Viswanathan K's Thoughts

There’s this blogger who goes by the moniker Southern Punk. Recently, he (she?) wrote a thought-provoking post titled “Why does Rome keep showing up?” . As American power (hard and soft) seems to be on the decline, more and more parallels to the slow decline of Rome are common.   He then brings up that famous Roman phrase, “Bread and circuses”. “Most people think it means entertainment. It doesn't. Not exactly. The bread kept people fed. The circus kept people occupied. The point wasn't the games themselves. The point was attention .”   Attention. Nowadays, the US government “seems to communicate through spectacle” only . “I don't remember a time when everything felt this performative… Sometimes it feels like we're living inside a never-ending competition for screen time.” He contrasts that with how things used to be. Once upon a time. “I miss the idea that government was supposed to be boring. Boring meant people were working. Boring meant budgets were...

A fter the Vatican visit, the next day was all about going around in Rome. Starting with a guided tour of the Colosseum. Our guide asked us to guess how long it took to construct the Colosseum. The answer was surprising: just 10 years. It takes longer today to build a metro station in Rome today, she joked. Rome may not have been built in a day, but it sure wasn’t built at a crawling pace either. Jokes aside, our guide acknowledged that was possible because they used slave labour back then.   The underground system below the arena that housed the wild animals and gladiators with its many holding areas and passageways is open and visible. This guide too was an archaeologist (like the one at the Vatican), which explained why she was so keen to convey the reality of the Colosseum, not the nonsense that Hollywood peddles, she said contemptuously.   Yes, it was all bread and circus, something to keep the masses entertained. No, gladiators did not fight to the death. Sure, ...

In most cultures, the eldest son was the heir to the throne. Rome wasn’t like most cultures, as Mary Beard points out in SPQR : “There was no presumption in Roman law that the firstborn son would be the sole or principal heir.” Instead, what decided the successor was cold realpolitik: “A successful claim to power also rested on behind-the-scene manoeuvres, on the support of key interest groups, on being groomed for the part and on the careful manipulation of opinion. It also depended on being in the right place at the right time.”   So what happened if a Roman emperor didn’t have any living heirs? Or they turned out to be incompetent? Or if the emperor didn’t like his children? The most common solution was: adoption!   But no, Romans didn’t adopt a baby in such cases. Why not? For one, infant mortality rates were high, so who knew if the baby would survive into adulthood? Secondly, even if it did survive, who knew if it would grow up to be competent or still be i...

Moral justification. Even Roman emperors craved it if their predecessor was assassinated. Even back then, the new emperor didn’t want to be seen as a power-hungry murderer. And so, as Mary Beard muses in SPQR , one never knows what the truth was in Roman history: “(The previous emperor) may have been assassinated because he was a monster, but it is equally possible that he was made into a monster because he was assassinated.”   This is a pattern that continues even today: “The basic rule of Roman history is that those who were assassinated were… demonised. Those who died in their beds, succeeded by a son and heir, natural or adopted, were praised as generous and avuncular characters.”   Every contender couches his reasons behind ideals (“Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more”, said Brutus). Yet killing a dictator rarely achieves the change its proponents hope for: “What came to be seen as a war between liberty and one-man rule was really a war ...

As Rome began to expand and the empire became larger and larger, it sowed the seed for newer problems, writes Mary Beard in SPQR . Transportation and communication systems being what they were in that age, it meant that moving troops and information across the vast expanse of the empire took far too long.   At times of war, or when a rebellion had to be put down, there was simply no time to wait for instructions, troops or money from Headquarters (i.e., Rome): “The demands of defending, policing and sometimes extending the empire encouraged, or compelled, the Romans to hand over enormous financial and military resources to individual commanders for years on end, in a way that challenged the traditional structures of the state.” It was almost inevitable that at one point or the other, a super-successful general like Pompey and Julius Caesar would come to be. Their enormous success brought them wealth and influence. It also made them a lot of enemies. It was such enemies, bot...

We crave for origin stories. A story that makes things seem destined. A story that assigns a greater purpose to things. Ancient Rome, once it began to be successful, was no different. The foundation story of Rome dates it to 753 BC, writes Mary Beard in SPQR . It even got narrowed down to a specific date - 21 April. That’s the date modern Romans still celebrate as the birthday of their city “with some tacky parades and mock gladiatorial spectacles”.   Rome’s foundation story starts with a man called Romulus. Did the founder really start off Rome? Or was the founder an “imaginative construction out of ‘Roma’”? Probably the latter, says Beard, since one can find a “shifting and sometimes self-contradictory amalgam” of stories around the man and his time, “constantly adjusted in the telling and retelling to changing circumstances and audiences”: “(The Romans had not) inherited the priorities and concerns of their founder. Quite the reverse… (the people had) constructed and recon...

While reading Mary Beard’s SPQR on ancient Rome, I was struck by how almost all of Rome’s problems and solutions to the problem called governance are still there even today. In 2,000 years, have we solved and improved nothing?   Within 2 centuries of its founding, Rome had (unbelievably) gotten rid of not just a particular king, but the very idea of a king itself. Monarchy was replaced by “liberty” and the “free Republic of Rome”. Here’s how Rome defined a Republic: “Two central tenets of Republican government were that office holding should always be temporary and that, except in emergencies when one man might need to take control for a short while, power should always be shared.” The dislike towards the idea of a king was deeply entrenched: “To be accused of wanting to be rex (king) was a political death sentence for any Roman; and no Roman emperor would ever countenance being called a king, even though some cynical observers wondered what the difference was.” Even J...

