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Category: Ancient Rome

Categories
Ancient Rome Axiology

Christianity:

The communism of antiquity, 7th and last

by Alain de Benoist

Editor’s note: I didn’t invent the term ‘neo-Christianity’.
Remember that this essay was published in French
almost… half a century ago!:

 

______ 卐 ______

 

In his essay on The End of the Ancient World (op. cit.), Saint Mazarin rightly recalls that, until recently, the culture of the Late Empire has always seemed to us ‘qualitatively inferior to that of the great civilisations that preceded it’. But today, he says, this is no longer the case: ‘All the voices of the “decadent” Roman world, between the 3rd and 6th centuries, have become accessible to us’. Conversely, ‘we can say that decadentism, expressionism and other modern categories of literary or artistic criticism are so many ways of understanding the world of the Late Empire… The kinship between our age and that world is a fact on which everyone can agree’. And he finally asks: ‘To what extent can we extend this revaluation of the poetry and art of the Late Empire to manifestations of social and political order?’

Curiously, Mazarino, for whom we probably live in the best of all possible worlds, draws from this observation the moral that the idea of decadence is illusory. At no point does he think that if the Late Empire seems more worthy of appreciation to our contemporaries, it is because they find stigmata familiar to them in it. After all, the current period refers like no other to the image of the tenebrae that Erasmus spoke of, and it is this similarity that has put us in a position to appreciate what previous generations, in better health, could not see.

Indeed, studying the conditions in which the Roman Empire died is not only of historical and abstract interest. The kinship between the two conjunctures, the parallel often drawn between those conditions and those that prevail today, makes it profoundly relevant. Moreover, many admit, with Louis Rougier, that ‘revolutionary ideology, socialism, the dictatorship of the proletariat, derive from the pauperism of the prophets of Israel. In the criticism of the abuses of the old regime by the orators of the Revolution, in the prosecution of the capitalist regime by the communists of our days, the echo of the furious diatribes of Amos and Hosea against the course of a world in which the insolence of the rich oppresses and flays the poor resounds; as do the harsh invectives of Jewish and Christian apocalyptic literature against imperial Rome’ (op. cit.).

Celsus would not find it challenging to identify even today ‘a new race of men, born yesterday, without a country or traditions…, united against all institutions… and glory in common execration.’ Once again, in the Western world, the fanatici, sometimes living ‘in community,’ truly stateless, hostile to all ordered structures, to all science, hierarchy and borders, to all selection, separate themselves from the world and denounce the ‘Babylon’ of modern times. Just as the first Christian communities proclaimed the abolition of all natural categories for the exclusive benefit of the ecclesia of believers, today, a neo-Christianity [Editor’s emphasis] is spreading, which announces the imminent advent of a new Parousia, of an egalitarian world unified by the overcoming of ‘old quarrels,’ the socialisation of Love and the flight forward in the delay of the ‘social.’ On December 30, 1973, Brother Roger Schutz, Prior of Taizé, declared: ‘Above all, there must be Love, because it is Love that gives us unity.’

Ancient Christianity rejected the world. The Church of classical times distinguished the order above from that of here below. Neo-Christianity boldly transferring its secular hopes from heaven to ‘here below’, secularises its theodicy. It no longer celebrates the solemn marriage of converts with the mystical Bridegroom but the marriage of Christ and humanity through the intercession of the universal Spirit of socialism. It too rejects the world, but only the present one, affirming that it can be ‘changed,’ that another must succeed it, and that the messianic union of the ‘disadvantaged’ can, through its intelligent intervention, fulfil on earth the old dream of the biblical prophets: to stop history and make injustices, inequalities and tensions disappear.

‘Today more than ever, the Greek Spirit, transformed into a scientific spirit, and the messianic spirit transformed into a revolutionary spirit, are irreconcilably opposed. The existence of cold-blooded sectarians and fanatics to whom subjective participation in a body of revealed truths, in gnosis, gives, in their own eyes, rights over everything and everyone, the right to do everything and to allow themselves everything, persists in posing a question of life or death to a society that is on the verge, not of a war of religion, but of something close to that historical plague: the war of civilisation’ (Jules Monnerot, Sociology of the Revolution, Fayard, 1969).

Certain critics repeat against European civilisation and culture the words of Orosius and Tertullian against Rome: today’s setbacks are the punishment for its past faults. It pays for its ‘pride’, wealth, power, and conquests. The barbarians who come to plunder it will make it atone for the sufferings of the Third World, the impotent ambition and the humiliation of the poorly endowed. On its ruins, the Jerusalem of the new times will be built. Then, we will see the disappearance of ‘the veil of mourning that veiled all peoples, the shroud that covered all nations’ (Isaiah XXV, 7). We are once again faced with the same moralising interpretation of history. But neither history nor the world is governed by morality.

The world is mute: it gravitates in silence. In his essay on The Jewish Question, Marx stated that only communism could ‘fulfil in a profane way the human foundation of Christianity’, thus pointing out the ‘revolutionary inadequacies’ of Christian doctrine (‘religion of the slaves, but not a revolution of the slaves’) and the affinities between the two prophetic systems, the spiritual and the terrestrial. Roger Garaudy clarifies these words by recalling that Christianity was ‘an element that disintegrated Roman power’. He adds:

The hostility to the imperial cult, the refusal to participate in it, and even more so the prohibition of Christians from serving militarily in the Empire at a time when recruitment was becoming increasingly difficult and when the number of Christians was increasing daily, a prohibition which persisted until the 4th century, had a clear revolutionary meaning. Moreover, there is in the character of Christ, magnified by the collective imagination of the first Christians, and heir of numerous messiahs similar to the Essene ‘Lord of Justice’, an undeniable revolutionary aspect (Marxisme du XXe siecle, La Palatine, 1966).

Engels, who reminds us that ‘like all great revolutionary movements, Christianity was the work of the popular masses,’ also noted the kinship between the two doctrines: the same messianic certainty, the same eschatological hope, the same conception of truth (well perceived by O. Tillich).

In early Christianity, he sees ‘a completely new phase of religious evolution, destined to become one of the most revolutionary elements in the history of the human spirit’ (Contribution a l’histoire du christianisme primitif, in Marx and Engels, Sur la religion, selection of texts, Ed. Sociales, 1960). And in his eyes, Christianity is the non-plus ultra of religion, the ‘consummation’ (in the sense of Aufhebung) of all the religions that preceded it. Having become the ‘first possible universal religion’ (Engels, Bruno Bauer and Early Christianity) it is also, by the force of things, the last: every end marks a caesura, which implies another beginning. After Christianity, assuming that there is an ‘after,’ there can only come its overcoming.

