a quick thought on the Romans

When we look at the Romans we’re normally looking at their imperial heyday, or their decay and downfall and their presaging of things that came later. Every once in awhile I try to read an “origins of Rome” sort of book in order to counter that natural impulse.

There are things we easily forget… For instance, just how hard it was and how long it took for the Romans even to subjugate the Italian peninsula, including many portions very close to Rome itself. Only in the 200’s B.C. did they succeed in finally putting away the Samnites, who were located not far from present-day Naples. The Volscians were a major problem until not long before that, and the Etruscans just a bit earlier, and even the Gauls were making incursions down the peninsula and sacked Rome itself in the 360’s B.C.

After the Samnites, the Punic Wars. One of the most staggering forgotten facts about Roman history is that Hannibal didn’t just come over with the elephants, win a few battles, and then leave. No, he hung out in Italy for years and years… something like 14 years, wasn’t it? If you read Livy’s account you get a sense of how endless Hannibal’s presence and his danger really felt to the Latins.

A similar illusion occurs in the history of philosophy, I think. There is a tendency to forget just how hard it was for certain now classic thinkers to become established. We imagine that German Idealism was a tsunami in its time sweeping all away before it, when it was actually a freak minority position for quite some time. Or we forget that the writings of Aquinas were banned for a short time after his death. Or we view Aristotle as a boring classic instead of realizing what a strange plant he really is, unheralded by what came before.