Rome in Times of Cicero and Caesar (Part 1)
Presented on: Tuesday, May 21, 1985
Presented by: Roger Weir
Ancient Rome: Rome, Essenes, Alexandria, and the Book of Enoch
Presentation 23 of 54
Rome in Times of Cicero and Caesar (Part 1)
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, May 21, 1985
Transcript:
This is the Roger Weir Lecture given on May 21st, 1985, at the Whirling Rainbow.
Rome in the time of Cicero and Caesar. Rome.
I realize it's difficult to follow and because of the sporadic-ness of attendance it's difficult for almost anyone to get the drift. So, if you find yourself slipping badly, please just consult the cassettes in their order because the order is meant to lay down a pattern which is a not a direct defining pattern but is a classical circumambulation pattern. It's impossible to understand this time in history, which is also a stage in consciousness which we all have. It is in fact the controlling stage in our consciousness, so that we're not just talking about history, which is difficult to understand. We're talking about a stage of consciousness which is so elusive, and which tyrannizes us constantly because we have fallen into a hypnotic addiction, to put it bluntly, over desires and goals which have very little to do with our actual persons, but which are evoked because our times are in a parallel development to the times in which this happened. And so, we are sandwiched in between two colossal glaciers and our individual integrity without an awareness of this bind, simply isn't worth very much. If the task is to individuate ourselves, if the task is to somehow understand purposes meaning, then we should be apprised of why it is impossible in the terms given to us. We cannot live in this time. Increasingly, the time is taking on archetypal overtones, and individuals like ourselves are really adrift on the ocean unless we learn how to hold the tiller and trim the sails.
We spent the last two weeks on the developing culmination of several hundred years of Jewish religious experience. And we brought ourselves down to see how the Essenes came to epitomize the ethical integrity of the Jewish people. And it is extremely important for us because the model of the integrity of the Jewish people will be the model that the Roman people grasp for as they're drowning. And this is what will make Christianity a world religion. I don't wish to offend anyone, but on its own merits, Christianity would have been fourth or fifth in religions, but it was because it answered an archetypal need. It solved an intolerable psychological situation. And it was grabbed for and embraced by tens of millions of people who had no idea, no intention whatsoever, of being good theological Christians, but had every desire to get out of the madness that was swamping the civilization at that time.
And for this, we have to understand the Roman character is a group character. It's a community character. On the standard that was held up in the Republic were the initials SPQR, and that was the symbol of the Republic, and it stood for the Senate and the Roman people - Senatus Populusque Romanus - the Senate and the Roman people. What was anathema to the Roman mind was precisely the individual. This was the glory of the Greek character was the individual, the daring person who could go out and have adventures in the world, be homomorphically mobile in the world, and come back to tell about it. And the joy for a Greek is in living wildly, escaping danger incredibly, and coming back to tell his friends about it. To the Roman mind, this was in bad taste, to say the least. The Romans loved to cluster together. The Romans were like bricks, and they knew that as long as they clustered together, they were strong. Whereas the Greeks are like arrows, and they need to be shot free to exist.
The Jewish temperament is very close to the Roman temperament, very close. And the Jewish ethic of purity for the community that was developed will become a talisman of salvation for the Roman state when it's going down for the last time. Now, the Essene communities, which are the epitome of several hundred years of evolution, of development, of refinement in the Jewish community - the Essenes are the epitome of that development. The man who will epitomize the essence will be John the Baptist, and John the Baptist will be the last teacher of righteousness for the Essene. And the Essene communities will produce a very strange relationship because the... So, the Essene will be seen increasingly to epitomize the developing Jewish integrity. And John the Baptist will be seen to be the last Teacher of Righteousness' of the Assyrians. But there's a relationship which is so elusive that it's almost impossible to keep in mind because of the overwhelming significance. The mother of John the Baptist was a sister of Mary, the mother of Jesus. Jesus and John the Baptist were cousins, and Mary, the mother of Jesus was an Essene. But Joseph, the father, was not. And Jesus, as we will see, was not an Essene.