Given how similar modern day democracies are to ancient Rome in their power sharing structures, elections, and term limits, it’s not surprising that Tom Holland writes in his wonderful book, Rubicon : “We flatter ourselves, in the democracies of the West, as if we trace our roots back to Athens alone. We are, for better as well as ill, the heirs of the Roman Republic.”   Rome itself was extremely functional. Why then did they care about prophecies? “The Romans, being a people as practical as they were devout, had no patience for fatalism. They were interested in knowing the future only because they believed that it could then better be kept at bay.”   The Romans’ admiration for ancient Greece was mixed with contempt: “While the cities of ancient Greece were regularly shattered by civil wars and revolutions, Rome proved herself impervious to such disasters. Not once, despite all the social upheavals of the Republic’s first century of existence, had the blood of he...

After Sulla, it was Julius Caesar who seized power in Rome. I wrote on that a few years back here and here . Tom Holland’s Rubicon has an excellent account on what happened next. Remember, Caesar himself had never declared himself a king, just “dictator for life” (Now you know where Calvin got that phrase!). That may sound like wordplay, but Caesar didn’t want to provoke a backlash: “Caesar knew that the Romans would never tolerate a King Julius.”   Besides, his experiences in the East and Egypt had taught him something else: “The forms taken by greatness were relative, varying from nation to nation.” Kings, pharaohs, dictators – those were just forms of power: “What mattered was not the form but the reality of power.” Just to be sure, Caesar tested the Roman waters anyway: “(Caesar) ostentatiously (and publicly) refused (Mark) Antony’s offer of a crown.” Antony repeated the offer publicly again and Caesar turned it down again. Firmly. That’s what Shakespeare ta...

The year was 89 BC. General Sulla had put down a rebellion in the Roman province of Campania. The war hero came back to Rome and become counsel. He intended to use his consulship to “serve as the ticket to an even juicier prize”, writes Tom Holland in Rubicon . And what might that prize be? Command of the war over Mithridates, a rebel king on the eastern end of the Roman empire. Another war with the prospect of great riches and popularity...   But the Senate, as always, was a snake pit. Sulla, who got the Mithridatic command, joined his troops at the end of his consulship. Even before the war started, he found himself relieved of his post by the Senate! But the Senate had miscalculated: they’d driven Sulla “into a corner where there were six battle-hardened legions ready at hand”. They’d taken it for granted that Sulla wouldn’t do the unthinkable, namely use the Roman army as his private militia.   From Sulla’s perspective, he was justified. How could the Senate arbitr...

(Ancient) Rome was unique. It didn’t have a king. Instead, it had a power sharing system with (1) a Senate for the upper classes, (2) another body for the lower classes (plebians) with lesser powers, (3) 2 counsels (heads of government) elected for a period of 1 year who then had to leave Rome on some assignment (this was to ensure the two most powerful men in Rome didn’t get to stay in town beyond their tenure), and (4) the provision to appointment a dictator in times of emergencies, but only for the duration of the emergency .   If you’re wondering why they had 2 counsels, it was for each to act as a check against the other becoming too powerful. Distribution of power, checks and balances, limited tenures, elections. Reminds one of modern-day governance systems, right? That is why Tom Holland says in his wonderful book, Rubicon : “We flatter ourselves, in the democracies of the West, as if we trace our roots back to Athens alone. We are, for better as well as ill, the heirs...

The common man today thinks that the democratic form of government he has comes from the Greeks. Wrong! Sure, the Greeks, as usual, were good with ideas in philosophy and yes, about democracy. But, as with all matters practical, the Greeks never solved the messiness of democracy problem. The ones who did solve that problem best were the Romans. I’ll just repeat the description of Rome’s solution from an earlier blog : “Their solution? To form a republic. It was a trial and error system of government that evolved with time and events: -          They create a body of aristocrats called the Senate. The Senate, however, could not pass laws and had no legal powers. Instead, all adult male citizens voted in the assemblies for the passing of bills. But, of course, the money of the aristocrats still wielded influence. -          From amongst the senators, two were elected as “consuls”, not by the ...

Refer to my previous blog for the backdrop to what follows, taken from Simon Baker’s Ancient Rome . Pompey the Great was a general whose military brilliance was there to see during his campaigns. He appointed kings here, and struck peace treaties there. Upon his return to Rome, the Senate was terrified: would he and his army seize absolute power? But Pompey had no such ambition. He disbanded his army; but he asked the Senate to ratify the treaties he had signed; and that his soldiers be awarded plots of land. The Senate was in a quandary: “To agree to these terms would be to acknowledge the preeminence of Pompey in the republic. It would confirm that he had won the personal loyalty both of the Roman army and of kings, potentates and peoples in the east.” So they stalled and avoided making a decision. Pompey and his disbanded army were bitter. The decision to not make a decision would haunt the senators soon. Julius Caesar, a high born senator, was a “suave and debonair p...

Ancient Rome by Simon Baker is a history book written like a thriller. It leads me to say something nobody ever says about a history book: it’s a page turner! Rome, from the time of its foundation, hated the idea of being dominated by one man rule. Their solution? To form a republic. It was a trial and error system of government that evolved with time and events: -          They create a body of aristocrats called the Senate. The Senate, however, could not pass laws and had no legal powers. Instead, all adult male citizens voted in the assemblies for the passing of bills. But, of course, the money of the aristocrats still wielded influence. -          From amongst the senators, two were elected as “consuls”, not by the people, but by the senators themselves. The two consuls would have the power of a king. But just for one year, after which they returned to the Senate. Why two of them? So one could...