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), the world is now divided between Optimates and Populares. All it takes to destroy a civilization is dwell within it at an 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 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 of them 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 hate each other, and yet the most recent machinations would seem to show they're in allianace and I have no doubt they went to Cicero to complete a triumverate of Rome's most powerful men, but Cicero knows too much. He knows that such an alliance can only end with one member having eliminated the other two. There is a small chance that by staying out, he will enable Pompey and Crassus to kill each other and restore Rome to the republican virtues he claimed it's always had. And 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 Pompey and Crassus will be any better than those who came before them?
In any event, it is more likely though 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 into a dictatorship overnight and half the population wouldn't realize it 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 their deserved station, should they offer meaningful insights on how to improve the state of things. Rome's model was so superior to any other provided that should Rome now become just another tyranical 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 has 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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...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. They say he will be a better dictator than others for 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 poetry worthy of the Psalmist, yet millions resent him; because by pointing out the greatness of Roman virtue, he holds the mirror up to how they all fail to live it, and therefore they call him a Rome-hater rather than the man who clearly loves it best. 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; and whether any of their accusations are true is immaterial. The more judiciously he conducts the investigation into Catiline, the more his investigation seems to Romans a show trial; the more evidence Cicero turns up, the more they call his evidence manufactured. Cicero might very well be the assinus arrogans gossip claims he is, but he could act as saintly as Hestia and people would still think he views them as his inferiors precisely because he's a saint. People hate those who achieve what they can't, and it is by virtue both of Cicero's intelligence and the intelligence of his virtue that inferiors so hate him, the very people whose welfare he would raise as close as possible to being his equal. And perhaps they're right...
Cicero is surely not the criminal Pompey or Crassus is, but he is the sort of willful naif who enables blood by preventing it.
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 virtuous liberality of Cicero to the libertinism of Crassus. And one day, the oratory of men like Cicero will be the banner of murder just as bloody as those he speaks against. 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.
He clearly means to rule as absolutely as no Pharaoh ever could, but one of the single most impressive pieces of oratory I've ever heard in all these years was procliamed in a speech not by Cicero or Cato, but by Caesar: "Honors must be provided to the strongest but necessities provided to the weakest." The words of a man who means dominate like a colossus, but also create and provide. If Roman democracy is gone forever, then Rome needs a Pharaoh with the softest heart and the hardest head.
Caesar, who started his life just as another rich debauched, then sowed his wild oats as
The key in politics is to always appear the solution to problems you deliberately cause.
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How am I supposed to help that which Hashem clearly means for me to perceive as foreordained?
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