Presentation 4
Presented on: Tuesday, January 8, 1985
Presented by: Roger Weir
Ancient Rome: Rome, Essenes, Alexandria, and the Book of Enoch
Presentation 4 of 54
Unknown Title
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, January 8, 1985
Transcript:
Then three steps backward and then work forward again. The first step is I'm going to go to Virgil about 40 BC. Then I'm going to go back 100 years or so to Polybius, the great Greek historian, about 140 BC. And then I'm going to go all the way back to 400 BC and then work our way up. You may recall that one of the distinctions between the Greek mind and the Roman mind. The Greek mind was individual, and the Roman mind is collective. The ideal of the Greek mind is to be mobile in the world, to have adventures. Anybody who reads Homer openly, and when you're young enough, gets the urge to go and have adventures. I remember reading Homer in the sixth grade in Corpus Christi, Texas and pretty soon all of us boys were making rafts and trying to get out through the breakwaters of Corpus Christi, get out on the Gulf of Mexico, and go have some adventures. So, Homer has that effect in the Greek mind. He has an individual mobile mind. Highly personal and consequently, naturally, a nature mystic. The Roman mind, on the other hand, is a collective, prefers organizations, prefers aggregates and groups. And the difficulty with the Roman mind, with the aggregates, with the groups, is to find some structure that will survive individuals and carry on. This, of course tends at its best to produce stability, but it also has a built-in tendency to veer towards tyranny and dictatorship to have the structures taken over by someone and become a dictator.
The clash of the Greek person and the Roman community. The Roman state is what the Hellenistic era is essentially all about. From the time of the Hannibalic wars on down to Augustus and with Augustus Caesar, Virgil's time. The Roman state, that is, the external world was completely controlled. The Roman Empire, the Principate was established, and it was the establishment of all establishments.
Now, Virgil was chosen personally by Augustus to write the great epic of the Roman people, to demonstrate, to justify, to put in poetic form, epic form, the rationale of why Rome won, why the world belonged to Rome. And essentially, we have to understand this, that the Roman Empire was an extension of the Roman city, the city of Rome. And so, we have to look a little bit tonight at how this happened. And we're going to start with Virgil. The reason Augustus chose him is that Virgil had mastered the long poetic forms. He had written and published two collections of very long poems, and one of them is called the Georgics, and the other is called the Eclogues. And the Fourth Eclogue of Virgil is often referred to as the Messianic Eclogue, and it is in this Eclogue that we find the sage like qualities of Virgil coming through the ability to be a seer on the vast scales of human history and civilization. And it was because of the power of vision and the power of his poetry in the Fourth Eclogue that Augustus turned to Virgil rather than some of the other famous poets of that time, like Horace, to write the Aeneid. So here is a little bit of Virgil's Fourth Eclogue, the Messianic Eclogue to start us tonight.
"Muses of Sicily. Let us attempt a rather more exalted theme. Hedgerow and humble tamarisks do not appeal to all. If we must sing of woodlands, let them be such as may do a council honor. We have reached the last era in Sibylline song time has conceived, and the great sequence of the ages starts afresh. Justice, the Virgin comes back to dwell with us, and the rule of Saturn is restored. The first born of the new age is already on his way from high heaven down to earth. With him the iron race shall end, and golden man inherit all the world. Smile on the baby's birth. Immaculate Lucina, your own Apollo is enthroned at last. And it is in your consulship, yours Pollio, that this glorious age will dawn. And the procession of the great months begin. Under your leadership, all traces that remain of our iniquity will be effaced. And as they vanish, free the world from its long night of horror, he will foregather with the gods. He will see the great men of the past consorting with them, and be himself observed by these, guiding a world to which his father's virtues have brought peace. Free roaming ivy, foxgloves, and every Dell and smiling acanthus mingled with Egyptian lilies. These little one are the first modest gifts that earth, unprompted by the whole, will lavish upon you. The goats and shepherds will make for home. And udders full of milk. And the ox will not be frightened of the lion. For all his might your very cradle will adorn itself with blossoms to caress you. The snake will come to grief, and poison lurk no more in the weed. Perfumes of Assyria will breathe from every hedge. Later, when you have learnt to read the praises of the great and what your father achieved, and come to understand what manhood is, the waving corn will slowly flood the plains with gold. Grapes hang in ruby clusters on the neglected thorn, and honeydew exude from the hard trunk of the oak. Even so, faint traces of our former wickedness will linger on to make us venture on the sea in ships, build walls around our cities. And plow the soil with a new typhus at the helm. A second Argo will set out, manned by a picked heroic crew. Wars even will repeat themselves and the great Achilles be dispatched to Troy once more. And he concludes with the lines. The fates have spoken in concord with the unalterable decree of destiny. Run spindles, they have said. This is the pattern of the age to come."
