Rome Joins the Hellenistic World
Presented on: Tuesday, January 15, 1985
Presented by: Roger Weir
Ancient Rome: Rome, Essenes, Alexandria, and the Book of Enoch
Presentation 5 of 54
Rome Joins the Hellenistic World
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, January 15, 1985
Transcript:
We're at the juncture now where the early Roman history is going to feed back into the Hellenistic milieu, and we're going to recontact Alexandria. We'll be coming back to Alexandria at the time of Ptolemy Philopator, and this will be about 220 BC. As we have seen, it is very difficult to reconstruct a sense of reality for the ancient world outside of classical Greece. And it has taken us all this time to appreciate the tremendous difficulties involved. Our view of antiquity is skewed by the Greek experience, and when we have tried to be more ecumenical and assess in terms of the complete spectrum, we have run across the age-old problem of a lack of perspective due to our own conditions. That is to say, our minds, our psyches, our notions of what consciousness might be are entirely skewed by the Greek experience and we're somewhat in a position now to understand that while the personal, individual mind is skewed towards the Greek, the institutional collective experience is skewed towards the Roman. And so, the Western experience is largely caught in between this scissors of approach. And it's very difficult for the Western mind to disengage itself from the almost hypnotic effects of these two tendencies. One of our few trustworthy guides at this particular historic juncture, where the Greek and the Roman experiences came together, and we must say that they did not collide, but they actually did come together. They flowed together.
One of our few trustworthy voices in the ancient world is Polybius, the Greek historian who was born about 208 BC and lived until about 124 BC. He was born in Megalopolis in central Greece. His family was involved in diplomatic associations for many years. At that time, the Achaean League was very popular in Greece and sent ambassadors representing the entire League to various places like Rome and Alexandria. Polybius himself was a part of a series of hostages that were taken about when he was 40 years of age, and they were taken to Italy to be tried by the Roman judicial system as conquered individuals, but as usually happened in large cases of extradition in the ancient world, the cases never came to trial. And after some 17 or 18 years of waiting, 70% of those who had been deported had already died. The remainder were repatriated back to their cities, back to their homes. But of course, a whole generation had grown up in their absence, and conditions were no longer available for them to be effective. Polybius, however, was an extraordinary intelligence, and in the first year of his capture was taken in by a very wealthy Roman family, the Aemilii.
In fact, the general was Aemilius Paullus, one of the great patrician generals of his time, and he commissioned Polybius to be a tutor to his two sons. One of his sons was adopted and would receive the name of Aemilianus and would become an extremely powerful and famous general in his own right. Polybius would be his lifelong friend. We have from Polybius, therefore writing in Greek, but close to the centers of Roman power. The Aemilius paterfamilias would have been extremely powerful, rather like say somebody of the Rockefeller families in our own time in this country contacts internationally. And so, Polybius had firsthand experience over the remainder of his life with the developments that he writes about. But in his Histories, he gives us a series of dates, 220 BC to 168 BC. And he says, this is the critical period, that this was the period in which Roman power finally took over all of the known world, and that in order to understand this phenomenon, to understand that it was from 220 BC onward, an inevitable occurrence was the sole reason for his writing, his Histories.
Now, in ancient times. The notion of histories was rather torn between that of Herodotus, who gave the recounting of all of the tales that one would have heard, and that this was then to be a history or, distinct from Herodotus recounting tales and indicating, through his personal travels, the stories that he heard. We had Thucydides as a model of history, wherein the notion was that man makes history happen. And therefore, if we can understand the characters, what we would today call the archetypal characters of human nature, we would be in a position then to understand why history reoccurs, tends to reoccur, since human types reoccur with great frequency and regularity, in fact.
But Polybius, different from Thucydides, different from Herodotus, had the notion that fortune, or the Greek word for fortune, was tyche, that tyche was in fact a domineering force, that while sometimes individuals would rise, arise, and be able to buck the winds of fortune, generally they were constrained by the operation of fortune in history. And so, we have with Polybius the notion that the Roman tyche was an inevitable world conquering force, and that all of the Hellenistic people, the different peoples, were in fact, given a field of experience of trying to combat this fortune, trying to find ways from being swallowed up by it, but that, of course, there was no hope for them. The classical dynamic by which the generation of fortune's power came to the Roman people was their series of wars with Carthage. And of course, there were three wars.
