(Once again we arrive at a Cain Fragment, inserted directly into the text of the Tales of Classical Perversion with incompletions rendered as though metatext and urtext are interchangeable formterms. As none of this Cain Fragment is in prototext we cannot know if the restcorpus was lost or if it was redacted, but there is circumstample evidence that both are true. Perhaps one can enconceptualize a Roman-Jewish philosopher of middling intelligence, analyzing personages from the Catiline Conspiracy in a manner thoroughly unscholarly and overjudgemented; unburdened by factable knowledge of the trial he discusses, but since those mentioned in the document's remains are precisely those which history remembers most vividly, one must conclude that either the writer was of a later century, writing historical commentary as though it were of his present day, or a redactor chose only those passages of a document from the Catiline Era which he thought relevant to scrollreaders of his own day and let the remains disappear.
Let us presuppose, just for an instant, that this were in fact Cain writing to Abel. While the Bible tells us that Cain lived eight-hundred sixty years, he has never lived so long a life as he seems to by the end of this letter, which presupposes that whether or not he is Cain, the writer at the end is in fact the same scribe as at the beginning, and has, in the only instance of the many Cain fragments, lived another seventy years unburdened by death or even by substantial ageing. This is, therefore, a highly unique and highly disputable Cain fragment. The Cain Fragments are almost certainly forgeries, but it is likely that this fragment is a forgery of a forgery. Nevertheless, if this forgery is a forgery of a forgery, then that would indicate that the Cain Fragments were already of note to people in the ancient world, and scribes of different places and eras may have in fact taken it upon themselves to continue the Cain narrative from one generation to the next throughout recorded history at an almost regular instance of roughly seventy years, which is in itself a finding of miraculous proportionality.
Again, one cannot imagidefine one's way into the spirit of a worldview in a world created by the world of two millennia ago, and yet this worldspeech timespeaks to us of how Judeopicureans and symposiers may have societoperceived the sociesoul and civispiritus of Rome in the decade directly before the rise of the Caesars.
Dr. Richard Westenbach - Humboldt University of Berlin - Department of Archeology - 1952)
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 often it deserves to be burned like Jerusalem.
By this lifetime, I'm just the latest in a 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 become house chambermaid then mistress of Romulus himself, until he decided my best decorative use would be on a sacrificial pyre. Two-hundred years later I returned as Flavius Avramus: a contract lawyer who settled a 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 professor of geometry whom Scipio Africanus employed as a tactical advisor during 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 some patrician families need to adopt a banker just to keep having it.
This is what happens when a country gets too much power. Some Romans think Rome's power is the result of a mania for work, others think power has grown Romans lazy. But regardless, Rome is no longer a city or even an empire, Rome is the world, and from here to aeternam, the world shall build on roads Rome paves. For my whole youth (of this lifetime), the defeat of Parthian Empire was the goal to which Rome strove, and from the moment of the recent victory over King Mithridates, Rome's decline will begin.
You'd think decline would make a country less powerful, but no, Rome's too magnum to fail. Every time Rome fails, they simply get more powerful. 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. When Rome falls, people will feel the ramifications millennia later. No country is meant to be this successful, and the more Rome accomplishes, the more accomplishment Romans demand of it, and what half Rome's citizens demand is in direct contradiction to what the other half demands.
Half of Rome demands the government share its wealth among its peoples, while half demands Rome's wealth be hoarded among the wealthiest families - including a large quotient of Rome's poorest inhabitants. Half of Rome demands complete bodily liberation, the right to sleep with any type of person, the right to live as any gender, the right to consume any type of drug, while half believes such liberation breaks the bonds of Roman family, and demands the violent policing of Roman virtues like fidelity and temperance with severe penalties for those who violate them. Yet the half who believes in fidelity and temperance is the half that particularly exults in vicious spectacles like executions and tributes and gladiatorial ga...
(Here the narrative breaks off as the author lists his clearly copious complaints about living in the world's most prosperous city. The narrative only resumes when speaking of the subject occupying everyone's mind in the very year when the Parthian King Mithridates was finally defeated. - RW)
...me sets itself up for greater defeats with every passing victory. To conquer pirates and Parthia, Pompey needed every available soldier at Rome's command united under a single officer. With the growth of our armed forces grow a growth in armaments, and apparently Romans' privately held armaments are of an even larger quantity than anything possessed by our exceedingly forceful army and police.
Meanwhile the Gauls amass on our border in quantities greater and greater and greater, fearful of what we may do to them and potentially eager for revenge on what we've already done - a threat which perhaps could be neutralized if Rome limited its sphere of influence, but of course, Rome never would -because its ambition is to make the whole world into Rome. Eventually, Rome will grow so powerful that even her greatest victories are defea...
