'Then ’twas the Roman, Now ’tis I'

“Contempt for the past is an inbuilt feature of modernity, its preoccupation with change and the future, its determination to be new and different, its deep intolerance (in President Obama’s revealing words) of those who stand ‘against the tide of history’.” 

I’ve written before about Nicholas Tate’s Seven Books That Everyone Once Read and No One Now Does, published last year by Ludovika University Press in Budapest, Hungary. Now I have a copy of the book and have finished reading it. For those of us who read, who value the great books of our precursors, it serves as a tonic, a reminder of what the culture has lost but also what individuals can preserve. The sentence cited above is taken from near the conclusion of the book, the section despairingly titled “For the First Time in History, the Past is ‘Dead and Silent.’”  

 

A quality that distinguishes our age from earlier periods is this drive to extinguish the past. A theme I have often addressed at Anecdotal Evidence is the impossibility of originality. Even those most vehemently stricken with “presentism” are nothing new. Without a million anonymous forebears, they would not exist, nor would we. I’m not convinced it’s possible to write good prose or poetry without reference to some earlier work, consciously or otherwise. Guy Davenport once put it to me more bluntly: every book is a reply to an already existing volume. Tate continues:

 

“The last half-century, with its identity politics and the increasing dominance of a left liberal pensée unique, has further intensified this attitude towards the past as a result of the West’s self-flagellation over its historical record in relation to its former colonial subjects, women, sexual minorities, and other minority groups. Although this has helpfully revised the historical record, it has left us with an image of the past as the site of oppression, discrimination, and trauma and encouraged the idea that one studies or teaches about the past mainly to wag one’s finger at it for the disgraceful ways in which it failed to conform to current liberal values.”

 

Believers in such creeds are characterized by naïveté about human nature. As Evelyn Waugh put it in Robbery Under Law: The Mexican Object-Lesson (1939): “Barbarism is never finally defeated; given propitious circumstances, men and women who seem quite orderly, will commit every conceivable atrocity.” They also fail to appreciate what is best about our species. One of the authors of Tate’s seven books is Edward Gibbon. In Vol. I, Chap. 3, “Of the Constitution of the Roman Empire, in the Age of the Antonines” in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, he writes: “History is indeed little more than the register of crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.”

 

Gibbon is describing the reign of Antoninus Pius, emperor of Rome from 138 to 161. He was the adoptive son of Hadrian and in turn adopted Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, who succeeded him as co-emperors. The irony of Gibbon’s bleakly clear-eyed view of human history is that it comes in the context of his praise for Antoninus, one of the “Five Good Emperors.” Here is the context:

 

“Antoninus diffused order and tranquility over the greatest part of the earth. His reign is marked by the rare advantage of furnishing very few materials for history; which is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.”

 

Humanity is infinitely more complex than the simple-minded deniers of history would have it. Here are Gibbon’s subsequent sentences: “In private life, he was an amiable, as well as a good man. The native simplicity of his virtue was a stranger to vanity or affectation. He enjoyed, with moderation, the conveniencies of his fortune, and the innocent pleasures of society; and the benevolence of his soul displayed itself in a cheerful serenity of temper.”

 

A.E. Housman died ninety years ago today, on April 30, 1936, at age seventy-seven. The poet was a classical scholar who edited Juvenal, Lucan and Propertius, and is famous for his five-volume critical edition of the minor Roman poet Manilius’ Astronomicon. Here is Housman’s Poem XXXI from A Shropshire Lad (1896), “On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble”: “Then ’twas the Roman, now ’tis I.”