And so, Polybius records in his Histories the tremendous effect on the Roman character of coming against the Carthaginians for a century and 20 years, 120 years, and in this conflict, generating the sense of historical fortune that came finally to rule the world. What is interesting to us here, of course, since we have largely been following the way in which Alexandria developed, the way in which the Alexandria ecumenical outlook began to change the classical Greek ethos, making it an international, cosmopolitan, intelligence.
It is interesting for us this last month to be reviewing the early history of Rome and finding that the Roman character was, in fact, based almost exclusively on accrual of custom, that the force of Roman law was in effect. But the writing down of a glue that had already set in the Roman character that the Romans were not law abiding so much as that the laws were correct expressions of their individual comportment to the group. And so, the Romans become, in fact, the first cemented community of human beings where other individuals could join the community and be given the rights of Roman citizenship, and they would be just as liable for the privileges and the responsibilities for Roman citizenship as any of the ancient families.
We come now, tonight to Polybius in book one, where the Romans, for the first time have already conquered most of Italy with their land armies, and are now for the first time, coming into an experience where they must go across the Straits of Messina to the island of Sicily. And there, of course the early Sicilians were Greeks. And the large city at that time, of course, was Syracuse. At this time, Syracuse would have been about three times the size of Rome. Probably on the order of about 20 miles squared. Syracuse was a very large city. The Syracusans and the native Sicilians held about two thirds of the island, whereas the other third was held by the Carthaginians and the Carthaginians, who had come from the northern coast of Africa. They were originally, of course, Phoenicians had begun to extend their seaports along the edge of Sicily, leading from Palermo towards Messina, and it became apparent to the Roman Senate that it was but a matter of time before the Carthaginians would make a bridge from Sicily to Italy, and the Romans therefore had to make a decision, a preemptive decision, to take themselves across the Straits of Messina and engage both the Carthaginians and the Sicilians. In order to do this, for the first time, the Romans had to build ships.
Now this became an extraordinary experience, and Polybius singles it out in his first book of his Histories. On page 55 of the Loeb Classical Edition, he cites the fact that the way in which the Romans acquired sea power is characteristic of the Roman determination and inevitability in history. They had no idea of how to build ships. They did not have shipwrights, they did not have plans, and so forth. One of the Carthaginian ships was wrecked by a storm, and this ship was towed to Ostia and was used as a model. And the Roman Senate, deciding that they were going to go through with this plan of invading Sicily, of taking on the Sicilian Greeks and the Carthaginians, turned around and built an armada of 120 ships. This was a tremendous armada at this time.
Polybius writes it in this way: "When they saw that the war was dragging on, they undertook for the first time to build ships, a hundred quinqueremes and twenty triremes. As their shipwrights were absolutely inexperienced in building quinqueremes, such ships never having been in use in Italy, the matter caused them much difficulty, and this fact shows us better than anything else how spirited and daring the Romans are when they are determined to do a thing. It was not that they had fairly good resources for it, but that they had none whatever, nor had they ever given a thought to the sea; yet when they once had conceived the project, they took it in hand so boldly, that before gaining any experience in the matter they at once engaged the Carthaginians who had held for generations undisputed command of the sea. Evidence of the truth of what I am saying, and of their incredible pluck is this. When they first undertook to send their forces across the Messene not only had they not any decked ships, but no long warships at all, not even a single boat, and borrowing fifty-oared boats and triremes from the Tarentines and Locrians."
They ferried their people across to the island of Terracina. These are cities in the south of Italy.
Excuse me. Well, would you like to ask Helen or whoever is in there to come in? It's distracting. Help yourselves to tea if you like. There are two different kinds here. And there's some honey.
The Romans were unable to sufficiently train their crews in time, of course, to outfit 120 ships took an enormous number of crews. And so, the first large storm that came up, almost all of the Roman ships were destroyed by the storm. The Roman response was to build 360 ships and by sheer weight of numbers, to overcome the circumstances. The Romans also outfitted the prows of the ships with landing docks. They came in 36-foot sections. 12 feet of them were on the prow of the ship and 24 feet up in the air, and these were arranged so that they could swivel on a pole and the prow of the ship, and on the ends, both ends of these landing docks were series of grappling hooks and clamps, so that the Roman ships, when they came in contact with Carthaginian ships, would immediately send these docks down, and the grappling hooks would link the two ships together in a way that could not easily be broken, so that the Roman idea of a naval engagement was to send massive numbers of ships in to crowd all the ships together, and begin linking them all by these docks, and carrying land warfare across the sea. Another huge storm came up. All but 80 of the ships of the fledgling Roman fleet were destroyed again. The Romans put together another 220 ships. It became apparent that this dogged tenacity of the Roman agricultural warrior was applying itself in a way that other maritime powers had never, ever conceived of before.
