Roman death masks—called “imagines”—were actually wax models impressed directly on the face during life, and they bore a remarkable likeness to the person. Displayed during the funerals of the elite, they served as a link between the present and the past and were meant to inspire attendees to patriotic virtue. The recent defacement of statues [...]
Andrew C. Johnston’s “The Sons of Remus” provides a window into not only how European identities were formed, but how all societies engage in a constant process of negotiation and renegotiation in determining who they are, where they came from, and where they are going. The Sons of Remus: Identity in Roman Gaul and Spain, by [...]
HPIM0645.JPG Tacitus was one of the most cited of all historians in Colonial North America. The colonists thought the world of him, preferring Locke only slightly more.[1] For example, “Josiah Quincy, Sr., was an omnivorous reader of historical literature that praised liberty, and he bequeathed to his son, ‘Algernon Sidney’s works, --John Locke’s [...]
The Roman Empire was unique because it espoused the principle of moderation in politics. This is what permitted the unique dynamism of a uniquely changing but uniquely enduring political form: from city, to empire, to nation. And that dynamism may still propel us today as a principle of rebirth, if only we recapture its essence. [...]
Historical novelists can tell us not only about the past, but also about our present in a manner that keeps our interest, and helps us reflect on our own existence as historical beings. This notion is important for our understanding of George Gissing’s great novel, “Veranilda.” When George Gissing died in December 1903, he was [...]
Was the fall of Rome suicide or murder? Did the Germanic tribes walk over a corpse or did they contribute to its demise? I. Continuing for more than 200 years, from approximately 27 B.C. to A.D. 180, the Pax Romana was among the most stable, prosperous, and peaceful periods in history—certainly in the history of [...]
The title of Shakespeare’s tragedy is misleading, in that "Julius Caesar" shows us much more about Antony and the friend who betrays Caesar, Brutus, than it does about the legendary leader of Rome. Brutus: “There is a tide in the affairs of men Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea [...]
In “The City of God,” Augustine systematically lays bare the empty ideology of the city of man and the Roman empire in a breathtaking counter-narrative that remains remarkably modern and relevant for today. In contrast to the city of man, the City of Love, Augustine argues, is the godly city to which Christians belong and [...]
In the Late Roman Empire, when classical civilization had fallen into decadence and decay, Christianity proved a dynamic and creative force. Amid the deterioration of political authority, the stagnation of economic life, and the decline of learning, a new civilization was emerging. I. As confidence in reason and the expectation of finding happiness in this [...]
The essence of Rome, by being conscious of one’s cultural debts, is the refusal to make a definitive synthesis or mediation. Only in Rome are there Athens and Jerusalem. Only because of Rome are there “two cities because one remains silently present.” Remi Brague’s observation about the historical essence of Rome shows that “Romanity” is [...]
Today, wherever the intelligent among us may still be found, the idea of Monarchy shimmers and beckons along the periphery of our collective intellectual subconscious; we suspect it has something that will save us from the erosions of shabby egalitarianism, from our sordid democracies and their petulant, tiresome, subversive “rights.” “Then Perceval was told that [...]
Everywhere Western man longs for Constantinople and nowhere has he any idea how to find her. To unearth this Byzantium, this “heaven of the human mind,” as Yeats dreamed her, is not to go searching through histories and legends, glorious ruins or immortal poems. “Le grand absent—c’est l’Empire” C. Dufour, Constantinople Imaginaire Everywhere Western man [...]
May 26 is the feast day of Philip Neri, known as the Second Apostle of Rome—after Peter himself—and the prophet of joy, a man who was marked by his love of the desert fathers. Philip’s approach to holiness was that all were called to it, including those in the world doing worldly and even intellectual [...]
Rome does not occasionally become relevant in our understanding of political upheaval. Rather, it forms part of our very identity as Christians and heirs of the Western tradition that it helped shape. No one saw the essential drama of Rome more clearly than William Shakespeare. In the current issue of Atlantic magazine, editor-at-large Cullen Murphy [...]