Hadrian’s digs, 2,000 years later

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Romulus and Remus, the central figures of the foundation myth of Rome. According to tradition, the twins were abandoned by their parents as babies, but were saved by a she-wolf who found and nursed them. Romulus killed his brother after a vicious quarrel, and went on to found a city, which was named after him.

The myth has been at the core of Roman identity since the 1st century AD, although the details vary in different versions of the story. For many Roman writers, the story embodied the ethos and institutions of their civilisation. The image of the she-wolf suckling the divinely fathered twins remains a potent icon of the city even today.

In the ancient world, the rich held themselves to very different standards from the poor. Not much has changed, argues classical historian Mary Beard…

“By and large, posh Romans didn’t have much time for poor Romans, free or slave – although they were no doubt a bit scared of them too. They regularly referred to them as a “turba” (rabble) or “multitudo” (the masses).

Interestingly, given the recent fuss, plebs wasn’t usually their insult of choice. It’s true that they did sometimes use the word in that way.

The historian Tacitus, for example, wrote of the plebs sordida (and you don’t need me to translate that). But plebs was just as often used to refer, in neutral or even complimentary terms, to the noble stock of the worthy Roman yeomanry.

It was only in English, and in the late 18th Century that the word lost its final “s” and became solely derogatory, as in “you filthy little pleb”…

The other way in which the comfortably-off traditionally talk of those less fortunate than themselves is, of course, to divide them into the Good Poor and the Bad Poor.

In fact, when Tacitus wrote of the plebs sordida it was explicitly to contrast them with what he called “the respectable elements among the common people”.Talk

ing about the death of the monstrous emperor Nero, he claimed the “filthy poor”, the squanderers and the racing addicts, lamented the death (for Nero had been an easy touch for entertainments and hand-outs).

Predictably enough, the “respectable elements” were those who welcomed the new regime of austerity and cost-cutting under the in-coming emperor Galba.

That division is still with us. The 19th Century notoriously had its “deserving” and “undeserving poor”. Our own equivalent of the “deserving poor” is “hard-working families”.

Turns out the rules for winning this campaign are the rules that have governed every political campaign for decades … or even longer. How long?

How about 2,076 years? Historian Philip Freeman has translated the Commentariolum Petitionis, a short tract written in 64 BC. In the Commentariolum, Quintus Tullius Cicero compiled political advice for his brother Marcus. The elder Cicero took the advice and won, becoming a consul of Rome—apparently an underdog upset of Obamanian proportions. Now Princeton University Press has published Freeman’s translation with a catchier yet somehow less dignified title: How to Win an Election. Would you believe it? The advice holds up. These candidates must have classics scholars on staff, because a close read of Cicero reveals they’re following his counsel.

Robert Siegel talks with Classics professor Philip Freeman about his translation of the book, “How to Win an Election: An Ancient Guide for Modern Politicians.” The book was written by the brother of Marcus Cicero, for when Marcus ran for office in Rome in 64 B.C. But the ancient Roman guide for campaigning still holds lessons for today’s elections.

Here is a PDF copy of the whole book Will Durant: Caesar and Christ

Plutarch’s take on Sulla (c. 138 BC – 78 BCE).

Polybius is our best source on the Roman Constitution. Here he describes and analyzes the Roman political system during the Republic.

“In Cicero’s day, consular hopefuls behaved as politicians always have and forever will: they made themselves as visible as possible, were charming to all potential voters and promised everything to everybody.”

And Never Say No: Politics as Usual in Ancient Rome
Response Questions

Read Chapter 6 of Will Durant: Caesar and Christ (pages 134-54 in the PDF)

Here are the response questions for the Durant chapter
It might be useful to cross reference Durant with these short Wiki entries on:

• The Social War
• Sulla’s First Civil War
• Sulla’s Second Civil War
  

Here is the timeline that we will use for our curriculum. Bear in mind that our focus is on the Roman Republic. As such, there is a lot of significant events that are conspicuously absent from this sketch.

Here is the sketch outline. Perhaps this will help you to ensure that you are using proper outlining format.

Titus Livius (59 BC – AD 17)  was a Roman historian who wrote a monumental history of Rome and the Roman people.  “Chapters from the Foundation of the City,” covers the period from the earliest legends of Rome  through the reign of Augustus in Livy’s own time. He was on familiar terms with the Julio-Claudian family, advising Augustus’s grandnephew, the future emperor Claudius, as a young man not long before 14 BCE in a letter to take up the writing of history.

Feeling ambitious? Then read our most valuable (?) written source on Rome.

It is no wonder, then, that the sense of being “not-Rome,” for good and ill, did so much to shape modern German identity. But the great irony, as Christopher Krebs shows in A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus’s Germania From the Roman Empire to the Third Reich, is that it was a Roman who did most to define and crystallize that proud German otherness. Cornelius Tacitus, best known for his grimly disillusioned history of Rome’s wicked emperors, was also the author of a short ethnographic treatise on the German tribes, known as the Germania. This book, written in 98 A.D., was almost lost during the Middle Ages. But when it was rediscovered and disseminated in the 15th century, just as the Renaissance and Reformation were gathering force, it became something like the bible of German nationalism.

Read more of this book review at Slate

Here are some well-culled excerpts from Germania from the Modern History Sourcebook.

The Aeneid

Etruscan Civilization

The Roman Republic

Rome and European Civilization

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire