Batiatus (played with cunning cruelty by John Hanna) and his wife Lucretia (played with venomous vigor by Lucy Lawless), would like to be the Macbeth and Lady Macbeth of the Late Roman Republic: rising past their current station to real political power and prominence. They are not above using murder, blackmail, kidnapping, and turning their lanista into a very discrete brothel for the Roman upper classes to achieve their ends. They first use their slaves, then their friends, and finally those they were initially trying to impress, in an attempt to achieve their goals. Batiatus and his wife repay every slight, real or imagined, in blood or blackmail. Every seeming favor has a secret intent behind it: in the form of an expected many-fold repayment, or the favor of the House of Batiatus being taken away at the last second, through no (apparent) fault of this conniving pair.
Never has the banality of evil been so wonderfully represented.
My fascination with the Roman Republic has always been as the warning it presented to America, a lesson to be learned, never as an example to be emulated. With rare exceptions of individuals such as Tiberius and Gaius Sempronius Gracchus, or Gaius Licinius Macer, there is no good role model among the Romans that presents themselves out of the history from that time. These men demonstrated a very rare personal courage when opposing the machinations of Rome's optimate (One Percent) oligarchs, and all of them died opposing the destruction of Roman citizens' rights.
Rome was an oligarchic republic. I have had people--primarily libertarians--write me to say that an oligarchy cannot be a republic. And yet, when you look at most republics in history, they are oligarchies. A republic is a nation which, through its constitution, establishes a set of rights for the citizens of that nation. John Locke, in his Second Treatise on Government, stated that those rights were life, liberty and property. And if John Adams had his way, those words, rather than "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness," would have been the statement of unalienable rights in the Declaration of Independence, and America would be an oligarchic republic, not a democratic one.
But Thomas Jefferson was the author, and the words of our immortal Declaration were "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness." Both Alexander Hamilton and John Adams did all that they could to steer the United States towards an oligarchy, headed by a hereditary aristocracy. The "Revolution of 1800," when Jefferson was elected President, put an end to that nonsense, at least for a time. But the wealthy and moneylenders have never completely surrendered their desire for an oligarchy.
The dominance of property over human beings in American law, including the recognition of corporations as persons under the law--up to and including the 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. FEC--has been at the heart of the oligarchs' attempts to subvert our democratic republic since our nation's founding.
The exaltation of property over human beings in law is as old as civilization itself. A system of law, without compassion for our fellow humans, whose primary concern is for things, not people, is far easier to administer than a system whose first concern is for the people affected by that law. Victor Hugo's classic Les Misà ©rables, where Jean Valjean is hunted by the law for years--after stealing a loaf of bread when he is hungry--is the ultimate example of the wrongness of a system that puts things ahead of the needs of people.
Ayn Rand--with her concept of producers and parasites--would have found the Late Roman Republic to be a world very much to her taste, which shows why she was a very poor historian, and no friend of real universal human freedom.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
2
1
1
