Starting from Scratch by Andrea Marcolongo

Author:Andrea Marcolongo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Europa Editions
Published: 2022-02-25T00:00:00+00:00

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Virgil’s genius was that he knew right away that the question to ask wasn’t “Where to start?” but “Where to start over?” And to that question the poet had the courage to answer: “From the beginning—and earlier still!”

Who knows what today’s political analysts would say. If the Aeneid were an election campaign, its claim (its slogan, technically speaking) would no doubt be “Make Rome Great Again!” The one difference between the campaign strategies of Virgil and Donald Trump is that Virgil conveyed his message in graceful hexameters, not vulgar tweets. More importantly, after the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, Virgil wanted to put an end to civil war, not incite another.

In all other respects, their narratives are identical. We might even accuse the American president of plagiarism were it possible to picture him as a sophisticated Latinist. Even the strategies implemented are the same. In the midst of historic political upheaval (arising from shaky democratic foundations, which were undoubtedly dictatorial in Augustus’s case), they decide to pull the wool over the eyes of a bewildered citizenry by waving a flag of past greatness and prosperity.

It matters little that “again”—or, as the Latins would say, etiamnunc—remains totally abstract and vague, be it in Rome in 29 BC or in New York in 2016. Exactly when was the United States at its peak? Twenty years ago? Thirty? One hundred? And was Rome better off under Romulus, Scipio Africanus or Julius Caesar? It isn’t for us to know, and nobody from on high will deign to tell us exactly.

It would have been useless to appeal to reason and respond that, at the time of its founding in 753 BC, Rome was just a pile of shacks along the Tiber, occupied by semi-barbarians, or that, in the third century BC, it wasn’t very pleasant having Carthage for an enemy and Hannibal crossing the Alps on the back of an elephant. Logic is bested by nostalgia for the good old days, which in ancient Rome were better and older than normal and fiercely shielded from the dangers of luxury and frivolity, starting with Cato the Elder and the constant championing of mos maiorum (the custom of the ancestors). The actual living conditions of those ancestors, the Italic and Gallic peasants who lived through Rome’s harsh annexation campaigns, didn’t matter. There is every reason to imagine they had it hard, but there will always be someone willing to believe things used to be better.

Virgil’s objective was to narrate what was to come after (the Principate) with the sounds and deeds of what had come before (Rome’s origins). To endow the beginnings of the Roman Empire with the strength, intrepidness, and dignity of the beginnings of the Roman Kingdom and its seven kings. It was like watering down—to the point of expunging—all that happened in the interim, almost half a millennium of the Republic and its institutions. (As tradition, and Livy, have it, the Res Publica Populi Romani was founded in 509 BC with the overthrow of King Tarquinus Superbus.

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