(Given that past here, the fabricator begins to discuss current events, this is presumably where the author would compare the Rome of BC 60s to the Rome of BC 80s when Sulla was dictator, when Rome was in far worse straights than it seemed during the Catiline Conspiracy. This scribe seems to paint an overly flattering picture of Roman freedom, because what the extant parts of this narrative fail to mention is how, in the four hundred fifty years before Julius Caesar, Rome's republic voted to grant temporary dictatorial powers to no less than ninety-six consuls. - RW)
...tiline, 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, what can you say except that when one looks at the trumpery of men like Catiline, you'd think man formed from monkeys rather than ribs. If such a serpentine sponge of feces rises so high, is there a sewer into which Rome cannot sink? Has power made Romans the stupidest people on earth? Was Rome blessed by Him out of pity because Romans were already this stupid? Or will the naivete which unbridled Rome to reach achievement's highest peak create its downfall just as easily?
But whatever stupidity guided Catiline to such heights, the fact is clear as day: he was 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 ever bitten. That stinking trash had neither money nor legions nor brains to organize his own rebellion, and even were that public toilet 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 cow flatulence orchestrated such a breathtaking conspiracy of his own accord, all these potens look oh so closely at the lessons 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 a bureaucrat under their patronage. Had the 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 dictator...
(There is a further break here for which one cannot even surmise the nature of the missing paragraphs. It is almost as though the writer could not formulate a transition. - RW)
...st 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 comforting 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 all this?
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 - every one, when gridlock freezes all actions in a kingdom 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 compounds in his personal chemistry set.
Inevitably, some small event sets dynamic elements in motion again, and in such a frustrated place, mere gusts of wind may set off explosions that cause entire countries to live in abyss and amiss, maelstroms overcome only by darkness on the face of the deep - the imposition of a human dictator who rules his land as though vicar to both God and Sa...
(Presumably the Cain forger-within-a-forger now elucidated what he thought was a terribly interesting theory of how dictatorship is imposed over chaos and authority is chaos's inevitable result. Such theories would be familiar to any ancient reader possessing a cursory familiarity with Plato's Republic. No doubt, the writer fancied himself quite familiar with it in spite of being reading it only cursorily. - RW)
....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....
(another element which tells us that this Cain fragment may be a particularly ill-done forgery is that, on close inspection, wherever an old paragraph leaves off, the next paragraph resumes with the exact letter which was the next of what we must presume the former word would have been - a feature which I have been at great pains to translate precisely into all the various European languages in which this edition prints. If this Cain fragment is, as I could not more strongly suspect, a forgery from at least 300 years later, then it is a trick designed to orient the reader so that he might feel some sense of continuity between passages that have none. - RW)
...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...
(It is probably impossible to know in what follows whether or not the fabricator views Caesar or his actions with approval or censure. He clearly looks upon him with an awe he does not have for any other politician of his era. - RW)
...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. This machine is the most beloved man in Rome, known for being Rome's most tireless administrator and advocate for its people, but that's exactlywhat he isn't. He's just a general who knows nothing but war nor wishes to learn. Some 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. Pompey Magnus is precisely that old sort of Middle Eastern adventurer who never gives thought to his subjects after he conquers them; he simply lusts to conquer. He trains giant mechanisms to conquer then disbands them before they can help rebuild the societies he destroyed. He gets credit in Rome for basically leaving the East to self-governorship, but what makes Pompey's reputation so effective is that he leaves his conquered territories so chaotic that they kill themselves while he moves on to his next glory, and there are so few Romans in the conquered territories that Rome has no idea about the casualties inflicted by Rome's unregulated proxy kings.
A lot of senators claim that would Rome have a dictator, Pompey would easily be the best as being reliable and trustworthy, and most importantly, too libertarian to state fund ambitious building and employment projects like Caesar's proposals. But Pompey will never be a dictator nor would he hold power because a true dictator provides the one thing Pompey never does: authority. Were Pompey to rule Rome she would be left to the same chaos as the entire Middle East. 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 Cicero because in pointing out the greatness of Roman virtue, he holds the mirror up to how everyone fails to live by it but him; therefore they call him a Rome-hater rather than the man who loves its virtues beyond Rome's deserts. The very Romans he champions call him smug and arrogant, they carry on about the circumstances of his birth, they call him a supercilious snob; 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 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 extols virtues no Roman has.
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's 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. Virtuous 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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...o is hardly the most dangerous man in Rome so long as Cato the Younger lives. A man of impeccable virtue is as rare as a peaceable Roman, and the one virtuous man in Rome is her most lethal. They call him a reactionary but reactionary or revolutionary, it's all the same isn't it? The fanatics are always the best, most virtuous people and their trustworthiness ends up killing us all. When virtuous beliefs are as simple as Cato's stoicism, the believers secretly operate in a state of rage because, of course, no society can be worthy of a man like Cato who devotes every waking moment to his zealot zen. The austerity of his belief taps into the unarticulated rage of the populi because he shows that it's possible for powerful men to live righteously. It gives some of them a hero and casts everyone else in the role of villains. The passion of Cato's following will terrify Rome into a dictator's hands and destroy everything Cato means to create. If or when Rome acquires a lifetime dictator, it will be Cato's insistence on stoical justice that pushes him ther...
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