Joseph de Maistre said: ‘The Gospel outside the Church is a poison,’ and Father Daniélou: ‘If we separate the Gospel from the Church, it loses its temper.’ These words have their whole meaning today, when the Church, the new catoblepas[1], seems to want to abolish its history and return to its origins. Throughout the two millennia, structures of order were established within the Church which, while adapting to the European mentality, allowed it to put into form and reason the dangerous evangelical message; the ‘poison’ having been softened, the faithful had become Mithridatic.

Today, neo-Christianity wants to put these two millennia in parentheses to return to the sources of a genuinely universal religion and give a more significant impact to its message. So, if it is true that we are living through the ‘end’ of the Church (not, indeed, of the Gospel), this end takes the form of a return to a beginning. The Gospel (pastoral ministry) increasingly separates itself from the Church (dogmatics). But this is simply a repetition: the tendency is to bring Catholics back to the ‘revolutionary’ conditions in and through which early Christianity was created. Hence, the interest of this historical overview which, while showing us what happened, tells us at the same time what awaits us.
 
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[1] The animal of which Pliny the Elder speaks, slow and stupid in appearance and which killed with its gaze (Translator’s note).

Categories
Ancient Rome Miscegenation

Christianity:

The communism of antiquity, 6

by Alain de Benoist

 

This certainty that the Empire needed to collapse for the Kingdom to come explains the mixed feelings of the early Christians towards the barbarians. Undoubtedly, at first, they felt as threatened as the Romans.

Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, distinguished between external enemies (hostes extranei) and internal enemies (hostes domestici). For him, it was the Goths that Ezekiel was referring to when he spoke of the people of Magog. But, in the second stage, these barbarians, who were soon to be evangelised, became auxiliaries of divine justice. Christians could not admit that their fate was linked to that of a ‘Babylon of impudence’. That is why the Carmen de Providentia or the Commonitorium of Orentius are scarcely interested in other than the ‘enemies within.’ In the 3rd century, in his Carmen apologeticum, a Christian author, Comodian, speaks of the Germans (more precisely of the Goths) as ‘executors of God´s designs.’ In the following century, Orosius, in turn, affirms that the barbarian invasions are ‘God´s judgement’ that come ‘in punishment for the faults of the Romans’ (poenaliter accidisse). It is the equivalent of the ‘plagues’ Moses used to blame the Pharaoh.

On 24 August 410, Alaric, king of the Visigoths, after besieging Rome for several weeks, entered the city by night through the Porta Salaria. It was a converse patrician, Proba Faltonia, of the Anician family, who, after sending her slaves to occupy the gate, had it surrendered to the enemy. The Visigoths were Christians, and the spiritual and ideological solidarity bore fruit. The Anicians, of whom Amianus Marcellinus (XVI, 8) says that they were reputed to be insatiable, were known as fanatics of the Catholic party. The sack of Rome that followed was described by Christian authors with kindly strokes. Alaric’s ‘clemency’ was praised. Georges Sorel asked: ‘Were the vanquished guilty?’ St Augustine says of the Visigothic leader, he was God’s envoy and the avenger of Christianity. Oretius says that only one senator died and that it was his fault (‘he had not made himself known’), and that it was enough for Christians to make the sign of the cross be respected, and so on. ‘Such daring lies, says Augustin Thierry, were later admitted as indisputable facts’ (Alaric).

Around 442, Quodvulteus, bishop of Carthage, claimed that the ravages of the Vandals were pure justice. In one of his sermons, he tried to console a faithful member who had complained about the devastation: ‘Yes, you tell me that the barbarian has taken everything from you… I see, I understand, I meditate: you, who lived in the sea, have been devoured by a bigger fish. Wait a little: an even bigger fish will come and devour the one who devours, despoil the one who despoils, take the one who takes… This plague that we are suffering today will not last forever: in truth, it is in the hands of the Almighty’. Finally, at the end of the 5th century, Salvianus of Marseilles affirms that ‘the Romans have suffered their sorrows by the just judgement of God’.

In the 2nd century, the City had been invaded by foreign cults. A temple to the Great Mother had been erected on the Palatine Hill, where fanatici officiated. Moral contagion did the rest. ‘Through the gap opened in the barrier that closes the horizon of terrestrial life, they were going to penetrate all sorts of chimaeras and superstitions, drawn from the inexhaustible reservoir of the Oriental imagination.’ (Bouché-Leclercq). These were the bacchanalia, the rites with mysteries, the Isiac cult, the cult of Mithra, and finally, Christianity. The words ‘The last of his family’ were written in the tombs more frequently. Pompey’s line had disappeared in the 2nd century, and also Augustus’ and Maecenas’ lines.

Rome was no longer Rome; all the rivers of the East flowed into the Tiber. It was only much later, in the Renaissance, that Petrarch (1304-1374) observed that the ‘black epoch’ (tenebrae) of Roman history had coincided with the era of Theodosius and Constantine; while in northern Europe, in the early 16th century, Erasmus (c. 1469-1536) claimed, although he called himself a ‘militiaman of Christ’, that the true barbarians of ancient times, the ‘real Goths’, had been the monks and scholastics of the Middle Ages.

Categories
Ancient Rome Bible Christendom

Christianity:

The communism of antiquity, 5

by Alain de Benoist

 
Christian doctrine was a social revolution. It did not affirm for the first time that the soul existed (which would not have made it original), but that everyone had one identical at birth. The men of ancient culture, who were born into a religion because they were born into a fatherland, tended instead to think that by adopting a behaviour characterised by rigour and self-control they might succeed in forging a soul, but that this was a fate reserved undoubtedly for the best. The idea that all men could be gratified with it indifferently and simply by the fact of existing was shocking to them. On the contrary, Christianity maintained that everyone was born with a soul, which was equivalent to saying that men were born equal before God.

On the other hand, in its rejection of the world, Christianity presented itself as the heir of an old biblical tradition of hatred of the powerful, of the systematic exaltation of the ‘humble and the poor’ (anavim ébionim), whose triumph and revenge over wicked and proud civilizations had been announced by prophets and psalmists. In the Book of Enoch, widely disseminated in the first century in Christian circles (cited in the epistles of Jude XV, 4, and of Barnabas: XV), we read: ‘The Son of Man will raise kings and the powerful from their beds and the strong from their seats; he will break their strength… He will overthrow kings from their thrones and their power. He will make the mighty turn their faces away, and cover them with shame…’ (Enoch XLVI, 4-6).