Polybius writes in The Histories how, when we note the maritime battles between the Hellenistic kingdoms, where they might have 20 or 30 ships, it boggles the imagination to think that the Romans made close to 500 ships, all within a few years for the first time out, simply to have their way. And he writes this as an indication of the kind of character that the Roman person has, that it was not a personal defeat that one could hand to Rome. The only way that they could have been beaten was a collective defeat; to defeat the Roman people en masse. They had no idea of following a single leader and then having that leader win or lose by his talents. The Roman way was simply to field enough commanders and armies that eventually some of them would get through, and that the tide of victory would come to the Roman people rather than a Roman commander, as we have seen [the first great it?]
An anomaly in this pattern was the great Roman mystical general Scipio Africanus, and he is an anomaly. And three weeks ago, when we talked about Scipio, we saw how he was constantly suspect by the Roman people because of his individual virtues, because of his personal accomplishments. And we also saw that Scipio, towards the close of his great life, after he had provided the margin of victory in the Hannibalic Wars, the Second Punic War, that, facing a charge of embezzlement, his brother was taken before the Roman Senate, and Scipio personally appeared and tore up the charges in face of the Senate and tossed them on the floor and walked out, saying, our family has no need of bribery. We've had whole kingdoms offered to ourselves.
It was the first time in Roman experience that a single man had grown larger than the state, and it was a foreboding of times to come. Polybius in Histories tells us, then, about fortune. He writes, "For the precept to distrust Fortune, and especially when we are enjoying success, was most clearly enforced by all of Regulus's misfortunes." He was a Roman general that he's talking about, but he's saying here. "He who so short a time previously had refused to pity and mercy on those in distress, was now almost immediately afterwards being led captive to employ pity and mercy in order to save his own life. And again Euripides' words, so long recognized as just, that one wise counsel conquers many hands' were then confirmed by the actual facts."
In the First Punic War, after the Romans had virtually taken over Sicily by sheer determination and force of numbers, they had pursued the Carthaginians to the coast of Africa. They had in fact bottled up the Carthaginian forces in several disparate groupings, and had surrounded the city of Carthage, which was under siege. The Roman consul in the field in charge of this was a man named Regulus. The Carthaginians were hoping to sue for peace. They asked for terms, and Regulus, who was a very bitter individual, gave them such niggling terms that they couldn't accept it. It was then that one of the Greek mercenaries, a man named Xanthippus, came into Carthage and castigated the Carthaginian Senate for wanting to sue for peace when they obviously had a clear advantage over Rome, but would not pursue it because of lack of leadership. The Carthaginian Senate, shocked at this, turned the command over to Xanthippus, and he took the Carthaginian forces, which were largely based on horses, cavalry and elephants, and changed the whole nature of the engagements by putting them out into large, flat areas, plains, rather than trying to defend Carthage close up, which was hemmed in by hills, so that the cavalry and the elephants did not have room to deploy themselves.
The Romans, who could not refuse a battle once offered because this was the way they were, left their places of advantage, and under Regulus went out to the plains, and with a Hellenistic general like Xanthippus in charge, changing his battle plans about every 30 minutes, the Romans not only lost several important skirmishes, but very soon the commander himself, Regulus, was taken prisoner and was suing for peace. The upshot of the First Punic War was that Rome and Carthage hemmed and hawed for 24 years. Polybius says we have no account on record anywhere of such a protracted contest without a break.
Carthage and the Romans finally reached some equanimity when the Carthaginians put to death their own best commander for not being able to prosecute the war to a successful conclusion. The man's name was Hannibal, and he was the grandfather of the man that history knows as Hannibal. This happened in one of the harbors of Sardinia. As soon as the Romans got ships, they not only went to Sicily, but they went to Sardinia. And in this contest, they were able to bottle up the Carthaginian fleet in Sardinia long enough so that the Carthaginians felt that Hannibal was incompetent. So, they ordered him put to death, and the fleet was surrendered. And the First Punic War was brought to a close.
