My Dearest Abel,
It is your brother again, now named Flavius Iacobus, reporting to you live from Rome, the latest in a long series of eternal capitals. Unlike all those others, this one seems to stay put no matter how many times it deserves to be burned like Jerusalem.
By this lifetime, I'm just the latest in a long series of Jews born to Rome. First I was just Flavia-bat-Yehuda, born in Central Italy to Israelite immigrants who fled the Assyria's destruction of Israel's Northern Kingdom. I was handmaiden to a Sabine women who witnessed the famed rape then shared their fate; only to became house chambermaid then mistress of Romulus himself, until he decided my best decorative use would be on a pyre of human sacrifice. After two-hundred years I returned as Flavius Avramus: a contract lawyer who settled a long dispute between Plebians and Patricians by writing them a simple constitution. The Roman decemvirate told me it was so good Rome was going to adapt it as their founding document, then the decemvirate buried me alive. Three hundred years later I returned to Rome as Flavius Isakus, a mathematician Scipio Africanus employed as a tactical advisor in the Second Punic War. Scipio had me crucified after the Battle of Cannae. There were 70,000 Roman casualties that day, all because Scipio thought I told him to attack the right bank but I said to attack FROM the right bank. Now I'm Flavius Iacobus - a Roman banker born Yaakov de Sabatus, adopted into the Flavians for having repeatedly paid off the orgy debts of six separate heirs. You'd think nobody is horny enough to spend that kind of money on sex, but Romans spend so much on sex these days that they decided they need a banker in the family just to keep having it.
This is what happens when a country gets too much power. Rome is no longer a city or even an empire, Rome is the world, and from here to aeternam, the world will build on the roads Rome paves. For the first half of this particular life, the defeat of Parthian Empire was the goal to which Rome strove, and from the moment of victory over King Mithridates, Rome's decline began.
You'd think decline would make a country less powerful, but no, they're too magnum to fail. Every time Rome fercocks something, they just get more powerful. No country is meant to be like this. Romans are such great builders, but no engineering feat can govern an empire of 60 million. And no building can make livable this capital of a million inhabitants. The more Rome accomplishes, the more accomplishment Romans demand of it, and even the greatest state on earth could not achieve what Rome's citizens demand of it.
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...Catiline, that family-defiling bucco of a conspirator whose debauched hair could serve as its own battle helmet. If I'm still alive then killing your brother is more common a sin than it seems; but deflowering your daughter, sealing a conspiracy with a human sacrifice he ate, this is not the work a civ...
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...as just bait to measure how many fish would bite at a dictator. They say a fisherman once stung will be wiser, but news now travels so quickly through the world's forums that a million fish can share your corpse before you realize you were bitten by even one. That tramas putidas had neither money nor legions nor brains to organize his own rebellion, and even were that sterculinum publicum to be dictator, there was clearly a puppetmaster to whose questions he provided every answer. The feeling of many here is that it's King Pharnaces of Pontus, eager to avenge the Parthian defeat and willing to infiltrate Rome from the inside. As implausible as it seemed prima facie, evidence is overwhelming of at least some Parthians colluding with Catiline. But my feeling is that even if Catiline had Parthian handlers, there had to be collusion within Rome's most powerful interests as well. Was it people from Crassus's camp, did it come from Pompey's, was it Caesar's? Was it all three? Or was it a different puppetmaster abroad? Perhaps it was King Antipater but that's too tempting a leap: everyone loves to blame Judeans for things they don't do.
But even were there no conspirator behind Catiline, even if such a vacca ac nebulo orchestrated such a breathtaking conspiracy of his own accord, all these potens are looking oh so closely at the example of the Catiline Conspiracy, testing its data, formulating precisely where it went wrong and documenting every way it went right. Rome claims to be a republic but even now it's basically run by three or four families and everybody else is just a bureaucrat under their patronage. Had the Roman Republic hope of survival before Catiline, there is no hope now. Were I to die a natural death, I would live to see Rome a perpetual dictatorship. And doubtless the Holy One BBH views it as my duty to steer Rome to choose the least bloody option. God forbid Hashem do this by making me something more powerful than a Roman J...
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....ust as the world once was divided between Rehovam and Yerovam, or Menelaus and Paris, (or Cain and Abel), you would think the world would have better options than its current neat division between the priggish Optimates and the vulgar Populares. All it takes to destroy a civilization is dwell within the indisputable apogee of its progress and watch helplessly as the societal organism vivisects itself into two parities with a neatness as miraculous as an ocean pebble.
How?
