Titus Livy: The History of Rome. Books I-V. Valerie M. Warrior translation. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2006.

Titus Livy: Rome’s Italian Wars. Books VI-X. J. C. Yardley translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

 

Tocqueville describes the advance of equality in civil societies throughout the modern era in the West, an advance concurrent with the retreat of aristocracy. He identifies that the advent of Christianity as the archē of this movement, which he understands not as an effect of ‘History’ but as the increasing awareness by all human beings of their own nature as humans, beings equal first of all before God and therefore among one another. Philosophers, Tocqueville said, had understood this for centuries, but Christianity brought this truth to ‘the many.’ The eighteen centuries since Christianity began, civil-social equality or “democracy” had pervaded Christendom; America, he wrote, was the “sample democracy,” the regime in which democracy had been most thoroughly instantiated in the habits of mind and heart of the people. Such a civil society could support a republican regime, as in America, or a despotism, as in Russia. In time, it might also generate a new form of aristocracy or oligarchy—perhaps in the form of industrial corporations or in the form of an administrative state. (Or, one might now think, so combination of the two.) Tocqueville called upon the remaining aristocrats not to resist democracy but to guide it toward well-founded republicanism.

The reader of Tocqueville who comes to Livy will see a similar movement in the first pentad of The History of Rome. Rome moves from kingship to tyranny to aristocracy to a mixed regime that saw the plebeian class, ‘the many,’ gradually if unsteadily assume more ruling authority. Conflict between plebeians and patricians within the mixed regime continued throughout the second half of the fifth century BC, near the end of which time Marcus Furius Camillus first comes to sight as one of a set of eight newly-elected military tribunes. In Livy’s estimation, Camillus was the preeminent Roman statesman of his generation and more, a model statesman for any time or place.

In the sixty years preceding Camillus’ first election to high office, Romans enacted several important law enhancing plebeian authority. Perhaps the most important of these was introduced by plebeian tribune Gaius Terentilius Harsa in 462 BC. During a war with the Volsci, when both consuls were out of the city, leading the armies, Terentilius “spent several days complaining to the plebs about the arrogance of the patricians, criticizing in particular the power of the consuls as excessive and intolerant in a free state” (III.ix.173). In ridding themselves of the monarchy, Romans had merely exchanged one master for two. He proposed a law establishing the election of a five-man committee to “write up laws concerning the power of the consuls,” so that “the consuls’ whims and license would not serve in place of laws” (III.ix.174). Thwarted initially in the senate, the Terentilian Law would remain the focus of Roman class struggle for many years. 

By the mid-450s, in negotiations with the senators, the tribunes argued that if the patricians “disliked plebeian laws, they should allow lawmakers to be appointed jointly from plebeians and patricians who would pass measures that were advantageous to both sides and would ensure equality before the law” (III.xxxi.201)—the principle underlying the mixed regime as outlined by Aristotle. The patricians agreed, with the caveat that only a patrician could propose a law. A delegation was sent to Athens to “write down the famous laws of Solon and acquaint themselves with the institutions, laws, and customs of other Greek states” (III.xxxi.201). With this information in hand, in 451 BC the senate agreed to a major change in the regime, whereby authority passed from the consuls and the tribunate to a board of ten, the Decemvirate. “It did not last long” (III.xxxiii.201); within a year, the Decemvirs began to rule by terror over plebeians and senators alike. “If anyone should utter a word that was reminiscent of liberty, either in the senate or before the people, the rods and axes were immediately at the ready, if only to frighten the rest” (III.xxxvi.207). They employed squads of young patricians as enforcers, granting them the property of those they beheaded. “Corrupted by these rewards, the young nobles not only did not resist such injustice but openly preferred license for themselves, rather than liberty for everyone” (III.iiivii.208). By 449 BC, “liberty was mourned as lost forever” (III.iiixiii.209).

It took a military emergency, a Sabine invasion of Roman territory concurrent with an Aequian attack on Rome’s allies, the Etruscans, to move the senate to action. Senator Marcus Horatius Barbatus now called the Decemvirs “the Ten Tarquins” (III.iiiix.211), but the senators, hating the plebeian tribunate even more than the Decemvirs, failed to move against them. After the leading Decemvir committed an outrage against a plebeian girl and plebeian soldiers refused to fight until the tribunate was restored, the senate yielded, abolishing the first Decemvirate and allowing a new election of plebeian tribunes and reestablishing the consuls. Moreover, laws enabling the plebeians to self-legislate, restoring the right of appeal of a consul’s judgment (“the sole defense of liberty”), and establishing the sacrosanctity of the tribunes ensured that return to old institutions did not leave the plebeians back where they had begun before the founding of the Decemvirate (III.lv.229-30). This enhancement of ‘the democracy’ even reached the army, as Horatius, now a consul leading troops against the Sabines, assured his men that “whatever strategy and spirit I am going to use will be up to you soldiers” (III.lx.239). After the victories, when the senate refused to grant a triumph to either victorious consul, the people themselves granted them a triumph—the “first time [that] a triumph was celebrated at the bidding of the people,” through their tribal councils, “without the authorization of the senate” (III.lxiii.241).

Factional strife continued, nonetheless. Although the plebeians “were quiet,” “the younger patricians began to maltreat them” again (III.lxv.243). They did so in accord with “cabals of the more powerful” (III.lxv.244). The tribunes were too weak to protect the plebs and, “on the other hand, the older senators, though thinking their young men too headstrong, preferred to have their excessive spirit on their own side rather than that of their adversaries, if moderation had to be disregarded” (III.lxv.244). Livy comments, “So difficult it is to be moderate in the defense of freedom. By pretending to want equality, an individual raises himself up in order to put another down. By protecting themselves against fear, men actually make themselves the object of fear, and, when they have defended themselves from injustice, we proceed to injure others, as if it were a necessity either to do or to suffer wrong.” (III.lxv.244).

A few years later, another step towards democratization occurred with the passage of the Lex Canuleia. Plebeian tribune Gaius Canuleius proposed a law reinstating marriage between patricians and plebeians. When the senate tried to promote a war scare to distract the plebeians, Canuleius blocked the troop levy and demanded discussion of his bill. Complaining that “the tribunes’ madness could no longer be tolerated” and “that there was more war being stirred up at home than abroad,” the consuls charged that passage of the law would only reward sedition, encouraging it in the future” (IV.ii.254-55). “The patricians,” they continued, “should recall the majesty of the senate that they had inherited from their fathers, which they were likely to pass on to their children in a diminished state; whereas the plebs could boast of their growing strength and importance. There was no end to this, nor would there be one as long as the leaders of sedition gained office in proportion to the success of their sedition.” (IV.ii.255). Intermarriage would “defile” patrician families “and create confusion in both public and private auspices, so that nothing should be pure, nothing unpolluted,” and “no one would recognize himself or his own kin” while “patricians and plebeians mat[ed] together like beasts” (IV.ii.255). What is more, another proposed law would allow plebeians to be elected to the consulship itself; “leaders of the rabble were now getting themselves ready” to assume that hitherto distinguished office (IV.ii.255).

In reply, Canuleius argued that plebeians are “fellow-citizens” who “inhabit the same native land, even though we do not possess the same wealth” (IV.iii.256). Citizenship is “more than intermarriage,” and we plebeians already have it (IV.iii.256). He asked the plebeians, “Don’t you realize in what an atmosphere of contempt you live. They would deprive you of part of the daylight, if they could. They resent the fact that you breathe, that you speak, that you look like human beings,” claiming in effect that “it is a religious abomination to elect a plebeian consul.” (IV.iii.257). But in fact many kings of Rome were foreigners. “As long as no stock was spurned that was prominent for excellence, Roman dominion increased”; foreigners can become patricians and consuls but according to patricians most native Romans should not marry into the patrician class or be elected to a consulship (IV.iii.257). Some of “the vilest of mortals” were patricians who served as Decemvirs; some of “the best of the kings” were “newcomers” (IV.iii.258).

“Must no innovation be made?” (IV.iv.258). If so, no pontiffs or augurs would have been created by Numa, no census and division by centuries and classes by Servius Tullius, no consuls after the expulsion of the monarchs. “Who doubts that, in a city that is founded for eternity and is growing immeasurably, new powers, priesthoods, and rights of families and individuals should be established?” (IV.iv.258). And as for intermarriage between members of the two classes, no one will be compelled “to make a marriage contract against his will” (IV.iv.259). The children will belong to the father’s class, and the parents of the couple will choose whether they approve of this outcome.

Finally, and crucially, “does the ultimate power belong to the Roman people or to you,” the patricians, or do “all men” in Rome deserve “equal liberty”? (IV.v.260). For their part, the plebeians “are ready for your wars, be they genuine or false, on the following conditions: if you finally unify this citizen body by restoring the right of intermarriage; if they are enabled to unite, be connected and joined with you in the ties of family and kinship; if brave and vigorous men are given hope and access to high offices; if they are granted a share in the partnership of government; and if, as is the mark of true liberty, they are allowed to take their turn, both in obeying the annually elected magistrates and in exercising magisterial power” (IV.v.260). Livy’s Canuleius defines liberty exactly as Aristotle defines politics, as ruling and being ruled in turn; to complete the resemblance, a law permitting patrician-plebeian intermarriage tracks Aristotle’s location of political relations in the household relationship between husband and wife, where the habit of ruling an being ruled in turn originates.

The marriage law passed. Election of plebeian consuls did not win favor, but the two factions reached a compromise whereby patricians and plebeians alike could elect military tribunes with consular power. In the first such election, all those elected were patricians. “Where will you now find”—under the regime of the emperor Augustus—in “one individual that moderation, fairness, and loftiness of mind that characterized the entire people at that time?” (V.vi.262). Democratization took another step forward.

Plebeian advancement hardly moderated factionalism, however. If, as James Madison wrote, republicanism is to faction as air is to fire, Rome could not escape that danger. Livy considers it dangerous, indeed: Factional strife “has brought and will continue to bring destruction to more people than have foreign wars, famine, disease, or other national disasters that men attribute to the anger of the gods” (IV.ix.266). And, given the fact cited by Canuleius, that Rome was “growing immeasurably,” one source of faction might well be the “various kinds of religious practice, mostly foreign, [which] assailed [Roman] minds,” especially during times of drought and plague, practices that arise “because men who make a profit from superstition-prone people were posing as seers and introducing new rituals of sacrifice into Roman homes,” rituals imported from Greece which turned Romans’ attention away from the noble and politic Olympians towards the cthonic gods of the underworld. And finally, the ever-calculating patricians often blunted plebeian sway by persuasive speech “if,” as one smart senator put it, “from time to time they adopted a rhetoric that was mindful of the situation rather than their own grandeur” (IV.xlviii.314-315). With a bit less self-preening grandiloquence, a couple of tribunes usually could be found to veto the democratizing proposals of the others. Once the senators voted to pay the soldiers, the same senator hit upon the notion of demanding year-round military service, which would keep many plebeians out of the city and away from political life.

Such was the political condition of Rome in 403 BC, when Marcus Furius Camillus won election as one of eight military tribunes. Since (as editor Kathleen Warrior observes) a camillus is a boy who assists priests in religious rites, it is likely that he was understood to be a pious young man, and he remained mindful of the gods throughout his career. He exhibited virtue beyond that of his colleagues several years later in a war against the Veientines. The war had not gone well, but when Camillus was chosen as dictator “the change of commander suddenly changed everything. Men’s hopes were different, their spirits different; even the fortunes of the city seemed different” (V.xix.356-57).

