The Ancient Wayfarer

Why we need a cursus honorum

2008-03-02T12:38:00.000-08:00

The 2008 Election may well be a matter of experience. And ancient Rome had a way of ensuring the leaders who decided on war and took the troops off to it had requisite experience. The cursus honorum provided that no man could run for consul without having first been praetor [and that no younger than age 39]. The brilliant C. Julius Caesar Strabo [cousin of the father of the famous Julius Caesar] was stopped from running for consul for this very reason -- he had never been a praetor.
By that time a man won office as praetor, he had been in the Senate since age 30, before which he had done 2 years military service. And after serving as a praetor he had to wait two years to run for consul. So no man could run for consul before age 42 with few exceptions [P. Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus being one]. And the consuls were the ones to head the army. There were two consuls, alternating their presiding over the Senate every other month. The one with most votes was senior consul and presided over the Senate the first month, then the junior consul took over the next. Every year new consuls were elected. Each consul then had a dozen years experience in the Senate by the time they first ran for office.
Bloodline alone wasn't always good enough to ensure a win at the polls. Quintus Caecilius Metellus Scipio, born a Scipio and adopted by Metellus Pius, never won election -- he had to rely on his son-in-law, Pompey, elected as sole consul, to appoint him. And the brilliant new man Cicero, with no ancestry to speak of, won election to the office. As did Gaius Marius, from backwater northern Italy, win office 7 times.
The war powers tend to be the most important in government -- extending its control over the youth [who form the infantry], providing the basis for trading some liberties [such is the cost of freedom], and justifying its own purpose ["to provide for common defense"]. And they reside in the hands of the head of our Republic.

Test thy mettle...

2007-07-12T14:59:00.000-07:00

Take my quiz: Roman Consuls

Lex Licinia Mucia...

2007-06-28T07:01:00.000-07:00

Since my friend Kahunah and I were talking about our being the new Roman Republic, I wondered how we'd do with a look at the law Rome introduced on their own Latin immigration problem. Rome's Latin neighbors had over the years been granted certain rights, and were often drafted into the Roman armies -- they took a heavy casualty loss at Arausio in 106 B. C. Some even married Romans.

In 95 B. C., the consuls Quintus Mucius Scaevola [the Pontifex Maximus] and Lucius Licinius Crassus [the famous orator] introduced a law expelling the illegal immigrants who had connived to get their names onto the previous census done by Marcus Antonius and Lucius Valerius Flaccus. M. Antonius and L. Flaccus, as censors, had the task of counting all the citizens of Rome.
Antonius had a son by a non-Roman woman, and the son was named Gaius Antonius Hibrida [hybrid son of a citizen father and non-citizen mother], who was to be consul 63 B. C., colleague of Cicero and prosecuted by Caesar.

Special courts were also enacted by the consular law, presided over by ex-consuls who went out to the Italian cities to find who was and who was not illegially enrolled.

Eventually, the Italian allies went to war with Rome, and in the end, Lucius Julius Caesar, consul of 90 B. C. censor the next year [and cousin of a more famous Julius Caesar], carried a law granting citizenship to all Italians not having taken up arms against Rome -- to the consternation of conservatives who decried the amnesty being granted.

why Cicero should be required reading

2007-05-04T13:45:00.000-07:00

"The greatest orator, save one, of antiquity, has left it on record that he always studied his adversary's case with as great, if not still greater, intensity than even his own. What [Marcus Tullius] Cicero practiced as the means of forensic success requires to be imitated by all who study any subject in order to arrive at the truty. He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what the are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion. The rational position for him would be suspension of judgment."

-- John Stuart Mill, quoted in Morality and Moral Controversies, 7th edition, edited by John Arthur; Pearson Prentice Hall, 2005

Tiberius Canardius Scriptor Magnus

2007-03-29T15:00:00.000-07:00

Yes, soon I shall be able to add another title to my name: writer. The upcoming July 2007 issue of the New Orleans Genesis will carry an article of mine on the royal ancestry of Charles de St.-Etienne de la Tour, Governor of Acadia (d. 1666). Many Louisiana families descend from him, most famously the Mouton family so prominent in Lafayette. They include in their illustrious number the 9th governor of Louisiana, Alexandre Mouton (1804 - 1885).

I will be obtaining several extra copies .

Somewhere I think my father is smiling.

Trading a window for a door...

2007-03-22T16:59:00.000-07:00

Today is the first birthday I've had without my father. Last night I had a dinner attended by two of my aunts, an uncle, my cousin, my sister, my sister's adoptive parents, and CK. We went to one restaurant that told us they could not fit a party as large as ours together, could not seat incomplete parties, and could not keep holding tables while the rest of our party arrived.