The Jewish tradition that Jesus will inherit is split because his delineation from the kingship, from David - the Davidian line - comes through Joseph the father. And in traditional counting, which you have in the very beginning of the Gospel According to Matthew. And we'll see that Matthew is extremely trustworthy evidence. Matthew was compiled and finally given out about 50 AD because they felt the Second Coming was imminent. And Matthew is a collection of five treatises - the "Sermon on the Mount" being one of them - which were exact reproductions, exact memories of the actual words and actual events. And the very first of the five documents of Matthew is the delineation of the ancestral line of the male line of Jesus. Fourteen generations to such and such a point, Fourteen generations to such and such a point, and a third Fourteen generations to Jesus. And it puts him in the king line of David. He is a direct descendant in the male line from David the King.
And we will see that the Assyrians are rejecting the Jewish kingship line because it has gone astray. It has produced the Maccabeans and finally the terrible kings that came after the last Maccabean, all the way down to Herod, who was not appointed by anyone less than Mark Antony, a Roman. All this gets very complicated. All this gets very synchronistic, so that the line of Jesus and the male line is a kingship line fraught with significance. Fourteen generations is the monumental step by which these large, unconscious, collective unconscious, involvements wave-like, come into manifestation.
So, we will have to come back to the Essenes, but we can't come to John the Baptist, we can't come to the Essenes quite yet, because as enthralling as this is, as meaningful as it is to us, it is actually, at this stage, still a tempest in a teacup. All of it is still a sideshow, and the main show is the development of the Roman mind to its breaking point. And because the Roman mind was a community mind, when the Roman mind broke, the community broke, and the Roman Republic shattered, and it was an attempt to collect the fragments of the Roman Republic together that made the Roman Empire. And so, the Roman Empire was like a badly healed leg. You couldn't stand on it. It looked okay as long as Augustus was alive and it even worked reasonably well for his successor, Tiberius. But for increasingly every emperor after that, the leg not only went bad again, but it split the bones, split all out again, until you had madness upon madness. And increasingly the focus of the madness was against the Christians. They were to blame. And then finally, in a great enantiodromia, a great swing, it was the Christians who were not to blame, but who were the salvation of the Roman people. And it's a tremendous drama. It did happen. It still happens in our minds. So integral to this is understanding how the Roman mind, the Roman Republic shattered. And the central figure for that story is Cicero - Marcus Tullius Cicero. And we have almost all of Cicero's writings in the Loeb Classical Library. We have 28 volumes, and there are many volumes more that have come out that have not yet been put in their hundreds of volumes of commentaries. We have that complete story. We know what happened there, almost day by day, and it is an amazing story. It is more exciting in a way, more compelling in a way, than any daytime television saga.
Cicero was born about 106 BC, which is exactly when the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs came out, which is exactly when the last of the Enochian books was written. So, he was born at a very, very peculiar time. He was born in the north of Italy, in an out-of-the-way, beautiful bucolic agricultural area - Arpinum. Old stock. Old Republican stock. The family had been there for centuries. And when he was born one of the governors, one of the councilor governors in the Roman Republic, in and out of the way place that had just been brought into the Roman domination, a place called Cilicia was governed by the grandfather of Mark Antony, also an Antonius. And Cilicia is the last province at the end of the Mediterranean before you come to Syria, and Syria is adjacent to Judea. So that Cilicia wraps around and comes up to those great cities, Antioch and Apamea, Palmyra, which were the end of the Fertile Crescent, which were the furthest extension of Sargon's empire and power in about 2300 BC. So that the Romans had at last, at the birth of Cicero about 100 BC, had come into holding the beginning of the Fertile Crescent, and for the rest of Cicero's life, for the rest of the unraveling of the Roman community, was their attempt to extend their hold on this Fertile Crescent.