Why? First, while still in Rome, he unhesitatingly re-imposed military discipline on the soldiers who “had fled in panic from Veii” during the initial engagement (V.xix.357)—discipline being central to the Roman way of war. He thereby “prov[ed] that the enemy was not the worst thing that the soldiers had to fear” (V.xix.357). He also declared a military levy to raise fresh troops for the campaign before “hastening in person to Veii to strengthen the soldiers’ morale” (V.xix.357). Returning to Rome, he made a religious vow to celebrate the Great Games and to restore and rededicate a temple if his troops were victorious. 

Thus prepared, he fought a couple of minor battles as he proceeded toward Veii. “All his actions were carried out with consummate planning and strategy and so, as is usual, were attended with good fortune” (V.xix.357); for the Livyan statesman, Fortuna cannot be mastered, but at times she can be persuaded. He had most of the spoils turned over to the quaestor, the treasurer, “and not too much to the soldiers,” whose minds he wanted to concentrate on fighting not pillaging (V.xix.357). Upon reaching Veii, he commanded the men to build forts and to refrain from fighting without orders; they also built a tunnel into the enemy citadel, working the men in six-hour shifts to prevent exhaustion and to ensure that the work would be continuous. “There was no letup by night or day until they had made their way into the citadel” (V.xix.358). Rightly anticipating victory, but knowing what controversy distribution of the spoils from such “a very wealthy city” would spark, he turned the matter over to the senate, which eventually decided to solidify plebeian approval for the expedition by giving them a share (V.xx.358). Finally, before engaging the enemy, he spoke a public prayer to Pythian Apollo, vowing a tenth of the spoils to his temple, while vowing to Veii’s divine patroness, Juno Regina, “a temple worthy of your greatness” in Rome if she switches sides—a traditional ritual of evocation described by Fustel de Coulanges (V.xxi.359). Camillus proceeded “to attack the city from all directions with overwhelming numbers in order to minimize the perception of the danger that was coming from the tunnel” (V.xxi.359). Victory came easily and the Veientine citizens were sold into slavery, the money going to the state treasury. “This was the fall of Veii, the wealthiest city of the Etruscan people, which showed her greatness even in her final overthrow. For ten continuous summers and winters she was besieged, inflicting more disasters than she sustained. In the end, when even fate was against her, she was taken,” like Troy, “by siegeworks and not by force.” (V.xxii.362).

In a military republic, the path to political prominence will pass through the battlefield. So with Camillus. As a military commander, Camillus distinguished himself from his contemporaries by exhibiting the ability to organize. Even before he had engaged the enemy he planned for ‘the postwar’ in a way that showed his recognition of the political factions in Rome and his intention to moderate them. Indeed, one of the few mistakes he made in his career occurred during the magnificent triumph he was granted upon his return to the city. He rode into the city “in a chariot drawn by four white horses, seemingly superior to not only citizens but also mortals. Men thought it tantamount to sacrilege that the dictator was making himself the equal of Jupiter and the Sun by using these horses.” (V.xxiii.362). He further offended the plebeians by following through on his pious promise to allocate a portion of the spoils to Apollo and his priests instead of giving it all to the plebeians.

On this latter point, Camillus stood his ground against this “disgraceful contentiousness,” “harangu[ing] the people over and over again” for being “more concerned about everything else than about discharging its religious obligation” (V.xxv.364-65). The senate backed him, but “as soon as men’s minds were relieved of their religious obligation, the plebeian tribunes renewed their political unrest, arousing the crowd against all the leading men, but especially against Camillus” (V.xxv.365). The senators, however, elected him to the military tribunate in 394 BC. 

In the ongoing war with the Faliscans, Camillus exhibited the virtue of justice alongside his well-established virtues of courage and prudence. A Greek tutor of some children of Faliscan aristocrats led his students to the Roman camp, offering them to Camillus as hostages. Camillus spurned the offer. “A criminal yourself,” he told the Greek, “you have come with a criminal gift to a people and a general who are not like you” (V.xxvii.367); that is, your ethos and ours contradict. Further, not man but “nature” implants that ethos in we Romans: “There are laws of war as well as of peace, and we have learned to exercise them justly, no less than bravely” (V.xxvii.367). He will conquer the Faliscans “by Roman skills, valor, siegeworks. and arms, just as I did at Veii” (V>xxvii.367). “He had the man stripped, his hands tied behind his back, and gave him to the boys to be led back to Falerii, handing them rods with which they were to beat the traitor as they drove him back into the city” (V.xxvii.367). When the Faliscans saw the children, “the entire citizen body now united in demanding peace,” praising “Roman fair dealing [fide or trustworthiness] and their commander’s sense of justice” (V.xxvii.368). Faliscan ambassadors went to Rome and told the senators that “you and your commander have won a victory over us that neither a god nor man could begrudge,” having convinced us by this act that “we shall live better lives under your rule than under our laws” (V.xxvii.368). They surrendered, and “Camillus was thanked by both the enemy and his fellow citizens” (V.xxvii.36). In sharp contrast to their treatment of the Veientines, the senate merely required the Faliscans to pay the salaries of the Roman soldiers for the year. “Camillus returned to the city, distinguished by a far better kind of glory than when the four white horses had drawn him in triumph into the city, since he had conquered the enemy by justice and fair dealing” (V.xxviii.368).

In addition to the dispute over the distribution of the Veientine war spoils, the plebeians also coveted Veientine land, some going so far as to say that they would prefer to move the capital of Rome to Veii. Two plebeian tribunes who opposed this and vetoed the bill were indicted by their colleagues and heavily fined. “Camillus openly charged the plebs with wrongdoing, since they had turned against their own and failed to understand that they had subverted their veto by their perverse judgment of the tribunes and, by subverting their veto, overthrown tribunician power” (V.xxix.371). Recalling his successful prayer to Juno Regina to leave Veii and accept a Roman temple as her new home, “he thought it a sacrilege that a city that had been deserted and abandoned by the immortal gods should be inhabited” (V.xxx.371). On the basis of this religious appeal, the senators went amongst their own tribes, “begging them not to drive the Roman people into the city of their enemies,” deserting their household gods (V.xxx.372). The appeal worked, and the tribes rejected the bill by one vote. The senators then apportioned Veientine farmland to every plebeian family, while keeping the city itself uninhabited.

Still resentful of Camillus’ intervention on the issue of the Veientine spoils, a plebeian tribune indicted him. To avoid the dishonor of an unjust conviction, Camillus went into exile in 391 BC.

That same year, a new and formidable enemy appeared, attacking the Etruscans. The Gauls turned toward the Etruscan town of Clusium, a Roman ally, which desperately requested Roman aid. The Romans sent envoys to negotiate a settlement with this unknown invader. The envoys failed to negotiate a peace settlement, rejecting the Gallic demand for some Clusian territory and the envoys themselves “took up arms, contrary to the law of nations” (V.xxxvi.379). When the Gauls sent ambassadors to Rome to protest this conduct, the plebeians elected those same envoys to the military tribunate “When this happened, the Gauls were enraged, as they had every right to be, and returned to their own people, openly uttering threats” (V.xxxvi.380). The Gallic army then advanced on Rome.

With “tribunes whose rashness had brought about the war” in “supreme command” of Roman forces, the city lacked adequate defenses because no one had anticipated such a sudden attack. That is, Romans had lacked exactly the things the exiled statesman excelled in; prudent foresight and the ability to rightly order an army. Defeated in a battle near the Allia River, most of the Roman troops fled to Veii, leaving Rome unguarded. The few remaining men of military age and the senators withdrew to the citadel, and a plebeian brought the Vestals and many of the city’s sacred objects to Caere. The Gauls entered the capital unopposed, but were repelled by the defenders of the citadel; having found no grain in the city that would support a siege of its citadel, they simply withdrew, taking to plundering the surrounding countryside.

At Ardea, Camillus was “grieving more for the fortune of the state than his own,” blaming gods and men alike (V.xliii.388). “In wonder and indignation”—in mind and in heart—he “asked where were those heroes who, with him, had taken Veii and Falerii and also waged other wars often with more bravery than good fortune” (V.xliii.388). His lamentations were cut short when he learned that the Gauls were approaching Ardea. At that, “touched by nothing less than divine inspiration,” he headed for the Ardean assembly to rally the people (V.xliii.388). Citing their “shared danger,” he offered the Ardeans the service of one whose “skill” in wartime service gave him high standing in his native land (“unconquered in war, I was driven out by my ungrateful citizens in a time of peace”) (V.xliv.389). Establishing the common ground for action and his hosts’ need for his military prowess, he next assessed the enemy. The Gauls are “a race to whom nature has given a physique and a spirit that are large rather than reliable”; they “bring more terror than strength into every conflict” (V.xliv.389). As proof, he pointed to their actions after their conquest of Rome. Instead of taking it over, they have taken to wandering through the countryside, filling themselves “with the food and wine they have hastily consumed” and laying themselves down to sleep “like wild beasts, without any protection, any guards or outposts” (V.xliv.389). Now is the time to strike, “when they are constrained by sleep and ready to be butchered like cattle” (V.xliv.389).

And so they were. Meanwhile, at Veii, the Roman army reorganized, “a strong body [that] lacked a head” (V.xlvi.391). Reminded of Camillus simply by being in Veii, the city he had conquered, upon the approval of the senate the soldiers summoned Camillus from Ardea. In Rome itself, a contingent of Gauls launched a night attack; the Romans were awakened by the sacred geese of Juno, which hadn’t been killed and eaten by the besieged but still pious Romans in the citadel. Although they warded off the attack, they were starving and soon capitulated to the besieging Gauls.

“Both gods and men prevented the Romans from living as a ransomed people” (V.xlix.394). Camillus and his forces arrived, routing the Gauls in two battles. “Everywhere the slaughter was total” (V.xlix.395). Camillus “was hailed with sincere praise as a Romulus and as father of his country and second founder of the city” (V.xlix.395). But once again Camillus thought not only of the war but its aftermath. The plebeians and their tribunes again wanted to migrate to Veii, now that Rome had been burned by the invaders. Camillus therefore did not resign his dictatorship after receiving his triumph but moved to prevent the migration. 

As before, he first attended to religious obligations. In gratitude to the citizens of Caere for receiving Rome’s sacred objects, permitting worship of the gods to proceed uninterrupted, Rome should “establish ties of hospitality” with them; additionally, Capitoline Games should be held in honor of “Jupiter Best and Greatest,” who has “protected his own abode and the citadel of the Roman people at a time of peril” (V.l.396). Addressing the citizens of Rome, Camillus took the occasion to deplore the plebeians’ intention to leave the city, despite “the religious obligations established” at its founding and the most recent evidence of the gods’ favor, allowing the city’s recovery from the Gauls. With this, “I would think that no human being will ever neglect the gods’ worship” (V.li.398). Punished by the gods for having violated the law of nations, making us “an object lesson to all the world,” Romans nevertheless enjoyed divine mercy because they never departed from “our worship of the gods” (V.li.398). “Therefore they have restored to us our homeland, victory, and the longstanding renown for warfare that we had lost,” turning “terror, flight, and slaughter upon our enemy” (V.li.398). As there is “no place [in Rome] that is not filled with a sense of religion and gods,” will you plebeians now “abandon all these gods,” “both those of the state and those of the family” in time of peace, when no necessity requires it? (V.lii.398-99).

