Words&Dirt

“ZEAL WITHOUT PRUDENCE IS LIKE A SHIP ADRIFT. But the lines of the letters were like fine invisible threads and it was only by closing his right eye tight and staring out of the left eye that he could make out the full curves of the capital.”

––A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce, loc. 613

“The more that the economy was glutted with slaves, the more dependent it became on them. Even when the Republic was not at war, this addiction still had to be fed.  The pirates were the most consistent suppliers. At the great free port of Delos it was said that up to ten thousand slaves might be exchanged in a single day. The proceeds of this staggering volume of trade fatted pirate captain and Roman plutocrat alike. To the business lobby, profit talked louder than disrespect.

Many Romans, particularly in the upper reaches of the aristocracy, were naturally appalled by this blot on Rome’s good name. Lucullus was merely the boldest to take a stand against it. But the Senate had long been in bed with the business classes. It was for this reason, perhaps, that the most farsighted critic of the Republic’s hunger for human livestock was not a Roman at all, but a Greek. Posidonius, the philosopher who had celebrated the Republic’s empire as the coming of a universal state, recognized in the monstrous scale of slavery the dark side of his optimistic vision. During his travels he had seen Syrians toiling in Spanish mines, and Gauls in chain gangs on Sicilian estates. He was shocked by the inhuman conditions he had witnessed. Naturally, it never crossed his mind to oppose slavery as an institution. What did horrify him, however, was the brutalizing of millions upon millions and the danger that this posed to all his high hopes for Rome. If the Republic, rather than staying true to the aristocratic ideals that Posidonius so admired, permitted its global mission to be corrupted by big business, then he feared that its empire would degenerate into the free-for-all of anarchy and greed. Rome’s supremacy, rather than heralding a golden age, might portend a universal darkness. Corruption in the Republic threatened to putrefy the world.”

––Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic, by Tom Holland, loc. 2631-43