The Romans would come unraveled in the east. In the west, even though there was tremendous pressure by the Celts the Roman armies always managed to find victory. In fact, the great account of that is Julius Caesar's own account of the Gallic Wars [Commentaries on the Gallic War (Commentarii de Bello Gallico)]. The tremendous ingenuity of the Romans, the tremendous stamina of the Roman soldiers to stand together all day fighting in the fields until the rushing hordes simply tired themselves. The large blond warriors finally tired after the end of the day, and the Romans, not breaking the line, pushing their way on to victory doggedly. But in the East, the Romans never had that kind of hegemony, because the eastern character slipped under the Roman character like an underground stream and commanders would be there probably for a year, and they would be susceptible to the intriguing mind of the Orient. The Roman mind was a patsy for the Oriental mind. And this is why, as it fragmented, as it broke apart, it was like a sponge for every oriental cult under the sun, and it soaked up all of this much like the old Chinese desert. The white fungus soaks up acacia honey and becomes sickeningly sweet. And the Roman mind will become that way by the time of Nero. But it started in Cicero's time - the break came then, which was thought to have been healed by Augustus and reopens requesters so that the great, tragic madness of the Roman Empire in the first century AD is a renewal. Not an initial break, but a renewal of the disease contracted in the first century BC. It's the first century BC that is the most significant of all.
Cicero was extraordinarily well taken care of as a youngster. By the time he was 16, his parents had enrolled him in the best schools, and from October to June of every year they were in Rome, and he was given the best education you could find. He was taught almost every subject that a young Roman lad should have, and he was a genius at it, and he was tremendous. And this kind of an individual found that the only career that really gave scope to his tremendous pursuits was law, just like in our culture today. And so, Cicero became one of the most brilliant young lawyers in Rome. In fact, the very first case that he tried was a celebrated case of an actor named Sextus Roscius. It's in this Penguin Classics, Murder Trials by Cicero, sort of a very high-class Perry Mason Cicero was. And Cicero won the case, but it was an extraordinary case not because of the murder, not even because of the verdict, but because of the circumstances under which it had to be won. Because all of the enemies of Sextus Roscius were friends of the dictator Sulla, who we've already talked about, about a month ago.
And remember that Sulla had revived the dictatorship. The dictatorship was always one of these hot irons that the Romans never liked to pick up. It was something that was used extensively during the period of the Punic Wars. In the period, the fifty years from about 250 BC to about 200 BC there were 50 or 60 instances of individuals given the six-month power of dictator, and when that six months ran out, that was it. And part of the rules for curbing the dictator were very interesting. A dictator could not ride a horse in the city of Rome - he had to walk. He could not leave Italy. He was severely curtailed in many ways because he was given unlimited power. Otherwise, the dictatorship was a desperate last-ditch effort that was resorted to only in times of crisis.
Sulla had invoked the dictatorship not because of an external crisis, but because of an internal crisis, and had taken over by force. His armies had stormed the city of Rome, come in by the Colline Gate, and his tremendous forces were successful because he had two young lieutenants who were absolutely brilliant in the field. One of them was named Pompey, and the other was named Crassus, who would become later on in another generation with Julius Caesar, the first Great Triumvirate that would literally steal the power of Rome for themselves. It is ours, they would say, and as long as we stick together, there isn't anyone who can take it from us. This kind of mentality was a pornographic shock, in Sulla's time, to the Roman mind. They were absolutely terrified of the fact that some Roman could go to some extraordinary extent as to, as we mentioned, Sulla was speaking to the Senate in very quiet terms after he had taken over the city, and as he spoke in very quiet terms, the senators realized that he was speaking quietly so that they could hear behind Sulla's quiet voice the screams and anguished cries of 6000 Roman nobles who were being killed outside the doors of the Senate.
It cauterized the sensibility of a whole generation. It brutalized the Roman mind in a specific individual way. And all of this ground had been laid by the end of the Third Punic War, when the Romans simply effaced Carthage from the face of the earth. They not only beat Carthage militarily, they destroyed all of the Carthaginian people, and then they tore up every stone of the Carthaginian city, so that even today, we're not sure exactly where it was. This was the brutal layer that was laid at the beginning of Sulla's life, and Sulla punched the message home. But not only a Roman army can do this to an enemy, but a Roman individual can do this to the Roman people. And while his armies were tremendously successful because of the talents of his young lieutenants, who were brilliant in the field, Pompey was a great general. Crassus was rich enough to hire secondaries who were great, but the stickler was in the domestic push the terror program for the population. And there too was a young lieutenant, and his name was Catiline. And Catiline prided himself, as a youngster, on his ability to hold the head of some noble as he slit the throat, and then holding the head, so the blood ran down between the fingers to show the people that if they stepped out of line, if there were any complaints by anyone for any reason, you could also end up like this.