Apart from these religious considerations, he continued, it would be “pitiful and shameful for us, but glorious for the Gauls” if Romans abandoned Rome (V.liii.401); the Gauls would return and occupy the deserted city where the Capitol and the citadel still stand, despite the destruction of so much else. A city is more than its infrastructure. “Does the soil of our homeland and the earth that we call our mother have no hold on us? Does our love for our homeland depend on buildings and their beams?” (V.liv.402). Not only the gods of Rome but the nature upon which Rome rests—its “hills and plains, the Tiber and the region familiar to my eyes, and this sky beneath which in was born and reared”—these too are Rome (V.liv.402). To this patriotic sentiment he joins an appeal to reason. “Not without reason did gods and men choose this place for the foundation of a city—the health-giving hills; a convenient river by which crops can be brought down from inland areas and foreign goods received from abroad; a sea nearby for usefulness, though not exposed by being too near to danger from foreign fleets; an area in the middle of Italy—a place, indeed, uniquely and naturally suited to the growth of a city” (V.liv.402). With an oath, he condemns the intention to leave such a sacred place with such natural, rationally understandable features. “Though your valor may be able to go elsewhere”—he is careful not to impugn their virtue, the source of their pride in Romanness—the “fortune of this place surely cannot be transferred” (V.liv.403).

As that fortune would have it, a centurion passed through the Curia Hostilia with his cohort as the senators deliberated. He called for his men to plant the standard, saying, “It will be best for us to stay here” (V.lv.403). Fortified with an event which they could interpret as a good omen, the senators rejected the migration bill and the plebeians concurred with their decision. They began to rebuild the city. “The city was then reborn, from its original roots, as it were, with greater vigor and fecundity, and from that point on, from its second beginning, its history on the home front and in the military field will be presented with greater clarity and certitude” (VI.i.6).

After this new founding, “the city’s stability initially depended on the support it found in its leading citizen,” “who was also the prop responsible for its recovery” (VI.i.3) and indeed “the mainstay of Rome” (VI.iii.5). Camillus presided over the first elections of military tribunes in the renewed city before overseeing the conduct of wars against the Etruscans, the Volsci, the Latins, and the Hernici, peoples hoping to take advantage of Rome’s apparent weakness. By now, his military reputation was so great that his mere arrival at a foreign city would cause it to surrender, as the Etruscans did at Satricum.

While “his colleagues admitted that, when there was any urgent threat of war, the overall direction of affairs should rest with one man, and they had already decided that their imperium should be secondary to his” (VI.vii.11), one patrician of “illustrious reputation,” Marcus Manlius Capitolinus, envied his preeminence (VI.xi.15). Observing that “his own influence among the senators was not as great as he felt it should be,” Manlius “became the first of all senators to champion the popular cause” (VI.xi.15). “Denouncing the senators and flirting with the commons, he was driven along by popular favor rather than by his use of judgement, preferring to have a grand reputation rather than a good one” (VI.xi.15). He conspired with groups of plebs, pointing out that the same men who showed such bravery in battle in building an empire, in ruling foreigners, lost their spirit when “attempting to achieve (rather than defend) liberty” (VI.xviii.24). When arrested and arraigned before the senate, the prosecutors turned the plebeians against him by charging him with aspirations to monarchy. He was executed, thrown off the Tarpeian Rock.

Camillus needed to do nothing to counter Manlius’ threat to the regime, but in Lucius Furius, a young military tribune who incited the soldiers against him in their campaign against the Latin city Praeneste. Its citizens had defected from it alliance with Rome, then joined with the Volscians to seize Satricum, now colonized by the Romans, whom they abused. “The Romans were angry over this,” and appointed aging Camillus as the sixth member of the military tribunate (VI.xxii.29). When the Roman army arrived in front of Satricum, Camillus deliberately held back from attacking, “seeking to use strategy to augment his strength” before doing so (VI.xxiii.30). Infuriated by the enemy’s taunts, the soldiers listened to the impatient younger tribune, who told them that “the old man’s ideas were feeble and spiritless” (VI.xxiii.30). Far from countermanding his impatient young colleague, who was legally his equal in the command, Camillus contented himself with building up the reserve forces and positioning himself “on some higher ground, where he kept a close eye on how another’s strategy would turn out” (VI.xxiii.31).

It did not turn out well. In their over-eagerness to attack and pursue, the Roman troops under Lucius Furius’ command overextended themselves and fell victim to the enemy’s counterattack. As the Romans retreated in disorder, Camillus intervened, shamed them into following him, and reassigned the chastened Lucius to the cavalry command. Camillus regrouped the infantry, and personally led them to victory. But this lesson in the advantage of experience over youth isn’t the main lesson Livy intends to draw. That comes in his account of Camillus’ conduct after returning to Rome, seeking senate approval for a campaign against Tusculum. Although everyone in the army and in Rome “was saying the same thing, that amid the fluctuating fortunes of the war with the Volsci the blame for the unsuccessful battle and flight lay with Lucius Furius, while all the kudos for the successful engagement went to Marcus Furius,” when he was asked to name his adjutant in the campaign against the Etruscans Camillus “took everyone by surprise and chose Lucius Furius” (VI.xxv.33). “By such forbearance Camillus alleviated his colleague’s disgrace while at the same time winning great distinction for himself” (VI.xxv.33). When they learned of Camillus’ appointment and saw his troops marching into their territory, the Etruscans wisely sued for peace. Having “won fame for his prudence and bravery in the war with the Volsci,” he won it again for “his outstanding forbearance and self-restraint to his colleague in both operations” and for the resultant peace with the Etruscans (VI.xxvii.35). He stepped down after once again overseeing the election of the next year’s military tribunes.

Plebeian agitation recurred. The senate attempted to dampen the unrest by keeping the plebeians out of the city on military expeditions, but plebeian tribunes Gaius Licinius and Lucius Sextus organized resistance around three bills: one to reduce debt by deducting monies already paid in interest from the principal of the loan; another to limit the extent of rural property allowed to any one property owner, which would reduce patrician sway in the countryside; and a third to prohibit the election of military tribunes and to require that one of the two consuls be a plebeian. “What was being proposed put at risk simultaneously those things for which all human beings have an inordinate craving: land, money, and high office” (VI.xxxv.44-45). By the year 369 BC, Licinius and Sextus had become “experts at manipulating the feelings of the plebs” (VI.xxxvi.46).

Elected dictator once again, this time to face a domestic threat, Camillus addressed the tribal councils, which were considering these bills. As before, he argued that “tribunician capriciousness” undermined the veto the plebs had won by their secession (VI.xxxviii.49). When the tribunes “reacted with disdain” to this, Camillus threatened to conscript all men of military age and take them out of the city; this “struck sheer terror into the plebs” but not into the plebeian tribunes (VI.xxxviii.49). Camillus resigned, probably (in Livy’s judgment) because it was discovered that the auspices conducted prior to his election were unfavorable. All the bills passed, and in the following year, having been reinstated as dictator, he negotiated a compromise whereby the plebeians were guaranteed one plebeian tribune in exchange for patrician control of the office of praetor, the official charged with overseeing the law courts. “So it was that, after a long period of bad blood between them, the orders were restored to harmony” (VI.xlii.56). Camillus died two years later, in 365 BC, “certainly a man without peer in all circumstances” (VII.i.57).

The factual accuracy of Livy’s account may be left to historians. Since Livy writes a political history in both senses of the word—a history of how Rome was ruled and a guide for Roman citizens and statesmen—his reader should first of all consider his account in light of that intention, attending to the lessons the historian finds in his portrait of Camillus. What made him peerless in all circumstances?

Camillus confronted troubles arising from the increasing democratization of republican politics in Rome. As a military republic, Romans united across class lines in honoring warlike virtues, as the patricians found glory in battle, the plebeians protection. The plebeians often went so far as to defer their demands for democratization of Roman institutions to the need for mutual defense, although their leaders would sometimes persuade them to withhold military service in exchange for political concessions. Even military success brought difficulties with it, as territorial expansion could lead to sharpened factionalism, thanks (for example) to the introduction of foreign religions.

As a military tribune, Camillus imposed discipline on his troops through a combination of force, religiosity, and morale-building rhetoric. Having established that indispensable prerequisite to victory, he attained victory itself with careful planning, overwhelming numbers, and careful division of war spoils between soldiers, ordinary citizens, and priests. That is, he exhibited the virtues of courage (fighting in the front line with his men), prudence (holding back, for example, when young Lucius Furius insisted on attacking Satricum without adequate preparation), and justice both in punishing dereliction of duty and in distributing rewards. After his display of hubris during his first triumph, he learned moderation, as well. Finally, he exhibited the crowning virtue, magnanimity, remaining loyal to Rome during his exile in Ardea (a small-souled man would have delighted in the Gauls’ humiliating conquest of his city) and in rescuing rash Furius from retaliation and installing him as second-in-command for his next campaign. In rescuing Rome first from the Gauls and then from the Romans themselves, when the plebeians wanted to abandon the city for what they took to be greener pastures, doing so in the latter case with words not deeds, invoking religiously-grounded patriotism. 

Above all, he served as a one-man balance-wheel in Rome’s ‘mixed’ regime, opposing the plebeians’ passions when they threatened to dominate the patricians (while forbearing with Furius, he made no attempt to rescue the rabble-rousing Manlius Capitolinus). When opposed by the plebeian demagogues, he refrained from force and forbearance alike, preferring to negotiate a political settlement whereby both plebeians and patricians were accorded institutional privileges. More than once, he presided over elections of officials replacing him. 

Camillus was indeed the mainstay of the republic. In effect, he served as a sort of much-needed monarch, one careful to act and speak in ways that preserved the regime by alternatively granting and denying plebeian ambition to rule. As such, he demonstrated the grandeur of Rome while exhibiting its weakness. Absent ‘the one,’ and a supremely virtuous ‘one’ at that, ‘the many’ and ‘the few’ would continue their rivalry, and factionalism would at last ruin the republic. Rome needed a middle class to go along with the occasional middle man.

 

 

 

Livy: The History of Rome. Books I-V. Valerie M. Warrior translation. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2006,

 

In retirement at his home in the village of Colombey-les-Deux-Églises, Charles de Gaulle came upon his grandson studying an oration by Cicero. Seeing which one it was, he reached down and placed his large hand over the page, elevated his gaze to the middle distance, and recited the oration to the astonished boy. After completing its peroration, he looked down and said, “You should read Livy. He is much more grand.” 

In what does the grandeur of Livy consist? Livy writes political history with political intent. He teaches his readers—most immediately Romans in the decades immediately before and after the birth of Christ—what amount to lessons in statesmanship. Philosophy can teach a student how to think logically; religious writings teach piety and right doctrine concerning divine and human conduct. Teaching statesmanship may seem impossible, an attempt to bring the student to a practical reasoning usually inculcated only by experience, that hardest of teachers. Political history enables its students to learn the lessons of experience with a minimum of injury to themselves. It second-handedness may be less vivid than experience but it is also less painful. When the historian recalls the history of one’s own country he additionally appeals to the love of one’s own, while spurring consideration of the lasting geopolitical interests and traditions that must enter into any serious consideration of Roman policy, moving forward. As Livy puts it in his Preface, “it will be a pleasure to have celebrated, to the best of my ability, the memory of the past achievements of the greatest people on earth,” a people now living in a vast empire, “laboring under its own size”—so much so that in “recent times [the Latin phrasing has the double meaning of “revolutionary times”] the might of a most powerful people has long been destroying itself.” Historical narration of Roman events with accompanying portraits of the Roman politicians who spoke and acted in the course of them will enable him, and his readers, “to turn away from the contemplation of the evils that our age has seen for so many years.” Under the watchful eye of the Emperor Augustus, it would not do to suggest that a reader might glean from his book any means to remedy those evils, but the thought does occur.

