** 40th book of 2021: History of Flesh and Bone **
Greece may have been the freedom-loving philosophic pillar of western civilization, but it was Rome that built the empire of text and architecture that was able to withstand the dark ages until the renaissance. Like The Life of Greece Durant attempts to tell history as more than * vicissitudes of politics and war, as if life for a thousand years had been nothing but taxation and death. * This was a comparatively easy task for Greece, whose literature, art and philosophy is both abundant and novel. Such an approach becomes harder for Rome, a civilization for whom * war and conquest … left men often coarse and usually hard , prepared to kill without compunction and be killed without complaint. * Throughout the book, Durant offers a wikipedia level summary of the political bones of history in a rush to get to the living tissue of art, science, economics and every day life that Rome created.
** Economics of Antiquity ** Durant states that * The older the civilization the longer the lawsuits. * A corollary might be the more complex a civilization the higher it’s inequality. In Rome, money was made without scruple and spent without taste. Capitalism, or at least the complaints of capitalism, were alive and well. This level of acquisitiveness surpassed Rome’s contemporaries over the millennia of its existence. In an anecdote that could describe 20th century America or 21st century China *Crassus Atticus and Lucullus typify the three phases of roman wealth, acquisition, speculation, luxury. * In contrast to its contemporaries in the Han (see Empire of Silver) the Roman monied class made their influence known: * Merchants and financiers swung their influence to the populares when the Senate proved selfish, and back to the optimates when democratic leaders tried to keep their pre-election promises to the proletariat. * Durant refrains from any analysis on Roman economic decline. This would be interesting, but economics was only slightly more interesting than political history, and is not Durant’s passion like art or architecture.
** Everyday and Decay **
Rome may not have excelled in art or philosophy, and instead reminds me of how posterity may come to view modern American culture. * The romans loved music only less than power, money, women, and blood. * Even when gladiatorial combat ended, chariot races took its place, where collisions meant that * men, chariots, and animals mingled in fascinating tragedy. * Rome’s decline is set as a cultural decline, where the absence of public morals or a unifying zeitgeist made a culture that was ready to believe anything or nothing. One pagan tombstone embodies such skepticism: *I was not, I was, I am not, I care not. * But like 21st century China, capitalism and political authority are not ideologies that can last centuries, and they collectively leave the door open for religion’s call to faith. * Education reached its height while superstition grew, morals declined and literature decayed. * As Christianity grew, it *did not destroy paganism, it adopted it. * This culminated in Constantine’s conversion to Christianity and founding of New Rome. * A new civilization based on a new religion would now rise over the ruins of an exhausted culture and a dying creed. * Setting the demarcation at 330AD with the foundation of Constantinople seems far more appropriate than the more traditional barbarian invasions of a long-since abandoned Rome or the symbolic siege of Constantinople occupied by the long-since gutted Byzantine Empire.
I had more difficulty enjoying Durant’s recount of religious machinations from 0AD to 330AD, it may be that I’m simply not familiar enough with the context or that early Christian theology isn’t my thing. Overall I enjoyed it as a broader survey complementary to Gibbon, and at this point I’m more or less committed to finishing out the entire series.