Sulla abrogated his dictatorship and went into retirement and died a horrible death. We've talked about that and how his body contracted a very peculiar symbolic, rare disease and literally putrefied before him. He had to be bathed five or six times a day to get rid of the maggots that were spawning in his skin. And finally, even that was not enough, and he was consumed alive by putrescence. This was seen, this was understood. The events were so horrific. And these are in the late 80s, early 70s BC that the Roman people began to look for an augury in all this. And because they dared not do this publicly, the documents that were consulted were mysterious oracles that were almost never consulted in a personal way, but were only consulted in a large, republic-sized, what we would call collective unconscious-sized divination. And these were the Sibylline Oracles. And the Sibylline Oracles were extraordinarily sacred to all individuals because they were not only mysterious, but they were monumental.
And we will see later on in several months that one of the symbols of Augustus' power, as the Principate, was that he collected by mandate all of the Sibylline Oracles in one place and built a monument of peace, the rise of Persius in the Roman Forum, to house all these oracles, to say, "I have now collected together all the roots of occult power in the world that deal with us, and they are safely here. And as long as this principate exists, this power will be contained. If you break me, if you break the form of government I have, you will let loose all the four winds of terror there are in the universe."
And in order to find someone to deliver this message in a size large enough and powerful enough for the Roman people to understand this, Augustus commissioned Virgil to write the Aeneid to show why he had the right, in terms of esoteric history, to bring this occult power together in Rome. To make a single world, and by that movement culminate what Alexander had begun. And we will see that the push of this, the trigger on all of this, will be Alexandria. Alexandria is the key to the whole thing. Alexandria is the place. And without understanding Alexandria, none of this will come through. And we'll get there but we have to lay this tapestry in this first case.
Cicero began his defense of Sextus Roscius by making an outrageous statement before the Senate of Rome. Remember now he's only 25 years old; Sulla is still alive - his power is everywhere. And Cicero says this publicly out loud in the Senate: "You must find it very surprising, judges, to see all these notable orators and eminent citizens firmly rooted in their seats, while I, on the other hand, am standing up here and addressing you. For after all, I cannot compare with these seated personages in age, still less in influence. It is true enough that every one of them, every single man you see here today, is utterly convinced that the charge on which this case is based is an unjust one, which it is imperative to refute a charge which only an unprecedented act of criminality could ever have concocted. Nevertheless, they do not actually venture to undertake the refutation themselves, owing to the hazardous times in which we live. They are here, that is to say, because they consider it their duty to be here, but they want to stay out of danger, and that is why they are keeping so quiet. Do I imply by these words that I am a braver person than they are? Far from it. Or do I mean that I am more conscientious? No, I certainly don't covet that sort of praise if it means diverting it from someone else." Meaning, of course, Sulla. "You may well ask then, my real motive in undertaking this defense of Sextus Roscius, which the others were so reluctant to touch. Well, my motive was this. These men I am speaking of are important, authoritative figures."
Now, if any of them had made a statement, and if anything in this statement had possessed political implications, a thing which have been would have been inevitable in a case like this, then people would have made out that he was meaning a great deal more than what he had actually intended to. But I, on the contrary, can say every single thing that needs to be said and say it with the most complete freedom, without there being the slightest question of my speech becoming known or achieving publicity to anything like the same degree. And then he goes on to say, I alone am free to speak. I am young, I have no enemies, and I have no friends. I am the one man in Rome who may speak freely, and it is only free speech that is needed to clear this man, because the case against him is a fraud. And of course, the case had been concocted by Sulla's friends. But Cicero conducted that case with such an extraordinary wit and brilliance, he used the finest examples of classical Greek oratory. But instead of speaking the Greek language, he spoke the Latin language. It was the first time they'd ever heard anything like this. It was absolutely new. It was absolutely outrageous to use Greek hairsplitting syntax in the clumsy Latin language, and to do it so well. He won the case, and it was a cause célèbre. People couldn't believe it, and they chalked it up to the incredible genius of the young man. And even Sulla and his enemies let the thing go.
