Return to the Eternal City

When in the XIII century Europe began to awaken from a centuries -old sleep of barbarism, its path to civilization was largely predetermined. Her public institutions, art and architecture, her philosophical thought went back to a single model - the Great Roman Empire, which once extended on three continents.

It was not even a choice, but fate, because the European West was practically cut off from the heritage of ancient Greece, and although Aristotle managed to return in a roundabout way, through Mauritan Spain, the Knowledge of Greek for a long time was the property of scientists, while Latin, no matter how dead, remained a living language, spoken and written. Dante, the first great poet of the West, wrote in Latin, using it paradoxically to protect the literary use of "folk speech". But even in his Italian masterpiece, he chose Virgil, crowned by the king of the poets, and he knew about Homer Dante only by hearing. The great Palladio almost solely founded the architecture of the Renaissance according to Roman patterns, pushing the homegrown Gothic into the past. Kings and emperors in their attempts to unite Europe from the very beginning built Rome of August and Constantine, and this sacred Roman Empire, at the end of the already pure fiction, was resigned only by Napoleon.

American founding fathers, creating a unique state of a new type, now and then turned to the shores of Tiber. The US Constitution has incorporated some details of the state structure of the Republic of Roman described by the Greek historian Polybius. The founders invariably called their state "republic" - not in the modern erased sense of the word, but in the literal Latin, "common cause". The upper house of the parliament was called the Senate, and the building in which this parliament was met was called the Capitol. Everyone who visited the capital of the United States remembers its magnificent Empire, one of the late modifications of the Roman architectural style.

However, from the end of the XVIII century, just when Napoleon swept the ashes of the Holy Roman Empire from the continent, her real predecessor and spiritual inspirer began to gradually lose her parental rights. Europe decided to retroactively change her ancestor, and chose ancient Greece for this role. Michael Lind, the author of the essay in the magazine Wilson Quarterly under the name "The Second Fall of Rome", writes about this with regret, even with nostalgia. I share this nostalgia to some extent.

"The reputation of Roman civilization in the Western world has never been lower than today. It is amazing to what the cultural and political heritage of the Roman Empire was deleted from the collective memory of the United States and other Western states - not only multiculturalists attacking the" Western canon ", but also alleged supporters of traditions that allegedly act in its protection.

This loss of the ancient Romans became the gain of the ancient Greeks. Today, Athens are usually considered a cradle of Western democracy, which would be pretty surprised by the American founding fathers and French Jacobins ... as for the Roman Empire, then they often think about it as an early version of fascist Italy or Nazi Germany of the 20th century - or if the emphasis is on a decline, as a rehearsal of the Weimar Republic. "

At first - a few words about the author. Michael Lind is one of the most noticeable American journalists and political scientists of the young generation, the Washington editor of Harper's magazine and a senior researcher at the New America Foundation. His recently published book "Vietnam: the necessary war" caused a lively discussion in the country, and I may still turn to it in the future.

As for the mentioned article, it is easiest to attribute it to the category of intellectual toys - those that exercise the mind and at the same time do not impose any obligations. Everything, ultimately, depends on the quality of performance. Nevertheless, it is curious to understand why we so radically corrected our collective past, and whether it would be more useful to put everything in place again.

The expulsion of Rome from the spiritual heritage of the West came over the entire spectrum, from art and culture to political thought. Since the 18th century, Europeans, partly on the initiative of Rousseau with his idealized savage, awaken interest in his own ethnic past. He was especially warmed up by the songs of the Celtic Bard of Ossian, allegedly translated by the Scottish writer James MacPherson, but soon exposed as a fake. Among the fans of fictitious Ossian can be called Napoleon, Byron and Pushkin. In Germany, the Grimm brothers collect national folklore, not embarrassed, however, to rule it at their discretion. At the same time, the theoretician of aesthetics and archaeologist Johann Joachim Winkelmann proclaims Greek art by the unsurpassed ideal of perfection, and the enlightener Wilhelm von Humboldt is taking a revolution in the German system of education, translating it from the Latin foundation to Greek. In the second half of the last century, the Humboldt reform covered almost all of Europe.

These trends merged together in the new powerful cultural movement of romanticism. Interest in his own past, albeit idealized, embodied in the tales of the Grimm brothers and the novels of Walter Scott, in the songs of Ossian and the Scandinavian sagas. All these research led to the spiritual ancestors of the Romans, the Greeks, to Homer and Periklu. As for Rome itself, they began to dismiss him dismissively. The ideal has squeezed reality, classicism lost to romance. One of the central works of English poetry of this period is the "Oda to the Greek Urna" by John Kitsa. He live a quarter century earlier, the poem, according to Michael Linda, could well be called "Oda to the Roman Vase." However, a quarter of a century earlier, Kits would have been impossible.