Jeremiah takes pleasure in imagining the future victims in the form of animals for the slaughter: ‘Separate them, O Yahweh, like sheep for the slaughter, and reserve them for the day of slaughter’ (Jeremiah XII, 3). To the women of the powerful, whom he calls ‘cows of Bashan’ (Amos IV, I), Amos predicts: ‘Yahweh has sworn by his holiness: The days will come upon you when you will be lifted with hooks, and your descendants with fishing spears’ (IV, 2). The psalms outline the beginning of the class struggle, and the same spirit will inspire ‘the first groups of Christians and later the monastic orders’ (A. Causse, op. cit.). ‘In the end, there is only one theme in the Psalms,’ says Isidore Loeb, ‘which is the struggle of the poor against the wicked, and his final triumph thanks to the protection of God, who loves the one and hates the other’ (Littérature des pauvres dans la Bible).

The poor are always the victims of injustice. They are called the Humble, the Holy, the Just and the Pious. They are unfortunate, prey to all evils; they are sick, invalid, alone, abandoned, relegated to a valley of tears, they water their bread with tears, etc. But they bear their pain; they even seek it out because they know that such trials are necessary for their salvation, that the more they are humiliated, the more they will triumph, the more they suffer, the more they will one day see others suffer. As for the wicked, they are rich, and their wealth is always culpable.

They are happy, build cities, perform pre-eminent social functions, and command armies, but they will one day be punished in proportion as they dominate. ‘Such is the social ideal of Jewish prophecy,’ says Gerard Walter, ‘a kind of general levelling which will make all class distinctions disappear and lead to the creation of a uniform society from which all privileges of any kind will be banished. This egalitarian sentiment, carried to its ultimate limits, is linked to an irreducible animosity against the rich and the powerful, who will not be admitted into the future kingdom. The ideal humanity of the announced times will include all the just without distinction of creed or nationality’ (Les origines du communisme, Payot, 1931).

The second book of the Sibylline Oracles paints a picture of humankind regenerating in a new Jerusalem under a strictly communist regime: ‘And the land will be common to all; there will be no more walls or frontiers. All will live in common and wealth will be useless. Then there will be no more poor or rich, no tyrants or slaves, no great or small, no kings or lords, but all will be equal’ (Or. Sib. II, 320-326).

Given this, it is easier to understand why Christianity initially seemed to the ancients to be a religion of slaves and heimatlos, a vehicle for a kind of ‘counterculture’ that only achieved success among the dissatisfied, the declassed, the envious and the revolutionaries avant la lettre: slaves, artisans, fullers, carders, shoemakers, single women, etc. Celsus describes the first Christian communities as ‘a mass of ignorant people and gullible women, recruited from the dregs of the people,’ and his adversaries hardly try to disabuse him on this point. Lactantius preaches equality in social conditions: ‘There is no equity where there is no equality’ (Inst. VII, 2). Under Heliogabalus, Calixtus, bishop of Rome, recommends that converts marry slaves.

For this reason, there is no idea more odious to the Christian than that of the fatherland: how can one serve both the land of one’s fathers and the Father who is in heaven? Salvation does not depend on birth, belonging to a city, or the seniority of one’s lineage but exclusively on respect for dogmas. From then on, it is enough to distinguish believers from unbelievers, and all other boundaries must disappear. Paul insists on this: ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither male nor female…’ Hermas, who enjoyed great authority in Rome, condemns the converts to perpetual exile: ‘You servants of God live in a foreign land. Your city is very far from this one’ (Sim. I, I).

Such a disposition of spirit explains the Roman reaction. Celsus, a patriot concerned about the health of the State, who sensed the weakening of the Imperium and the decline of civic feeling that the triumph of Christian egalitarianism could provoke, begins his True Discourse with these words: ‘A new race of men born yesterday, without homeland or traditions, united against all religious and civil institutions, persecuted by justice, accused of infamy by all and who glory in this common execration: that is what Christians are. Factious men who pretend to make a separate ranch and separate themselves from common society.’ And Tacitus, who says that they were detested for their ‘abominations’ (flagitia), accuses them of the crime of ‘hatred of the human race.’ ‘As soon as it was suppressed,’ he says, ‘this execrable superstition was once again breaking out not only in Judea, the cradle of the plague, but in Rome itself, where all the horrors and infamies that exist flow from all sides and are believed…’

The imperial principle is at this time the instrument of a conception of the world carried out as a vast project. Thanks to it, the Pax Romana reigns in an ordered world. Filled with admiration, Horace exclaims: ‘The ox wanders safely through the fields fertile by Ceres and Abundance, while sailors everywhere plogh the peaceful seas.’ In Halicarnassus, a tripartite inscription in honour of Augustus proclaims: ‘Cities flourish amid order, concord and wealth.’ But for the early Christians the pagan State is the work of Satan. The Empire, the supreme symbol of a proud force, is nothing but arrogance worthy of ridicule. The harmonious Roman society is declared without exception guilty, for its resistance to monotheistic demands, traditions and way of life, are so many offences against the laws of heavenly socialism. And as guilty, it must be punished; that is, destroyed. Like a lengthy complaint, the Christian literature of the first two centuries breathes out its rosary of anathemas. With feverish impatience the apostles preach the ‘hour of vengeance,’ ‘so that all things which are written may be fulfilled’ (Luke XXI, 22). As the Fathers of the Church did after them, they announce the imminence of revenge, of the ‘great night’ when everything will be turned upside down. The Epistle of James contains a call to class struggle: ‘Come now, you rich people! Weep and howl for the misery that will come upon you. Your riches are corrupted and your clothes are moth-eaten’ (V,1-2).

James, who has read the Book of Enoch, predicts terrible tortures for the rich and the pagans. He imagines the final judgment as a ‘knock to the throat,’ ‘a kind of immense slaughterhouse to which thousands of the well-off, fat and splendid, and with all their wealth on them, will be dragged. He is joy at seeing them go one by one, returning their ill-gotten gains before feeding with their fat the formidable carnage he glimpses in his dreams’ (Gérard Walter, op. cit.). Above all, he accuses the rich of deicide: ‘You condemned and killed the Just One.’ (V, 6.) This thesis, which makes Jesus the victim, not of a people, but of a class, will soon become popular. Tertullian writes: ‘The time is ripe for Rome to end up in flames. She will receive the reward her works deserve’ (On Prayer, 5).