What a show! What an incredible young man. And in fact, the next two or three cases Cicero won exactly the same way, exactly against friends of Sulla, so that at the end of three years - when he was 28 - Cicero diplomatically took a long vacation. He realized that he was pushing it to the breaking point, and he said, I really need to touch myself up. I think I'll go and study in Athens and be a graduate student. So, he left Rome. And for three years until Sulla died, Cicero made himself scarce in Rome because by this time he could see, he could experience, that there was nothing for him in Rome.
As soon as anyone rose to a certain level, 500 people were plotting against him, and 200 people were plotting for him, and a thousand people were thinking about it one way or the other. And next month, half those people would change their minds and be on the other side. It was a peculiar situation. The legacy of Sulla, of his dictatorship, was to make plotting and conspiracy the rule of the day. In Rome, all of the young men aspired to find the right group of partners by which they could seize power on some level or other that seemed attainable for themselves. And of course, the older men felt that they too could become dictator for a day if they only had the right companions.
It was a Roman mind that could conceive of conspiracy. On this level, the Roman mind could not become a Greek individual, but it could in a Roman way, do Greek things by daring conspiracies. And this is the key to the day, so that the outstanding Roman individuals were those who were not great in themselves, but who were great as focuses for the click. This is why Catiline was such a tremendous power in Rome he became almost the power in Rome. He was a thoroughly despicable man. The seduction of humans and beasts on every level was part of his little specialty. And these are only the beginnings. But what made him really likable to the Roman conspirators - He was a good chum to talk about divvying up this conspiratorial mass individual that was rising in the wake of Sulla would find its apotheosis. The oasis in Julius Caesar, who for the first time would show them that a Roman individual could rise even above his fellow conspirators and be a great man by himself. And this is why they killed him. And the only Roman before him who had ever risen to that position was, as we have seen, Scipio Africanus the Elder. You remember the image of Scipio Africanus after he had won back Spain and won back Africa, and gone to the east, and helped win there, and the family was charged with embezzling funds, and he went in front of the Roman Senate with all of the charges. And he said to them, here are the charges that you have brought before us. I have been offered kingdoms. You think money means anything to me? And he tore the charges up in front of the Roman Senate and threw them on the floor and walked out. But it was the old Scipio at a point of retirement, and no one said anything. But Julius Caesar in the prime of life would say this has gone far enough. I am taking over by myself. And for that they killed him.
Cicero becomes a central figure in this whole menagerie. He is the model upon which Caesar patterned his growth from a conspirator to an independent dictator. Curiously enough, he used the integrity of Cicero as an individual, as a model for his own maturation. This is why the uneasy alliance between Caesar and Cicero right up almost to the end. At the end of three years Cicero had bettered himself in an extraordinary degree. He had been such a talented man, but he went to Athens and studied under the best teachers he could find there at that time. He realized that the greatest mind in the Greek world at that time was at Rhodes, Posidonius. And so, he went there and studied under Posidonius, the great stoic. If we had Posidonius' works, he would be easily on par with the great Greek philosophers, easily Epicurus, and so forth. Unfortunately, we don't possess Posidonius' works. All we have is the testimony, and the testimony is clear that in those classical times he was one of the greatest of all minds. He is the mind that produced the cosmic vision of the Stoics. He's the one that integrated the vision from the atomic structure all the way to the cosmic shape, so that the mind of man could move in the central corridor of conception, and that the conception of man that came out of this was that it was his mobility on levels of comprehension that gave the key to man's nature, and that the fully developed man was universal because he could occupy any level in the universe. Any sense of proportion whatsoever was available to himself, plus the proportion of all proportions, the sense of the whole, the sense of the all. And it was this that was the religious element in Posidonius' thought.