Livy is no ‘scientific historian,’ obsessed with separating fact from fiction. But he does want to get at the truth insofar as he can. “The intent is neither to affirm nor refute the traditions that belong to the period before the foundation of the city or the anticipation of its foundation, for these are embellished with poetic tales rather than based on uncorrupted records of historical events.” The ancients made “the beginning of cities more august by mingling human affairs with the divine,” sanctifying the foundings they recall by “reckon[ing] their founders as gods.” “These and similar things, however they will be regarded and judged, I shall not for my own part regard as of great importance.”

Five things are more important: the kind of lives men lived; what their moral principles were; by what individuals and with what skills Roman dominion was born and grew; how, as discipline collapsed, there was as it were a disintegration of morals; how Roman morals decline, until the present time in which “we can  endure neither our own vices nor their remedies.” That is, Livy undertakes an account of the several Roman regimes, especially the way of life of each regime and its purpose, its principles, and the rulers. He omits mention only the form or institutional structures by which the Romans ruled, perhaps because these were the phenomena Romans struggled over in exhibiting their habits of heart and mind. The “particularly healthy and productive element of history [is] to behold object lessons of every kind of model as though they were displayed as a conspicuous monument.” From such examples “you should choose for yourself and for your state what to imitate and what to avoid as abominable in its origin or as abominable in its outcome,” inasmuch as “there has never been a state that is greater, or more righteous, or richer in good examples,” one in which “greed and luxury migrated so late into the citizens, nor where there has been such great respect for small means and thrift.” Grand indeed, as the founder of France’s Fifth Republic said.

Livy’s work extended to 142 books, most now lost. The first five books or “pentad” recount the city’s founding in the eighth century BC to its conquest (soon reversed) by the Gauls in 390 BC. The first two books discuss not only the founding but several important regime changes from kingship to aristocracy to tyranny to its overthrow. The third chapter, the central and pivotal chapter, shows the gradual ‘democratization’ of the regime, how the plebeian class gradually came to control some of the key institutions, with the patricians opposing them at every step; the result, a republic or ‘mixed’ regime, survives military challenges from neighboring city-states and continues to see further democratic encroachments on aristocratic authority.

Livy begins his story with the more-or-less legendary figures of Aeneas and Antenor, who were spared by the Greeks after the conquest of Troy because “they had always advocated peace and the return of Helen” (I.i.5). Antenor settled in the uppermost gulf of the Adriatic Sea, where the people had lost their king at Troy. As for Aeneas, “fate guided him to initiate greater achievements” (I.i.5). In Livy’s hand, even mythological history has value because he can produce lessons for statesmen out of it. Here, two heroes win very different degrees of fame not through virtue alone, not even through virtù alone, but because fate treated them differently. Statesmen must understand that; respect for circumstances is the first thing they need to learn.

Aeneas and his men went to Macedonia, then to Sicily and then to Laurentum, fifteen miles south of Rome. There they confronted King Latinus and the aborigines, made peace with the king, who gave his daughter in marriage to Aeneas, who became king. The basis of the polis is the family, which is also the basis of the regime of kings. The newly-strengthened polis fought the Rutulians and their king, Turnus, who allied with Etruscans—the rulers of both people worried by the increased power of Laurentum. “Confronted with such a formidable war and the need to win over the minds of the Aborigines, Aeneas called both peoples Latins so that everyone would not only be under the same law, but also the same name. From that time on, the Aborigines’ dedication and loyalty to King Aeneas was no less than those of the Trojans. Aeneas relied on the spirit of these two peoples, who daily became more united” (II.ii.7). Nomos means both ‘name’ and ‘law’; the new king was a statesman who understood that citizenship and law can unite disparate peoples. King Aeneas died after leading the successful defense of the city against the Rutulian-Etruscan alliance.

Aeneas’ line ruled the polis well for several generations, founding the polis of Alba Longa, until younger brother, Amulius, exiled his older brother, Numitor, the rightful inheritor of the throne. “Violence was more powerful than the father’s wishes or respect for age,” and Amulius used violence thoroughly, murdering his brother’s male children and, “under the pretext of honoring his brother’s daughter Rhea Silvia, selected her to be a priestess of Vesta,” thereby “condemning her to perpetual virginity” (I.iii.9). There would be no one from Numitor’s line to claim the throne Amulius had usurped.

But again the fates ruled otherwise. “To the fates, as I suppose, was owed the origin of this great city and the beginning of the mightiest empire that is second only to that of the gods” (I.iv.9). “The Vestal was raped and produced twins,” claiming “that Mars was the father of her doubtful offspring, either because she believed this or because it was more honorable to put the blame on a god” (I.iv.9) “But neither gods nor men protected her or her children from the king’s cruelty” (I.iv.9); he commanded that the infants be throne into the River Tiber. Fate or the gods—”some heaven-sent chance” (I.iv.9)—caused the Tiber to overflow, and the lazy executioners of the tyrant’s command left the children on the edge of the tidewater, where Faustulus, master of the royal flock, found them and took them home to his wife. Livy reports the rival stories that the infants were suckled by a she-wolf before their discovery or, perhaps, only by their adoptive mother, “who was called ‘she-wolf’ among the shepherd community, since she had been a prostitute” (I.iv.10). However that may have been, they became hunters as well as farmers and shepherds. “In this way the achieved strength of body and mind” (I.iv.10). Faustulus suspected that the boys were “of royal birth,” having heard that the Amulius had order the exposure of two mail infants just before he found them. Their exiled grandfather, Numitor, took custody of Remus and, observing the “temperament” of both twins,” which was not at all slavelike,” readily entered into a conspiracy with them, now grown, to overthrow the tyrant. Romulus and Remus led separate forces against Amulius; it was Remus who got to the tyrant first, killing him.

With Numitor restored as the legitimate king of Alba Longa with the support of Romulus, Remus, and the people (“a unanimous shout of assent” [I.vi.12)), the brothers were “seized by a desire to establish a city in the places where they had been exposed and raised,” gathering a group consisting of Albans, Latins, and the native shepherds, all of whom hoped that their new city would soon grow bigger and better than the poleis they had left behind (I.vi12). “But these thoughts were interrupted by the ancestral evil that had beset Numitor and Amulius—desire for the kingship,” that is, a struggle over control of a monarchic regime (I.vi.12). “From quite a harmless beginning, an abominable conflict arose” (I.vi.12); Livy means to impress his reader with the vulnerability of monarchy to tyranny, a lesson that might well be taken by anyone living under the rule of Augustus and the subsequent monarchs of the Roman Empire, many centuries later. 

In this case, neither contender for the throne could claim legitimacy on the basis of prior birth. “They decided to ask the protecting gods of the area”—every place has a ‘genius’ or ‘genii,’ local deities—to “declare by augury who should give his name to the new city and who should rule over it after its foundation” (I.vi.12). [1]  When the augury proved ambiguous, Remus was either killed in a brawl between his followers and those of Romulus or when Romulus himself killed his brother when Remus jumped over the wall separating his section of the polis, the Aventine, from Romulus’ section, the Palatine. However it happened, it happened in violence, and “Romulus became the sole ruler and the city, so founded, was given its founder’s name” (I.vii.13). Monarchic regimes originate, then, in one of three ways: alliance or consent (Aeneas) or violence (Romulus). They are perpetuated either by legitimate succession (the kings up until Amulius) or violence (Amulius). Either way, they may be decent kingships or indecent tyrannies and, either way, they may or may not win the consent of the few who are rich and/or the many who are poor.

Romulus solidified his rule by reassuring the people in two ways. He fortified the Palatine, looking after their physical safety, and he sacrificed to the gods and to Hercules, whose legend was associated with the area—attending to the religious concerns of his new subjects. Livy pauses to explain the significance of Hercules to the founding. It was “the only foreign rite undertaken by Romulus” (Hercules having been a Greek) (I.vii.13); according to the local legend, the hero had killed a cattle thief there—that is, someone who had seized Hercules’ property, as Remus had attempted to do to Romulus. Although Hercules was accused of “blatant murder” by the shepherds, Evander, an exile from the Peloponnese whose “wonderful skill with the alphabet, a novelty among men who were untutored in such arts” was “revered” by the shepherds as a consequence, intervened in his defense (I.vii.14). Citing a prediction handed down by his mother, “who was believed to be divine and was admired as a prophetess,” this Evander proclaimed that Hercules was a son of Jupiter and that an altar would be “dedicated to you” here, an altar to be called “the Greatest Altar” by “the race that was destined one day to be the most powerful on earth” (I.vii.14). Hercules shook hands with his new ally, said “he accepted the omen and would fulfill the prophecy by establishing and dedicated an altar” I.vii14) “A fine cow was taken from the herd, and the first sacrifice was made to Hercules,” punisher of cattle thieves (I.vii.14). By so associating Rome, and himself, with Hercules, “Romulus was already honoring the immortality won by valor, an honor to which his own destiny was leading him” (I.vii.15).

As his final act of establishing his legitimacy, Romulus “made himself venerable by adopting symbols of office,” including royal dress and a retinue of twelve lictors—symbolism backed by force, and the only way “by law that [the Romans] could become a unified community” (I.viii.15). He undertook a building campaign, “more in expectation of a future population than for the number of men they currently had” (I.viii.16). He also had recourse to the myth of autochthony, “long used by founders of cities, who gather a host of shady, low-born people and put out th story that children had been born to them from the earth” (I.viii.16). Rome became a city of asylum; “the entire rabble from the neighboring peoples fled their for refuge,” men and women “without distinction, slaves and freemen alike eager for a fresh start” (I.viii.16). “This was the first move toward beginning the increase of Rome’s might” (I.viii.16). The founder wisely saw that strength is not enough, “add[ing] deliberation to strength” by appointing one hundred men as senator, called patres or fathers, their descendants called patricians (I.viii.16).

With deliberation comes stratagem. The next move to enhance the population was the famous-notorious ‘rape’ of the Sabine women. “Already Rome was so strong that she was the equal of any of the neighboring states in war,” but this wouldn’t have lasted if the polis lacked a sufficiency of women to produce an equally populous next generation (I.ix.16). Romulus sent embassies to the neighboring tribes, seeking alliance and intermarriage. The envoys told their hosts that poleis, “like everything else, start from the most humble beginnings” (I.ix.16); the Romans were not to be despised. More, “great wealth and a great name are achieved by those cities that are helped by their own valor and the gods”; “the Romans were men like themselves, and so, as neighbors, they should not be reluctant to mingle their blood and stock with them” (I.ix.16). Neither the appeal to piety nor the appeal to common humanity swayed the neighboring peoples, who “fear[ed] for both themselves and their descendants, the great power that was growing in their midst”; to this geopolitical concern they added contempt for the low origins so many of the Romans, deeming them unworthy to wed their daughters. “The young Romans resented this attitude, and things were undoubtedly beginning to look violent” (I.ix.17). 