And so, with Virgil's great capacity and poetry and seership, there was this tremendous expectation which grew literally year by year in the closing years BC and as they turned towards what we recognize as the millennium now, it became asymptotic. That is, it grows to become a universal expectation for a hundred years before this. The great Greek historian Polybius wrote a prophecy in his sixth book of history, The Histories of Polybius [aka Histories], section 57. And he has in here a discussion of what will come in the Roman Republic. And, of course, within a decade after this, the great rebellion, the Great Revolution, the Great Roman Republic Civil War broke out. We won't get to that this week. Next week, we'll discuss the Gracchi and the rise of Julius Caesar. Polybius says that all existing things are subject to decay, and change is a truth that scarcely needs proof for the course of nature is sufficient to force this conviction on us. There being two agencies by which every kind of state is liable to decay, the one external and the other a growth of the state itself, and we can lay down no fixed rule about the former, but the latter is a regular process.
And if you recall, three weeks ago we talked about how the external and the internal pressures came to focus on the Roman mind in the person of Hannibal. And that is why we look to the Romans to come to an adopted grandson of Scipio Africanus and had access to the family files. So, he writes in here about the external pressures are rather random, but the internal processes have a regular process. He writes, "I have already stated what kind of state is the first to come into being, and what the next, and how the one is transformed into the other, so that those who are capable of connecting the opening propositions of this enquiry with its conclusion, will now be able to foretell the future unaided."
Do you notice Virgil is seeing epically in a sort of a seer vision? Polybius is saying history by my time has become a science capable of predicting the internal processing, and that the internal processing is the one to watch because it controls the flow of history psychologically. This is true in the sense that while we often do not know what our actions are to bring to us, we can have a better insight with a mind of judgment to tell what our reactions are going to bring. And so, ethics, morals are the control of our reactions, uh, rather than our actions in a technical sense. He writes. And what will happen is, I think, evident when a state has weathered many great perils and subsequently attains to supremacy and uncontested sovereignty. It is evident that under the influence of long-established prosperity, life will become more extravagant and the citizens more fierce in their rivalry regarding office and other objects than they ought to be as these defects go on, increasing the beginning of the change. For the worse will be due to love of office and the disgrace entailed by obscurity, as well as to extravagance and purse proud display.
And for this change, the populace will be responsible when, on the one hand, they think they have a grievance against certain people who have shown themselves grasping, and when, on the other hand, they are puffed up by the flattery of others who aspire to office, for now, stirred to fury and swayed by passion and all their counsels, they will no longer consent to obey or even to be the equals of the ruling caste, but will demand the lion's share for themselves. When this happens, the state will change its name to the finest sounding of all freedom and democracy but will change its nature to the worst thing of all - mob rule.
