I’m sitting here eating a nice vegan meal, reading Livy. I just heard that somebody killed Charlie Kirk, another fascist nobody in this rapidly disintegrating country. We can’t keep track of how many fucking wars or proxy wars we’re in, or how many innocent people we’ve killed or sent to concentration camps in a week, but here come the hand-wringers and cry-babies on command, from Trump to Newsom to Obama, gnashing their teeth and virtue signaling over the least consequential death in America today.
Spare me. One more right-wing loudmouth gone silent? No tears here. I feel fine. I ain’t done with my latte. Or my Livy. Too bad I don’t have Conrad’s Heart of Darkness with me to read right now. But then, I don’t really need to read it. I’m in it.
Policy of Truth 
I was going to suggest that if you had lunch, you could eat it with a Caudine Fork. But I guess that’s not till the next volume.
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I was really tempted to skip the first volume, honestly. But then I remembered my Marcus Aurelius, and figured I should do my duty, so yeah, it’s like 500 pages and another $20 before the Caudine Fork.
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In Livy’s early books, I love how in every generation there’s always an Attius Clausus a.k.a. Appius Claudius, and he’s always a villain, as though he kept getting reincarnated. I often suspect that Livy is imposing an official chronology on a baggy mass of folklore.
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Haven’t gotten there yet. Just keeping track of the Alexanders and the Aristobuluses in Josephus was a full time job.
They all seem like villains to me, honestly, even the best of them, but even worse are their modern apologists: “Thus Sulla and Pompey and Caesar and Antony and Octavian were all forced to carry on an imperialistic policy and to extend unceasingly the limits of the state…” (M. Rostovtzeff, Rome, p 148). “Circumstances had forced Augustus to adopt a defensive policy on the frontiers–in Germany, on the Danube, and on the Euphrates–and the same policy was consistently carried out by Tiberius” (p. 200). The Antonine policy was “defensive without being passive,” and “did not hesitate to annex new territory, when it could not be avoided, or to carry on preventive warfare in the enemy’s country” (p. 210).
Five emperors were “forced” to adopt a policy of conquest. Augustus was “forced” to adopt a “defensive policy” over lands that Rome had violently conquered. The Antonines were just trying to defend themselves, for Christ’s sake, and how do you do that without a little annexation?
As for the conquered people? “At the same time there was an inclination to incorporate in the empire all peoples that were fit to receive the Greco-Roman civilization.” They were “incorporated.” No force there. “In particular, the reliefs on the Arch of Titus, representing a triumphal procession after the conquest of Judea, rank among the highest achievements of Roman imperial art” (p. 204). It’s kind of funny that no one regards the Arch of Titus, a celebration of the near-genocide of the Jews of Jerusalem, as anti-Semitic. Meanwhile, they’re sure Judith Butler is. Judith fucking Butler. I mean, come on.
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Yeah, I meant “villain from Livy’s standpoint.”
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