So, CK, observant of the smoldering wrath of my plans in ruins, called Copeland's and we went there. I gave my sister and my cousin copies of Redwood Delta, about the platoon my father served in while stationed in Vietnam. I gave my aunts copies of the report I wrote up on my father's royal line to Emperor Charles II the Bald.

Had my father been alive, I doubt I would have had the visits with my sister and her adoptive parents that I've had since last October. They 've taken me into their family by my being brother of their adoptive daughter.

One idea of Imperio

2007-03-16T12:06:00.000-07:00

A quote from Sir Ronald Syme,

"The nobiles by their ambition and their feuds, had not merely destroyed their spurious republic: they had ruined the Roman People. There is something more important than political liberty; and political rights are a means, not an end in themselves. That end is security of life and property: it could not be guaranteed by the constitution of Republican Rome. Worn and broken by civil war and disorder, The Roman people was ready to surrender the ruinous privilege of freedom and submit to strict government as the beginning of time....So order came to Rome. "Acriora ex eo vincula", as Tacitus observes."

(The Roman Revolution, Oxford)

Sorry for the interruption....

2007-01-22T11:52:00.000-08:00

THis is my first post in quite some time. The reason for that is that last October my father died. He was 60. He died of acute pancreatitis, and it was quite sudden. A decade ago I would have said there was no way he'd see 60; five years ago I would have said he has access to the best medical care in the state [the Veteran's Affairs hospital system] and so will outlive me.

And now I have a half-sister. After my father died I had genetic testing done to confirm the long-heard rumor we knew but never had proved. So finally after decades of crying myself to sleep praying for my family to be put back together [and offering to God any body part he'd care to take of mine iin return for the brother and sister he took from me], I have proven the paternity of my half-sister. A half sister that was taken from her biological mother at age 6 by the state and put into foster care, not really knowing who her father was. Now she does. I will see to that. I will tell her all about my father and how he turned his life around.

A certain friend of mine brought this to my attention, so I had to reply:

My Peculiar Aristocratic Title is:
Imperial Majesty Donald the Rustic of Fishbourne Sneething
Get your Peculiar Aristocratic Title

show me Missouri

2006-09-14T11:23:00.000-07:00

I got some mail from the St. Louis Genealogical Society. I had written them before my trip to New York, and I was asking about my great-grandfather, William Matthews, who was born in St. Louis c. 1870 or so [he died in August 1948 in New Orleans, LA, at 78 years of age].
I knew he was married in 1921 -- after his children with Nathalie Tourne Bailey were born and a month after she divorced her first husband, William Bailey -- and that marriage in New Orleans in December 1921 gave his parents as William J. Matthews and Winifred Fitzpatrick.

So I hoped St. Louis records could help.

They replied to me in great detail. Wonderful, thoughtful, service. They found William Matthews and Winifred Fitzpatrick in a marriage record. They married 11 March 1867 in St. Louis, MO. A record of the marriage written by the justice of the peace was sent to me.

Now, I conjecture this son William had a brother Thomas P. Matthews, born c. 1873 in MO, who is listed in 1920 St. Louis census with daughter Winifred. I know that my grandfather William had a daughter Winifred born in 1904 in New Orleans. It is plausible to think this Winifred is a cousin of Thomas's daughter Winifred, born abt. 1909 [she's 11 years old in the 1920 census].

my mother's cousin Ray told me his father, Alcee Clement Matthews, felt there was a line of Blackfoot Indian in the family; also, my mother's brother, Daniel, was often seen wearing Indian headdress. With Winifred Fitzpatrick born in Ireland and dying in Jan 1883 in MO, the Indian is not from her. It may be from her husband....

glucose and Augustine, anyone?

2006-09-11T14:48:00.000-07:00

So my glorious road trip to New York tempted the Fates. My joy had to be balanced by equal angst, trepidation, and other such conditions making my hereditary anghina work up. Three days of sheer take-your-plan-and-toss-it-punyhuman joy.

1. On the way home, CK and I are driving along in Georgia on our way to New Orleans when we have a flat tire. Result: 4 hours in local Wal-Mart. Cutting into the time I need to get home for work at 4 am the next day. Which means I have to hop a jet alone at Atlanta for a flight out. 300 lira americano.