So, he writes in here that the Roman Republic, at the time of writing here, about 140 BC, was quite clearly headed for this disaster. Now we go back to about 400 BC. If you recall, we said that the Gauls had sacked Rome about 390 BC. That there is a historical correction of 386 BC, but it was in that time period. The fact is that on close inspection that the Gauls were not responsible on their own for the sack of Rome, that the power responsible for the sack of Rome was in Sicily and was the rather large metropolis of Syracuse under the tyrant Dionysius the Second.
If you recall, in Plato, three times he went to Sicily, to Syracuse, to try to help Dionysius restore the Syracusan city-state against the incipient tyranny that was starting to rise among that populace, and that Plato's Laws were written in Plato's Republic was written to help the city of Syracuse come back into its order. The best documentation for Plato's personal trips to Sicily to Syracuse is in The Seventh Letter of Plato. Now it's available in a Penguin paperback with the Phaedrus. We also have several other translations. Plato's Seventh Letter.
What had happened? The Greek city-states had attempted to extend themselves. Extend their rule over other city-states in the sense of setting up confederations, and central to those two contests were the cities of Athens and Sparta. If you recall, Athens was described by Thucydides as being the most glorious city, that if someone came and found the ruins of Athens, they would think this surely was the greatest city in the world. And if they found the ruins of Sparta, they would think an insignificant village, but that they were equally matched powers because the Spartans were all military, male and female, from very young age. And thus, the might of Sparta was not in proportion to the civic buildings in the Great Cold War fought between Athens and Sparta. Both sides were bled dry, that is, by 403 BC, both Athens and Sparta were financially ruined. And so, the Greek city-states like Syracuse sought to move in their own domain and set up a confederation. And they hoped, of course, to cripple any growing powers on the Italian peninsula. And so, it was the Syracusans who spurred on the Gauls. When we look at a map, we see that the Gauls that sacked Rome went way out of their way. They bypassed 4 or 5 sites that would have been just as juicy plums to sack as Rome, so that it was a strategic move on the part of someone watching strategy, and not at all just a simple marauding band.
Now, most of this information is not apparent in the history books. It was put together in 1964, 1965 by Arnold Toynbee, the great historian, the author of a study of history, and in his two huge tomes called Hannibal's Legacy, published by Oxford University Press. We have the detailed story behind this. Syracuse hoped to succeed where Athens and Sparta had failed because they were a polyglot population. There were many different kinds of Greeks who were there, and not just one traditional family structure. This this mixing up to build a supra city-state had gone quite far in Syracuse. We, for instance, know that when the walls of Rome were put up by Servius around the 360s BC the area of Rome was about 540 hectares. Hectares, as a metric measurement of about two and a half acres. The city of Syracuse was three, almost four times the size, so it was quite a huge city. In fact, in the 360s, it was apparent to the Romans that they were going to lose strategically to Syracuse or one or the other Hellenic kingdoms if they did not suddenly expand their population. And so, the Romans in the 360s began a policy of incorporating almost whole hog, all of the outlying districts. So that within about ten years the population of Rome almost tripled. That is the manpower available to the Roman state. But in the process, the city of Rome was now extended beyond what could ever be fenced in with city walls. They had manufactured a problem out of their solution. Where do you now draw the line? And for the next hundred years, the Romans kept trying to find some place to draw the line and to stop their expansion. And finally, in 264 BC, we will find that Rome had conquered most of the Italian peninsula.
Not finding any kind of a natural, normal, or political boundary that would be acceptable to them it was at that stage where they had expanded to most of peninsular Italy that the Carthaginian city-state sensed Rome was after a large empire on the scale of Alexander the Great and precipitated the First Punic War. And of course, the First Punic War was indecisive, and the Second Punic War came, and that is the Hannibalic Wars, and that was decisive for Rome. But the Carthaginian powers went into alliances, and there was a Third Punic War, and it was in the Third Punic War that Polybius writes about, where Rome finally decided that they would follow the old pattern that their ancestors had followed, to tear down the opposing city stone by stone and move the entire population into slavery. This, of course, was the end of the Carthaginians, and the beginning of the process that Polybius describes as an internal tyranny of a parent coming up.
