Posted on 05/26/2006 3:57:38 PM PDT by Uncledave
bttt
Neither the weary, disciplined Roman soldiers, ranked along the west bank, nor the anxious, helter-skelter tribes amassing on the east bank could have been giving much thought to their place in history. But this moment of slack, this relative calm before the pandemonium to follow, gives us the chance to study the actors on both sides of this river and to look backward on what has been and forward to what will be.
Europe, rising out of Lake Constance in the northern Alps, bending and bowing north, then northwest, till after 820 miles of travel it reaches the coast of continental Europe and empties into the North Sea just opposite the Thames estuary. Returning to our Alpine heights, we can spot another river, rising from a smaller lake just north of Constance and coursing east for more than twice the length of the Rhine till it spends itself in the Black Sea. This is the Danube, Europe's longest river (after the Volga). To the north and east of these two Alpine rivers live the barbarians. To the south and west lies Romania, in its time the vastest and most powerful empire in human history.
The omnipotence and immensity of this empire-embracing, as it did, "the whole of the civilized world"— are not the qualities that would strike us were we to soar above the Mediterranean on that fateful day. What we would discern is the very opposite of power-- fragility, specifically geographic fragility. "We live around a sea," the perspicacious Socrates had reminded his listeners, "like frogs around a pond." For all the splendor of Roman standard, the power of Roman boot, and the extent of Roman road, the entire empire hugs the Mediterranean like a child's village of sand, waiting to be swept into the sea. From fruitful Gaul and Britain in the north to the fertile Nile Valley in the south, from the rocky Iberian shore in the west to the parched coasts of Asia Minor, all provinces of the empire turn toward the great sea, toward Medi-Terra-neathe Sea of Middle Earth. And as they turn to the center of their world, they turn their back on all that lies behind them, beyond the Roman wall. They turn their back on the barbarians.
That Rome should ever fall was unthinkable to Romans: its foundations were unassailable, sturdily sunk in a storied past and steadily built on for eleven centuries and more. There was, of course, the prophecy. Someone, usually someone in his cups, could always be counted on to bring up that old saw: the Prophecy of the Twelve Eagles, each eagle representing a century, leaving us with-- stubby fingers counting out the decades in a puddle of wine-- only seventy years remaining! Give or take a decade! Predictable laughter at the silliness of the whole idea. But in seventy years exactly, the empire would be gone.
Eternal Rome, eleven centuries old, hardly foresaw its doom. But theories about its fall are very old indeed. Two dozen years after this Roman-barbarian encounter along the Rhine, Augustine of Hippo, second city of Roman Africa, will be lying on his deathbed, listening to the clamor of another wave of barbarians as they attack the walls of his city. He has barely finished the final pages of his great defense of Christianity-- The City of God-- written to contradict the Roman pagans who discerned behind the barbarian assaults the old gods of Rome, angry at being forsaken by Christian converts. (No, insists Augustine eloquently, it is not Christianity but vice-encumbered paganism that is bringing the empire down.) Nine centuries later, as impressive feats of Roman engineering and sculpture are being dug up all over Italy at the dawn of the Renaissance, the question of what became of the cultural giants who built these things will be on everyone's lips. Petrarch, the Tuscan poet and scholar who is rightly remembered as the father of Renaissance humanism, rediscovers the concept of a "fall," which, following Augustine's lead, he blames on the empire's internal faults. Machiavelli, writing a century and a half later in a less spiritual, more cynical time, will blame the barbarians.
..............
Clues to the character of the Roman blindness are present in the scene along the frozen Rhine. The legionnaires on the Roman bank know that they have the upper hand, and that they always will have. Even though some are only half-civilized recruits recently settled on this side of the river, they are now Romans, inheritors of nearly twelve centuries of civilization, husbandry, agriculture, viniculture, horticulture, cuisine, arts, literature, philosophy, law, politics, martial prowess-- and all the "gear and tackle and trim" that goes with these pursuits. The world has never known anything as deep, as lasting, or as extensive as Pax Romana, the peace and predictability of Roman civilization. Inspecting the Roman soldiers now, we note the quiet authority of their presence, the polish of their person, the appropriateness of their stance-- they are spiffy. More than this, there is an esthetic to each gesture and accoutrement. All details have been considered-- ad unguem, as they would say, to the fingertip, as a sculptor tests the smoothness and perfection of his finished marble. Their hair is cut with a thought to the shape of the head, they are clean-shaven to show off the resoluteness of the jawline, their dress-- from their impregnable but shapely breastplates to their easy-- movement skirts— is designed with the form and movement of the body in mind, and their hard physiques recall the proportions of Greek statuary. Even the food in the mess is prepared to be not only savory to the taste but attractive to the eye. Just now the architriclinus -- the chef -- is beginning to prepare the carrots: he slices each piece lengthwise, then lengthwise again, to achieve slender, elongated triangles.
