Rome?

What was it like in A.D. 14 after Augustus passed, at its best and most brilliant?

There was no cycle of four turnings to follow the passing of the High age of excellence and community responsibility, which followed a good 100 years of Civil war and slave revolts.

In brief, this is what followed:

Most people were not Roman’s but slaves.

Most Romans were poor urbanites and just getting by rural farmers being pushed out of business by the Elites who owned thousands of slaves, including Gladiators to come take your daughter. These people filled the ranks of the early Imperial army. 20 to 30 years of service got you a farm and family. You were not, as a soldier, permitted to have a wife.

This was an anti nationalist dysgenic policy. The Zulus seemed severe for not permitting marriage until battle. The Romans did not permit it for 20 or 30 years, and then your sons were liable for conscription.

The elites, quasters, tribunes, legates, senators and other imperial shitheads were mostly, by our standards, violent, psychopathic sadists who branded, beat and slew slaves out of hand, to the point where Galen had to suggest not punching slaves in the teeth as a cure for infected knuckles to one of his patients.

Rome conquered some 3 dozen peoples or races and annihilated their culture, eventually bringing in the top traitors as Roman citizens. The soldier farmer, in retirement, had to move to the frontier and live across the river from barbarian foes. For Roman lands were owned by the elite, men who held as many as 20,000 slaves!

The bosses and big estate owners employed barbarian gladiators and mercenaries for body guards and bullies. The emperors and generals did so as well.

Ovid and Virgil, writing under heavy sanction for Augustus as propagandists [one in exile], in their writings, screamed for a Christ [even as he was born]. While the rural farmers of the enslaved races were slowly exterminated and driven into slavery, they held onto their ancient folk religions and faiths. The urban elites though, had become degenerates and cruel monsters, with faith largely limited to social forms.

From A.D. 14 to 96, about the length of one of Strauss and Howe’s modern four cycles, there was but one age, the age of Unraveling mixed with Crisis. There was no Awakening except among the tiny cryptic cult of Christians and the even smaller cults or elite Gnostics, Neoplatonists and Maniceans. Roman citizens spent 82 years as bystanders to the destruction of their once brutal and now senselessly cruel anti-nation. For, as a great Roman [1] quoted a Pictish rebel, with no argument, in a book about how his virtuous father in law was hated and murdered by the system for holding up Roman values such as not looting temples, at the end of this period, “Rome makes a desert and calls it peace.”

It was during this period that the Praetorian Guard, under international financial interest, took control of Rome, seating whatever emperor pleased them.

During the Roman peace that followed, these Guards as well as most of the regular army, would be increasingly staffed by barbarian mercenaries. This had to be done by the “Five Good Emperors,” in order to keep corrupt Roman conspirators from cutting their throats, and also because Roman Soldiers had not permitted to breed until middle age for centuries, weakening the once hearty Latin masculine stock.

By the time that Marcus Aurelias had been succeeded by his corrupt son Commodus in AD. 180, the Guards were entirely mercenary, and may in fact disposed of Marcus in favor of his malleable son, who would be killed. What followed, from 181 to 325 was one single season of Unraveling and Crisis at the same time, with no general Awakening and no Cultural High among the literate, political and military classes, until Constantine. For 144 years was one brutal Age of Iron, of rapine, torture, purge and taxation so punitive that what is now Italy and France would be occupied by more statues of ancestors and gods then of their flesh and blood descendants. [2]

But there was a time when Rome was less than murderous to its majority, when the emperor no longer wished to have slaves branded on the face [like Anglo-American runaways of the 1700s and 1800s], when enough peace and prosperity was engineered by the most benign rule of Late Antiquity, that some slaves were content.

How does the reign of the Five Good Emperors line up with the 4 cycles explained in The Fourth Turning by Strauss and Howe?

It was the most “modern” of Ancient times, the only period other than the Reign of Augustus from 31 B.C. to A.D. 14, in which Roman rulers seemed concerned with the well being of their nation and people outside of strict family cartel building.