The Book of Daniel, written between 167 and 165 b.c.e., and the Book of Revelation are the two great sources from which this holy fury draws. St. Hippolytus (c. 170-235), in his Commentary on Daniel, places the end of Rome around the year 500 and attributes it to the rise of democracies: ‘The toes of the statue in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream represent the coming democracies, which will separate from each other like the ten toes of the statue, in which iron will be mixed with clay.’ Around 407, St. Jerome, in another Commentary on Daniel, defines the end of the world as ‘the time when the kingdom of the Romans will be destroyed.’ Other authors repeat these prophecies: Eusebius, Apollinaris and Methodius of Olympus. The revolutionary ardour against Rome, the ‘accursed city,’ ‘new Babylon,’ and ‘great harlot’ knows no bounds. The city is the last avatar of Leviathan and Behemoth.

In all these apocalypses, sibylline mysteries and double-meaning prophecies, in all this mental trepidation, hypersensitive to ‘symbols’ and ‘signs,’ in all this psalm-like literature, we find more imprecations than would have been necessary to warm the spirits, shake the imaginations and even arm still hesitant hands. This explains the accusations that followed the burning of Rome in the year 64.

Deuteronomy ordered the services of God to slaughter unbelieving populations and burn their cities in honour of Yahweh, and Jesus repeated the image: ‘He who does not abide in me will be thrown out like a branch that withers, and is gathered and thrown into the fire and is burned’ (John XV, 6). And indeed, from Rome to the bonfires of the Inquisition, much will burn. Sacred pyromania will be exercised without respite. ‘This idea (that the world of the impious will be destroyed by fire),’ says Bouché-Leclercq, ‘had been received by Christians from Jewish seers, from those prophets and sibilants who invoked lightning as quickly as a torch, iron as quickly as fire on the cities and peoples hostile to Israel. Never has the imagination burned so much as in the prophecies of Isaiah and Ezekiel, the richest collection of anathemas that religious literature has ever produced.’

‘In this opinion of a general fire,’ adds Gibbon, ‘the faith of Christians came to coincide with the Eastern tradition… The Christian, who based his belief not so much on the fallacious arguments of reason as on the authority of tradition and the interpretation of Scripture, awaited the event with terror and confidence, was sure of its ineluctable imminence. As this solemn idea permanently occupied his mind, he regarded all the disasters that befell the Empire as so many infallible symptoms of the agony of the world.

Categories
Ancient Greece Ancient Rome Eduardo Velasco

Tough replies

by Eduardo Velasco, 4

 

Skirita said:

Hi NT. I just recently discovered your blog. It is really interesting. I wanted to ask you something from the ignorance and passion that these topics produce:

  • On the one hand the Minoan culture has as a symbol the Labrys (according to your article a specifically patriarchal symbol), in another of your comments is considered matriarchal (when you talk about the hero Theseus against the minotaur and the sacrifices that were made by this kind of cultures with young girls).
  • On the other hand, studying Roman law and the Roman gods, I have found that they had a very special worship of the god Janus. This, as I understand it, is a deity from the Etruscan pantheon, and yet he was highly revered in Rome and was considered the counterpart of Mars (god of war and fighting). I understand that although the legend says that Romulus came from the lineage of Mars, after he died in unclear circumstances, he became the god Quirinus, who was later called Janus-Quirinus, and came to be the representation of the citizen, that is, the Roman when he was in peace.

I also understand that the figure of the Rex (patriarchal, hierarchical and governing) comes from the Etruscans in the Roman case, and even had a lot of typical Etruscan paraphernalia… I ask you to clarify these things because no one has ever made them clear to me and they are very confusing.

Excellent article yours. Greetings from Argentina. HH!
 

NT (Velasco) replies:

Good morning Skirita.

The use of Labrys by the Minoans is not in contradiction with their matriarchy, simply because Minos was probably not founded as a matriarchy, but as a patriarchy. The symbolism of the axe testifies to this, as does the fact that, like Egypt (and like Etruria) this civilisation drew from what is called the Nordic red race (or Brünns) [Editor’s note: redheaded whites—see here]: a variety that tended towards patriarchy (also Scotland, England and Spain drew from the same race and were patriarchal societies).

The problem is the same as always: miscegenation. When the ‘red’ ruling class of both Minos and Etruria (there are paintings of blond Etruscans and Minoans in the style of the Egyptians that we saw in the post about them) gave way in numbers in favour of the Near-Asiatic and North African type, the idiosyncrasy of the society changed. Thus, the Minoan civilisation at the time of the Achaean invasion was a pale and decadent caricature compared to what it had been. The same can be said of Etruria.

And indeed, the same can be said of our society today. The origins are patriarchal, but the System is leading us more and more into the realm of matriarchy.

As for the ‘Romanisation’ of certain Etruscan gods or institutions, we should not pay too much attention to it, precisely because, after being Romanised, they ceased to be what they really were. What is more likely is that for example the figure of Rex was originally Etruscan patriarchal; in the Etruscan decline matriarchal, and after the Latin triumph, patriarchal again. As you say, it is confusing.

Other customs however weren’t Romanised, but on the contrary, ‘Etruscanised’ Rome, such as gladiator fights, feasting and orgies—unthinkable for a people as disciplined and martial as the Latins!

I would summarise by saying that both Etruria and Minos were almost certainly founded as patriarchates, and that they became matriarchates with the decline of those civilisations, which is when the Latins and Achaeans respectively burst onto the scene, putting things back in their place.

Here is an image that proves that there was Nordic blood among the Minoans. Pay attention, more than to the hair, to the profile of the individual: [linked here in the original thread—Ed].
 

Anonymous said:

NT, a question that has nothing to do with matriarchy. Why are the Vikings and Germanic people in general depicted as the men in the video you posted, and not platinum blond guys as they were pure Aryans?
 

NT replies:

Well simply because perfect Nordic whites are not plentiful, and even fewer Nordic white film actors. On the other hand, modern Scandinavians are also quite mixed.
 

Daniel the Argentinian said:

Nordic Thunder, I see that in the list you present at the top of the page, you show those you admire followed by those you hate or despise as opposed to the former. Examples: Sparta vs Athens; lord vs slave; strong and healthy vs weak and sick; training vs leisure; Spain vs the Moors; soldier vs hippie; fascism vs communism.