Roman art was subjected to a crushing reduction in the rank. Since Winkelmann once and for all declared the achievements of the Greeks with an unexplored record, their Roman successors were reduced to the status of epigones and mannerists. Supporting epic poets, such as Lucan or Statiy, were almost forgotten, and the once reigning Virgil disappeared into the shadow of the legendary Greek blind. However, Homer soon had to give in to the championship - to the throne, which Dante unconditionally gave to Virgil, romantics erected Dante himself.

Lucius Annene Seneca was considered during the revival of the undeniable master of the genre of tragedy - he was the inspirer of the unprecedented heyday of theatrical creativity in England in the Elizabeth period and a model for Shakespeare. But Shakespeare became the new idol of the romantics, and his ancient mentor was declared a rude amateur, the author of bloody groteses, and contemptuously expelled from all anthologies and university courses.

The route of this escape from the real past can be traced on the fate of a single artist, Lord Byron, who became the brightest symbol, the founding of romanticism. Byron, as I already mentioned, started to the songs of Ossian, and finished his days in Greece, where he went to fight for her liberation from the Turkish yoke. It is characteristic that the real Greece and the Greeks seen upon arrival, Byron despised. He gave his life for Greece Winkelmann.

The United States was in no hurry to catch up in Europe in the field of spirit, and the Humboldt reform did not get there soon. A Latin basis has survived here until the XX century. The poet Allen Tate, a southerner, described the ideal "agrarian" hero of the generation under the collective name "Cicero Cincinat", and the most characteristic of the American South was a gentleman, a short -term clock under the old sugar tree for reading the letters of Ciceron Attica - up to the First World War.

The whole socio-political life of the United States was initially permeated by the spirit of the Roman heritage. I already cited Michael Linda about the current custom to proudly proclaim Athens by the birthplace of democracy. But Athenian democracy aroused a feeling close to disgust among the founding fathers - this was precisely the dictatorship of the crowd, the possibility of which they wanted to exclude in their future state. The principle of separation of power, which was completely absent in Athens, was first formulated by the polybium in the description of the state structure of the Republic of Roman. The founders of the American state, in general, avoided the term "democracy" because of its Greek associations and preferred Roman: "republic"; And this tradition is alive to this day.

Nevertheless, the “second fall of Rome” began in the United States quite early, even in the correspondence of the first presidents of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, where you can find many skeptical words and addressed to the republic that they recently admired, and for centuries, the centuries of the ideal of the state husband, the thinker and the speaker. This discredit, now undoubtedly in favor of Greece, continued the romantics of the typically American school of "transcendentalism" led by Emerson. At the beginning of the new century, the Greeks completely replaced the Romans in the cultural genealogy of Americans.

The second fall of Rome, which Michael Lind writes about, is most noticeable in the political sphere, where his influence was especially noticeable before. In Ciceron, which was once considered a noble victim on the altar of the republic, now tend to see a cowardly cynic; August, which founded the empire for centuries, was endowed with a reputation as a hypocritical tyrant. The very idea of Rome as civilization is compromised, and here, of course, Mussolini and Hitler were attached. The latter was the temperament with a completely typical romantic, but at the same time, like his Italian ally, there was a weakness for Roman classics. Here's what Michael Lind writes about him:

"Hitler, unlike some participants in his movement, did not experience much interest in the culture of the ancient Teutonic barbarians. However, pagan Rome, with his capita, coliseas and boulevards, with triumphal arches, became a model for the new Berlin, this" Germany " - a grandiose and not built the capital of a new European empire. Nazi salute was copied from Rome, but "Ave Caesar" was replaced by "Hail Hitler".

In fact, the Roman Empire, of course, has no more in common with National Socialist Germany than the Roman Republic - with the republics of George Washington and Robespierre. But despite this, the image of Rome, already compromised by generations of propaganda in favor of Greece, was even more disgraced by this association with dictators of the 20th century. "

It is amazing that from the entire Roman heritage, it was the architecture that survived and survived to our time. The attempt of the so -called "Greek Renaissance" at the beginning of the last century caused only hostile bewilderment among the public. The toy and in many respects primitive architecture of temples and porticoes was turned by the Romans into the style of monumental urban development - they were the first to use the real arch, invented concrete, and began to erect domes. The Marquis de Custine, who was mocking in the last century over St. Petersburg - they say, the style of green hills and a bright sky was moved to the polar circle, ”he honored his own ignorance. Petersburg, of course, is the Roman city: it does not play with a landscape, it becomes them.

