Bread and Circuses: Historical Sociology and Political Pluralism. - book reviews

National Review, Sept 3, 1990 by Michael Coren

DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON, the sage for all seasons, reviewing a hopeful arriviste's manuscript on one occasion, described it as both good and original. However, the piquant lexicographer added, what is good is not original; and what is original is most certainly not good.

To what extent this critique may be applied to contemporary society lies at the heart of these two volumes about the classical world, and assaults the emetic sohpsism of the last quarter-century. I breathe, therefore I am. The dictatorship of the living. The belief that the past is redundant, or mechanically and inevitably surpassed in the maelstrom of chronology. To many in seats of letters and learning in the West, philosophy, history, and literature are deemed to have begun only in 1789.

Imagine a man crossing a river by way of steppingstones: if he leaps from the bank to the middle stone, he loses his balance and topples; if he walks stone by stone, he is stable, his footing sure. Is the footing of the current generation of graduates and teachers sure? The question is as rhetorical as its answer is baleful. The attempt to expunge classicism from education and society is already well under way. We have fiddled whilst Rome is spurned.

Bread and Circuses is not new, but a translation by Brian Pearce of Paul Veyne's seminal work originally published in France (1976). Gallic historical writing is hardly renowned for its streamlined prose, and this translation is prolix and unpredictable. Its worth, however, lies not in its accessibility but in its analysis.

At the center of its thesis is a question: Why did ancient Rome's patrician classes offer munificent gifts "benefaction") to the masses? These donations were seldom meager, and included buildings, feasts, institutes, and entertainments. The meals invariably included much more than bread, and the entertainments were far more substantial than mere circuses. The phrase bread and circuses" was, in fact, Juvenal's contemptuous and misleading reference to the apparently easily satisfied Roman plebeians; he desired them to know their place but, anticipating modern liberal wisdom, wished to define that place for them. Unlike so many present-day historians, Professor Veyne carried no ideological luggage on his quest, had no desire to blacken any reputations. He chose three cultures-the Greek cities of the later Hellenistic period, the Roman Republic, and the Roman Empire and applied the same inquiry to each.

The author's assumption is that the genius of the ancient world lay not in a rejection of class structure, but in a percipient and empathetic comprehension of it. The almost religious dedication to philanthropy was motivated in part by three things: It satisfied the cravings of the masses and ensured their loyalty. It codified the forms of public enjoyment and organized its regularity. And it provided perennial reminders of the superiority of the ruling elite.

The systems they built worked with graceful success and triumph. Romans and Greeks adopted the ethos of empire, it is true; but on their journeys of conquest they took with them religious toleration, advanced technology, language and literature, a higher life expectancy, and eventually, in the case of Rome, the Christian religion. One is reminded of the Monty Python movie in which a risible Judean revolutionary asks rhetorically: What have the Romans ever given us?" The answer grows ever longer-roads, water supply, law and order, communications until the embarrassed radical petulantly shouts for his comrades to desist.

The verisimilitude of this scenario is staggering-particularly to certain pedagogues who fear precedents that contradict their position. Rome above all epitomized an idea the modem intellectual undervalues: citizenship. Romans were obliged to participate in a symbiotic and all-embracing social contract; the giving of gifts, more noble than taxation and less altruistic than charity, was intrinsic to their secular covenant. Citizenship demands obligation, sacrifice, and discipline in order to enjoy liberty, gain, and protection. It is give-and-take, rather than give-and-give, and take and-take. From the glory that was Rome to the gluttony that is modernism. As Father George Rutler has written, "Society is burdened by social critics who boast little awareness of the artifacts of civilization, whose word processors are bloodless, and who do not feel the pulse of whole ages."

The immutable moral hierarchy was a Greek idea, and ideal, which reaches down to the present day. It is one of the aspects of Hellenism so poignantly depicted in Oxford academic Oliver Taplin's Greek Fire, essential reading as a corrective for those who have been more interested in Plato's supposed pederasty than in his Republic. The achievements of ancient Greece have suffered a different fate from those of Rome, but an equally impious one. Rather than having been ignored, they have been distorted, vulgarized, and exploited. Mr. Taplin's work is designed to coincide with a documentary series (premiering in August on the Arts & Entertainment Network), and is suited for the coffee table as much as the library shelf. That factor does not detract from its verve and stature. The author has not let television (a word of half-Greek, half-Roman etymology) interfere with his approach. The book is a conspectus, dividing Greek accomplishments into ten distinct chapters and focusing not so much on their history and content as on their influence over the modem, and particularly the English-speaking, world. This is partly wisdom, partly necessity: introducing the cornucopian outpourings of Aristotle, Mr. Taplin modestly explains, "There is simply not room for me to pursue everything." Indeed there is not. Nor should there be. Better to challenge a smaller field in depth than to fail in a quixotic effort to examine every tenet of Hellenism.