But you also place the Antichrist before Christ and Lucifer (Satan) before Jehovah, the Judeo-Christian God. Do you and your Nazi henchmen confess that you are Satanists? Clearer than water…!
 

NT replies:

First of all, apologies for taking so long to reply, but it’s just that the new comment notification service isn’t working too well.

Let’s see. Being anti-Christian is not the same as being Satanic, just as being anti-capitalist is not the same as being communist.

Lucifer wasno’t equivalent to Satan. He was reminiscent of ancient Aryan gods (such as Baldur, Abelius, Byelobog, Apollo) which the Church demonised to accuse of ‘heresy’ anyone who worshipped such gods. The ‘Antichrist’ was a way for the original Christians (who were Jews) to designate everything they hated, i.e. the strong pagan Aryan states fighting against the Jews (in this case, the Roman Empire). The Emperor was the Antichrist. The legionaries were the Antichrist. Roman art (98% of which they destroyed) was the Antichrist because it represented the glory and health of the pure human body.

I take this opportunity to remind people that Szandor LaVey, the ‘apostle’ of modern Satanism, was a Jew. Satanism sucks. It is a childish reaction against Christian dogmas. No, I don’t consider myself a Satanist, I think it’s stupid.

Without Christianity, Satanism makes no sense, just as without capitalism, communism makes no sense.

Greetings.
 

Daniel the Argentinian said:

[…] Returning to the subject of the Amazons who supposedly castrated men, and you accused me of that story, that I had invented it, well I found it in Wikipedia. Look it up in ‘Eunuch’ on Wikipedia. It says something like this: In ancient Greece, the Amazon warrior women were feared, formed a matriarchal society. According to some versions of the legend, they killed or mutilated the men who were no longer useful to them for reproduction.
 

NT replies:

As for the problem with Wikipedia, anyone can get into the articles to edit them. And it’s well known that feminists have an unhealthy fixation with male castration, which fits in nicely with making that up about the Amazons. The most the Amazons did was to go to a neighbouring tribe, where they lay with the men to get pregnant and, after returning to their kingdom, the male babies were killed.

On the other hand, I have never ceased to find this feminist fascination with the Amazons comical, because they were defeated a thousand times by the Greeks. Besides, the Amazon chiefs had the habit of falling in love with the Greek hero of the day (the Amazon queen fell in love with Hercules).

Cheers.
 

Anonymous said:

Very good article, but I would put ‘Puritanism’ in the list of ‘schizophrenias’: it is an anti-pagan, anti-Christian, anti-natural schizophrenia.
 

NT replied:

Anonymous, when I speak of Puritanism I am not referring to the modest attitude of the Puritan sects, but to a non-promiscuous attitude to sex, which is what once distinguished the Germanic (heathens) from the decadent Romans, or the original Romans from the Etruscans.

Cheers.
 

Aed Caomhnóir said:

NT, I’ve been reading you for a long time now, and truth be told your blog is one of the ‘where I go to die’ places to pick up good information in these days of miscegenation and treachery in the streets.

Categories
Ancient Rome

Imperial Rome

The following is my response to Robert Morgan at The Unz Review:

______ 卐 ______

 
Ditto your last paragraph.

Since white nationalists are incapable of questioning the foundations of their nation (capitalism, Christian morality and secularised Xian ethics), they are incapable of good historical perspective. For example, in chapter 1, ‘The Romans’ of The Law of Civilization and Decay: An Essay on History, Brooks Adams illustrates how capitalism ruined Rome (Adams was an historian, political scientist and a critic of capitalism):

[Imperial] Rome was never really a people, never a nation. It was merely a system, a machine. From the very beginning, Rome populated itself by opening its gates to refugees from other cities. The Roman machine liquidated this founding stock [the farmers] and replenished itself with foreign blood until it became too weak to assimilate new peoples.

In ancient Rome, as in modern America, the economic system and its imperatives are treated as absolute and fixed, whereas the people are treated as liquid and fungible.

My emphasis! This was the main aetiology of white decline, which was further aggravated by what Constantine did. The Jews simply took advantage of this ethnocidal stain of whites on their own ethnicity.

By the way, Adams was a great-grandson of Founding Father John Adams.

Categories
Ancient Rome Film

Caligula, 6

If, as the sticky post implies, the aim of this site (remember: he who controls the past controls the future) is to find the Weirwood to see the past as it happened, we will understand why historical revisionism is vital to save the white race.

In this instalment of the series on Roldán’s book, I would just like to comment on the thought that came to me when I came across the phrase on page 244 of his book: ‘Gauls disguised as Germans, whose hair he [Caligula] dyed blond’ to transport them to Rome.

What Ridley Scott’s blockbuster film Gladiator shows us in its opening scene, epic by the way, was Romans under Marcus Aurelius fighting dark-haired Germans (in that subsequent century of Caligula’s reign the Germans were still blond): an inversion of the facts for propaganda purposes. Typical Hollywood.

Scott is a gentile, but it reminds me of what the Jewish producers of the film Ben-Hur, to which I referred in yesterday’s post, did. This 1959 film, awarded as many Oscars as possible, dared to reverse everything. It cast Judah Ben-Hur, a Jewish prince from Jerusalem, as the handsome, Nordish-looking Charlton Heston, and the Roman Messala (Stephen Boyd) not only with dark hair. In real life, Stephen Boyd had blue eyes.

To film Ben-Hur, the Aryan Boyd was forced to wear dark contact lens so that his eyes would not compete with the light eyes of the Jew interpreted by Heston! This is revealed by the producers themselves on the DVDs that now accompany the film with commentary.

This inversion is typical of the way the story has been told to us, including Aryan depictions of Jesus and his holy family in Christian iconography, especially from the Renaissance onwards. 1st century Palestinian Jews looked like sandniggers: the opposite to Heston. No wonder that, if the collective white unconscious has been programmed in this way, they have taken the New Testament as the founding scripture of their race, when in fact it is a rabbis’ scripture for gentile consumption (again, read our latest PDF). And the 1959 film aggravates the matter by casting the Jews of first-century Palestine as white Europeans, including Jesus’ carefully coiffed straight brown hair that is only seen from behind.

Much of the psychological healing of the Aryan consists precisely in finding the Weirwood to see the real past, not the toxic myth our enemies have been telling us for two millennia.

