Dinner for the Ides of March

The Republic may be crumbling, but we're going to eat well.  How else to celebrate the Ides of March but with an ancient Roman dinner, in the style of Apicius? We have here Parthian Chicken, or a modernized version of it, with Lovage and Cumin sauce.  Lentils with mint and coriander, and a salad with a dressing that could be Roman.  And blood oranges, of course; as Quarta pointed out, very appropriate for the Ides of March.

I freely adapted various recipes based on Apicius for the chicken; I made a sauce with sauteed onions in olive oil, sweet wine, garum (fish sauce), honey, ground dried plums and raisins, chopped green lovage and toasted ground cumin and caraway seeds.  I slightly pureed the sauce with an immersion blender - I wonder if that's ever been done in ancient Roman cuisine before? I salted and peppered the chicken and poured the sauce on top, then baked it at 375 for about an hour, covered for the first half and then uncovered.  The combination of lovage and cumin is distinctly Roman and the sweetness of the sauce evens out some of the unfamiliar flavor combinations in a very nice way, I think.

The lentils were cooked first, then I added chopped parsley, mint, and cilantro, ground coriander, garum, vinegar, honey and salt and pepper.  It's a bit like Indian Dal, if you've had that, but with a sweeter flavor.

The salad was just sliced cucumber, radishes, red onion and carrots and the vinaigrette was olive oil, red wine vinegar, dried mustard, a very small amount of garum, salt and pizza seasoning.

Book Review: Lives of the Twelve Caesars

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

It's a good summer to be reading Suetonius.  Disturbing, but reassuring in a way, to realize that the cultural disintegration we are experiencing here and now is nothing new.  American exceptionalism - maybe not so much.  We have made a wilderness, and we call it progress.

I read Tacitus several years ago, and appreciated his restrained yet biting style.  I'm sorry that many of the juicy parts were lost to history.  But although both of my sons have read Suetonius as part of their classical education, I had developed my 6th grade Roman history unit without it.  So in late spring I set out to remedy the situation.  In a sense, I have learned nothing that I didn't know already, and only filled out what I already knew from secondary sources with material which is almost entirely inappropriate for 6th grade.  You might want to grab your copy of Suetonius soon, before the cultural police decide he was too judgmental and bigoted to remain on the shelves.  We already know how they feel about the Bible and those who teach from it.

Suetonius is a bit more prone to repeat hearsay than Tacitus.  And it is a bit disconcerting for a modern reader who wants to see a psychological analysis of the depravity of the Caesars, some kind of explanation for their behavior - and it is not forthcoming.  But in matters of historic record he is careful to present a balanced and fair account, with not much personal feeling coloring his writing.  The ancient Romans were, as a whole, very tolerant of anything or anyone that could conceivably be of use to them.  This open-mindedness served them well as they were building their empire.  In fact, their great irony was that they were so tolerant, even of immorality, that they became intolerant of those who adhered to any basic morality.  And when absolute power was concentrated in one emperor (who expected to be treated as a god), the new intolerance could be directed toward quite unexpected victims.

In the world's way of looking at things, both Julius and Augustus Caesar were brilliant leaders, and they were both duly deified after their deaths.  Yet the arrogance and narcissism that became pathological in their successors was present in them as well.  Strangest to modern readers is the obsessive-compulsive way they arranged their own and their families' personal lives - even to the point of arranging divorces and remarriages, frequently against the consent of the parties involved.  Check out the family tree of the Julio-Claudian emperors for just a taste of the weirdness, but prepare for a confusing time.  Ironically, with all the attention Augustus gave to micromanaging his family, he was remarkably shortsighted when it came to preparing a successor.

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Think Paula Deen got a raw deal?  The emperor Tiberius was so sensitive to imaginary insults that he banished a Greek leader, Xeno, for speaking a dialect that reminded him of an unhappy time in his life.  He forced Seleucus, a scholar, to commit suicide because he was too well-informed about the literature Tiberius was reading.  Of course, Tiberius was perverted as well as being cruel and, hmm, maybe you could say "capricious" if you wanted to make a bad pun.  So many Romans were killed without cause during his reign that no one thought of deifying him when he finally died.

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Caligula - even Suetonius calls him a monster.  Probably the less said about him, the better.  His attempts to define as normal whatever he wanted to do were not accepted by the people, and were ultimately not successful.  There is no denying that human life was not valued highly in ancient times, and that common decency was hard to come by.  But then you read a story like this one and wonder whether we should really feel superior at all.  Or when a shrieking mob of activists is so devoted to the killing of late-term babies that they shout down a Texas bill preventing abortion when a child is capable of feeling pain.

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I always felt sorry for emperor Claudius.  Awkward and weak, he was despised by his own family members and was never expected to amount to anything - so he wasn't prepared to be a leader.  It's hardly surprising that he was not a capable leader, and that his great weakness of falling for inappropriate women led to his downfall.

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The first recorded account of gay marriage was by the emperor Nero.  Oddly enough, this is not something that makes it into the current press coverage, but I'll quote from Suetonius, p. 228, right after Nero raped the Vestal Virgin Rubria:

"Having tried to turn the boy Sporus into a girl by castration, he went through a wedding ceremony with him -- dowry, bridal veil and all -- took him to his palace with a great crowd in attendance, and treated him as a wife.  A rather amusing joke is still going the rounds: the world would have been a happier place had Nero's father Domitius married that sort of wife."