Because so great are this great society's newbegotten powers that its citizens believe themselves possessed of their truth like God possesses our truths. They grow accustomed so quickly to powers for which they have neither understanding nor precedent that they think themselves gods. The more accustomed they grow to new conveniences, the more dim their realization that they know as little of the innovations' potential dangers as children, yet they have no parent willing to guide them. And so because the society believes with so little evidence they understand powers of such exponential largesse compared to what they shortly once had, of which they know nothing, the society neatly divides into two parties:
"The Party of More", and "The Party of Less."
The Party of More wants to use their powers to effect enormous change that includes everyone, the Party of Less wants to use these powers to exclude everyone from any change at all. The more the two parties interact with one another, the more they push each other into ever more extreme versions of themselves that cannot abide the idea that their vision of what life is is partial.
And yet each creation remains complete, and in 3700 years, what God has best taught me is that when each person pursues their goal far and hard enough, their goal becomes precisely the opposite of what they initially thought they pursued. Those of the Party of More who wish to share their riches end up attracting so many who wish to benefit that the value of what they share shrinks to the same penury they wish to alleviate - thereby making the Party of More into the Party of Less. Those of the Party of Less who wish to preserve and increase their riches repel so many with what must be done to preserve their wealth that they cause their own downfall with the vileness of their actions - thereby making the Party of Less into the Party of More. Life is a vapor: the flower withers, the grass fades, the world mourns, but He is forever.
How do we know?
Because in every era, these arguments on how to use these powers will eventually have equal means to convince their segment of the populace that their side is the right one, and within a generation of a civilization's celestial apogee, every society reaches a state of absolute parity, when gridlock freezes all actions in this kingdom of heaven on earth where dynamism was so recently the state of everything, until the Holy One BBH decides its time to mix these volatile elements together like we're mere compounds in his personal chemistry set. Inevitably, some small event happens that sets these dynamic elements in motion again, and in such a frustrated place, a mere gust of wind may set off an explosion to cause entire generations to live their lives their after in a land of abyss and amiss, a chaos that only is overcome by the imposition of still more violent tyranny from a human dictator who rules over his land as though vicar to both God and Sa...
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....t are these new powers brought to earth?
It's different in every society. In Sumeria it was writing. In Babylon it was law. In Egypt it was measurement. But in the case of this particularly grandiloquent metropolis, it's their engineering - their capacity to build: housing, plumbing, weapons, tools, roads, roads; roads: roads so strong, so durable, so distant that they pave an entire world, and what once was a world full of small spheres has become a large globe around which men like me may wander an eternity.
Rome's roads brought her wealth beyond what any city ever procured, but since Rome has more work than elsewhere, so there are more workers, more mouths, more noise, more crime, more garbage, more fire. The more is built, the less is secure and the more buildings f....
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...all major politicians in Rome profess to be horrified at the prospect of a Roman dictatorship, yet each seeks it. Those who don't actively seek an eternal throne, like Cato and Cicero, are thrust into that increasingly obsolete party of more whose value is ever more diluted in a society where people already come to expect so much more than they had a mere generation before. Pompey and Crassus are said to detest one another, yet recent machinations show they're in alliance and I have no doubt they went to Cicero to complete a triumvirate of Rome's most powerful men; but Cicero knows too much. He knows such alliances only end with one member eliminating the other two. There is a small chance that by staying out, Pompey and Crassus may kill each other and restore Rome to the republican virtues he claimed it's always had, yet the Roman republic created monsters like Pompey and Crassus, and if Rome stays republic or becomes dictatorship, why should anyone expect that those who follow them act better than those who came before?
In any event, I think it far more likely that one still more authoritarian and canny than the other two will prevail, and we must occasionally allow the devil his due, if a republic allows for death to populate the planet, perhaps only a dictato...
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...Rome so takes its democratic norms for granted that it could turn dictatorship overnight forever and half the population wouldn't for a hundred years. Rome rose because the rest of the world ran itself with mediocre tyrants while Rome's republic allowed certain men ability to rise to the station of their worth. Rome's model was so superior to any other provided that should Rome now become just another tyrannical imperium, what world power could rise to Rome's like station and simultaneously so rise with better means of governing? Perhaps I'd seen Rome's like in the rise of Sumer, but it's been two-thousand years since Rome improved upon Sumer's model. How many thousands of years will it be before we see again the likes of R...
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...assus is the most likeable man in Rome who will converse with any slave as his equal, convinces everyone that he agrees with what they believe, tells business associates and women exactly they want to hear, and like all likeable moderates, the way he cuts corners ideologically is how he cuts professional corners. The man as is corrupt as a rotted fig and rumors persist he was even conspiring with Cataline to lend the new dictator money at an interest that would make Crassus dictator of Rome's dictator.