In the meantime, the son of Hannibal became completely insane about the Romans and what they had done to his family and plotted a return to the Roman wars as soon as he could collect his forces. But now a difficulty came up that many nations faced at this time in history. When they were beaten, their allies attempted to perform services upon the body politic and to take over their government, and so the mercenaries that they had hired to fight with them now turned against them. And the Mercenary War distracted the Carthaginians from the Romans for about eight years.
And during this whole time, this man named Hamilcar - Hamilcar Barca - plotted in his mind to get back at the Roman people and the way that he was going to do it was he was going to move his base of operations to Spain, and he plotted to come across Gaul and over the Alps and down into Italy to make the Roman people pay for the tremendous humiliation which his family had suffered.
He, once the mercenary war was finished, was praying in a temple, and his nine-year-old son, also named Hannibal, was there with him. And he made the young boy swear to Zeus that he would never be a friend to the Roman people and would constantly, unrelentingly seek to punish them for the shame that they had heaped upon the family line. Hamilcar, of course, was a very great general, and moved the Carthaginian forces to Spain, and it was a matter of a couple of years, and the Carthaginians had a foothold on the Spanish peninsula. Hamilcar would not live to see the tremendous developments which his son would make in warfare, and it would be his son, Hannibal, who would, of course, carry the war over the Alps and into Italy.
We now shift over in Polybius to book three. Polybius is telling us in his Histories that he is trying to account for the massive, inevitable buildup of Rome, and that as long as historians were only interested in telling the story of the war between Carthage and Rome, the full story was not visible. And he likens this in metaphor of saying that if you have several parts of a dead animal, you cannot imagine the animal alive by simply using your imagination to put those parts together and put it alive, that you have to study the animal itself in its site. And so, he proposes then, to expand his history, to take in all of the elements that led to the achievement of Rome's victory, because Rome was not simply a victor over the Carthaginians, but Rome was a victor over the entire civilized world. And so, Polybius, then, in book three of his Histories, temporarily leaves aside the Roman and Carthaginian developing fight. He says, yes, this was the major fight, and all eyes eventually looked in that direction. But that something of great development was happening in the eastern Mediterranean. The Greek word for the geographical notation of nearer or closer was coele. Coele-Syria, which we would mean today by Israel and Lebanon. And this was a scene of battle between two great powers, the two great Hellenistic powers of that time.
Three of the Hellenistic kings had died within a few years of each other, and there were new people in office in Egypt. Ptolemy Philopator had come into office, and in the Seleucid kingdom Antiochus had come into power. Both of these men coveted this seacoast, this eastern Mediterranean Sea coast, at the same time. And it was the contest between the two of them that Polybius saw as relevant to the Roman issue. He writes here, in fact, "Now, if from their success or failure alone we could form an adequate judgment of how far states and individuals are worthy of praise or blame, I could here lay down my pen, bringing my narrative and this whole work to a close with the last-mentioned events, as was my original intention. For the period of fifty-three years finished here, and the growth and advance of Roman power was now complete. Besides which it was now universally accepted as a necessary fact that henceforth all must submit to the Romans and obey their orders. But since judgments regarding either the conquerors or the conquered based purely on performance are by no means final - what is thought to be the greatest success having brought the greatest calamities on many... I must append to the history of the above period an account of the subsequent policy of the conquerors and their method of universal rule, as well as of the various opinions and appreciations of their rulers entertained by the subjects, and finally I must describe what were the prevailing and dominant tendencies and ambitions of the various peoples in their private and public life. For it is evident that contemporaries will thus be able to see clearly whether the Roman rule is acceptable or the reverse, and future generations whether their government should be considered to have been worthy of praise and admiration, or rather, of blame. And indeed, it is just this that is the chief usefulness of this work for the present and the future will lie."
