Posted on 05/16/2019 5:38:33 AM PDT by Kaslin
Sometime around A.D. 60, in the age of Emperor Nero, a Roman court insider named Gaius Petronius wrote a satirical Latin novel, "The Satyricon," about moral corruption in Imperial Rome. The novel's general landscape was Rome's transition from an agrarian republic to a globalized multicultural superpower.
The novel survives only in a series of extended fragments. But there are enough chapters for critics to agree that the high-living Petronius, nicknamed the "Judge of Elegance," was a brilliant cynic. He often mocked the cultural consequences of the sudden and disruptive influx of money and strangers from elsewhere in the Mediterranean region into a once-traditional Roman society.
The novel plots the wandering odyssey of three lazy, overeducated and mostly underemployed single young Greeks: Encolpius, Ascyltos and Giton. They aimlessly mosey around southern Italy. They panhandle and mooch off the nouveau riche. They mock traditional Roman customs. The three and their friends live it up amid the culinary, cultural and sexual excesses in the age of Nero.
Certain themes in "The Satyricon" are timeless and still resonate today.
The abrupt transition from a society of rural homesteaders into metropolitan coastal hubs had created two Romes. One world was a sophisticated and cosmopolitan network of traders, schemers, investors, academics and deep-state imperial cronies. Their seaside corridors were not so much Roman as Mediterranean. And they saw themselves more as "citizens of the world" than as mere Roman citizens
(Excerpt) Read more at townhall.com ...
So Trump is Nero? What are you saying Victor? Spell it out for us.
I read this last week. An interesting perspective. Love VDH.
LOL - lots of toxic overlap...
They’re illustrating events that took place in 60 AD with an image of the remains of a building they didn’t break ground on until 70 AD?
Trump would be the anti-Nero, standing in the way of wealthy elites who rejected traditional values.
Yet another example of why I love Victor Davis Hanson.
So, Trump is the paragon of traditional values. Roger that.
One needn’t be a paragon to stand on the side of traditional values. The most wicked elites rely on the broader culture having a large measure of traditional values and morality. They just object to ‘too much’ morality.
How many abortions do you think Trump has paid for?
If we are lucky he'll be our Nerva. If not, maybe Marcus Aurelius
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