Romulus himself had a smarter course to follow. He “hid his resentment” and instead announced a festival in honor of Neptune, patron of horses, inviting the neighbors to attend (I.ix.17). The grand new buildings he had constructed drew a large crowd, animated by their human curiosity; the rapidity of construction had been possible precisely because the Romans had no real household, no families to care for. These peoples included the Sabines, who brought their wives and children to enjoy the holiday. On signal, “the Roman youths rushed in every direction to seize the unmarried women,” with “some exceptionally beautiful girls” seized by plebeians at the command of the senators, for the senators (I.ix.17). The enraged parents could only call down the wrath of the god in whose honor the festival was ostensibly organized. Romulus stepped in, telling the maidens that their parents were to blame, having arrogantly refused intermarriage with Romans and assuring them that they would have all the rights of marriage, a share in the household properties, citizenship in Rome, “and the dearest possession that the human race has—children” (I.ix.18). “They should calm their anger and give their hearts to those to whom chance [!] had given their bodies. For, he said, often affection has eventually come from a sense of injustice. They would find their husbands kinder because each would try not only to fulfill his obligation, but also to make up for he longing for their parents and homeland. the men spoke sweet words to them trying to excuse their action of the grounds of passionate love a plea that is particularly effective where a woman’s heart is concerned.” (I.ix.18). Some time later, Romulus’ wife, Hersilia, would persuade the king to grant amnesty to the women’s parents and “grant them citizenship,” too, “saying that by this means the state would grow in strength and harmony” (I. xi.20). This policy worked because by then Rome had defeated those neighbors who were outraged at the theft of the women, leaving their parents’ spirit “collapsed as a result of the defeat of the others” (I.xi.20). At this point the Sabines themselves attacked but Romulus again led his soldiers effectively and, as the battle intensified, the Sabine women intervened, “their womanish fear overcome by the terrible situation” in which fathers and husbands were killing each other (I.xiii.22). Like so many Helens of the Troy from whose citizens the Roman founders descended, they cried, “We are the cause of war; we are the cause of wounds and deaths to our husbands and our fathers” (l.xiii.22). Unlike Helen, however, they said something effective to halt the war: “Better that we die than live as widows or orphans, without either of you” (I.xiii.22). Their appeal halted the fighting and led to a treaty merging the two peoples into one, with a shared kingship but with Rome as the capital. Romulus honored the women by naming each of the thirty wards he established in the city after the women.

Romulus’ monarchic counterpart, Tatius, proved unfortunate. Some of his relatives assaulted a group of visiting Laurentine envoys, “who protested under the law of nations” (I.xiv.23). “More influenced by partiality for his relatives and their pleas,” he died at the hands of a mob that surrounded him in Lavinium (I.xiv.23). “Romulus took this less badly than was proper, whether because of the disloyalty that is inherent in shared rule or because he thought that Tatius’ murder was not unjustified” (I.xiv.23). He renewed the pact between Rome and Lavinium “in order to expiate the insults to the envoys and the murder of the king” (I.xiv.23). He went on to win subsequent battles with two attacking Etruscan poleis, Fidenae and Veii. “The strength that he gave to Rome enabled her to have untroubled peace for the next forty years” (I.xv.25). “More popular with the people than with the senators,” he as “above all…dearest to the hearts of the soldiers,” enjoying the protection of 300 armed bodyguards (I.xv.25).

These men were not unfailing in their vigilance, however. Presiding over an assembly of the people, Romulus disappeared when a thunderstorm “enveloped him in a cloud so dense that it hid him from the view of the people” (I.xvi.25). The people “readily believed the assertion of the senators who had been standing nearby that he had been snatched up on high by the storm”; “stricken with fear as if they had been orphaned,” they all decided that Romulus should be hailed as a god, son of a god, king, and father of the city of Rome” (I.xvi.25-26). Livy raises an eyebrow: “I suppose that there were some, even then, who privately claimed that the king had been torn into pieces by the hands of the senators” (I.xvi.26). This remained the minority view, although the people still longed for a king and disliked the senate. If they did indeed plot the king’s assassination, the senators navigated around that dilemma, as an outright murder would have sparked a popular uprising. A patrician appeased the people by claiming an epiphany: “Today at dawn, Romulus, the father of this city, city descended from the sky and appeared before me. Overcome with fear and awe, I stood there, beseeching him with prayers that it might be permissible for me to gaze on him. But he said, ‘Depart, and proclaim to the Romans that it is the gods’ will that my Rome be the capital of the world. So let them cultivate the art of war; let them know and teach their descendants that no human strength has the power to resist the arms of Rome.'” Livy comments, “It is astonishing what credence was given to this man’s story, and how the longing for Romulus felt by the people and army was alleviated by belief in his immortality” (I.xvi.26-27). By encouraging the people’s pious superstition, ‘the few’ maneuvered themselves into greater authority over ‘the many’ while never assuaging their distrust. 

“An ambitious struggle for the kingship engaged the minds of the senators” (I.xvii.27); given the newness of Rome’s general population, no prominent men had yet arisen from it, so there could be no competitors for the position from that quarter. “All wanted to be ruled by a king, for they had not yet experienced the sweetness of liberty” (I.xvii.28). The senators split between the “original Romans” and the Sabines, each wanting a king from their group. Deadlock ensued, and for a time they established a power-sharing arrangement whereby the senators divided into groups of ten, with a representative from each group presiding over the government. This aristocracy or oligarchy caused popular “grumbling,” as it seemed that Romans’ servitude “had multiplied,” with rule by “a hundred masters instead of one” (I.xvii.28). If they could not offer a candidate for the monarchy from amongst themselves, surely they could elect one from among the senators. Alarmed, the senators “won the people’s favor by granting them supreme power on such terms that [the senators] gave away no more of their power than they retained”; the people could elect the king but “their choice would only be valid if it was ratified by the senators” (I.xvii.28). “This so pleased the people that they did not want to give the appearance of being outdone in goodwill, and so they merely resolved that the senate should decide who should be king in Rome” (I.xvii.28). Such popular deference to both monarchic and aristocratic rule would endure for a long time. Livy does not neglect to compare the electoral arrangements of early Rome to those of his own time, when the people are allowed to vote for laws and officials but only after the senators have “ratif[ied] the outcome of an election in advance, before the people can vote” (I.xvii.28).

Eventually, the Sabine Numa Pompilius attained the kingship, a ” great man” “famed for his justice and his sense of obligation to the gods” (I.xviii.28,29). Numa was learned in divine and human law but his virtues were natural; “I think that Numa’s mind and moral principles derived from his own native disposition (I.xviii.28). His elevation to office duly solemnized by an augur, Numa set about “giv[ing] the new city that had been founded by force of arms a new foundation in justice, law, and proper observances,” seeing that “the warlike spirit of his people must be softened by their giving up of arms” (I.xix.29). At the same time, he also saw that such softening, augmented by the peace treaties he signed, would “cause the spirit that had been held in check by military discipline and fear of the enemy [would] become soft from idleness” (I.xix.30). His remedy was “to instill in them a fear of the gods, on the assumption that it would be most effective with a populace that was unskilled and, for those days, primitive” (I.xix.30). “Since he could not get through to their minds without inventing some miraculous story, he pretended that he had nocturnal meetings with the goddess Egeria,” who instructed him on the establishment of divinely-approved rites (I.xix.30). He also established a calendar, the political benefit of which was that it marked out holy days when no public business could be done, “since it was desirable to have times when nothing could be brought before the people” (I.xix.30). Popular religious piety could thus be deployed to limit popular authority. Anticipating that “in a warlike nation there would be more kings like Romulus than like himself,” he also used piety to tame the Romans, establishing permanent priestly offices, including a pontiff to govern the practice of sacred rites, public and private, guarding against the introduction of the foreign religious practices to which frequent military expeditions would expose patricians and plebeians alike (I.xx.31-32). Perhaps as a guard against rapine, he also “chose virgins for the service of Vesta, a priesthood that originated in Alba and was thus associated with the race of Rome’s founder” (I.xx.31); the Vestal virgins, supported by public expense, would enjoy “revered and inviolable status” (I.xx.31).

Numa’s constitutional lawgiving worked. “Consideration and attention to these matters turned the thoughts of the entire people away from violence and arms. They had something to occupy their minds, and, since the heavenly powers seemed to have an interest in human affairs, the people’s constant preoccupation with the gods had imbued the hearts of all with such piety that the state was governed by regard for good faith and oaths, rather than by fear of punishment under the law” (I.xxi.32). Rome’s neighbors accordingly “came to feel such a respect for the Romans that they considered it sacrilege to do violence to a nation that had so entirely turned to the worship of the gods” (I.xxi.32). This was another reason why peace endured for decades after Romulus’ death. “Thus two successive kings, each in a different way, promoted the state: the one by war, the other by peace,” as “the state was not only strong but moderated by the arts of both war and peace” (I.xxi.33). 

Livy finds such dualities a core feature of Rome, eventuating in the longstanding tension between patricians and plebeians within the city, warfare with the peoples outside it. The next king, Tullus Hostilius, would confirm Numa’s expectation of Roman kings generally; “even more ferocious than Romulus,” Tullus thought “the state was enfeebled by inaction” and so “looked around for an excuse to stir up war” (I.xxii.33). He maneuvered ambassadors from the nearby Alban people to declare war on Rome. The Alban dictator, Mettius Fufetius, nonetheless offered some prudent advice. “If truth is to be spoken, rather than a show of words, it is a desire for dominion that is goading two related and neighboring peoples to take up arms” (I.xxiii.35). Without “discussing the rights and wrongs of the matter,” Mettius pointed out that both his people and the Romans were surrounded by the Etruscans, whose “strength on the sea is even greater than on land” (I.xxiii.35). If Alba and Rome go to war, the Etruscans will wait until the two nations exhaust themselves, then step in to conquer both. “Since we not content with the certainty of liberty but are casting dice for slavery or dominion, let us find a way whereby it can be determined which side will rule the other, without great loss of life or bloodshed on either side” (I.xxiii.35). They agreed to a solution involving a double duality: two sets of three brothers, the Horatii and the Curiatti, would meet in a combat of champions to settle the conflict. When the Romans won (the surviving Horatian then killing his sister, who dared to mourn her fiancé, a Curiatian he had killed in the fight), Tullus ordered the Alban dictator to keep his men under arms for a war against the Etruscan city of Veii. The Roman people themselves acquitted Horatius of murder when his father intervened, “implor[ing] them not to make him childless” (I.xxvi.40). “The people could not endure either the father’s tears or the courage of the young man who was steadfast in every peril. They acquitted him in admiration more for his valor than for the justness of his cause” in keeping with their warlike character. (I.xxvi.40).

Pressured by the Alban people, who were “resentful that the dictator had entrusted the fortune of the state to three soldiers” and evidently did not appreciate his larger geostrategic objective, Mettius betrayed Rome within “the guise of the alliance,” stirring up the peoples of the Roman colony Fidenae and the Veientines to attack the Romans and promising he would join them (I.xxvii.41). In fact he planned to hold his troops back, ready to attack whichever side was losing. After winning the battle, Tullus, who had uncovered Mettius’ treachery, punished Mettius but rewarded the Albans, bringing them into Rome and granting citizenship to the people, their leaders to positions in the senate, “mak[ing] one city and one state” (I.xxviii.43). Out of duality, oneness: Mettius, he said, “as you divided your mind between the Fidenates and the Romans, so now you will give your body to be torn apart,” a lesson for “the human race to hold sacred the bonds that have been violated by you” (I.xxxviii.43). This punishment, Livy remarks, itself “ignor[ed] the laws of humanity”; “in other cases, we can boast that no other nation has decreed more humane punishments” (I.xxviii.43). After the Albans were brought to Rome, their city, Alba Longa, was demolished; for the ancient peoples, such a loss was even more catastrophic than it would be for ‘we moderns,’ as every city, and every household within it, harbored the lar and the penates of the people. Tullus spared the public temples of the gods.