We look out across the river to the barbarian hosts, who in the slanting, gray light of winter mass like figures in a nightmare. Their hair (both of head and face) is uncut, vilely dressed with oil, braided into abhorrent shapes. Their bodies are distorted by ornament and discolored by paint. Some of the men are huge and muscular to the point of deformity, their legs wrapped comically in the garments called braccae— breeches. There is no discipline among them: they bellow at each other and race about in chaos. They are dirty, and they stink. A crone in a filthy blanket stirs a cauldron, slicing roots and bits of rancid meat into the concoction from time to time. She slices a carrot crosswise up its shaft, so that the circular pieces she cuts off float like foolish yellow eyes on the surface of her brew.
This unequal portrait of the two forces would not only have been the Roman view: it could almost have been the German view as well (for the milling hosts are of Germanic origin, as are all the intruders of this period). To the Romans, the German tribes were riffraff; to the Germans, the Roman side of the river was the place to be. The nearest we can come to understanding this divide may be the southern border of the United States. There the spit-and-polish troops are immigration police; the hordes, the Mexicans, Haitians, and other dispossessed peoples seeking illegal entry. The barbarian migration was not perceived as a threat by Romans, simply because it was a migration-- a year-in, year-out, raggle-taggle migration-- and not an organized, armed assault. It had, in fact, been going on for centuries. The Gauls had been the first barbarian invaders, hundreds of years before, and now Gaul lay at peace. The verses of its poets and the products of its vineyards were twin fountains of Roman inspiration. The Gauls had become more Roman than the Romans themselves. Why could not the same thing happen to these Vandals, Alans, and Sueves, now working themselves to a fever pitch on the far side of the river?
When, at last, the hapless Germans make their charge across the bridge of ice, it is head-on, without forethought or strategy. With preposterous courage they teem across the Rhine in convulsive waves, their principal weapon their own desperation. We get a sense of their numbers, as well as their desperation, in a single casualty count: the Vandals alone are thought to have lost twenty thousand men (not counting women and children) at the crossing. Despite their discipline, the Romans cannot hold back the Germanic sea.
From one perspective, at least, the Romans were overwhelmed by numbers-- not just in this encounter but during centuries of migrations across the porous borders of the empire. Sometimes the barbarians came in waves, though seldom as big as this one. More often they came in trickles: as craftsmen who sought honest employment, as warriors who enlisted with the Roman legions, as tribal chieftains who paid for land, as marauders who burned and looted and sometimes raped and murdered.
I'm not so sure it is intended to destroy conservatism as Rush says because to date all it has done is fire up conservatives as no issue has since 9/11.
I would agree that as a means of adding to the literally dying Democrat Party base there is no question of that. Americans know liberalism is a failure as seen by election results since 1968. So if you are the Democrats who are stuck at around 40% of the vote they can count on you go out and bring in new voters.
In this case illegal aliens who can only work at the "jobs Americans won't do" for a short period of time because of the physical demands of the jobs and denied the opportunity to assimilate as others have in the past they are left as dependents of the failed liberal welfare state. God help them.
Rush is right. Savage has right for a long time.
Lindsey Graham must go in 08!
L
BULLSEYE!
Be sure to get rid of him in the primaries. We have to wait until 2010 to again try to get rid of John McCain.
That scraping sound you hear is the shyster "lawyer" lobby sharpening it's knives. Twenty million potential "discrimination" lawsuits. That is, until one of their buddies on the bench decides that it's "constitutional" for all of those who have been deported since 1776 are allowed to file lawsuits against the United States.
There. Fixed it.
just kidding
Also Hagel, McCain, And Lugar when they are up for reelection
What is all this stuff about Rome? Don't you know that human nature has changed drastically in the last 1600 years? Seriously, we have cell phones and computers now. They didn't. /sarcasm
I believe the Sac Bee recounted him "pumping his fist" onboard his private 757 in jubilance.
He won, we lost.
The 29 Pubbies who voted against the immigration bill should waltz into the GOP Caucus and tell the RINOs that if you want ANYTHING done in the senate, you got to go thru us.
It is the DIM's senate trick played against the 23 RINOs. Ditto for the house.
He's right on the money here. The house has to stand tall.
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