Years ago I read a thing that stuck with me, and apropos of the recent discussion about re-reading books (something I don’t do much of) I happened to crack open a book and find the passage (having previously failed to find it several times, searching in the wrong volumes on my bookshelves).  It is from Thomas Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization*:

So the living civilization died, to be reassembled and assessed by scholars of later ages from the texts preserved miraculously in the pages of its books.  There is, however, one classical tradition that survived the transition — the still-living tradition of Roman law.

We have encountered Roman law already — as a dead letter, promulgated by the emperor and circumvented, first by the powerful, then increasingly by anyone who could get away with it.  As the emperor’s laws became weaker, the ceremony surrounding them became more baroque.  In the last days, the Divine One’s edict is written in gold on purple paper, received with covered hands in the fashion of a priest handling sacred vessels, held aloft for adoration by the assembled throng, who prostrate themselves before the law — and then ignore it.

The book was published in 1995 and this struck a chord in me, and I’ve remembered not the precise quote, but the gist for nearly 30 years.  In all of that time of course it only has become more haunting in that it is a putative description of ancient history and couldn’t possibly be an accurate description of our own day and age.  In fact, his whole treatment on the fall of Rome (alluding to both Augustine’s and Gibbons’ views), which is merely prelude to his main thesis, is worth the read (as I had pulled this from the shelf not actively searching for the above quote this time and only stumbling upon it on page 60 and muttering to myself: well, there you are).

The law as dead letter, elevated in vainglory, empty of living impact is our own zeitgeist.  It has no practical value because no one takes it seriously.  It can’t be taken seriously by any serious person, so the spectacle becomes ever more important.  The benefit you can give to the Romans is they didn’t have their own example to learn from.  We have less excuse than they did.  Though I don’t think the Romans were so boneheaded as to believe that making an act “extra illegal” would have any beneficial effect as we seem to think in this day and age.

One part we haven’t properly emulated the Romans in, yet, is tax collection.  Let us all be thankful for that, for the lot of the Roman tax collector late in the Empire made slavery attractive.  In the early days the tax collector was a sort of entry level position in the civil rank system, and it wasn’t difficult to ascend to a less onerous position.  On the cusp of the fall, tax collector was a caste you were born into and promotion out was anything but simple.  Worse, the nobility (and all of their wealth) was exempt and any shortfall in collection was a personal debt laid upon the collector.  In cases where someone escaped the office, they could be recalled from whatever position they had and stuck with the shit job once again.  Even slaves weren’t treated that badly.

Where last I left off (in my previous article) I asked – What do we do?  The answer may be we do what many Romans did as their society decayed around them, the perceptive having made and executed plans, and the laggards left to fend for themselves (something that didn’t generally go well).  The strange thing to consider is that anytime in the last 100 years, possibly more, of the Imperium, judgement day could’ve arrived.  It might not even have arrived when it did, instead coming another 100 years later.

I did say the meanderings would be muddled.

 

* – This turned out to the be the first book in a series (The Hinges of History) by Cahill.  His fascination was with the transitions between historical eras rather than the bounded eras themselves.  The transition in question here from late Roman civilization into Medieval Christian Europe and how the isolation of the Irish (pre Viking and English depredations) kept them from the turmoil of that transition and allowed some degree of classical knowledge to monastically survive which would help shape the following era.  Having re-sparked my interest, I may have to acquire and read his succeeding volumes.