Rome’s population now doubled, Tullus turned his warlike attentions to the Sabines. Rome won again, but Tullus died, after a thirty-two-year reign, “his famed ferocious spirit broken along with his physical health” during a plague (I.xxxi.46). The Romans too had wearied of war, now “want[ing] to return to the situation under Numa, believing that the only help for their sick bodies was to seek favor and pardon from the gods” (I.xxxi.46). They elected, and the senate ratified, Ancus Marcius, grandson of Numa, as their next king. Although “both the citizens who yearned for peace and the neighboring states were led to hope that Ancus would adopt the character and institutions of his grandfather,” the Latins began a series of raids on what they took to be a weakened rival (I.xxxii.47). “Ancus’ disposition was midway between that of Romulus and that of Numa; he was mindful of both. He was convinced that, in his grandfather’s reign, a people that was both young and ferocious had a greater need of peace; but he also believed that the absence of war without being exposed to injustice would not fall as easily to him as it had to Numa. His strength was being tested and, having been tested, was the object of contempt.” (I.xxxii.47). At the same time, he did not want Roman war-making to ignore the gods. “Since Numa had set up religious practices in time of peace, he wanted to hand on a ceremony for war so that wars might not only be waged, but also declared with some kind of ritual,” whereby Rome would first ask restitution from a foreign state for a perceived injury before a formal declaration of war could be issued (I.xxxii.47).

The Latin aggressors wanted no peace, however, and got none. Rome conquered them and integrated their population into Rome. This demographic shock led to a regime crisis. “The enormous increase in the population of the city resulting in a blurring of the distinction between right and wrong,” the distinction both Numa and his grandson had striven to establish (I.xxxiii.50). The rule of law was undermined, presumably because the size and heterogeneity of the population weakened moral consensus by introducing new and contradictory ways of life to the city while making the old ways of life harder to enforce, given the sheer numbers of persons to govern—Livy himself does not explain. This moral and legal derangement afforded an opportunity to a dangerous foreign man.

Tarquinius Priscus was the son of an exile from Corinth who had settled in Tarquinii, an Etruscan town located 56 miles north of Rome. Despised as the son of a foreign exile, despite his wealth and the wealth of his wife, he set out for Rome, where Tanaquil “could see her husband in a position of honor,” given the Romans’ condition as “a new people, where nobility was quickly acquired and based on merit,” not birth, as seen in the lives of the Sabine Tatius and Numa the Curiatti (I.xxxiv.52). According to the story Livy relates, as they approached Rome an eagle “came gently down,” removed the cap from Tarquinius’ head, the “deftly replaced the cap on his head, sent, as it were, by the gods for this purpose” (I.xxxiv.52). “Tanaquil, a woman skilled in interpreting prodigies from the sky, as Etruscans generally are,” “embraced her husband” and “told him to expect a high and exalted position” in Rome, the eagle having “performed the auspice around the highest part of a man,” removing the cap “placed on a mortal’s head, only to put it back with divine approval” (I.xxxiv.52). He did indeed rise quickly in Rome, winning the confidence of King Ancus to such an extent that he was named guardian of the king’s children.

Upon the king’s death, with the sons conveniently dispatched on a hunting expedition, Tarquin seems to have become “the first to canvass votes for the kingship and make a speech that was designed to win over the hearts of the people,” citing the precedents of foreign kings in Rome, his apprenticeship with King Ancus, his familiarity with Roman laws and rites, and his goodwill toward the people—all “claims that were by no means false” (I.xxxv.52-53). Upon election, he took the precaution of adding a hundred members to the senate, effectively packing it with partisans; he then captured a Latin town and inaugurated the Great Games in honor of Jupiter, thus checking the boxes (as it were) of military prowess and piety. He also increased the number of the cavalry, which proved the decisive factor in a rout of the Sabines, who had launched an unprovoked attack on Roman territory. While Numa had counteracted the threat of peacetime softening of the Roman spirit with a spirit of piety, Tarquin preferred to put the people to work, directing the construction of defensive walls in unfortified parts of the city, draining swamps, and constructing sewers. He also built a temple to Jupiter that he had vowed during the Sabine war, far from neglecting respect for the gods even as he busied Romans with these tasks.

What of an heir to the throne? King Ancus’ sons had by now attained their majority and were “outraged that they had been driven from their father’s throne by their tutor’s deceit and that Rome was ruled by a stranger who was not of neighboring stock, still less Italian” (I.xl.58). Tarquin and Tanaquil had already designated another successor, a child Livy suspects to have been the child of the wife of the king of Corniculum, a Sabine city; Tanaquil had rescued the woman after the city’s capture, befriended her, and raised her son as “a safeguard to our royal house when it is stricken,” attributing a reported miracle attributed to the child as a glimpse into “the will of the gods” (I.xxxix.57). The disinherited sons of Ancus hired two “ferocious shepherds” to assassinate Tarquin, and they succeeded (I.xl.58). Unintimidated, Tanaquil concealed her husband’s death and elevated her now-adopted son, Servius, to the throne, the partisan senate concurring in this without the consent of the people.

Servius secured popular support and reinforced senatorial approval of his rule by routing the Veientines and other Etruscans. More important in terms of the regime, he formalized the class distinctions in Rome, first instituting the census, then decreeing that “a man’s duties in war and in peace would be determined, not indiscriminately on an individual basis as before, but in proportion to a man’s wealth” (I.xlv.60); that is, the new Roman class system would consist of political distinctions based upon ‘economic’ distinctions. There were six classes in all, with the poorest exempt from the military service that can serve as a pathway to honor. What is more, “now suffrage was no longer given indiscriminately to all,” with the upper classes voting first; since votes were weighted to favor those classes, voting on laws “almost never…descend[ed] as far as the lowest citizens” before a law was enacted (I.xlv.62). Servius further divided the city into four territorial divisions, their inhabitants called “tribes,” probably a derivative of “tribute” because tributes were collected according to one’s place of residence, not class. “The king had promoted the state by enlarging the city and arranging domestic affairs to meet the needs of both war and peace” (I.xlv.64). “Now undoubtedly king de facto, Servius was formally so declared, having “won over the goodwill of the people by dividing the territory captured from the enemy among all the citizens” (I.lvi.65).

The senate was another matter. Servius had married his two daughters to the sons of his predecessor, Tarquinius Priscus. “It was the women who began all the trouble” (I.xlvi.66), trouble that resulted in “a crime worthy of a Greek tragedy, in order that hatred of kings might hasten the coming of liberty and the last kingship be one that was obtained by a criminal act” (I.xlvi.65). Lucius Tarquinius was spirited and ambitious, Arruns Tarquinius “a young man of a gentle nature” (I.xlvi.65). The women they married were similarly “very different in their characters” (I.xlvi.65), but the gentle wife was married to the ambitious man, the ambitious wife married to the gentle one. The wife of Arruns “turned completely from him to his brother; he was the one she admired, calling him a man and one of true royal blood. She despised her sister, because, as she said, now that the other woman had a real man as a husband, she had lost the boldness that a woman should have. similarity quickly brought the two together, as usually happens since evil is most drawn to evil.” (I.xlvi.65). They murdered their spouses and married; unable to prove that crimes had been committed, “Servius did not prevent the marriage but hardly gave his approval” (I.xlvi.66). Further goaded by his wife, Lucius denounced his father before the senate, pretending that Servius, a man of low origins, hated nobles and had divided Roman land “among the rabble” (I.xlvii.67). Lucius then threw Servius down the steps of the Senate, where the king was murdered by Lucius’ partisans. To complete the enormity, his wife drove her carriage “over her father’s body” (I.xlviii.68). Thus the regime changed from kingship to tyranny.

Lucius Tarquinius earned the name “Superbus,” for his arrogance. He forbade the burial of his father-in-law, killed the leading supporters of Servius in the senate, surrounded himself with bodyguards to prevent his own assassination, and ruled with neither popular support nor senate approval. “His rule had to be protected by fear, since he had no hope of the citizens’ affections” (I.xlix.69). (Centuries later, that profound student of ancient Rome, Montesquieu, generalized this point, identifying fear as the principle of despotism.) Tarquinius Superbus went on to murder more senators in order to seize their wealth and to “bring more contempt on the senate” (I.xlix.69). “The first of the monarchs to break with the custom of consulting the senate on all matters, a custom handed down by his predecessors,” he sought support instead from the Latin peoples, “in order that assistance from them might give him greater safety among the citizens at home” (I.xlix.69,70). Thus, like many monarchs and especially tyrants, he appealed to ‘the many’ against ‘the few’—in this instance, a people only recently added to the Roman population, thus less tied to the customs and traditions of the original stock. 

Some of the Latins regarded the tyrant’s overtures with suspicion. Turnus of Aricia warned that Tarquinius “would press them into servitude” if they followed him, treating you as he has treated his own people, with murder and theft (I.l.70). A “rebel and troublemaker” himself, Turnus soon attracted the tyrant’s unfavorable attention. “He began to plot Turnus’ death, so that he might inspire in the Latins the same fear that he had used to oppress the spirit of the citizens back home” (I.l.71). “He trumped up a false charge and so destroyed an innocent man” (I.li.71). This had the desired effect. Out of fear, the Latins acceded in renewing their association with Rome while relinquishing the right to have their own military commanders.

“Unjust as the monarch was in peacetime, he was not a bad general in war,” Livy concedes (I.liii.73). He waged a successful campaign against the Volsci, initiating a series of conflicts between the two peoples that would continue for the next 200 years. He also took the city of Gabii with “guile and trickery, a thoroughly un-Roman stratagem,” then had his son, Sextus, execute the city’s leaders, some in public and others secretly (I.liv.75). In a show of piety at Rome, he built the temple of Capitoline Jupiter as “a memorial of his reign and of his family” while deconsecrating several sanctuaries and shrines established by the ill-fated Sabine co-king, Tatius (I.lv.75). Portents were interpreted to predict the future greatness of the Roman empire. As for the Roman people themselves, he imitated King Ancus by putting them to work, this time on the sewer system and the seats for the Circus Maximus.

Conspiracies to overthrow Tarquinius Superbus’ tyranny began to emerge. His two younger sons hoped to exploit an oracle they had been granted at Delphi to eliminate Sextus from the succession. At the same time, Lucius Junius Brutus, the son of their aunt, Tarquinia, bided his time, playing the fool and concealing “the great spirit that was to free the Roman people” (I.lviii.79). Lucius Tarquinius had initiated a war against the Rutulian city of Ardea; it was a wealthy place, and he needed the money to pay for his vast public works and to pay off the increasingly disgruntled people of Rome. “Seized by an evil desire to debauch” Lucretia, the wife of the son of the Ardean king—her beauty and her chastity equally inflamed him—he blackmailed him into committing adultery with him by threatening to kill her and her slave, then laying them together and thereby ruining her reputation (I.lvii.80). After reporting the crime to her father and grandfather, she committed suicide so that no unchaste woman could ever use her example as a precedent.