Ptolemy Philopator was a dissolute ruler. He and his sister Arsinoe [Arsinoe III]. And by now you recognize that these names reoccur again and again in Hellenistic histories. His two major individuals that he depended upon for matters were a man named [Cestrus?] and another man named Agathocles. And these two were involved in counseling Ptolemy to amass his armed forces outside of Alexandria, but to meet with the envoys of the young boy Antiochus in Memphis. And so constantly the envoys were going to Memphis, down on the Nile, and were being fed a lot of propaganda and stories about how the Ptolemaic dynasties want nothing but peace. And in the meantime, outside of Alexandria, a huge armed force was being trained. I think the figures that Polybius gives are Ptolemy was training 70,000 infantry and 5000 cavalry, and I think he had 53 or 55 elephants. A tremendous armed force. What was important about this armed force was that it was largely recruited from the Egyptian populations. The officers in charge of training them and the officer corps in charge of maneuvering them in battle were Greek, but the soldiers were Egyptians. And this was to prove a great problem for Ptolemy Philopator, because after he would win in his wars against Antiochus, the Egyptian soldiers felt that it was on their courage that the Ptolemies had won, and so physical unrest, military unrest, accompanied the victory for the Egyptians for the next generation and a half, and contributed very directly to the kind of opposition between the ruling families in Alexandria and the populations that were developing trading sites along the Nile.
So, the Egyptian populations, the indigenous peoples, began to think of themselves as distinctly different from the Hellenistic rulers. Finally, Antiochus and Philopator. Marched their various armies to what is today, Gaza, and there, along the Gaza Strip the two armies came together and fought. Ptolemy, because of the Greek general staff, was able to secure the victory because Antiochus, being a rather headstrong youngster, overstepped his own battle lines far enough so that while he felt that he was winning the battle, the rest of his soldiers were cowards and were losing. And it turned out that towards the end of the day, he realized that he had simply transgressed his own military plans and had lost because of his headstrong capacity. It's interesting to note in here, incidentally, that the Egyptian elephants were African elephants, whereas the Seleucid armies had Indian elephants, and Polybius says that the African elephants were unable to fight against the Indian elephants. The smell of the Indian elephants created fearfulness in the African elephants, and they fled from the battle. None of them were useful in the fight. And it's interesting to note this because of the use of Indian elephants was almost exclusive for Hannibal when the battle for Syria had ended and Ptolemy had taken over what would today be the land of Israel. And in Lebanon he was re-establishing the hegemony which the founder of the Ptolemaic dynasties, Ptolemy I Soter, Ptolemy, the son of Lagus, the great general for Alexander the Great, had initiated, and in fact it set the tone that of a revival of sorts.
The Egyptian Ptolemies, who had originally had hegemony in this area, had been ousted now for three generations, had come back in the fifth generation to take over the administration of that land mass. The people who lived in this area, namely the Jewish ancestors of those Alexandrian Jews who were to play such an important part in the final century BC, looked upon the return of the Ptolemies, the return of the Egyptians as the return of good days. That the Persian Seleucids had been ousted, and that now the individual capacities of men would be respected. And we will find within two generations that the rise of the Maccabean armies and the development of the idea of a Hellenistic Jewish king, John Hyrcanus [Hyrcanus I], comes directly out of this experience from the time of the Second Punic War. Ptolemy Philopator, although he personally as a leader, as a king, did not have the moral qualities and the leadership integrity that we would like to think of someone in this role. Nevertheless, left this image very much alive in this area of the world.
Polybius then returns us back, and he says that all of these events came together "during the 140th Olympiad," about 220 BC. He says the defeat of Antiochus and Coele-Syria, the battle of the Romans, the treaty of the Achaeans and Philip. All of this happened at the same time, and that it was at this time and at a conference, that the affairs of Greece, Italy and Africa were first brought into contact for Philip, and the leading statesmen of Greece ceased here henceforth in making war and peace with each other, to base their actions on events in Greece. But the eyes of all were turned to the issues in Italy. And very soon the same thing happened for the islanders and the inhabitants of Asia Minor, and so on and so forth.
All of the eyes of the known world began to turn towards Rome, to see what the Romans were doing, and what the Romans were doing were beginning to engage themselves in what came to be called later on the Second Punic War. This is the war between Hannibal and finally the Roman people, spearheaded by Scipio Africanus, which we have already gone over. And those who are interested.
If you weren't here, you can review the tape on this so that the Second Punic War becomes the period in which the fortunes of the entire Mediterranean Sea became focused upon the stubborn might of Rome. And the victory of the Romans over the Carthaginians was an incomplete victory in two senses. First, it left Carthage intact. It was a power which had a vast economic base. I think the seacoast of the Carthaginian Empire was something like close to 2000 Stades, which is, close to about 700 miles of coast. It was a tremendous power. Second of all, it produced the feeling among the Hellenistic empires that perhaps the Romans were just enjoying a season of advantage and were not really what they were cracked up to be. So that the Third Punic War becomes the effective means whereby this entire mystique about the Romans becomes precipitated. And the developments of the classical world become Romanized after that.