Returning to Roldán’s phrase, could we imagine an epic scene with blond Germans fighting the Roman mudbloods of a couple of centuries after Caligula’s reign? What effect would a film shot by someone who has already touched the Weirwood have on an audience of white-skinned, blue-eyed, light-haired people?

Categories
Ancient Rome

Caligula, 5

Marble portrait bust of the emperor Gaius, known as Caligula, A.D. 37–41.

Ordinary people, moulded by Hollywood, have a lofty idea of the Roman Empire (as a child, for example, I was impressed by the scene in which Ben-Hur arrives in the triumphal chariot with Quintus Arrius, first consul of Rome, before the emperor Tiberius) and no idea of the Roman Republic, betrayed by Caesar, Augustus, Tiberius and Caligula. As we have seen, the subtitle of Roldán’s Calígula is ‘The Immature Autocrat.’ In the chapter ‘The First Crisis’ the author speaks of the tyrannical behaviour of the emperor and how, unlike in the times of the Roman Republic, in imperial times senators had to behave in the most crawling manner on pain of death. On page 222 we read:

A collective such as the senatorial one, torn by envy, jealousy, resentment and ambition, could only react with vileness to the challenge of imperial tyranny. Meeting the next day, now without Gaius [i.e., Caligula who was in his twenties], they found no other way out than to humiliate themselves lowly, pretending to regard him as a sincere and loyal prince, who had condescended to spare their lives and who, for that, deserved thanks expressed in the granting of new honours. Accordingly, they voted to offer annual sacrifices [of animals] in honour of his clementia, on the anniversary of the day on which he had addressed them, and, to celebrate it, a golden image of the emperor was carried in procession from the Palatine to the Capitol, accompanied by a choir of children from the noblest families, who sang commemorative hymns. [my translation]

Since the Principate was a de facto monarchy the senators could not counteract but react with creeping flattery. Then Roldán adds that Augustus and Tiberius had done the same, but with more hypocrisy: not as blatantly as Caligula did. Since Julius Caesar the Senate had been reduced to the role of a mere coryphaeus willing to endure the worst humiliations, although this situation only became obvious with Caligula’s so-called Principate. On page 131 we read:

The condemned, whose names Gaius took care that they should be publicly exposed, ended up either in prison or hurled down the rock of Tarpeia unless they tried to escape public shame by committing suicide. There were no guarantees even for those sent into exile, who could die en route or during the time of exile. Of the few known cases, one senator, Titius Rufus, was prosecuted for denigrating the Senate as an institution by accusing the House of thinking one way and acting another. Such statements were permitted only to the emperor. For the rest of the mortals it meant death, which Titius anticipated by committing suicide. [my translation]

Imperial Rome was a joke. From Julius Caesar onwards there were problems with Jewish empowerment, as William Pierce tells us. If we recall Eduardo Velasco’s masterful essay in The Fair Race on Judea’s surreptitious war against Rome, one Aulus Avilius Flaccus was appointed governor of Roman Egypt from 33 c.e. until the reign of Caligula (Flaccus grew up with the sons of Augustus’ daughters and was a friend of Tiberius). His rule coincided with the riots against the Jewish population of Alexandria and in Velasco’s essay he is portrayed as a hero. Although Caligula undertook anti-Semitic measures because of the tremendous problems caused by the Alexandrian Jewry, he finally consented to the killing of Flaccus. The Jew Philo portrays the execution this way (page 242 of the Roldán’s book):

The officers therefore pursued him without stopping to take breath and arrested him; and then immediately some of them dug a ditch, and the others dragged him on by force in spite of all his resistance and crying out and struggling, by which means his whole body was wounded like that of beasts that are despatched with a number of wounds; for he, turning round them and clinging to his executioners, who were hindered in their aims which they took at him with their swords, and who thus struck him with oblique blows, was the cause of his own sufferings being more severe; for he was in consequence mutilated and cut about the hands, and feet, and head, and breast, and sides, so that he was mangled like a victim, and thus he fell, justice righteously inflicting on his own body wounds equal in number to the murders of the Jews whom he had unlawfully put to death.

And the whole place flowed with blood which was shed from his numerous veins, which were cut in every part of his body, and which poured forth blood as from a fountain. And when the corpse was dragged into the trench which had been dug, the greater part of the limbs separated from the body, the sinews by which the whole of the body is kept together being all cut through.

Can you see why I say that the paradigm is Hitler’s Third Reich and not Rome? It was only until the 20th century that the Aryans became authentically Jew-wise, at least for a brief historical moment.

Categories
Ancient Rome Monarchy

Caligula, 4

Marble portrait bust of the emperor Gaius, known as Caligula, A.D. 37–41.

On page 90 of Calígula, José Manuel Roldán speaks of Livia, ‘the richest woman in Rome and also the most influential’. According to the legislation enacted by Augustus, she enjoyed full freedom to administer her property without the need for male guardianship. On the same page the author mentions Alexander Lysimachus, a Jewish potentate, brother of Philo of Alexandria. If we remember that, centuries later, wealthy women and Jews would play a central role in the empowerment of Judeo-Christianity, it is clear that I am repulsed by Imperial Rome insofar as in Republican Rome women had no such power and neither did Jews (see this tough article from the book On Beth’s Cute Tits). Studying the causes of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire sheds light on the Western world today, which reminds me of Hegel’s phrase ‘History only teaches us that man learns nothing from history.’

But we must still try to tell the story as it happened. On a footnote on page 211 Roldán tells us that there is no historical basis for ‘the revolting scene in I, Claudius, the novel by R. Graves—and, subsequently, in the television series based on it—that presents Caligula as the murderer of his sister in a fatal game in which, disguised as Jupiter, he opens Drusilla’s womb to eat the child inside her.’

It is most unfortunate that, in today’s prolefeed for the proles, the Roman era is presented through Hollywood as exclusively that of the Caesars, concealing centuries of Republican Rome. Now we complain about the culture of cancellation, but such a culture was started by Augustus.

On pages 153-154 of Calígula Roldán tells us that from Augustus onwards the burning of books began as a result of new censorship laws, and that this policy of repression was reinforced by Tiberius. Naturally, Roman intellectuals complained. Aulus Cremutius Cordus wrote a History of the Civil Wars of Rome which was burned by senatorial order because it praised Caesar’s assassins, Brutus and Cassius. (Those who have read William Pierce’s Who We Are will guess that those who killed Caesar to defend the Republic were the good guys and Julius Caesar, the perpetrator of a veritable holocaust of nordish Gauls, the bad guy.) A few centuries later, Constantine and subsequent Christian emperors took advantage of the culture of cancellation, initiated by the early Caesars, to burn all criticism of Judeo-Christianity: which is why the triumph of the imperial church was so overwhelming.