The only readable chapter on Posidonius, though, in the whole history of Western philosophy was written in the twentieth century by a Frenchman, [Emil Bruguiere?], in his history, and you will find in the volume on Hellenistic Philosophy, which we have here about a ten-page chapter on Posidonius. Cicero studied under Posidonius, and the final outcome of that study appeared years later, in a time of great crisis, when Cicero undertook to rewrite Plato's Republic and wrote his own De Re Publica [The Republic] in six books. And in Cicero's De Re Publica. The sixth section has a key phrase in it. He writes in translation. "What you look for, then, is an account of this ruling statesman's prudence in its entirety, a quality which derives its name from foreseeing... Wherefore this citizen must see to it that he is always armed against those influences which disturb the stability of the State... and such a dissension among the citizens, in which one party separates from the rest is called sedition... And indeed in civil strife, when virtue is of greater importance than numbers, I think the citizens ought to be weighed rather than counted."
And one of the startling elements in Cicero's thought, which comes from Posidonius' genius is that moral integrity is a force. The individual integrity of a human being fully unfolded, fully developed, is a force which has its physicality, and it is the intenseness of the leader that counts and the intenseness of those around him that counts, not their numbers. It is not the majority who wins in the real world. It is those who are organized best with the intentness the desire to win. They are the victors. This will sink deep into the mind of Julius Caesar and the first office that we will see that Julius Caesar covets is not a political office, but a religious office. The Pontifex Maximus is the first office that he bought. He had to have it, and everybody was jealous of him.
Why does this young man, only 33 years old, want to be Pontifex Maximus? He's supposed to be a general. He has armies. He wants to be the religious head of the Roman state. Why is that? Because of understanding, because of tutoring himself by Cicero. The relationship between Cicero and Caesar is formative. When Cicero came back from his three years, from his studying, and he went everywhere that he could in the classical world, he went to Delphi, he went to Athens, he went to Rhodes. He studied every place that he could - Asia Minor. When he came back to Rome at the age of 30, in 76 BC, Cicero was untouchable. He was far and away the greatest figure of his time, the greatest mind, the greatest character. When he displayed himself in the law, hordes of people queued up just to take him in. It was one of the fantastic events. And in this development, the quality of Cicero's mind that discloses itself increasingly is his understanding that the religious core actually manifests itself in terms of the exterior politics, and that politics is not, on some scale, far distant from religion, but that politics is founded upon the religion, that the religious view is the center.
And in fact, in this Cicero rediscovers the secret operating core of the Roman mind because if you remember way back at the beginning of the sequence, and we've been taking layer here and a layer there and putting them together, the first layer of the Roman mind after the radical beginnings of Romulus, the 37 years of the tough bully gangs under Romulus that founded the Roman state, the Roman people, the Roman city. They were such a rabble. They couldn't get along with each other so that the follower of Romulus was Numa Pompilius, who for more than 40 years recast the Roman people according to law. And it was the laws of Numa Pompilius, religious in their focus, but political in their amplification, that laid the basis of the Roman character. Numa Pompilius' 43 years is like Moses's 40 years. He remade the people remember.
At the end of the legendary reign of Numa Pompilius, Livy, who recounts that history, says that the Roman people were so changed by this - they were such good citizens, working together and helping each other - that other peoples thought that they were patsies and started to make war against them, to provoke the Romans, thinking that they were pushovers, forgetting their other side, their other aspect.
So, Cicero rediscovers the archetypal structure of the Roman character of the Roman mind, and in his formulation, at the core of it, is a Greek understanding of the - probably best exemplified not in philosophy, but in the Greek mystery schools. He was initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries, and this was the central operating core that the secret knowledge of the integration of the universal feminine roots - man to the reality of the earth - so that his actions have veracity, so that what he does has amperage, so that he's not just spinning his wheels. He's not writing on sand but it's an inner veneration on a cosmic scale, so that this commitment in eternally to the earth rooted feminine, allows him to amplify himself in a masculine way.