How are we doing on time? Well, that's just 45 minutes. Okay, it's 9:10. I think we should take a break here and have some tea and have some food. Let's take a break here, okay?
It's like Livy writing around 20 BC. He said, we can no longer live with our vices, and we can no longer stand the cure. Something had to give; something had to break. And that's why that turn of the millennium becomes so catastrophic in its imagery. Everything happens. And we'll get to that. And we'll see it in close detail from 50 BC until around 120 AD. For those two centuries, it was literally a madhouse because the Roman character refused to break. But it had to permutate because of the tremendous internal pressures that had been brought to bear upon it.
We'll see next week when we get to the being the total destruction of Carthage at the end of the Third Punic War, the Romans could no longer help themselves. They totally destroyed the city. They tore down every building. They uprooted every foundation. They poured salt on all the fields so nothing would ever again grow there. They completely effaced Carthage from the map of reality. And Toynbee writing in his book, you know the two big volumes that I brought up, the effect of the Hannibalic war on the Roman mind says that it brutalized the Roman people. Brutalized them psychologically so that they became almost killers. What we would call psychological, psychopathic killers. But anybody who fights against us threatens us in such a basic way that we will have to escape for our own self-protection. This becomes a very dangerous thing.
At the same time that this is happening, the revision of the Book of Daniel is being written. It happens in the very same year. And this apocalyptic imagery of someone who is able to survive in the midst of a furnace that could not burn someone up completely. Not only do you survive, but some spurious fourth figure occurs there and helps you to survive. This is the first indication of a transcendental helper image. The Greek term was the anthropomorphs and all of this becomes posited in the psyche, as it were, of the time. And it grows in Alexandria. And it grows in Jerusalem. But it doesn't come to surface in Rome until the time of Nero. And when we get to that, we'll see how that the whole effect of burning the city of Rome down as almost like an act of collective suicide for the Roman people. And the next emperors after that, Vespasian and his son Titus, steal the occult symbols of power from Jerusalem, from Alexandria, and they bring them to Rome. We see the Arch of Titus, and we see the huge menorah from the temple being carried into Rome, and we see all the Alexandrian materials, the sacred books and so forth of prophecies and the Sibylline documents and all that, all being taken to Rome. And it's almost like the Roman psyche is inviting its own transcendental death, a transformation of itself on a scale that only a world empire could sustain.
And all of this happens around 70 AD, but it's difficult to understand these tremendous events and pressures without first getting a sense of this long, inevitable landslide of capacity. That's why we're taking all this time to try and build it up. And I think that you can realize here that the personality of Scipio Africanus becomes like a beacon. He's the first Roman who becomes Hellenized. And it's an indication that the Roman character is transmutable - they're not a different species of man at all, but that when they become transmutable, when they become Hellenized, they seek to amplify themselves in terms of a world empire.
[Question from audience]
Does this Scipio Africanus have anything to do with Africa being named Africa today?
He was named because of Africa. He conquered the Carthaginians in Africa right there at Zama. The Battle of Zama. Yeah, so, it's named his brother was named Scipio Asiaticus [Lucius Cornelius Scipio Asiaticus].
So, the basic spirit of military might, and conquest of the Roman spirit just transcended or transmuted into the psychic desire for mind power in the spiritual sense of world conquest then, because actually the Roman Empire still rules today in the sense of I think one way to understand it. It's difficult to try and reduce something down. We talked about this about a month ago. These are these images of these Greek mythic images of divinity are very difficult for us to posit in terms of feeling toned reality. We give it a try this way. Leaving ourselves transcending ourselves generally happens in a few limited ways. One way that we leave ourselves is through the experience of some ecstatic experience. Another way that we leave ourselves is through sheer terror. Another way is through an experience of sublime wisdom. These experiences of leaving ourselves. Ah, what? The Greek mythological divine figures Aries and Aphrodite and Athena. Not what they were, not what they represented, but what they presented in their psychic manifesting symbolic capacity. Aries was the god of war but isn't just the God of war. He is the God of terror. His two companions are Phobos and Deimos - Panic and fear. So, Aries is that embodiment of the terrific transcendent capacity of man. The polarity to that was Aphrodite, and Aphrodite and Aries are always paired together in an illicit relationship. And when they come together, Aries is always then falling asleep afterwards.
