Gregory Aldrete: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. I mean, Rome has been hugely influential, I think, just because of the image. I mean, there’s all these practical ways. I mean, the words I’m using to speak with you today, 30% are direct from Latin. Another 30% are from Latin descended languages. Our law codes, I mean, our habits, our holidays, everything comes fairly directly from the ancient world. But the image of Rome, at least again in Western civilization, has really been the dominant image of a successful empire. I think that’s what gives it a lot of its fascination, this idea that, “Oh, it was this great, powerful, culturally influential empire,” and there’s a lot of other empires. I mean, we could talk about ancient China, which arguably was just as big as Rome, just as culturally sophisticated, lasted about the same amount of time. But at least in Western civilization, Rome is the paradigm. But Rome is a little schizophrenic in that it’s both the empire when it was ruled by emperors, which is one kind of model, and it’s the Roman Republic when it was a pseudo-democracy, which is a different model. It’s interesting how some later civilizations tend to either focus on one or the other of those. The United States, Revolutionary France, they were very obsessed with the Roman Republic as a model. But other people, Mussolini, Hitler, Napoleon, they were very obsessed with the Empire. Victorian Britain as a model. Rome itself has different aspects. But what I think is actually another big difference between the modern world and the ancient is our relationship with the past. One of the keys to understanding all of Roman history is to understand that this was a people who were obsessed with the past and for whom the past had power, not just as something inspirational, but it actually dictated what you would do in your daily life. Today, especially in the United States, we don’t have much of a relationship with the past. We see ourselves as free agents just floating along, not tethered to what came before. o in your daily life. Today, especially in the United States, we don’t have much of a relationship with the past. We see ourselves as free agents just floating along, not tethered to what came before. The classical story that I sometimes tell in my classes to illustrate this is Rome started out as a monarchy. They had kings. They were kind of unhappy with their kings. Around 500 BC, they held a revolution and they kicked out the kings, and one of the guys who played a key role in this was a man named Lucius Junius Brutus. 500 years later, 500 years down the road, a guy comes along, Julius Caesar, who starts to act like a king. If you have trouble with kings in Roman society, who are you going to call? Somebody named Brutus. Now as it happens, there is a guy named Brutus in Roman society at this time, who is one of Julius Caesar’s best friends, Marcus Junius Brutus. Now, before I go further with the story, and I think you probably know where it ends, I talk about how important your ancestors are in Roman culture. I mean, if you went to an aristocratic Roman’s house and opened the front door and walked in, the first thing you would see would be a big wooden cabinet. If you open that up, what you would see would be row after row of wax death masks. When a Roman aristocrat died, they literally put hot wax on his face and made an impression of his face at that moment. They hung these in a big cabinet right inside the front door. Every time you entered your house, you were literally staring at the faces of your ancestors. Every child in that family would have obsessively memorized every accomplishment of every one of those ancestors. He would’ve known their career, what offices they held, what battles they fought in, what they did. When somebody new in the family died, there would be a big funeral and they would talk about all the things their ancestors had did. The kids in the family would literally take out those masks, tie them onto their own faces, and wear them in the funeral procession. You were wearing the face of your ancestors. So you as an individual weren’t important, you were just the latest iteration of that family, and there was enormous weight, huge weight to live up to the deeds of your ancestors. The Romans were absolutely obsessed with the past, especially with your own family. Every Roman kid who is let’s say an aristocratic family could tell you every one of his ancestors back centuries. I can’t go beyond my grandparents, I don’t even know, but that’s maybe 100 years. It’s a completely different attitude towards the past. And the level of celebration that we have now of the ancestors, even the ones we can name, is not as intense as it was in Roman times.…

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