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Ancient & modern

Peter Jones

Wednesday, 30th January 2008

How the Romans set a good exemplum

Augustus himself, determined to shake off the stigma of autocrat, went out of his way to present himself as the regular, pius family man, living in a palace positively humble by Roman standards. This explains his moral legislation, designed to control adultery and encourage marriage and procreation (he instantly banished into exile his daughter Julia when she emerged as the Paris Hilton of her age). It explains his restoration of temples and various ancient Roman rituals. This was the traditional way. Emperor he may have been, but he wanted to present himself first and foremost as the archetype of the ordinary Roman citizen, doing his best to restore from the wreck of the civil wars the ‘golden age’ of the Republic, when Rome under the gods was truly a great nation.

The problem was that the more peace, order and stability became associated with and focused on the personal example of Augustus, the less could dissent be tolerated. As the great historian Tacitus saw, this restoration of the ‘old order’ was all a sham, which came at a great price: that of libertas.

But it worked. The Roman empire in the West lasted (in all) 700 years, in the East over 1,500 years. Romans must have been doing something right, and part of that ‘something’ was tied up with the exemplum of their own immutability, doing things properly, in accordance with tradition. As Gordon Brown stands shivering on his remote Scottish hill-top bleating about ‘vaaaaarlues’ into the howling gale, he may care to reflect how far an agenda of incessant ‘change’ makes any sense.

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