Crassus still believes he can make himself dictator, but the world of Crassus is the world of likable mediocrities who cut corners and hand out giftbags to guests at the end of an orgy. If Crassus is remembered in thousands of years, it will be as moderate corruptions always are, the mediocre villain in the hagiography of a fanatic.
It is as foil to Spartacus that Crassus will be remembered. Yes, Spartacus was a slave, but as far as slave life goes, Spartacus's was fairly glorious: a highly literate descendent of the Spartaocid Dynasty in the Bosphorus, allowed for years to soldier in the Roman army and even allowed to keep his priestess wife when he became a slave; whom upon becoming slaves used his collegium education to preach to fellow gladiators that colonialism is a particularly Roman invention and that the supposed universality of the Roman system is particularly designed to oppress occupied peoples and indoctrinate them into wanting to be Roman. What did Spartacus do when he wasn't burning his captives? He and his wife were lecturing them about his ideas. Were his ideas right? I never read those collegium treatises and I'm convinced no one else has, but when people explain them to me I can never make sense of that collegium shite, it reminds me too much of all that rabbinical doublethink, but right or wrong though his ideas are, what the fuck did Spartacus know about slavery? I have lived more slave lives than Spartacus and died on more crucifixes, but there would be no privileged pseudo-slave leading the Roman Empire to the cross had the entire empire not been robbed blind by money-mad p...
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...ompey is not a man. He is a machine of murder. He trains giant mechanisms to conquer then disbands them before they can help rebuild the societies he destroyed. A lot of senators claim that would Rome have a dictator, Pompey would be best as being too conservative to support ambitious building and employment projects like Caesar's. Some even call Pompey one of that new type of conservative who believes that by imposing his values elsewhere, Rome will elevate their tribute states rather than the tribute states debasing Rome, but that's all a ruse. He is precisely that old sort of Middle Eastern adventurer and I doubt he gives any thought his new subjects after he conquers them, he simply lusts to conquer. He is the sort of man who believes that Rome will always be great by virtue of being Rome and therefore it matters not a fig how Rome governs. Historical infamy is made from such R...
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...o is precisely the sort of man everyone claims they aspire to be but everyone hates because he achieves it. His oratory defends democracy with prophetic force worthy of Jeremiah, yet millions resent him because by pointing out the greatness of Roman virtue, he holds the mirror up to how everyone but him fails to live by it; therefore they call him a Rome-hater rather than the man who clearly loves it beyond its deserts. They call him smug and arrogant, they carry on about the circumstances of his birth, they call him a snob who thinks himself better than they; but whether any of it is true is immaterial. The more judiciously he conducts the investigation into Catiline, the more it seems to Romans a show trial; the more evidence Cicero turns up, the more they think it manufactured; the bigger a story Catiline's conspiracy becomes, the less Rome cares. Cicero might very well be the assinus arrogans gossip claims he is - surely no one but a bore would signal their virtue so loudly, but he could act as saintly as Hestia and people would still think he views them as his inferiors precisely because he values virtue so highly. But a man of impeccable virtue is as rare as a peacable Roman. The few among the world's truly righteous know it's too hard to remain virtuous to demonstrate one's virtue to the public; and yet the most damning evidence of Cicero's insincerity is how many resent his beneficence. No one worries that Cicero looks down on them, they worry that Cicero is correct to look down on them, and they would rather sabotage the future than improve their own lots, because if Cicero enacted policies that created a world of smarter, better Romans, future generations would look back on our Rome as a city of violent animals.
Cicero is surely not the criminal Pompey or Crassus is, but his willful naivete may be even more dangerous because he enables blood by preventing it. He claims he saved the democratic process, and he's absolutely right, but by clothing republican ideals in such hauteur, he slayed it for the future more thoroughly than a Catiline ever could. He claims he saved the republic from civil war, but by framing the Catiline conspiracy as a battle between democracy and authoritarianism rather than a mediocrity who rose to power from slime, he has condemned Rome to an eternity of civil war.
Already we see how Clodius, who seems to have abused every woman in Rome, turns on Cicero for having spoken out against his misogyny. Once Clodius revealed his true nature, it cost him so little to switch his loyalty from the moral gesticulating of Cicero to the rapacious libertinism of Crassus. Heroic and saintly names like Cicero are always invoked when it's time to kill people for not agreeing with the murderer's concept of vir...
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...ome is full of talented men and still more of men who waste their talent. But Caesar..., I have seen Moses and Romulus, I've seen Theseus and Cyrus, and now I've seen Caesar. This is a man who is everything Alexander the Great was, only with the temperament to survive
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