“To pacify, to impose the rule of law, To spare the conquered, battle down the proud.” —Publius Vergilius Maro (Vergil), describing Rome’s destiny
“To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?” —Marcus Tullius Cicero
“There is no king who has not arisen from slaves, nor any slave who has not arisen from kings.” —Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Younger, paraphrased
According to tradition, 2,777 years ago, on April 21, 753 B.C., the city of Rome was founded. Legends blend with history in Rome’s founding, of course, and the tales of Aeneas (the Trojan progenitor of the Roman people) and Romulus and Remus (Aeneas’s descendants miraculously suckled by a she-wolf and later Rome’s founders) contain elements both of fact and of fiction. But one fact is undeniable—Rome has given to the world much of the greatest civilization it has ever seen.
In modernity, there is unfortunately a tendency either to despise all ancients (especially European ancients) or to pretend that Western civilization owes almost all its greatness and glory to Greece. Both views are wildly inaccurate. Both as pagan and then as Christian, the “Eternal City” has been swaying the world’s fate for thousands of years; sometimes much to the worse, and sometimes very much to the better. Romulus, Scipio Africanus, Titus Manlius Imperiosus Torquatus, Cincinnatus, Horatius, Seneca, Cicero, the Caesars, Vergil, Horace, Suetonius, Marcus Aurelius, the Plinys, Ovid, Livy, Boethius. . .the list could go on and on. Good or evil, or a mixture of both, the great and brilliant men of Rome are still impacting the world today.
In fact, both Christians and Americans should be most particularly grateful to Rome. Christianity could certainly have not spread from the Holy Land as it did without the rule and infrastructure of the Roman Empire. True, the Romans persecuted the Christians; but when the Roman Empire recognized Christianity in the 300s, Christianity never saw such a rapid increase in converts. Furthermore, Roman philosophy and traditional Roman values, for all their corruption or failures along the way, prepared the Romans well to receive the doctrine of Christianity.
Vergil, for all his gods and goddesses, is not far from a Christian worldview (infinitely more so than Homer); some of Seneca’s sayings are almost exact quotes or sentiments from the Bible; and Cicero has been quoted by Christian saints and theologians for centuries, as much as the Greek philosophers. The great Roman thinkers and artists certainly owed a debt to Greece, but to pretend there was nothing original or revolutionary about their work is preposterous.
And, of course, when the apostle Peter chose a city to be the chief seat of episcopal authority, he chose Rome. Latin has always been the official language of the Catholic Church, many of the greatest Christian theologians throughout history have written in Latin, and to this day Latin is the most effective language for exorcists to use when driving out demons.
As for Americans, we owe much of our political philosophy to the heritage of Rome. Americans explicitly demonstrated that they thought of themselves as the New Rome. That is why the Founders created a Republic (with a “Senate” etc.), and not a democracy. John Adams translated Cicero from Latin, was inspired by Cicero’s mixed government ideals, and said of Cicero, “as all the ages of the world have not produced a greater statesman and philosopher united in the same character, his authority should have great weight.” Thomas Jefferson said he drew inspiration for the Declaration of Independence not only from Aristotle and Locke but also from Cicero. Jefferson was also evidently influenced by the Roman philosopher Seneca (and other Roman Stoics); in fact, he had a copy of Seneca’s work on his nightstand when he died.
The Roman influence is also why Washington, D.C., has so much classical architecture—George Washington and the other architects/planners intended it to look like a Roman city. Washington, first by refusing to be king and resigning his position as commander-in-chief of the army, and later by voluntarily limiting himself to two terms as president, has always been compared to the Roman hero Cincinnatus. Later, after the birth of the American Republic, Alexander Hamilton wrote under the pseudonym “Tully” as an adaption of the name of the great philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero (Hamilton saw himself as the American Cicero). And the Founding Fathers all hoped to see America increasingly filled with schools and teachers providing a classical education, as full of the great Roman and Latin writers as of the Greeks’ works and the Bible.
It is time we once again took up their challenge and fulfilled their dream. We are the inheritors of Rome, as we are of the Founders. As Cicero noted, “To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.” We can learn from both the heroes and villains of Rome, from Rome’s triumphs and its failures, from its thinkers’ truths and lies, and profit from them still today. If we hope to save Western Civilization, we must return to our Roman roots. As Vergil said, “To each his day is given.” Now is the time for us to reclaim our heritage and work “great deeds [by] virtue’s power.”
(This article was originally written and published last year.)
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Author: Catherine Salgado
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