The Roman Peace will be measured against the Modern Saeculum of War and Politics, from page 39, Seasons of Time, also pages 61, 70, 71, 74 and 81, demonstrating that the ruling archetypes contend with overlapping ages, in 5 generative and degenerative cycles

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Crisis: Winter/Fourth Quarter

For Rome was in Crisis when Nerva ascended and Trajan wages constant wars of external conquest, maintaining total war crisis footing

A.D. 96-98: Sage/Prophet Ruler

Nerva gained the purple and established his rule based on his promise to select a successor on merit, a successor who was a soldier, the opposite of he the statesman. Nerva was the transformative, prophetic figure that ushered in an age. His reign and that of Trajan, spans one short lifetime, about the 20 years that Strauss and Howe use in their study.

98-117

Hero/Warrior Trajan

Winter continues with victorious major wars, including the extermination of the Dacian Culture and Race, and the avenging of the Parthian slaughter of Crassus in about 50 B.C. with the extension of Roman power to the Persian Gulf. Under Trajan there were two sea routes to Indian, including the Red Sea, mostly used for African trade. Trajan continues this odd blessing in human affairs with the appointment of his opposite.

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High: Spring/First Quarter

117-138

Philosopher/Engineer & Builder, Hadrian

What Trajan conquered and protected through war, Hadrian developed, personally visiting every province, the only Emperor ever to do so. Hadrian was a student of Stoicism, and under the influence of Epictetus and Arrian, his teacher and his classmate, decided to select the next two emperors, the first on the condition that he in his turn dutifully appoint the second.

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Awakening: Summer/Second Quarter

138-161, Pontiff and Religious Conservative, Antonius Pious

Rather than a world-questioning figure like Nerva, and rather than a soldier or builder, Hadrian chose the most moral man in the empire to instill decency among the frame that had been expanded by Trajan and secured by Hadrian. However, climate change was driving barbarian migration and the army had to be staffed by barbarians and imperial ease weakened the Roman character. So, Antonius was selected on the condition that the most brilliant Stoic among the disciples of Epictetus, would be chosen to succeed him, learning imperial administration under his wing.

Unraveling: Autumn/Third Quarter

161-180, Philosopher, Warrior a Nomad General, Marcus Aurelius

Universally considered the most benign ruler of antiquity, a sage still read today, Marcus, the most brilliant mind of his age, was forced by exterior climate and political pressure to spend his life on the frontiers as the moral fabric of Rome decayed, to include possibly his debouched wife and degenerate son. I think it likely, that Marcus had been forced to depend on barbarian mercenaries to such a degree to continue the empire, that he saw its defense as hopeless and permitted his son to take the purple. Either that, or he was murdered by Praetorians and/or at the command of his vicious son Commodos, or possibly by the bankers devaluing the currency and looking forward to looting the temples stocked by Antonine Piety.

Crisis: Winter/The Forth Quarter

181to 325 saw constant Crisis entwined with Unraveling.

Henceforth, most emperors were forced on pain of death to take the purple and were, as they had feared, murdered in office by those who elevated them. Severus and Diocletion would carve out brief 20 year periods of relative stability, the first through brutal efficiency and the second through ingenious humility. The period after 180, and also the period following Constantine from only 325 to 337, down through the next thousand years, to 1453, saw continued Crisis and Unraveling together.

It is my suspicion, that rather than an Augustean or Golden Age, what the Praetorian/Banker interests that I call Steerage Cults, wished, indeed needed, to continue their diabolical Conspiracy Against the Human Race, was a wedding of Political Crisis and Cultural Unraveling in order to productively render subject minds, bodies, families and hopes, into a profitable extinguishing. I see this process at work today, since 2001.

I shall continue this project in looking at a brilliant self-published book from the 1970s, when I return east into the belly of the soulless beast. For now, I thank Bob for the loan of this book which I inserted notes into, and go to sit with my deeply read friend before taking the train from Salt Lake City.

James, 8/22/24, Kamas, Utah

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Notes

-1. Tacitus, Agricola

-2. Gibbon, The History of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter 25 or 26