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Article Excerpt
Konnte Caesar wirklich hoffen, seine Zeitgenossen, sogar seine
Standesgenossen auf diese Weise zu beeindrucken? (Claassen 128) [Could Caesar really hope to influence his contemporaries in this way, even those of his own social class?]
I write these words as the United States' armed forces, assembled in and around Kuwait and the borders of Iraq, prepare to carry out an attack on one of the oldest and most admired cities in the world, Baghdad. This attack will almost surely have taken place by the time you read this. I am a U.S. citizen. My political leaders have, against the urging of almost half the citizen population (which was not offered a chance to vote on this question), made a decision to attack a country that has not attacked my country, killing (it is certain) thousands of persons. My leaders tell me that after this other country is attacked, it will be restructured. They tell me that this "other" civilization resents and is jealous of my power and resources. But in order to deserve a share in some of my resources, they say, it must be reorganized in my own civilization's image. For these alien citizens lack certain goods that I (they tell me) have, on account of my civilization's virtues: political and religious freedom, food and water, housing, education, health care, a vehicle, a job, a happy family life. Their people (not their leaders however) have all the simple virtues of my own forefathers, and will prosper so long as they follow the same historical path my society did. I may not, they tell me, directly reach them, give them resources directly, or even seek to reorganize my own society so as to make direct distribution of its resources to those "others" a systematic part of my lifestyle. We are separated, I am told, not only by distance, culture, and language but by time, in essence, for the "other" represents my own society's past existence in the rhetoric of my leaders. The present existence of Iraq's society is deemed of little or no interest by those leaders and the media that report their sayings, for Iraq is a tabula rasa scheduled to be merely the staging area for a replication of my own nation's history.
The reasoning is familiar, even cliche. This is not because it is human nature to reason this way, but because the use by an aggressive imperialist force of this formula for its public reasoning has been overdetermined historically: its political, philosophical and religious underpinnings and heritages combine to make the institutionalized alienation of groups of people within a statist model of the world a powerful rhetorical pose. (1) One cannot seek the roots or origins of this thinking in the ancient Mediterranean world of interlocking cultures and city-states: the social, political, and historical gap is too wide. But it is possible to trace the development within the western Mediterranean of a somewhat similar imperialist argument, projected broadly onto Hellenistic historiography and literature by the "western" Greeks who settled Sicily, south Italy, and some parts of North Africa in the seventh to fourth centuries B.C.E., and borrowed and improved upon by a literate Roman aristocracy in the first century B.C.E. The spread of this argument deserves attention, but not because the argument is profound: it is not. It is interesting because it is aristocratic propaganda aimed at an entire society. It is a way of building group solidarity, by offering one group of humans distance from another group on cultural grounds, while claiming to assimilate the group--that is, one gains the emotional distance necessary for military attack in proportion as one claims the group as one's own. The argument that "they are our past" works consistently in the service of those desiring to control and dominate another group. It obliterates actual group history, both on the side of the dominators and on the side of the dominated. In this paper I will trace the argument through some key passages in works by Cicero, Caesar, and Virgil, showing how its overtly cosmopolitan tones ("we are all one large community" is the corollary, in this argument, to "these people represent simply a version of us") shift with the change in the Roman regime from the expansionist military aristocracy of the late Republic to centralizing military dictatorship under Augustus. Cicero idealizes the Sicilian Greeks as similar to old-fashioned Roman farmers in his speech against a Roman governor in 70 B.C.E., and Caesar similarly attributes to the Gauls super-Roman levels of courage, physical ability, and natural temperament. Both Caesar and Cicero project Roman ideals onto their non-Roman subjects. Cicero goes so far as to envision in De republica a sort of primeval international contract among nations who have willingly consented to be governed by Rome. On the other hand, Virgil, writing under the newly established Augustan regime, imagines early Rome itself--and replaces the solipsistic formulation of Cicero, disturbingly, (2) with a Roman version of what one might call a manifest destiny credo.
Before the Romans came the western Greeks. (3) These explorers, settlers and writers, from among whose ranks rose entire schools of Sicilian historiographers of the western Mediterranean beginning with Ephorus and the formidable Timaeus of Tauromenium, (4) predated and influenced Roman accounts of Mediterranean history profoundly. Now, the Greek Sicilians themselves were colonizers; their historiography reflects that fact. It is not an "opposition" historiography, but one developed during and after Greek/Macedonian expansion into the western Mediterranean. It was designed in part to justify and celebrate that expansion. It is in this context that the "they are our past" argument surfaces and takes on meaning for Roman writers as well as for Greeks. (5) As Walbank remarks, the Greek historiographers of the west imagined Greek heroes such as Heracles and Orestes into the prehistory of their western colonies in order to claim a place as true heirs to the lands of the West: genealogizing, that well-respected Hellenistic strategy, sprang largely from an imperialist motive, and grew in proportion to the need of the literate Greek aristocracy for legitimacy in rulership. How much of Roman imperialist ideology, as it began to be articulated in the late republic, was actually reworked Greek colonialist ideology? (6)
At the same time as Greek philosophy and geography were thriving, (7) in the third century B.C.E., Greek "universal" historians--a new class of history-writers that aimed to encompass no less than the stories of all known human civilizations in their works--also began. We know this in large part because these new "universal" historians were admired, attacked, and imitated: Polybius (a Greek writing about Rome a century afterward) quotes them and cites both Ephorus and Timaeus by name--he admired the former and detested the latter. These histories, like the histories of Alexander that proliferated during the same period, spring from a strong colonizing tradition. Timaeus and his compatriots were concerned to sketch the religious...
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