This gave Brutus the opening he needed. Swearing vengeance on the Tarquins and the overthrow of the monarchic regime in Rome, he entered into a conspiracy with Lucretius’ widower, Collatinus, and her aggrieved father and grandfather. They gathered an army and moved against Rome, under Brutus’ command. “There he gave a speech that was quite inconsistent with the spirit and disposition that he had feigned up to that day,” he denounced Lucius for his crime and his arrogance in rule, including his policy of near-enslavement of the people for the purpose of building and cleaning sewers and ditches (I.l.ix.82). The tyrant, still in the camp at Ardea, returned to Rome but found the gates closed; he had been exiled by a vote of the people. For his part, Brutus had made the opposite journey, from Rome to Ardea, where he received the enthusiastic support of the army. 

“The rule of the kings at Rome, from the foundation of the city to its liberation, lasted 244 years” (I.lx.83). It was replaced by the rule of two consuls, the hero-liberators Lucius Junius Brutus and Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus—yet another duality, this one ending Tarquinius Superbus’ malign rule of one. Livy ends Book I here. He has provided his readers with a guide to monarchic statesmanship, both its advantages and its defects. His Book I thus serves as an ‘ancient’ equivalent of Machiavelli’s The Prince, in term of its theme. It stands in strong contrast to Machiavelli’s treatment of monarchy in two ways; although it shares some of the Florentine’s inclination to recommend the use of piety for purposes of ruling unruly peoples, it never departs from the classical virtues; what Machiavelli would term virtù enters in strictly as subordinate to those virtues. More, Livy never suggests that Fortuna can be mastered by human beings. Fortuna, and behind it Fate, put limits on human action in ways Machiavelli denies they need to do.

In Livy’s presentation, the monarchic regime presents a problem of ‘one versus two.’ As the story of Romulus and Remus demonstrates, a dual regime may lead to fatal inconveniences. However, no one monarch is usually good enough. A people needs two things, not one for good government; it needs both rule by force and rule by law. Yet no one man is likely to be good at both modes of rule; early Rome itself oscillates between forceful and lawful monarchs—Romulus types and Numa types. The attempt to combine the two in one person can as easily result in a tyrant, who combines the two modes malignly—saying in effect, ‘I am the law’—as it does in a wise and just monarch who uses force in accordance with the law. It was exactly this tyrannical eventuality that ruined the monarchic regime in Rome and led to the installation of ‘republicanism’—initially rule of ‘the few.’

Hence Livy’s opening sentence of Book II. “The libertas of the Roman people, their achievements in peace and war, government by annually elected magistrates, and the rule of laws that overrides the rule of men will be my theme from now on” (II.i.84). Livy carefully counsels his readers that Brutus “would have acted in the worst interests of the state if, in a premature desire for liberty, he had wrested the kingship of any of the earlier kings” (II.i.84). A people consisting of shepherds and refugees would not yet have been prepared for governing themselves. “Released from fear of a king’s power, they would have been buffeted by the storms of tribunician demagogues, creating quarrels with the senators of a city that was not their own, before pledges of a wife and children and love of the very soil—a characteristic that develops over a long period—had created a sense of community” (II.i.84). Factionalism would have destroyed Rome “before it reached maturity.” before it could “bear the good fruits of liberty” (II.i.85).

The Romans replaced the one king with two consuls. Crucially, the limited the term of the consulship to one year, rather than reducing the power wielded by the new ‘kingly’ offices. Also, only one consul at a time could hold the fasces, the symbol of the power to flog or execute wrongdoers. Quite sensibly, the liberator Brutus was chosen to hold the fasces at first, and he “prov[ed] as keen a guardian of liberty as he had been its champion” (II.i.85). Brutus brought the Senate back up to strength, enrolling leaders of the equestrian class to replace those murdered by the tyrant. If anything, the liberated Romans “went too far in protecting their freedom,” forcing one consul, Tarquinius Collatinus, to abdicate simply because he was a member of the hated Tarquin family, all of whom were then exiled, their lands either distributed to the plebs or consecrated to Mars (II.ii.86). The senators intended this to persuade the plebs to “dismiss forever any hope of peace with the Tarquins” (II.v.89).

The first threat to the regime came not from them, however, but from young aristocrats, “sons of families of some importance whose pleasures had been less restricted under the monarchy,” having been the “companions” of the Tarquins and “accustomed to living like princes” (II.iii.87). They preferred “license” under tyranny to liberty under republicanism (II.iii.87). Under tyranny, “there was scope for receiving and doing favors,” as monarchs know “the difference between a friend and an enemy” (II.iii.87). “The law, however, was deaf and inexorable, more helpful and better for the weak than for the powerful; it was inflexible and lacking indulgence, if one exceeded the limit” (II,iii.87). For the young aristocrats, “it was dangerous to rely on innocence alone” (II.iii.87). They plotted to restore the monarchy, and two sons of Brutus himself joined in the conspiracy. But a slave overheard their conversation and reported the matter to the consuls, who “crushed the whole plot without any disturbance” (II.iv.88). The traitors were “stripped, scourged, and beheaded”; although the Romans were grieved by the betrayal of Brutus, Romans generally, and the gods by Brutus’ sons, as was Brutus himself (his “face revealed his natural feelings as a father as the state’s retribution was administered”), the informer was rewarded with money, liberation from slavery, and citizenship in Rome, “to provide in all respects an outstanding deterrent to further crimes” (II.v.89-90). 

“When news of what had happened was reported to Tarquin, he was enraged with not only disappointment at the collapse of his great hopes” (II.vi.90). Conspiracy having failed, “he realized that he had to prepare openly for war” (II.vi.90). He found allies in the Etruscan cities of Veii and Tarquinii—his people, who had suffered defeats at the hands of Rome. “Two armies from the two states followed Tarquin to restore the monarchy and make war on the Romans” (II.vi.91). In the battle, Brutus and Arruns Tarquinius, a son of the former tyrant, rushed at one another, each then mortally wounded. The victorious consul, Publius Valerius, returned to Rome in triumph, but his “popularity turned to hatred and suspicion,” “so fickle are the minds of the mob,” frightened that he secretly aimed at kingship (II.vii.92). It took his resignation from the consulship and a conciliatory speech to the people to assuage their fears; these actions, along with new laws granting the people the right to appeal the decisions of magistrates and “pronouncing a curse on the life and property of a man who plotted to seize the throne,” brought him back into public favor, and he was granted the title “Publicola,” “the People’s Friend” (II.viii.93). This was among the earliest steps of bringing an aristocratic ‘republic’ closer to a mixed-regime republic.

Tarquin was dead, but the Tarquins still lived. The fled to the city of Clusium, asking the king, Lars Porsenna, to rally to the standard of monarchy against republicanism. “The end was at hand for monarchy, the finest institution known to gods and man,” they argued (II.ix.95). The panicky Roman senators, still unsure that the people would stand firm in defense of the new regime, freed them from taxes and customs duties while assuring them a ready supply of grain and salt. The people, they saw, might incline to either rule by ‘the few’ or rule by ‘the one,’ and their actions secured popular allegiance to themselves against the monarchists. “This liberality on the part of the senators so maintained the harmony of the state in the harsh times of siege and famine that were to come, that the name of ‘king’ was abhorrent to high and low alike. Nor was there any individual in later years whose demagogic skills made him as popular as the senate was at that time because of its good governance.” (II.ix.95).

In this war, such ardor led to the famed battlefield prodigy of Horatius Cocles, who faced off against the invaders in defense of the bridge across the Tiber River with only two companions at his side. He held out long enough for the bridge to be destroyed, preventing the monarchist army from overrunning Rome. Another hero, Mucius Scaevola, infiltrated the enemy camp in an attempt to assassinate Lars Porsenna; captured and threatened with death by fire, he thrust his own hand into the fire, saying “Look and see how cheaply the body is regarded by those who look to great glory,” and averring that there were hundreds more young Romans just like him (II.xii.99). The intimidated king offered peace, which was accepted. He later persisted in requesting that the Tarquin monarchy be restored, but the Roman envoys explained that “what the king was seeking was contrary to the liberty of the Roman people” and that “they were united in this vow that the end of liberty in the city would be the end of the city” (II.xv.102). 

To Livy, then, the maintenance of republicanism requires citizen virtue, virtue based on the superiority of the soul, and particularly the spirited aspect of the soul, thumos, over the body and its appetites. A soft people—and not only the men, as he recounts the stories of courageous women, as well—must unhesitatingly risk and even sacrifice their bodies in defense of political liberty. 

Next to plot against Rome were the Sabines. Although the war faction among its rulers prevailed, there was a substantial peace faction, including one Artus Claudius, who fled the country with his “large band of clients” (II.xvi.102); admitted to Rome, they were granted citizenship there, and Claudius became known as Appius Claudius. The Sabine threat soon induced the senate to appoint a new office, the dictator, selected from the ex-consuls to meet military emergency with a unified command. This quasi-monarchic office struck fear into the plebs and the Sabines alike. Temporarily stripped of the right to appeal from one consul to the other, the plebs saw no other recourse for themselves but the path of “scrupulous obedience” (II.xviii.105). The Sabines took the precaution of forming an alliance with the Latins, who broke their peace treaty with Rome. The indignant and well-disciplined Romans won the war, and the practice of appointing a dictator as the leader in major wars was affirmed.

The great republican, Publius Valerius died, and his son also died in battle against Latin forces allied with the Tarquins. Tarquinius Superbus himself died in exile in 495 BC. “The senators were cheered by this news, as were the plebs. But the senators indulged too much in their joy. The nobles began to mistreat the plebs, whose interests up to that time they had most diligently served.” (II.xxi.108). Removal of the regime threat and perhaps the increased commerce made possible in peace (the senate dedicated a temple to Mercury, god of commerce, at this time) as it were elevated care for the body. The citizens of ancient Carthage, a commercial republic, were accustomed to prosperity; the citizens of the military republic, and especially its ruling class, may have been corrupted by it, and were in any event made arrogant when fear of losing their regime to rival monarchists abated. A peace treaty with the Latins reinforced this. Roman duality recurred, this time in the form of class struggle.

From then on, the Roman republic saw “hatred between the senators and plebeians, especially on the question of those who were ‘bound over’ to their creditors for debt (II.xxiii110)—that is, forced into servitude to their creditor until the debt was paid. “The freedom of plebeians,” the plebeians complained, “was safer in war than in peace, amid enemies rather than amid fellow citizens” (II.xxiii.110). Indeed, the threat of war was often the only thing that cut short the periodic plebeian rebellions. And even then, on many occasions, the plebs would simply refuse to enlist when the consuls attempted to raise an army, holding out for concessions even in the face of serious foreign threats.