The Carthaginian Empire was an interesting phenomenon. Toynbee writes in this way about it. The Carthaginian Empire had been one of the most stable features in the international landscape at the western end of the Achaemenid. Toynbee constantly uses the word. The Greek word that Alexander used, the ecumene, ecumene was the one world idea. Alexander had a mystical vision, given to him at Siwa. And his vision was that all mankind was a single population, a single family. That there was a humanity, and there was a world, and that world and that humanity were called the ecumenical. And Toynbee often used this term. This is why he could write a study of history. He found that the vision of the ecumenical was so potent - we have to now speak in psychic terms - was so potent in the Hellenistic period that it infused its ideals among all peoples the Indians, the Chinese, the Romans even the New World, even the Americas. This idea, once borne, once seen, spread in a grassroots almost archetypal way by the third century AD, was a worldwide phenomenon the notion of a single man, a single family of man.
We find native peoples after that referring to themselves as the people. The people. From the beginnings of to the end of its history, its purpose and policy, the purpose and policy of the Carthaginian Empire was essentially defensive. Its establishment was one of the countermeasures against the movement of Hellenic expansion in the western Mediterranean that were taken more or less simultaneously in the 6th century BC by the Greek competitors (the Phoenicians and Etruscans), and by the surviving native peoples who had been victims of all three Levantine intruders. Levantine refers to the areas around Lebanon and Canaan and so forth, but who felt themselves threatened most seriously of all by the Greeks.
When the Carthaginians took the offensive, they did so for defensive purposes. Their original hold on the western tip of Sicily was precarious, and he goes on to describe the area of the tip of Sicily that they held, and then skipping over, Carthage took every opportunity that offered itself for trying to strengthen her Sicilian beachhead by expanding it. This policy accounts for her unsuccessful attack on the various Greek municipalities, and for several centuries Carthage had, followed this this policy. The supreme instance of a Carthaginian offensive defensive was Hamilcar, the father of Hannibal. Hamilcar. The Lightning's conquest. He was called the Lightning's conquest of the Italian peninsula from a Spanish base of operations. Hamilcar had the vision that Italy could be had by coming from Spain as a base and coming over the Alps and moving down through northern Italy collecting allies as one went down, snowballing, in other words. Hannibal's aim was to break up the Roman Commonwealth, and this aim might seem aggressive with a vengeance. But after the experience of the First Punic War and the subsequent Roman encroachments on what was left of the Carthaginian Empire, it was reasonable for a Carthaginian to conclude that for the Carthaginian Empire and perhaps for Carthage itself, co-existence with the Roman Commonwealth had been shown by the Romans to be impossible.
That's the very important point for us today. Being in a world where there are two superpowers, the perception of the impossibility of co-existence is the dangerous vision. That is the one perception that triggers a war. Given that kind of attention, the perception of the inevitable eventual impossibility of coexistence. Not the fact that it's difficult. Not the fact that it might take a long time. Not the fact that it's precarious. It needs to be redone every once in a while, but the perception that eventually it is impossible. This is something to guard against. So, the movement of the Carthaginians became more and more chronic as Rome extended itself over the Italian peninsula. Now remember that Rome, extending itself, has transformed itself from the Rome of the kings, from a city to now a city-state in the Roman Republic is a vast extension of what was originally the city.
By 266 BC, Rome was in a position - now, it had conquered most of the Italian peninsula and they were challenged by one of the great Hellenic, Hellenistic generals, Pyrrhus. And they beat Pyrrhus about this time. And it was the defeat of Pyrrhus that spurred the First Punic War. The Carthaginians realized that no Greek general could now hope to move from any section of the eastern part of the Mediterranean and defeat the Romans. That this was now an impossibility. Further, that no Greek consortium based in Sicily could hope to beat the Romans, and all of the power structures then in the Hellenistic world were on the far side of a whole series of buffer states - Alexandria and Egypt, Seleucid, Persia and so forth, were all too far away to ever hope to come into contact with Rome. And so, Carthage realized that it was alone. It was sort of in the backroom, alone with this lion, this young lion. And it was a do or die situation. So, from that time on for the next 120 years the struggle in the Mediterranean world was between Rome and Carthage, and in this struggle the Roman state was changed in order to have the massive armies that they needed to have battle upon battle and generation upon generation of war.
