The Parallel Lives

Recognizable quotes on the ancient Romans: “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” “All roads lead to Rome.” “Rome was not built in a day.” Caesar Augustus boasted, “I found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble.”     

     The poet Virgil observed, “So vast a toil it was to found the State of Rome.”

     In ancient times, the city of Rome astonished everyone. The Pantheon, the Colosseum, the Circus Maximus, the Forum, the Temple of Vespasian, the Palace of the Caesars on the Palatine, the tens of thousands of statues. All these and countless more amazed the ancient world. 

     A 20th-century historian, Frank Richard Cowell, wrote, “The vast metropolis of Rome from the first century A.D. onwards was more splendid than anything that had been seen on earth before or has since been seen. Building and rebuilding always went on.”

     Mary Beard, a 21st-century British historian, published in 2015 a book on ancient Rome that she entitled “SPQR,” meaning “The Senate and People of Rome.” 

     Of the city of Rome, she wrote, “a sprawling imperial metropolis of more than a million inhabitants,” and “a mixture of luxury and filth, liberty and exploitation, civic pride, and murderous civil war.”

     The Roman Republic swallowed much of Europe, the Middle East, and Northern Africa. The Empire then ruled the conquered lands and people by two axioms: keep the peace and pay taxes. 

     Otherwise, a conquered people could live as before. They kept their language, their laws, their religion, their coins, and their customs, but they had to keep the peace and pay taxes to Rome.

     “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.”

     Should a conquered people rebel or refuse to pay taxes, Roman armies would appear in an instant and slaughter, or decimate, the people in a most shocking and brutal manner.

     Yet, allegiance to Rome ensured that a conquered people received a multitude of benefits.

     In 1979, an English comedy acting group, known as Monty Python, produced a film entitled, “Life of Brian.” The film tells of Brian Cohen, a young man living in Judea in the first century.

     In one scene, a gang of thugs are planning an assassination upon a Roman official, Pontius Pilate, when the gang’s leader asks his fellow thugs, “What have the Romans ever given to us?”  

     In the movie’s scene, the thugs think about all of Rome’s gifts to them, and they answer: “the aqueduct, sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, public health.”

     The gang’s leader, played by John Cleese, then asks, “All right, apart from sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, fresh water, public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?” One thug answers, “brought peace.”

     Indeed, Pax Romana or Roman Peace lasted for 200 years, from 27 BC, with the reign of Caesar Augustus, until180 AD, with the Stoic emperor, Marcus Aurelius. Over those 200 years, the Roman empire was for the most part free of conflict, battles, and civil wars. 

     “Unprecedented economic prosperity” spread throughout the Empire during Pax Romana.

     An 18th-century British historian named Edward Gibbon wrote a massive three-volume work between 1776 to 1788, entitled “The History of the Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire.” 

      In Gibbon’s first sentence, he wrote, “In the second century of the Christian era, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind.”

     A lad who grew up in 16th-century England named William Shakespeare loved the stories of the ancient Romans. Hence, he wrote two plays, “Julius Caesar,” and “Antony and Cleopatra.”

     A favorite quote of mine from Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar.” Prior to a battle on the plains of Phillipi, Brutus wonders aloud, “O that a man might know the end of this day’s business ere it come! But it sufficeth that the day will end, And then the end is known.”

     Next time in these pages: more on Mary Beard and her 2023 book, “Emperor of Rome.”