Ive recently said some derogatory things about Rome; that they didn’t produce philosophers or science, and I quoted Gibbon on ‘that puny breed’ that populated the Roman world -
But I love Rome, and I consider it my duty as a European to work to the restoration of its glory, and have been doing this. Though I would like to intensify this effort I will need allies, and these allies cant be messianic Christians, as the glory of Rome is manifestly pagan.
It is true that Rome did not produce philosophers in the sense that Greece and Germany produced them. There is only Seneca. In the same sense it is true that they didn’t produce any science; they developed no physics. They didn’t develop any theory. But of course they are foremost of all human people in their development of praxis. And this can perhaps be seen to amount to a modest form of philosophy and science.
They had no theoretical thinkers worth of much - or perhaps the theoretical thinkers that grew up in that dominion simply found no audience. But the design of Roman Law, the intricate power balance of the Republic, is the most beautiful apparatus of state that has ever existed. The American Constitution is a reflection of it but one very severely compromised by the use of political parties, which are an absolute guarantee of the dilution of the will - as the idea that the Ideas of Power can be universalized so as to be carried by a whole mass of people is simply false. The Romans relied on the will and passions of individuals, not on Social Ideas - and here we see that the absence of philosophers was actually an advantage. There was no sense in theorizing about morals, there was just looking out for manifest interests. I hope that our modern world will find a way back to Roman politics, with Consuls and Tribunes. It was a magnificent system, very dignified and very much efficient in maintaining the Majesty of a people.
In the end days of the Republic, the vast quantities of lands and peoples that had been subjected began to pose a significant problem, namely the very unequal distribution of wealth; some men possessed as much as what today are whole countries, many lived off mice and the crumbs they beat those mice to - this was not a tenable situation and the attempts to amend this situation predictably led to the internal strife among the elites that led to Caesars reign.
If they had a better way of dealing with conquest to begin with, the Republic would probably have survived.
After it fell, Rome became a disaster, albeit a very beautiful one - the fact that one could set foot nowhere in Europe without being subject to the arbitrary whims of extraordinarily decadent tyrants was simply not cool. There was little good about that, and in the meantime the fact of Rome’s lack of poets, writers, philosophers, scientists, the fact that it still relied mostly on the Greeks for its culture, became a much more dreadful condition when this poverty subjected the larger part of Europe. The cultures of the subjected peoples, such as that of the Celts, were often richer than Rome’s own culture at that time.
Then, when Rome’s poverty of culture became unbearable, it yielded to Christianity, and what was perhaps the last standing virtue of Roman politics - its respect of religious freedom - disappeared. What was left was simply a barbaric machine of oppression extortion and humiliation.
Yet Rome still excelled, from the oldest to the most recent days of its empire, in the invention and application and perfection of method as such. The legal structure off the Republic is the finest method of handling power that has been known to man, their aqueducts represent a sublime method, their warfare was obviously deeply and soundly methodical -
in the end though the methods, the means, found no ends except their own exertion. The story of bureaucracy.
Let this serve as an introduction.