The so-called plebeians were taken more and more into the governing circles of the Roman state, so that the traditional position of patricians and plebeians was almost effaced. It almost in fact inverted itself and became a rule by the plebeians, because the plebeians could be consuls, but the patricians could never hope to be tribunes, so that there was an imbalance. The plebeians had the best of it, really. This development led Rome increasingly to depend upon a massive detailing of law and custom to keep the structure somewhat similar to what it had been. One could no longer just rely upon unwritten custom. Just being a patrician and from a famous family was not enough. Now there had to be detailed recommendations. So, we get the huge development of Roman law in this time. Toynbee writes, "A radical change in the structure of the Roman Commonwealth, as we may now begin to call the greater body politic that the Roman state had built up around itself. In other words, the Roman Commonwealth was now coming into possibility. The change had been brought about by three innovations the partial incorporation in the Roman state of previously foreign and sovereign communities, the plantation of a colony of Roman citizens on the model of the dissolved Latin confederations colonies, and the planting of a posthumous Latin colony by Rome, acting as the dissolved Latin Confederation successor for this purpose."
In other words, Rome became highly permeable - it became able to absorb other peoples and other governments into its own body politic, and it also was able to send out colonies of itself among foreign people and develop indigenous Roman populations. So, it became rather like a disease. It sent out little runners and little offshoots of itself, and it also was permeable to incorporate anything that came into its kin. So, Rome grew like a cancer. And when this situation was set up, the Romans realized in the Second Punic War that they no longer had control of the process of growth of Rome. This was, in fact, the issue that came to a head in the person and lifetime of Scipio Africanus. People who criticized him did not criticize him as a man so much, but as a representative of the inevitable process of domination that Rome had entered upon that was unstoppable because it was built by this time.
Polybius, two generations later, would confirm this view that it was not only inevitable, but was tragic because it would lead to tyranny, and that there was no way that one could stop this process. When we get to Virgil, the notion is that this process stops itself when a single vision of history is achieved by the people, that the old idea of the ecumenical is made manifest in a transcendental way, so that from the time of Virgil and Augustus onward, the built-in psychological expectation was that the only way that this world could work out was to have a transcendental flowering. In other words, it became inevitable that some religious movement, some religious perspective, would take over, absorb the uncontrollable growth of the Roman state, and that by extending itself into afterlife and transcendental realms, it would achieve its own final flowering. And the new age would then be able to begin because the cycle will have been created. And the expectation in the Roman psyche was that there must be a circularity to history. There must indeed be some grand pattern that comes back to go and starts all over again.
Why is this necessary? It's because of the perception, enunciated so clearly by Polybius, that the internal structure has a cycle, has a form which is rational, which is understandable. And that, in fact, if man will only look out upon the universe, upon the world, he will see this eternal cycle of return, and that this happens in large part through vast ages. The Golden Age, Silver Age, down to the Iron Age, and as in the Fourth Eclogue the new age is ushered in, but it is not a final triumph. It is just the same cycle begun again. This will be one of the primary points that the Alexandrian vision will differ with the Roman vision. The Alexandrian vision will be that this is not at all round. It is not a circle, but a spiral. And if not a spiral, it is at least a cosmic process.