I can, after the lend, continue this exposure for quite some time, but it's time to look into morality. According to Michael Linda, "hostility towards Roman civilization is a hostility to civilization in general." Those who value not just Western civilization, but civilization as such, should defend the idea of Rome.

I have no objections to such a conclusion, but it involuntarily creates that the author suddenly ended in ink. Too much evidence has been collected, and an indictment is too concise. The author, apparently, simply played enough of his thought and went on. The idea, meanwhile, accepts a serious turn, and breaking it off in a half -mouth.

Western civilization still plays its own game and is not in a hurry to interrupt it. Greece, which was composed by Winkelmann and his romantic followers, was never a real country - just a utopian fiction, grape and masinious paradise, populated athletes, poets and democrats. If Greece was not there, Rousseau would have come up with it.

The real Greeks were, perhaps, the most gifted people in the field of thought and arts. But they were also in a striking degree deprived of precisely those talents that are most significant for civilization. In political and legal terms, they were real children: the whole short history of their independence was a series of fratricidal wars, until the Army Macedanian called for order. Athens, this legendary cradle of democracy, remained an exclusive club, where foreigners were practically closed to foreigners, and where the crowd on their democratic gatherings issued a decision to expel anyone who deviated, morally or mentally, from the arithmetic mean.

The Romans, who were well aware of their spiritual duty to the Greeks, tried to take patronage over them, but ultimately were forced to transfer them to the position of the colony for the difficult to sleep. As for the Romans themselves, we have a lot of evidence, including the testimony of the same polybium, how their civil virtues hit the guests because of the Adriatic. And even if these virtues were in many ways a legend, and subsequently completely disappeared, they formed the basis of the future masterpiece of social creativity - the rule of law.

It is useless to find out whether Homer is really better than Virgil, although in my free time I would talk about it too. But with all the love of art, the Greeks have never learned to see equal to themselves in other peoples - we inherited a wonderful word "barbarians" from them. For the first time, starting with the oldest centuries of his history, Rome introduced the idea of universal and open citizenship, and today in the veins of any European, as well as millions of Africans, Asians and Americans, the blood of citizens of the Great Empire flows. Aristotle, who explained the whole universe, saw in the slave only an animal, a working cattle, while Seneca saw in him equal to himself and any free -born. Today we call this human rights.

Rome is civilization, and Greece, which was dreamed of Goethe and Gölderlin, with her winding nymphs and goat -legged flutists - at best a lifestyle. And here we come close to our own era. What, in fact, is a conversation when the XX century is burning out in the yard, and even a well -educated person will not distinguish Pindar from the Property?

We know that we live in the era of postmodernism, but no one can remember when romanticism has expired. There is a thorough reason for this: it still continues. The Greek substitution of the past from which the Western cultural canon has formed, for a long time and throughout the front, today's multiculturalism, a historical model of political correctness, has been crowded. This model tries to equalize in the rights of everyone who is not quite lucky in real history, and not only Greece, but Rome becomes one line with some Dagoua monarchy. In this list of equal and equivalent civilizations, everyone is opened - it is enough to submit an application and indicate the historical injustice made.

Postmodernism is just a disguise with the term. In fact, we continue the game, begun Winkelmann and Byron, and contrary to reality, we closer in his teeth, we continue to choose the ideal. Lifestyle to us is still more expensive than civilization.

The "classic" romantics, contemporaries of Byron and Kitsa, chose Greek harmony, read "spirituality", preferring its Roman sophistication. But sophistication is the main attribute of civilization, because the arches of laws are not created during Socratic symposia in the portico, and the marble temple on the mountain is not replacing a millionth city with stadiums and libraries, police and fire guards, with sewage and water supply, which the Western world did not know until the end of the 19th century.

Multi -grinding, this rearguard of romanticism, suffered an infection of a romantic ideal from history into morality, believing that national cultures, like human personalities, deserve compensation for an under -groove or taken away in the past, although in paradoxically it affirms the original equality of all such cultures. But states, societies and ethnic groups are not people, and moral codes did not provide for them with inevitable justice. It is still not enough for people in good faith.

It's time to take off romantic glasses and look into the past soberly - this is what, apparently, Michael Lind would say if he hadn’t ended in ink, and he would not go to cook coffee in the kitchen. Compromising our own history, we do not raise someone else's to its level, we lower our to general. And if our past remains a lie, the future will no longer be able to become true. Parthenon in Athens is worthy of admiration, but it is useful to keep in the mind that Rome bequeathed to us. Otherwise, like Byron, we run the risk of putting life for a fictional country.