Mansfield Fox

Law student. Yankees fan. Massive fraggle. Just living the American dream.

Monday, November 29, 2004

Britney Spears: a Julia Caesaris for Any Age

Currently reading: Suetonius' "The Twelve Caesars", the Robert Graves translation. (Hey, it beats doing the reading for class.) I'm up to Tiberius.

It's some interesting stuff. The Romans are so alien, and yet so familiar. The Americans really are the Romans of the modern world: we have the same kind of syncretic/practical civic religion, the same quasi-religious devotion to our constitution and republic (and the same willingness to ignore them when it suits our ends), the same fondness for dangerous sports as a way to prove our virility in an age when most men will never know war or even much manual labor, the same inadvertently-stumbled-into global hegemony.

(I suppose in my analogy the Europeans would be the Greeks, content to smugly savor their refinement and civilization as their power fades into memory. Who, then, are our Carthaginians? The Germans - Morgenthau certainly did want to salt the earth - or the Russians? Is al-Qaeda our Parthia? Latin America our Germania, or Asia? Ho Chi Minh and Viet Nam would be a nice analogue to Arminius in the Teutoberger Forest. Have I possibly taken this metaphor too far?)

The one place where the Roman achievements still really exceed our own is in the creation of "non-traditional" family structures. Perhaps my view is shaded, somewhat, from only reading the lives of the Caesars (monarchs of every age have been fonder of unnatural and serial marriages than their subjects), but the House of Julian seems to have had an inordinate fondness for serial quasi-consanguineous marriage. Augustus' step-son and successor, Tiberius, married his step-sister, Julia. His child by his first marriage, Drusus Minor, married Livilla, daughter of Tiberius' brother Drursus Major, who had in turn married his step-cousin (Antonia Minor, daughter of Mark Anthony and Octavia, sister of Augustus). The fourth emperor, Claudius, was both stepfather and father-in-law to his successor Nero.

Fascinating stuff, though it makes for some cumbersome family trees. I suppose someday we shall rise to their level in this field, too, as we have in all others.