And we have seen that the Roman gods, in fact, the Triumvirate, the triad of the Roman exterior gods, are all male. They're all male, and they all have to do with the power and might and aggressiveness of the male side Mars, Quirinus, and Jupiter. But the guarantor of the conduit of this male triumvirate to the earth is through the feminine mode. And preserving that contact was what the Temple of Vesta was all about. And the Temple of Vesta was one of the last sacred grounds in Rome. If you recall the apocryphal story that Porphyry told in Plotinus's time, the third century AD, some 400 years down the line when an Egyptian conjurer wanted to find out what Plotinus's guardian spirit was like. They had to do this, conjuring this, evoking this ceremony on sacred ground, and the only place in the whole city of Rome that was still sacred ground was the Temple of Vesta in the Forum Romanum. So, the Vestal Virgins - virgins maintain this sacred tie of sanity with reality. For the masculine Roman structure, it is this virginality that Mary will displace and take. This is what she will take, and she will bring with it an Essene doctrine of purity, which is in a large cosmic way at all odds with Jesus completely changing the tone of his revolution, of his radical recasting of structure not based at all upon this kind of a tradition.
And so, the church progressively will have to anesthetize the Christian elements in order to make the church stable. And they do it council after council after council until around 737 - Second Council of Nicaea. Everything is all handled, and the whole civilization is leveled into drab mediocrity because the driving force that would have impelled it forward has been muffled, gagged, tied up, bound, and thrown away. And we'll have to be rediscovered covertly over the centuries by Christians who say, gee, maybe we better look at Jesus a little more closely and put these theological arguments aside for a minute. And when they do, he will speak through every dogma and say, tear it up, the doctrines are meaningless in face of the reality. Meaningless. This is real, that you are, and that the cosmic acts through you.
Cicero becomes the most famous man in Rome. He defended all of the big cases. He won against every talented lawyer in the city. His client list finally, were just hundreds upon hundreds. In fact, after the revival by Pompey of quick trials, instead of having the long waits which we have today, even one had to go to trial right away, and there was a certain time limit. And so, the cases just rose astronomically in this time period through the 70s into the 60s, early 60s BC. The Roman mind became more and more intrigued with putting together, as I've said, a conspiracy that would work on many levels. This was happening. There wasn't just one conspiracy. There were thousands of them all the time. But the prototype was always - can't we get some of the big boys together to take over the whole show?
And the ferret in the works was Catiline. He was the one individual around whom the best of the worst could get together and cooperate, and they had the best chance. In fact, Catiline is the focus of two distinct levels in Roman society. He's the focus of all of the loudmouthed plotters on the exterior, and of all the great strategists on the interior. Caesar and Crassus both were supporting Catiline for their own purposes. The only person standing in his way, in fact, not only once, but again and again and again with Cicero again and again, until Catiline began to hate the man. He is the one that is in my way. And so, Catiline, finally deciding that what needed to happen was a revolt of the slaves in Rome, and what they would do would be to set fire to the entire city. This would be a signal that not only new times are coming - they must come now.
And the prototype for this - because a mind like Catiline's is not original at all... The prototype for this was a revolt of the slaves in 72 BC, led by the great slave general Spartacus. And after the revolt of Spartacus, where the slave armies almost took over large sections of Italy, defeated several legionary armies, put down only by a last-ditch colossal effort. But Catiline remembered that and he saw that the population of Rome, as the great historian Sallust tells us in his classical book The Conspiracy of Catiline, whenever anybody went bankrupt anywhere in the Roman lands, he always pulled up stakes and moved to Rome so that the city began to burgeon with all of these conniving types - bitter, embittered types - so that the population was very strange, seething kind of unrest. And the plebeians, who had risen in power progressively and then had lost the tribunate and then tried to get it back, were also plotting so that the population of Rome was all in upheaval. And because Sulla had killed off at least three quarters of the male members of the noble families of the Roman Republic, there was a vacuum of leadership. And all of this came to a head in the late 60s, 64, 63 BC. And it was in 64 BC that Cicero attained the pinnacle of his political office. He was elected council over Catiline. And Catiline, a violently mad, enraged, insane over this last straw, decided to bring the slave revolt into Rome and set fire to the city, and Cicero laid in early in November in front of the entire senate, with Catiline just walking into the Senate, began one of his great orations against Catiline, and laid everything out with his brilliant rhetoric, his incredible mind, his fantastic language, his unwavering Republican sentiment.