Botticelli's great painting of Venus and Mars. And there's Venus sitting there very nicely and she's looking at Mars, who's conked out because love and war are these two great fields wherein these transcendental capacities become really manifest. But the balance between that polarity has to be held by a figure who is an armed woman, Athena. As an armed woman, she's feminine, like Aphrodite, but she's armed like Aries. She holds that polarity. Wisdom holds that polarity of terror and ecstasy, not just love and fear. That's not deep enough. That's not archaic enough. Terror and ecstasy. So that wisdom as a divine gift holds terror and ecstasy in balance. And as long as that triad is in harmony, then they focus together, and they form what was called the smile of Apollo. Apollo is the symbolic Greek mythological figure of the balance of all.
But there was another way to maintain that ecstasy, that terror, that wisdom, that was to balance it instead of just in terms of Apollo, to balance it in terms of Dionysius, where nothing is formed but it is balanced because of the ongoing pell-mell dynamic of life. Life has no distinct form in the Dionysiac way. So, Dionysius is simply the fruitfulness of the vine, of complications of life ongoing. And it's balanced by virtue of that. So that the Apollonian and Dionysian focuses were transcendental. This the Greek mind had from Homer on and wherever the Greek mind went, it carried that kind of an understanding, but the Romans were different. The Romans had Aries as Mars, but their polarity to Mars was not Aphrodite, not the goddess of love, of ecstasy, but was a god we hear very little about now called Quirinus.
Because for the Roman mind, what balance? Terror was defensive capacity. So, it wasn't a question of love and war, or war and peace. It was a question of defense and offense. Of being ready, and the balance between them, between Mars and Quirinus, was held by Jupiter. And there was no Roman priestly class, except that the leader, the king, held the office of Jupiter - Pontifex Jupiter Maximus. And that was his, that was his place in the Roman state. And in that capacity, he oversaw the religious rites of the state. But the priests of Jupiter Maximus were all the heads of the families, whoever they might be. Not the father, but what the Romans called the paterfamilias, the head of the family and the head of the family. The family might extend to thousands of individuals. It wasn't just your children and grandchildren, it was everybody in that family, plus the people they took care of - slaves, what were called clients, various individuals. Like a very large extended family. And whoever was the male paterfamilias, his decision on the application of religious issues that obtained whatever it was, like a godfather. Yeah. And the king, the Roman kingship, was thought of being the paterfamilias of the whole Roman people. He was not just simply a king in terms of a monarch, but he was king because he cared for the people as a whole. That the Roman people as a whole were a family, like the Egyptian priest-king in one.
Right now, the Egyptian priest-king is looking after a religious hierarchy. The Roman king is looking after the whole people and the difficulty came later on. The difficulty came later on when the Roman mind had spread so far, and the Roman domination had spread so far that there were literally tens of millions of people who were Romans, so that by the time of Julius Caesar, he considered himself to be an emperor of the world, because the paterfamilias of the Roman people had extended that far, and he was simply the one who was bringing the news. Our family is now a worldwide phenomenon, and I need these powers to make it work. And he was killed for that. But his nephew said the same thing and brought in the whole thing.
The Augustan Principate was the prince - Principate meant the prince, meaning princeps, meaning first among men. He was no better than anybody else, but he was always first. And because Romans went along with custom to a phenomenal extent, whatever the first among men would say was usually what is going to happen because you had to be very foolhardy to say, well, I disagree with the paterfamilias of the empire. Who is going to say that? No one's going to say that. This is why the motto of Rome was SPQR - Senatus Populusque Romanus, the Senate and the Roman people - that they were indissoluble. That that's where the Roman might was. It wasn't in Jupiter; it wasn't in Mars. It wasn't in any particular emperor or even in the Roman arms. It was the Senate and the Roman people, the will of them.