2. That gets me home in New Orleans in my own bed by 11 pm. I get up at 2 am the next morning; my father and I skipped dinner. 6 hours into my shift, security comes and gets me from the cafeteria asking me if my father has a history of seizures. I arrive to find my father in a wheelchair looking for all the world like he's drunk -- slurring words, no motor control, etc. Only he's not. He's low on sugar [not good for a diabetic] and was waiting for lunch when he fell. He's very redfaced, sweating gallons, and needs water. And a bathroom. So I get him into the bathroom, get security to get me water for him to drink , and orange juice, and also granola bars for him to eat. Finally I get him standing and he gets all done. Then when finished, he stumbles into me. A 300 lb man and his 150 lb only son is trying to hold him up. And failing miserably. He falls again onto me. Enter security to pick us up. When we get him outside, I have to drive him home. I, who haven't driven a vehicle since I wrecked my last one last August. I get him home without incident, fix him a can of peaches, and send him off to bed hiding the paternal deathscare I just had.

3. A day after this, I am dealing at my blackjack table and my mother come up to me. My mother who is in florida and was callliing me like mad to say she's coming in. But with my havingn lost my cell phone, I had no idea. My mother is in the same building as my father and the mere thought of this sends images of Chernobyl into my mind. Only the hand of Fate prevented their meeting.

Which brings me to my point. In new york CK and I talked about why I am so fatalistic. Hence my "god doesn't play dice with the universe" idea and why nothing is coincidence. And in Georgia at wal mart when I am perturbed at the delay and CK tries logic to reasssure my temper. And I say that it's Fate that in Georgia we are detained, as if the gods were tellling him they heard how he debated the idea of seeing various family members near there, the very place he was then forced to stay. And more of the fates trying to perhaps tell me how I actually can handle things like driving, meeting my parents both together, medical emergencies, or any other daily maelstrom in my life.

How many paths can one man take?

2006-09-06T04:56:00.000-07:00

I was on a trip to Virginia this past weekend to meet an old college friend. While our merry group was busy touring Washington, D. C., I was asked about my opinion on going back to change our pasts. Many of my friends have searched souls to wonder if they could have done things differently by changing past decisions.

I said that I believed in historical inevitability. We may not have gotten to where we are by the same path, but eventually we wind up here. And Life is not a path-defined function. And God does not play dice with the universe. And so on.

Hence the title of my musing. With a nod to Bod Dylan we wondered on our lives and where they were and how five years ago we never would have thought these paths would be the ones we would travel. St. Augustine would approve.

A philosophical roadblock to genealogy?

2006-06-20T14:58:00.000-07:00

I was talking to a cousin of mine the other day [it's not hard for a Cajun to do that] and I as usual discussed genealogy. And my cousin said there was a fairly straightforward tack that could dismantle any importance to the concept of drawing any familial conclusions.

Basically, it involves transmigration.

AS Meat Loaf said, "Life is just a highway, and the soul is just a car." Only here, the soul is the driver, and every fourscore years or so the driver decides to get a trade in. Always for a brand new car. With no memory or paperwork on any previous cars he/she may have owned.

And the genealogy I love doing amounts to tracing the production of the auto factory. The soul goes on to drive something new, completely different, by apparently a total random [or at least unknowable to us] system of choice in finding a new car to drive.

And so we die, in bodies royal or pauper, with the next model having nothing to do with any previous one, only perhaps in how we drive it. Which means we should try not to have too many accidents lest we lose a Cadillac and wind up with a Citroen or worse, a jalopy.

Now this didnt mean a fatal malfunction for my overall thesis on eternity of families. It just meant my genealogy trees may not trace them as well as I thought. My cousin was quick to add that the souls, driving their new cars around, could still well be drawn to seek out drivers they knew in previous races [on the idea that there just had to be a purpose in our going around this track however many times we go]. Causality seems to demand a purpose for everything. God just doesn't play dice with the universe....

the ghost of Crassus

2006-06-01T15:35:00.000-07:00

Our “new Rome” has an enemy in common with the old one -- Persia. M. Licinius Crassus died in battle against the Persians at Carrhae 54 B .C. The Parthian King, Orodes II, was in such a strong position that he issued coinage with the title "King of Kings," a deliberate evocation of the great earlier Persian King Xerxes [to whom the Parthian kings, ruling over the same land, traced their genealogy.

Then, C. Julius Caesar was planning to lead an expedition against them when he was killed in the Senate a decade later in March 44 B. C.. His adoptive son, Augustus, was only able to reach a diplomatic solution with the help of a succession crisis in the Persian royal family.

And now we have named Persia -- Iran -- as the latest non-democratic country we don’t trust. Just as Rome started many of her wars on the basis of a preemptive strike in self-defense, so too our leaders have considered the same strategy.

Deja vu?