Cicero's technique was to keep firmly in your gut the moral point which you want to get across, and then let your mind rove through the language at will. Complete freedom. This will tell you what to say. You need not want for structure. And he let into Catiline in a classic way. The classic way. Lambasted the man, exposed the final conspiracy, humiliated the whole situation that someone of such incredible stupidity should even think to try and out plot the integrity of the collected people of the Roman Republic. It would be laughable if it weren't so despicable. And Catiline fled from the city of Rome, fled north, fled to some armies that were collected, and they were finally attacked and destroyed. And the Roman general cut off Catiline's head and sent it to Rome, sent it to the Senate with a note that the conspiracy was over, that this was finished. It was the finish of that ineffective era of conspiracies.
And right after that is when the great effective conspiracies began, because it was within a year and a half of that debacle that Crassus and Caesar got together with Pompey and set up the First Triumvirate. They extended an invitation to Cicero to join them to make it four, and Cicero refused. He couldn't do it. Old Cicero thought about it. He probably would have liked to have done it as a man, but he had lived too integral a life too long. By then he could not do it, and it was this quality that Julius Caesar latched onto in Cicero's character. It was this quality that made Pompey ignore the man, that made Crassus feel that the man should be gotten rid of. The same quality made Caesar pay attention to him and learn from him. It is the victory of Caesar over the other two triumvirates. The key to that is his regard for Cicero's integrity, inner integrity. And it is this that Caesar will try to engender in himself, this very toss of the virility of man's character. This will be the central vision for Julius Caesar.
I'm having to skip over everything and leave everything out. If you read the histories yourself, you can see what a tremendous development all of this is under the First Triumvirate then, and we'll get that far tonight. The situation was as follows. The Roman character had been completely bent out of shape. The Roman mind, as far as any communal structure, was based upon plotting rather than law, and increasing numbers of persons not only impoverished or poor or uneducated, but increasing numbers across the board were disenfranchised, were terrorized.
Cicero recounts in one of his letters, one of his hundreds of letters that we have to his friend Atticus. Later on, when he became a governor of Cilicia, that the Romans had ruined the economy by milking it dry, that everywhere he went there was wreck and ruin. What Cicero means to say is that everywhere in the world, the common people, the ordinary people, have been ruined by the rapaciousness of this new kind of plotting mentality that men are no longer based upon the earth as they had once been, but were now based upon the projected greed of their minds, upon power as a cloud of possibility, rather than upon earth as a certainty. And so, man was inverted. His basis was no longer on the earth, but upon the clouds of ambition. And so, everything was turned upside down. The roots of the tree of state that would flourish were no longer nourished by Tellus Mater - Mother Earth - but they were nourished by the clouds of thunderous ambition, of plotting men.
One final note before we leave off for tonight, and I'll pick up this story next week and carry it down to the death of Cicero - the death of Caesar. While all this is happening, in Judea the Essenes are experimenting and coming closer and closer to a form that works, a spiritual form that not only works day by day for individuals, but one that can be mathematically projected in history backwards or forwards, so that one can compute the cycles of manifestation, can gauge the exact incarnation level that will come and are doing everything that they can possibly do to bring this to be.
Cicero will become, in 51 BC, the governor of Cilicia of that far province. The largest city in Cilicia is Tarsus, and it's in Tarsus that Paul will be born about two generations later. And Paul's grandfather was alive there when Cicero was governor of the province. Cicero sets up in Tarsus because of his background. One of the great philosophic schools that taught in Greek, and it's in that school that Cicero set up, that Paul will be educated, and his Greek-shaped mind will have the Macedonian cosmological setting, with all the sensitivity and the nuance to the Roman character and all of the insightfulness of his Jewish integrity. And that's what will make him formidable because he will understand the whole show, all the characters, all the major events. He will become the most significant person of his time because he alone will be able to bridge all these worlds. All of these characters make translations in himself that no one else could have possibly made. Cicero, unbelievably, sets the stage for all of this. He's not just something that undergraduates read in order to pass exams and learn to write Latin. He is a formative person in this whole drama that we're revealing.
Well, that's probably as much as we can take tonight, so let's leave it off there.
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