Here the Aztec Indians used to have a phrase for that kind of stubbornness. They used to use the phrase, the will of the ant. That there's no way to argue with it. And if there are enough millions of them, they're going to have their way. And it's not a question of being nice about anything, or democratic or transcendental or beautiful. It's a question that this is what's happening, and if you can't stop it, it's going to happen. The Romans were like that. Roman custom was like that. We in our country at this time have a very difficult road to hoe because we have a judicial tyranny that's coming up because of the abrogation of the legislative and executive branches of our government. We have a judicial tyranny because the whole movement of Western law bases itself upon this Roman psychic idea, the will of the ant. Yes, that's federalist. And you and it's very difficult because you can't really argue, right? Because the law is not after justice. That's not the whole issue. The issue is to uphold the law. The business of the law is to uphold the law, which is like a fire feeding itself. And until one understands that one can't understand the tremendous pressure that's exerted dispassionately. It's like being caught in a landslide. You don't there's no way to argue against it. The IRA - that same kind of mentality.
The INS was criticized for being terroristic, creating tyranny. So that's our business to create terror. So, people we work better that way. Yeah. That way. Yeah. But it's totally impersonal. I mean anybody can be subject. Yeah. That was like on the news. They had a guy from the INS, the immigration service, he says if the president breaks the law the INS will come after him if he's harboring somebody. They were talking about the various religious communities harboring Salvadorians. And they said, well, we're going to prosecute regardless of who it is, because that's the law. See? Well, that's a very Roman mentality.
Well, we've come a long way, and I think, I don't want to get involved too much more tonight in some of these developments. Next week, we're going to come back to Alexandria, and we're going to come back to Alexandria and see what a tremendous psychic stew has evolved in this hundred years. And we'll get there just in time to see the whole Alexandrian social order fall apart. And by the time of John Hyrcanus in ancient Israel, there's almost no unity left in Alexandria. There are still Ptolemies, but it's like brother and sister who are teenagers, trying to keep aunt so and so from killing them. And so, the various family factions are in a fragmented, free for all. But all of the centralized energy is still there in Alexandria, and a tremendous relationship develops between Alexandria and Jerusalem, and it becomes one of the great esoteric links at the close of the classical period. And Rome steps right in between, because the Romans, not understanding that all these delicate power dynamics have been set up and simmered and matured and amplified. The Romans come in and swallow everything whole, and they don't realize until it's too late that they have simply taken upon themselves this massive spiritual energy complex, and they were unable totally to appreciate what happened. The Romans were literally electrocuted by the relationship between Alexandria and Jerusalem.
Who was the destruction of the temple in 70 AD and what period are you talking about?
We're talking about 150 years before that. And look at the Romans. Yeah.
Did you say that? I know very little about Greek history, but the Greek had a period, something like the Romans preceding it build up to this point where they were.
No, it was different.
Nothing similar happened?
No. It was it was totally distinct and different. The basic Greek idea was that you had adventure so you could come back and tell your fellow men the kind of adventures you had. That's a Homeric great bias. That man is mobile. His life is full of adventures. But for the Romans, it's not something to experience with joy and mobility. These are travails to be gotten through together, and regardless of how much it's going to take, we are going to get through. And our tendency is to rearrange the problems so that they're part of our solution and if need be, why, we'll bring them in with us.
The first city that Rome ever tore down was Alba Longa. That was about 600 BC, when they went in and very patiently chained the entire population. Took them into Rome and pulled every building down in Alba Longa. And whenever they would run against somebody who crossed them long enough, they would do that. And that's why they tore down the temple in 70 AD, because they had been crossed long enough by a situation that they could not understand. But the man who tore it down - Vespasian - began then having nightmares of thinking that he was the Messiah. And he began to preen himself in front of mirrors so that he would look good when the new age came. And he was supposed to be an improvement over people like Nero. Tacitus, who writes the history of that time, says that almost nobody would believe that any of this could have happened. Anyway, that's what we're looking at because nobody ever tells us anything, and we don't want to live through other people's nightmares anymore.
You are right about the lawlessness. A judge jury told me that we did not have a court of justice -we had a court of law. That's right. It's different. And I got off a jury by saying that I found this a very difficult philosophical concept. And so, I was excused. I do remember that, but we need people like you. I must say, I did shake up the court. There was a sudden she said she spoke out, you know, kind of thing. So, then they explained to me that we elected people who made the laws, and that's why we had a choice. So, we have our laws because of the people we elect from you tell me it isn't exactly that way anymore, because the people we elect are those that are power, the material interest. That's really.
Well, we have a court of law.
Let's have a break.
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