In my posts on Friday last week and Monday this week, I linked to videotaped interviews with Richard Miller, a New Testament scholar. Since in the foreword to Neo-Christianity I mentioned Miller in an important paragraph, I felt compelled to order his super-scholarly book, which I hope to read as soon as it arrives. But even in the linked videos we can see that Miller, along with other NT scholars, has been trying to understand these early Christian writings from the point of view of the 1st century Gentile world (as opposed to the studies of the fundamentalist schools which approach the NT solely from the POV of 1st century Judaism). Miller studied the deifications in the classical world. A passage from Roldán’s book about one of the deifications contextualises the deification that the evangelists would make a few decades later (but this time deifying a Jew).

The inordinate and gratuitous honours that Caligula decreed in memorial of Drusilla not only represented to public opinion—and, especially, to the senatorial order—the devotion bordering on the madness of a bereaved brother. Divinisation, whether it was a matter of innocent comedy or was indeed felt in all its theological dimension, had hitherto been an extraordinarily restrictive honour, only granted to two personages, Caesar and Augustus, whom, moreover, the popular imagination had already endowed with superhuman traits. [my translation]

Let us remember that by this time the Romans were no longer as purely Aryan as they had once been. This imperial devotion to the monarch (monarchy was forbidden in the Roman Republic) would also be suffered by the Russians in later centuries, who, historically, have been able to tolerate tyrants. I find it incredible that, in the beautiful streets of St. Petersburg, small busts with effigies of Lenin and Stalin are still sold to tourists! Like the Romans of imperial times, since the Mongol invasions* Russians haven’t been as genetically pure as they were before the Asian invasions.

________

(*) Bear in mind that Mongol terror ruled Russians for a quarter of a millennium, enough to spoil their Aryan blood due to interbreeding (see The Fair Race, pages 268ff).

Categories
Ancient Greece Ancient Rome Psychohistory

Caligula, 3

Marble portrait bust of the emperor Gaius, known as Caligula, A.D. 37–41.

The West’s Darkest Hour isn’t a news site. But it is still difficult not to say at least a word about what has happened in the last few hours regarding Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mutiny in Russia. Media misinformation is such that it is as difficult to know exactly what is happening this very day as it is to make a reliable biography of Caligula: both sources, some from the 1st century and some from the 21st century, are compromised by propaganda.

But back to our topic these days. José Manuel Roldán received his doctorate in 1968 and a few years later obtained the Chair of Ancient History at the University of Granada, and later that of Salamanca. His work has focused on the history of Rome. Despite his credentials, the Spanish historian is a normie. Unlike what William Pierce wrote in Who We Are, much of what we read in Calígula isn’t useful to us. Nevertheless, the book allows me to explain some very important issues.

If the conquest of Germania up to the Elbe was regarded by Caligula as an un-renounceable family legacy (his father wanted to avenge Rome for the defeat of Hermann), the positive image I had of him, after reading that sentence by Eduardo Velasco quoted in the first instalment of this series, immediately collapses. I confess that on this site I stopped quoting Gore Vidal’s novel Julian when I came across the pages in which Julian the Apostate fought against the Germans. (If we recall Who We Are, as quoted in The Fair Race, the pure Aryans were the Germans, not the 4th-century Romans.)

Calígula is reminding me of what Tom Holland said in Dominion: that, although he was an absolute fan of the Greco-Roman world, when he began to study it he noticed some barbaric customs. Pages 40-41 of Calígula for example describe the essential triumphal ceremony in Rome, where white bulls whose horns were gilded and entwined with garlands were then immolated. Caligula himself, at the age of five, went to one of these ceremonies in the triumphal chariot when his father Germanicus was honoured in Rome. But even as emperor the number of animal victims sacrificed during the first three months of his reign has been calculated at one hundred and sixty thousand (page 139 of Calígula).

Regarding humans, an anecdote collected by Tacitus alarmed me. When Tiberius punished the remaining sons of the traitor Sejanus, an innocent daughter of Sejanus repeatedly asked for what crime she was being dragged off for. Historians of the time say that being a virgin she couldn’t suffer capital punishment, so the executioner raped her and then he could legally strangle her! Furthermore, influenced by the histories of William Pierce and Arthur Kemp, I have always sided with Republican Rome and against Imperial Rome. But on pages 178-179 of Calígula we are informed that gladiatorial combats, of Etruscan origin, had been introduced in the middle of the 3rd century b.c.e. And by the end of the 2nd century b.c.e. they had become so popular that the Senate found it necessary to admit them among the public spectacles!

This is not to say that I am, like Holland, making concessions to Christian morality insofar as what we, in Day of Wrath, have called psychogenic emergence is a development of empathy that evolved without the need for Semitic religions. But it’s clear that both Eduardo Velasco, who blogged in his webzine Evropa Soberana, and William Pierce, were wrong to believe that Sparta was the model for the Aryan man when the obvious choice was none other than Hitler’s Third Reich. See what I wrote on pages 481-482 of The Fair Race about the Vikings and the extreme Yang exemplified in Sparta (exactly the same could be said about the ancient Romans).

This prompted me this day to publish a new page, ‘The Sacred Words’ which can be read in red letters at the very top of this site, as well as changing the subtitle once again to The West’s Darkest Hour (the site of the priest of the sacred words).

Precisely because I am a priest of those words, Roldán’s Calígula is having a very different impact on me than I imagined when I bought it (funnily enough, it was the last copy they had at Amazon Books, so I had no choice but to buy it). If anyone has already assimilated my version of Psychohistory in Day of Wrath, he will understand my repudiation of much of classical culture in favour of Hitler’s Third Reich. It is obvious that recent advances in psychogenesis have determined me, and this reminds me of the seminal essay ‘The Red Giant’ (collected in my anthology On Exterminationism), in which a Swede said that some values had to be transvalued to Greco-Roman values and other values to more recent times (say, to Jane Austen’s world).

Like Tom Holland, familiarity with the dark side of the classical world makes me see things about it that I find disturbing and unacceptable. But unlike Holland, I reiterate, I do so not because of Christian morality but because of what we in Day of Wrath call psychogenesis.