2006-05-22T10:50:00.000-07:00

My friend Kahunah at Dogs of Atlantis and I are having a debate over what the current state of our country is. He sees it resembling the end of the Weimar Republic, and I thought of Rome. I told him our loss of the Soviet Union as rival was akin to Rome losing Carthage. And, to quote Augustine:

“Moreover, a people becomes avaricious and luxurious by prosperity; and it was this which that very prudent man [P. Cornelius Scipio] Nasica was endeavoring to avoid when he opposed the destruction of the greatest, strongest, wealthiest city of Rome's enemy. He thought that thus fear would act as a curb on lust, and that lust being curbed would not run riot in luxury, and that luxury being prevented avarice would be at an end; and that these vices being banished, virtue would flourish and increase the great profit of the state; and liberty, the fit companion of virtue, would abide unfettered.”
-- Augustinus, Bishop of Hippo, City of God, I, 31

Scipio Nasica lost his case, and Carthage was despoiled.

The result of this? Consider the following, written in 1961 during the days of the Kennedy White House -- considered by many as our last days of innocence:

“Wherever crowds gather in suffocating numbers, wherever rents rise steeply and housing conditions deteriorate, wherever a one-sided exploitation of distant territories removes the pressure to achieve balance and harmony nearer at hand, there the precedents of Roman building almost automatically revive, as they have today: the arena, the tall tenement, the mass contests and exhibitions, the football matches, the international beauty contests, the strip tease made ubiquitous by advertisement, the constant titillation of the senses by sex, liquor and violence -- all in true Roman style. So, too, the multiplication of bathrooms and over-expenditure on broadly-paved motor roads and, above all, the massive collective concentration on glib ephemeralities of all kinds, performed with supreme technical audacity. These symptoms are the end: magnification of demoralized power, minifications of life. When these signs multiply, Necropolis is near, though not a stone has yet crumbled. For the barbarian has already captured the city from within.”

-- Lewis Mumford, The City in History (New York: 1961), p 262; quoted in Arthur Kahn, The Education of Julius Caesar (New York: 1986), p. x.

Not too long after 1961 -- indeed, perhaps because of Kennedy sucessfully standing up to the Soviet premier, Russia declined as a power and fell apart. And the threat of Russian reply held the United States in check from anything too extreme. As did our reply check the Kremlin. And both of which kept Germany divided long enough to prevent her rise to power again [unlike the Treaty of Versailles, which attempted to do the same thing]. Without them, who is to check us from devolving into a war such as Rome had with her Italian allies 90 B. C. over the question of Citizenship? Or check us from the next generation after that war, when Julius Caesar wound up witnessing the fall of the Roman Republic?

The golden door....

2006-05-15T11:18:00.000-07:00

I was talking to a cousin of mine yesterday over how I had gotten some mail delivered. It was a response from the Louisiana Secretary of State, and his office was sending me copies of vital records I requested. My cousin found it very tormenting that her grandmother's great-grandfather was a native of Spain. This cousin thoroughly enjoys the language, culture, and food of Germany [and wants to go visit there]. But French and Spanish ancestry my cousin found mocking; yet German was different.

With the immigration battle raging not far away in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona [at least, the front line of it], I told her that FDR was right: save only for the Native Americans, we all come from immigrants. Ours had come legally and gotten naturalization. For New Orleans, they mostly came from France at first, and then Spain; only later Germany and Italy. And Spain tied her policy to France ever since 1700 when Carlos II of Spain chose his French cousin as heir: the royal family of Spain is senior male line to the throne of France. Only the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713 bars them from it.

In my case, all my Spanish lines are legal, but many of the protests center on their cousins since Mexicans are mostly either Spanish -Indian or pure Indian. [And we're not even counting the ones coming from Central American countries up through Mexico to here...]. So is it any wonder that the cousins of the Natives we European immigrants massacred, interred, and coughed on are coming back? Quel suprise!

Introduction

2006-05-12T07:14:00.000-07:00

For my first post, an introduction. What struck me about an ancient wayfarer? Two things, mostly. First, of all the functions I assumed in my childhood, the one of messenger to my parents is the one I recall most. My parents agreed on very little in their marriage, and often needed a messenger lest their communication devolve to shouting matches. I was Hermes to their Zeus and Hera.

And as for the other reason, it has to do with my deep interest in history and genealogy. I like to think that Augustine wasn't off track in seeing a continuity in History. The path that history chooses to follow are often winding roads, crossing over itself many times in various places. But the path remains unbroken.

So I hope to put here many interesting pathways that don't seem to have a glaringly obvious connection. Until we follow them.

This allows all sorts of things. Among others, Cicero's hope for all social classes to get along. And, with my genealogical arguments, for a great many of our population to embrace itself as one big family.