their year expired, but they refused to step down. And they said, well, now this next cycle, we've been sort of disagreeing with each other, and now we're going to agree with each other.
What anybody of us, what any one of us, says all of us will go along with. And so suddenly the Roman people started saying, we have ten Tarquin kings at the same time. And of course, anybody who said this was made an outlaw of the state and killed, so the Decemvirs became tyrants. This was a very important revelation, because it meant that the tendency towards dictatorship was not a personal arrogance, but was built in, as it were, to the psychological history of the Roman people. The need for cementing the collective pattern. In terms of the structures developed leads inevitably towards dictatorship and tyranny. The enlightenment phrase about power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely is true of the Roman mind. It is not necessarily true of the human mind at all. But it certainly is true of the Roman mind.
One of the decemvirs coveted a very beautiful girl named Virginia. The first Virginia. Her fiancé made a great plea publicly before the decemvirs, before the man who was trying to take her away. He had made a decision that some other man could take her as a slave because she, in her background, hadn't been fully freed, and that she was then technically able to be made a slave again. And this friend of the decemviri named Appian, that was his name, was going to take her from him once she became a slave. And he's the one that made the decision that his friend Claudius could have her as a slave. So, the young man made this impassioned speech. It's in Livy. And the father named Virginius refused to give her up and took his daughter out in front of the Roman people, and said, rather than let her go into his clutches, I myself will save her from this, and took a dagger out and killed his own daughter in front of the Roman Forum, in front of mobs of people. But the guilt was on the decemvirs. The guilt was on Appian, and eventually they were brought down because the same pattern as Lucretia had worked its way again, and the table of laws of the decemvirs received two additional tables, and in 443 BC they were made the basis of a new Roman constitution.
They're called the 12 Tables, and Roman law begins to have its lawnmower effect from that time. If you look back at those 12 tables, you see the taproot of Western law and the travail of our court system today that's grinding up our people because the tyranny is in the judiciary in this country's future, has its original taproot in those 12 tables that came from the mentality of those tyrannical decemvirs about 2400 years ago. And the accrual of law on the basis of that skeleton has only fleshed out the insidious detail ever since. This is known colloquially as Caesar's Law. Money is power, and if you have it, you should use it. And if you use it, you should win because the system is all geared for that to happen. Not only legally, but psychologically. And not only that, but historically, the good man by our time experiences all this as a landslide in the gut. But he feels so responsive to it that he dare not cry out, because it feels just to him that he should be crushed in this way.
This is insidious indeed. But those peoples who are not of our immediate cultural background experience this as madness because they are not caught up like we are. So, you can see where some of this goes. The 12 tables once promulgated, the Romans brought back the consular, the consular power. But it had changed. And in fact, the Roman stability, once it had been achieved largely internally, everyone had agreed to be Romans on this basis, and they began working together very well. The Romans began then taking in more and more land and more and more people. And we'll see in two weeks that the Romans will finally take over all of Italy by about 275 BC. The only hitch in this growth, in this development, came in 390 BC, when the incursion of the Gallic people, the Celtic people who had filtered into the Po Valley, come over the Apennines, finally sacked the city of Rome in 390 BC.
Historical records now say it was 386 BC, but the Roman accounting is 390 BC. The city of Rome looked deserted for about a week, and the peoples recognized that the city of Rome had been deserted once before that, just before the decemvirs had fallen in 450 BC, some 60 years before, all of the people in a silent protest in a massive city-wide strike against the tyranny had left the city. Only the old-crippled people were left in Rome, a couple of them hobbling across the Forum. The rest of the city was completely empty and vacant, so that the desecration of the Eternal City was an event that was two pronged one by internal dictatorship and two by external invasion, and those two became linked together in the Roman psyche.
We can't go any farther tonight, but when we meet in two weeks - we'll be off for Christmas Day and we'll be off for New Year's Day - but in two weeks, we'll take that movement as it comes down to Scipio Africanus, because the personage of Hannibal blended together an external foe and a dictator in one person, because he was free for a whole generation to roam at will in Italy. And so, Hannibal became an archetypal integration of tremendous proportions for the Roman mind, and the only way to beat someone who was an internal dictator and an external enemy at the same time will be to have a mystical general. And Scipio Africanus will become the prototype for a new kind of a figure in Roman, in the Roman mind and in human history. And it is through the figure of Scipio Africanus, the mystic general, that the whole influence of the Hellenistic world funnels itself into Rome. And we'll take a look at that because that is an extremely important event. When we do that in two weeks, we'll be all set then to go back to Alexandria, go back to the developments there, because from then on, we can include Rome at the same table, because by that time, by about 146 BC, the entire ancient world was sitting at the same table India, Persia, Parthia, Rome, Greece, Spain, the Phoenicians, the Hebrews. Everybody was at the same table. And that's why human history changed at that time because all of the archetypes came together. And the best figure that we have reporting the psychological event, is that figure in the Book of Daniel that when Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, which were their Babylonian names, were cast into the furnace to see whether they were telling the truth or not. And Nebuchadnezzar looked in the furnace. There was a fourth man in there who had burnished white lightning like hair. And gold coppery skin. And when they pulled Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego out and they were unscathed, the fourth man was not there. He had been there in the fire, and now he was mystically everywhere. All that actually happened. So, we'll see that in 85.
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