Categories
Ancient Rome

Caligula, 2

Marble portrait bust of the emperor Gaius, known as Caligula, A.D. 37–41.

 

Foreword: Caligula, A Historical Enigma

by José Manuel Roldán

Thirty stab wounds ended the life of Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus on 24 January 41, barely four years after he succeeded Tiberius, Augustus’ heir to the imperial throne. He had not yet reached the age of thirty, which was, however, more than enough time for his memory to be stigmatised forever as a paradigm of cruelty, under the nickname that his father’s soldiers had given him in his childhood: Little boot.

The life and reign of Caligula have been a topic of unresolved debate and controversy since antiquity, although it seems impossible to banish from the popular imagination the gloomy and disturbing image that his name alone arouses. And yet, this image of an inept, bloodthirsty, unpredictable and monstrous tyrant that tradition has handed down to us seems more like a melodramatic and simplifying label, invented not so much to define the character as to avoid a coherent explanation of the apparent contradictions in his behaviour: a simplification that has pontificated with the diagnosis of madness the many nooks and crannies of a complex personality.

This diagnosis has served to ‘explain’ the dozens of anecdotes with which the ancient literary tradition has traced the outline of the emperor, converted into as many examples of erratic and perverse behaviour, as support for a trivial stereotype: the bloodthirsty monster, capable of any outrage, about whom there has been no scruple in inventing even imaginary crimes to give greater consistency and morbidity to the character, already condemned from the beginning to play this role. Examples are the descriptions offered by Robert Graves’s I, Claudius, later plastically recreated in a well-known BBC television series; the image of the emperor in a 1953 film, The Robe; Albert Camus’ drama Caligula; Pepe Cibrián’s Argentine musical Calígula; or the shameful monstrosity of Tinto Brass in a pornographic film produced for Penthouse. Titles and titles of so-called ‘historical’ novels have piled up with Caligula as the protagonist. Thus, Calígula, una novela sobre el perverso emperador romano, by P.J. Franceschini and P. Lundel; Calígula, el dios cruel, by S. Obermeier, or Calígula, by M.G. Silato, to offer only examples published in Spanish.

The label, on the other hand, was quite simple. It was hard enough to follow faithfully the outlines drawn by the Roman literature of the imperial period itself, which was unanimous in its vilification of Gaius. But are these sources reliable? A preliminary step, therefore, in approaching the life of Gaius would be to take this tradition into account and look into it objectively. Only two authors knew Caligula during his lifetime: the writer Seneca and Philo, a Jewish philosopher from Alexandria. The former, an intriguing and quarrelsome courtier, was nearly condemned to death by Gaius; the latter went to Rome as spokesman for a delegation of Alexandrian Jews to the emperor and left his impressions in the pamphlet Embassy to Gaius. The rest wrote their works after Caligula was dead: Flavius Josephus, a Pharisee Jew of the Flavian period, included in his Antiquities of the Jews, published in 93, numerous facts about the reign, though in connection with problems of his people; the Annals of the great historian Cornelius Tacitus, a few years later, can only be used to illustrate the youth of Gaius, because the books on his reign—VII and following—have been lost; the Life of Gaius, by Suetonius, secretary for a time to the emperor Hadrian, is the only complete biography of Caligula, but its tendency to sensationalism forces many of its facts to be called into question; finally, Dion Cassius, the Anatolian writer, between the 2nd and 3rd centuries, in his Roman History, while providing a good deal of information about Caligula’s rule, is too far removed from the events and therefore influenced by the sources he used in his account.

But in the analysis of these sources one decisive point must be borne in mind: by whom they were written and for what audience. Except for the two Jewish writers, Philo and Josephus, whose interlocutors were their fellow countrymen in Alexandria and Jerusalem respectively, the rest wrote mainly for the Roman social elites and, more specifically, for their most influential representatives, the members of the Senate, to which they all belonged, except Suetonius, otherwise closely linked to the circle of a conspicuous senator of the Trajanic period, Pliny the Younger. In the case of a clearly anti-senatorial figure like Caligula, this finding is highly significant. The audiences of these writers would not have entirely accepted a representation of Gaius that portrayed him in a positive light. A sentence from Tacitus’ Annals is illuminating in this respect: ‘The deeds of Tiberius and Gaius, as well as those of Claudius and Nero, were falsified out of fear while they were alive; and written, after their death, with hatred still fresh’.

But at the same time, regardless of the true intentions of their authors, these sources are an invaluable source of evidence for understanding the emperor’s views. Views, as we shall see, marked by the aspiration to move away from the elaborate, but also mistaken, political construction devised by Augustus—an autocracy disguised in republican garb in favour of open monarchical domination. All the emperors who tried to advance in the logical deployment of the powers implicit in the Principate were stigmatised, as opposed to those who prudently maintained the fiction of separation, however illusory, of powers between the prince and the Senate. Thus was born the distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ emperors, which, overcoming the barriers of antiquity, still continues to influence our own judgement.

Caligula undoubtedly occupies a prominent place in the second group, not so much for his governmental action as for his manifest hostility towards the senatorial collective, which took revenge, after his death, by heaping rubbish on his memory and denying him the essential element that distinguishes the human being: reason. Caligula was treated as a madman for persecuting the aristocracy. But his successor, Claudius, who tried to respect the aristocracy, was considered an imbecile.

Nevertheless, and as a predictable reaction, since the beginning of the 20th century historical research, aware of the partiality of the documentary sources, has tried to correct this negative image. A long article by H. Willrich, published in 1903, first drew attention to the positive aspects of Caligula’s work and his motivations, over and above the simplistic label of madness. Subsequent studies have taken up this point of view, with new or more substantiated arguments, to become, on occasions, veritable apologies, as far removed from the historical truth as the very sources they seek to correct. Thus, it is not surprising that there is also no shortage of works which, while accepting Gaius’ madness without further ado attempt to explain it using psychoanalysis or clinical points of view, thereby indirectly recognising the reliability of the ancient sources.

These sources are certainly full of inconsistencies and difficulties in their correct interpretation, but it is also true that it is not possible to do without them as a guiding thread. It is the task of the historian to winnow out the fictional elements they contain, to separate them from the consistent data with which a plausible picture can be reconstructed. Plausible, but not authentic. And that is precisely the greatness and the misery of the historian.

Potsdam

______ 卐 ______

 

Editor’s note: Emphasis is mine. It perfectly portrays what I meant in the last paragraph of my previous post on Caligula.