And so, the Alexandrian vision of the new age will be that it will be open-ended, not a beginning again, but will be open ended, like producing a paradise on Earth. The interpenetration of the Roman and the Alexandrian view will be the apocalyptic view that the world will come to an end and an apocalyptic holocaust, and only then, when it comes to an end, is there to be some, after a day of judgment, an ushering in of a new age, in a transcendental realm. But the expectation there is a confused one. Neither Roman nor Greek, nor Alexandrian.
When we get to that portion in about two weeks, we will see that the Book of Revelation is in fact not by Saint John, that the Book of Revelation is a Jewish apocryphal writing, and is not even a Christian writing that its vision of holocaustic apocalypse is not at all the expectation of a new age, of a savior, of a transcendental realm, opening up the difference between the Gospel of John and the Book of Revelation is astronomical. One is a vision of love and hope, and the other is a vision of inevitable structural doom due to confusion of two different warring types - archetypes of expectation.
Toynbee, in his book, tells us the tremendous development of Rome had produced the need for a perception among the Romans increasingly of strong individuals. Strong individuals who could oversee the strategies of being at war for 10 or 15 or 20 years. Strong individuals who could keep together battle plans over such a long time. And Scipio Africanus becomes the first great individual in the Roman history. He becomes the first super individual not on the pattern of Alexander the Great, but on the pattern of the Roman indigenous hero that Scipio is ever and always turning over his conquest to the Roman people. Well, this was the law. Whatever was seized by conquest did not become the property of the soldiers who seized it but became the property of the Roman state. And the Roman state, then dispersed it on an equality basis.
According to law, the first individual who will mimic Alexander the Great's idea of the God-man will be Julius Caesar. And what Caesar will do is perform a mutation on the development initiated by Scipio Africanus, and the only individual in his time who will understand the significance will be Cicero. And one of the great poignant images that we will get to is Cicero going into the Roman Senate late at night with torches and a number of other senators to try to hold an emergency meeting. And there will be two hands cut off someone nailed onto the speaker's podium in an empty Senate. And this will be a horrible vision to Cicero that the final days have indeed come, that the capacity for man, even on a vast scale, have been transcended by the fantasy of a God-King who was coming into incarnation and who is as uncontrollable as an individual as the Roman state had become as an organization. The conception of the individual had had to rise to a parity with the Roman state, but in doing so, it had to accept enormous inflation because the Roman state had been uncontrollable for now, several centuries. And so, with Julius Caesar, we will see the arrival of a whole new phenomenon. Julius Caesar will become the paterfamilias of the ecumenical.
Remember, all the religious power was vested in the paterfamilias, the man who is extended family, relatives, and slaves, and friends that he was taking care of. And paterfamilias and some large families might have several hundreds or even several thousands of persons - our idea of the Godfather. Mafia godfather is actually just a development of the Roman paterfamilias. Caesar will attempt to set up as a dictator for life. The fact that there is a transcendental paterfamilias who family has come into incarnation called the Caesars. And this will be the ultimate justification for the seizure of all power by his nephew Octavian, who will become Augustus Caesar. And this will start the whole line of the Caesars that they are a transcendental, godlike family who reincarnate in a regular progression according to universal law, and that mere man simply doesn't understand the scale on which they work. And this, of course, is an enormous inflation of the personality, and it will progressively destroy the minds of most of the Caesars, the great apocryphal figure, and that is Nero. Of course, Nero, Caligula and so on.
Well, I am... if you'll forgive me, I'm having difficulties, as you can see. So, I will just close with this observation by Toynbee which sets us up for what we will go into next week, the great democratic revolution, the Gracchi brothers, and if you notice some parallels next week between the Kennedy brothers, you'll be quite surprised to see the nature of these events. If you spell their name, Gracchi is spelled G-R-A-C-C-H-I.