There follows a paragraph describing Nero's most likely incestuous relationship with his mother Agrippina, and then another gay wedding, this time with Nero playing the bride.  So much for the "committed, loving" relationships we keep hearing about as the gay agenda is imposed on modern America: the second time was with Doryphorus, not Sporus.  It would have been amusing, if it had not been accompanied by so much wanton cruelty.  Nero was responsible for killing an obscene number of human beings who crossed him, including most of his family members.  The word "unnatural" does come to mind.  One can only imagine what might have happened to the poor florist who refused to provide flowers for his gay wedding.

I wonder, will future generations look with the same freak-show amusement at modern America that we have when we read about the decadence of the Ancient Romans?  Bottom line, what I get from Suetonius is, the ancient decadent Roman emperors practiced perversity and the cruel slaughter of innocent people, but even the pagan historians still viewed their behavior as unnatural and depraved.  Human cultures do not turn around on a dime (or a sestertius), and trying to force people to accept what they know at a very deep level to be wrong will not be successful.

Political Tuesdays: Panem et Circenses

Arguably there were several points during Rome's long and ugly fall at which a twist of history might have averted chaos and barbarism.  If Gaius Gracchus had not established the bread donative as a sacred right, of course -- that is the easiest "what if."  Rome at that time (2nd century B.C.) was a strong and independent republic of fierce and loyal warriors, demanding self-discipline and virtue from her citizens.  Her leaders refused on principle to call themselves "king" -- but that was before they discovered that they could call themselves something else and have all the power of a king, and then some.  With the establishment of statist welfare provision as a sacred right, the plebeians became a permanent dependent class and their support automatically went to their feeders.

If only the party of Marius and the party of Sulla had avoided violent retribution against their political enemies, but instead practiced some of that historical self-discipline (it was a recent memory then) in steering Rome toward a course that didn't involve demagoguery.  If only Julius Caesar had been less imperialistic, or, if not that, once he had conquerered Gaul, if he had retired quietly to Rome without his army like Cincinnatus, content to act in an advisory role in the Senate.  After his assassination, if Augustus had been less insistent on his own godlike prerogatives and turned his considerable administrative skills to supervising a reasonable transfer of power to the Senate.  Certainly, it would have been nice if Augustus had chosen a wiser successor than Tiberius; better yet, if he had set up a system for ensuring a peaceful succession that did not depend on one man's ego.

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Tiberius.  Tacitus complains about Tiberius that new words had to be invented to describe the depravities he committed.  There was to be no change for the better under his rule; in fact, the Praetorian Guard took on new and excessively unsavory duties, while Tiberius himself disengaged from public affairs and left governance to his underlings, who had their own agendas.

There were brief moments when the Republic might have been restored, or at least, the absolute power of tyrannical emperors might have been curtailed.  There were even a few good emperors; "good" in that they were competent administrators and took necessary steps to ensure peace and stability - Vespasian, Titus, Trajan, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius.  But the high places were not destroyed, and they continued to accept and even demand the worship of the people as a basic pledge of allegiance.  And of course they continued the official policy of persecution of Christians, that dangerous sect loyal to a city not of this world, who were viewed as dangerous because they were not "Roman" enough.

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Marcus Aurelius, the scholarly Stoic.  He had considerable wisdom as a philosopher, but spent his life in the saddle carrying out increasingly futile wars against masses of barbarians.  Plagues and natural disasters added to the burden of leadership.  He also was curiously unwise in his selection of his son Commodus as his successor.  Commodus was narcissistic and perverse, and his reign began a period of social instability and financial collapse lasting more than 100 years.  The Praetorian Guard could be bribed by anyone who really wanted to be emperor; but as soon as money to pay the legions ran out, so did the emperor's time in office.  The people who had once refused on principle to negotiate with an armed enemy took to paying off the barbarians to leave them alone.  By the time marginally competent leadership emerged once again, it was too late.  Rome had lost its cultural integrity and its ability to convince the world that "Roman" was a good thing.  The Empire was too big to be ruled by one man, and even the barbarians knew it.  It has been fashionable for centuries to blame the Christians for the fall of Rome, but that argument ignores the very obvious trail of internal corruption and self-absorption that is available to any serious student of history.

The American presidential election last Tuesday gave us an extremely clear-cut choice; I see it as a little like choosing between Tiberius and Marcus Aurelius.  And we rejected a decent, capable, intelligent man in favor of a self-absorbed, detached man-child who sends his own thugs out to do his bidding while trying to find himself.  But as long as we get our free birth control and entertainment, about 50.5% of Americans prefer to return the party that feeds us to power.  Granted, there were good leaders after Tiberius and very few after Marcus Aurelius.  Granted, Obama is not the pervert that Tiberius was, and Romney is a Mormon, not a Stoic (both of which have been confused with Christianity in the past, by the way).  A checkpoint has been passed, and we are quite a bit further down the road to chaos.  When the Chinese become the majority shareholders in the American GNP, when Russia demands even more "flexibility," when the true barbarians in the world today demand that we implement Sharia law, will we have enough cultural cohesiveness to stand up to them?  Will we be able to convince them that being American is a good thing?

If you want some analysis more directly related to the election, I enjoyed David Bahnsen's blog post.  For the ominous implications of Obamacare alone, check out this article.  Plenteous opportunities for observing the political circus games can be found on the Drudge Report.  And how about those incredible imperial scandals with the Petraeus Guard, I mean the Praetorian Guard, and the various cherchez-la-femmes associated with them?  Who even lives like that?!  For us plebeians raising kids in non-gated communities, working a dead-end job that barely pays for the gasoline for the commute, it's quite entertaining to see the soap operas unfold.  It keeps our minds off the worry that we will be forced into the bread lines next.