He writes, "The emergency institution of a six-month long dictatorship, which the Roman constitution held in reserve for times of crisis, was not adequate for dealing with a crisis if this was going to be long-drawn-out. The second bout of the Romano-Carthaginian Double War was to prove long enough, and harrowing enough, to invest one member of the Roman ruling aristocracy, the first Scipio Africanus, with an aura of providential reality that was offensive to the popular hero's peers. Scipio's fellow nobles could not forgive Rome's savior for having been hailed as such by the Roman People at large. Their disapproval eventually condemned him to end his career under a cloud, though he had refrained scrupulously from exploiting his popularity for making anything like a bid for unconstitutional power. Even Scipio's career did not open the Establishment's' eyes to the writing on the wall."
By the middle of the 3rd century BC to the normal Roman mind, they were in a wonderful position. There were no clouds in the sky at all. It seemed as if they had finally matured as a power and were going to take their place among a family of nations. They did not understand that they had an interior structure, an archetypal cycle that would forbid them to simply take their place among a, quote, family of nations. This is very important. This is very important. This conviction is true in our own time, equally of both the Soviet Union and the United States. Both the Soviet Union and the United States do not see themselves as nations in a family of nations, but as ultimate confederacies, federations that could extend themselves quite easily to the entire ecumene. Both sides are equally influenced and controlled by this age-old dream, and this is the problem. It is not conscious. It is not conscious.
He writes, "By 167 BC, Rome had established her supremacy over the whole circuit of the Mediterranean. By that date one of the other four great powers, Macedon, had been destroyed, and the rest were surviving only on sufferance. As a result of this rapid and irreversible overturning of the previous international balance of power, the pace of the Roman Commonwealth's adjustment to the rest of society was greatly speeded up, and the process itself was forced on to untoward lines. The consequence was the outbreak of a revolution in 133 BC." And "This Roman Revolution was prophesied by Polybius in the famous chapter 57 of Book VI [Book Six]. In this book, Polybius is giving an account of Roman political and military institutions, nominally as at the year 216 BC, but actually, as he himself had been observing them in the life of about half or three-quarters of a century later. Polybius may have lived to hear what happened at Rome in the year of Tiberius Gracchus's tribunate of the plebs but this passage in his work is certainly not wisdom after the event masquerading as prescience. Polybius had a high standard of intellectual integrity."
He is, in fact, one of the world's great historians. He is the historian who had the firmest conviction that there is such a thing as destiny or fate in history, and that while man is not absolutely subject to it, if he is any less conscious than he could possibly be, he will be determined by fate and destiny, and thus it is up to man to hold his own with the pace of events, or he will surely be inevitably, structurally, outstripped by those very events.
We'll go to Polybius just for a second and close this evening. He writes in here. "The influence of long-established prosperity under this life will become more extravagant, and the citizens more fierce in their rivalry regarding office and other objects than they ought to be. As these defects go on, increasing the beginning of the change for the worse will be due to love of office and the disgrace entailed by obscurity, as well as to extravagance and purse proud display."
Why is this? This is because the disgrace of obscurity is a very poignant psychological point. There needs to be some background. There needs to be some intelligent population who are not in the fray in order to give it balance. When this is upset, to the extent that no one is content to be obscure, to be in the background, everyone enters the fray. And this is why Polybius says when this happens, the state will change its name to the finest sounding of all - freedom and democracy - but will change its nature to the worst thing of all - mob rule.
Well, we'll see this, this movement and the Gracchi will take us back to Alexandria. This will be the last of the Roman series next week, and it will naturally take us back into Alexandria. Curiously, almost unbelievably, one of the last representatives as a challenge to Roman power is the incredible personal vision of Cleopatra. And we will see that it is Cleopatra, intelligent woman as she was, was one of the few individuals of her time who understood the course of history and was looking for the right man, not as a lover or a playmate, or as a king, but the right man to manifest the historical archetype that she understood could be manifested. She twice failed, and in her third encounter realized finally, that the right man had been alive all the time as she had found out, but that he was now the man who surrounded her with his enemy armies. Octavian. Augustus. It was then that she killed herself for bearing with me all this.
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