Unfortunately for the plebs, what has been conceded can be taken away, once the threat has been removed. It was the former Etruscan Appius Claudius who sided with senate oligarchs, opposing his milder consul counterpart, Publius Servilius, who, in “steering a middle course… neither avoided the hatred of the plebs nor won the goodwill of the senators” (II.xxvii.115). “The latter considered that he was soft and courting popularity, whereas the plebs deemed him equally hateful” (II.xxvii.115). “At last, these consuls who were hated so hated by the plebs went out of office. Servilius had the goodwill of neither side, but Appius was amazingly popular with the senators.” (II.xxvii.116). Out of office, Appius Claudius, “harsh by nature and brutal because of his hatred of the plebs on the one hand and the senators’ adulation on the other, said that such a great uproar had arisen, not because of the plebs’ miserable lives, but because of license: the plebs were more out of control than enraged” (II.xxix.118). He diagnosed the problem as insolence stemming from their right to appeal the decision of one consul before his counterpart, and urged the appointment of a dictator to put a stop to that. He nearly got himself appointed to the office—”a move that would have alienated the plebs at a most dangerous time, since the Volsci, Aequi, and Sabines all happened to take up arms at once” against Rome (II.xxx.119). The senate prudently chose Manlius Valerius, whose brother had proposed the law that gave them the right to appeal; “they had no fear of harsh or arrogant action from that family,” and they went along with the military call-up (II.xxx.119). The resulting army went on to defeat the enemies.

Victory merely returned the senators to their arrogance. They rejected Valerius’ call for a fair policy respecting credit and debt. “You don’t like it when I urge harmony,” he told them; “you will soon wish, I guarantee, that the Roman plebs had patrons like me”—a moderate, not some demagogue to inflame them against the patricians (II.xxxi.121). Sure enough, the plebs withdrew from the city, fortifying a camp, which caused “great panic” among the oligarchs (II.xxxii.122).

The senators sent Menenius Agrippa as an emissary to the plebs. “An eloquent man who was dear to the people because he was one of their own by birth,” he brought them back into the city by telling them a parable “in an old-fashioned, rough style of speech” (II.xxxii.122). This was the famous parable of the belly, which recalls a mythical time when the parts of the human body were poorly coordinated, with each having “its own way of thinking and its own voice” (II.xxxii.122). All were angry at the belly, which alone among them appeared to consume without producing. They decided “starve the belly into submission,” but soon learned that the belly had a function after all, which was to supply “all parts of the body the source of our life and strength—our blood, which it apportions to the veins after it is enriched with the food it has digested” (II.xxxii.123). This showed the plebs “the similarity between the internal revolt of the body and the anger of the plebs toward the senators, and so won over men’s minds” (II.xxxii.123). 

The plebs nonetheless exacted a major concession from the senators. The plebeians were given magistrates “who would be sacrosanct”; the “tribunes” would “have the right to give help to the plebeians in actions against the consuls” (II.xxxiii.123). The tribunate would endure as an important institution in the republic from then on.

The next threat to plebeian rights came from a young soldier, Gnaeus Marcius, later given the cognomen Coriolanus. His rise, based on his military prowess, began at the same time as the death of Menenius Agrippa, the lifelong “promoter and mediator of civic harmony” between patricians and plebeians. Due to the plebs’ temporary secession, Rome suffered a grain shortage. Coriolanus was “foremost” among those who “thought that the time had come to repress the plebeians and recover the rights that had id been forcibly wrested from the senators as a result of the secession,” describing this as a “humiliation” comparable to that experienced by defeated soldiers forced to pass under the yoke by their triumphant enemies (II.xxxiv.125). The senate, he contended, should “annul the tribunician power” by withholding grain just as the plebs had withheld themselves (II.xxxiv.126). This infuriated the plebs, who intimidated the senators, who then exiled Coriolanus. 

He settled at Volsci, where his host, Attius Tullius, shared his animosity toward the Roman people. Since the Volscians generally had lost interest in fighting Rome, “they would have to employ devious means in order to provoke the Volscians’ hearts with some fresh anger” (II.xxv.127). At the next session of the Great Games in Rome, Attius warned the Romans of a likely disturbance by Volscian youths; they were expelled, giving him the opportunity to complain, upon their return to Volsci, that the city had been humiliated, its youths treated as if unclean. “War has been declared on you—but those who made the declaration will greatly regret it, if you prove your valor” (II.xxxviii.130). Coriolanus led the march on Rome.

This led to the dramatic story Shakespeare presented, as the women of Rome, including Coriolanus’ wife and mother, came out of the city to beg for mercy. At first “intransigent,” Coriolanus was intent on attack, but “the weeping of the entire crowd of women and their lament for themselves and their country finally broke the man” (II.xxxix.132). “The men of Rome did not envy the praise won by the women—people at that time did not disparage another’s glory” (II.xxxix.132); Livy marks the magnanimity of early republican Rome, glancing at small-souled contemporaries in passing. Coriolanus lived to an old age. The Volsci and their Aequian allies retreated, then fell to fighting one another after dumping Attius Tullius as their leader. “The good fortune of the Roman people destroyed two armies in a struggle that was as ruinous as it was stubborn” for their enemies (II.xxxix.132).

Domestic faction re-ignited when the consul Spurius Cassius proposed to divide land gained by treaty from the Hernici between the Latins and the plebeians. The senators were “concerned for the state, thinking by his largesse the consul was building up an influence that endangered freedom”; he might be favoring the people in order to install himself as a king (II.xli.133). “This was the first time that a land bill was proposed, a measure that, from that day to within present memory, has never been brought up without causing great upheavals” (II.xli.133). The other consul, Proculus Verginius, sided with the senators and vetoed the bill. When Cassius then order that money received from the sale of Sicilian grain be allocated to the plebs, they “rejected this as an obvious bribe to get the kingship” (II.xli.134), despite the continued economic depression. Cassius was prosecuted for treason and convicted; his house was demolished.

During a war with the Aequi and the Veientines, the plebeians, led by the tribune Spurius Licinius, withheld military service, this time “to force a land bill upon the patricians” (II.xliii.136). This caused the consul Quintus Fabius to suffer “considerably more trouble with his fellow citizens than with the enemy” (II.xliii.136). His foot soldiers did report for duty and defeated the enemy but then refused to pursue the fleeing Aequians. “The commander found no remedy for this ruinous and unprecedented behavior”; Livy observes that “men of talent are more often deficient in the skill of governing their fellow citizens than in that of defeating the enemy” (II.xliii.136). 

The accounts of Coriolanus, Cassius, and Fabius illustrate a weakness of a military republican regime. Powerful in war, its way of life does not foster the kind of souls which readily master the arts of peace—souls inclined to civility, souls that do not carry the passions of war into civil life. In battle-ready Rome, factions inclined to militancy not compromise. 

And so, in 480 BC, when another tribune, Tiberius Pontificus, sponsored another land bill, the plebs again obstructed a troop levy and the senators again “were thrown into confusion” (II.xliv.137). And again, Appius Claudius was unbending, confident that the senator “would never lack a tribune “who would be willing not only to seek for himself a victory over a colleague but also to ingratiate himself with the better element for the good of the state” by opposing any such proposal by an ambitious tribune who attempted to curry popular favor (II.xliv.137). The same policy of divide-and-conquer that works in foreign policy and war could be applied to domestic policy and faction.

Rome’s enemies saw the city’s factionalism and attempted to exploit it. Rearming, the Etruscans were “spurred on… by their hope that Rome would be destroyed by her internal strife” (II.xliv.137). “This was the only poison; this was the decay that had been found to work on wealthy states, making great empires subject to mortality,” namely, that “two states had been created from one, each with its own magistrates and its own laws,” making “military discipline” shaky (II.xliv.138). “Under such pressure, Rome could be defeated through her own soldiers. Indeed, all [the Etruscans] had to do was to make a declaration and a show of war. The fates and the gods would automatically do the rest.” (II.xliv.138). Or so the Etruscans hoped, clearly not without reason. The Roman consuls themselves “dreaded nothing except their own forces and military might,” given “this new kind of mutiny when armed men were silent and inactive,” not loud and openly rebellious (II.xv.138). 

On the battlefield, the Etruscans insulted the Roman soldiers, dividing plebeian hatred between the Etruscan and Roman aristocrats. That is, the attempt to divide and conquer the Romans only succeeded in dividing their outrage, refocusing part of it on the leaders of the enemy troops. Meanwhile, “the consuls put their heads together, as if they were deliberating, and conferred for a long time” (II.xlv.138), effectively employing what we would now call ‘reverse psychology’: “The more [the soldiers] believed the consuls did not want battle, the more their ardor increased” (II.xlv.138). For their part, the Etruscan officers, assuming that the Roman consuls feared engagement, redoubled their insults, thereby redoubling the fury in the ranks of the Romans, who finally “rushed to the consults,” clamoring for battle (II.xlv.138). The consuls still demurred, but finally Fabius demanded that “they swear” not merely to the consuls but to the gods “that they will return victorious from this battle” (II.xlv.138). So they swore, and so they returned, and when the soldiers returned to Rome he put the wounded soldiers under the care of his family, bringing his family to enjoy popularity for the first time, “a favor won by a skill that promoted the health of the state” (II.xlvii.142). The following year, the Fabii volunteered not only to lead the army against the Veientines but to pay for the expedition themselves. “People praised the Fabii to the skies. One family had shouldered the burden of the state.” (II.xlix.143). But success made the Fabii restless; all but one was killed in battle, the survivor “hardly more than a boy” (II.l.146). A year later, however, the arrogance lodged in the other set of heads, and the Veientines fell victim to a disastrous ambush.

Once again, in the characteristic pattern, peace abroad brought strife at home, as “abundance and idleness again made the Romans irresponsible,” with tribunes “stir[ring] up the plebs with the usual poison, a land bill” (II.lii.148). Between 476 BC and 468, this kind of oscillation continued, with the plebeians winning the right to elect the tribunes through the Tribal Assembly, a move that “deprived the patricians of all their power of using their clients’ votes to elect the tribunes they wanted” (II.lvi.152). “While consuls and tribunes were each pulling in their own direction, there was no strength left in the middle. The state was torn and mangled. The question was in whose hands the state belonged, rather than how it might be safe.” (II.lvii.154). (At one point the Volsci won a rare victory over Rome in battle.) Rome now had a mixed-regime republic of sorts, but without the feature Aristotle regards as indispensable to that regime: a strong middle class to act as a balance-wheel between the many poor and the few rich. 

 

Note

1. See Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges: The Ancient City. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.

 

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Between Two Millstones. Book Two: Exile in America, 1978-1994. Clare Kitson and Melanie Moore translation. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020.

 

In Between Two Millstones Solzhenitsyn blends several literary genres—autobiography, essay, and a touch of diary.  Volume I consists of his memories from his first years of exile, following his departure from the Soviet Union in 1974, years in which he lived for a time in Western Europe before settling in Vermont. There, as Daniel J. Mahoney observes in his excellent Forward to this volume, “above all, he found a place to work” and “a serene and welcome home for his family.” [1] His main work consisted of researching and writing The Red Wheel, a vast historical novel tracing the origins of first the Russian and then the Bolshevik Revolutions, beginning in 1914. [2] His subsidiary work consisted of fending off both the blandishments and irritations of life in the great Western democracy, from speaking invitations to polemics to lawsuits—all swirling around him like mosquitoes in a Siberian summer. Whether great or petty, all of these activities centered on a central theme of his life: What will Russia be? What moral, spiritual, and political regime will replace the sordid rule of the Communists, by now in welcome but dangerous decline? These are the ruling questions of Volume II, which consists of Millstones parts two, three, and four.

Perhaps the most important spokesman for the alternative anti-Communist regime to the one that Solzhenitsyn prayed for, dedicated his life’s work to preparing, was the courageous dissident Russian physicist, Andrei Sakharov. Sakharov was the quintessential ‘modern.’ Impatient with what he took to be the dead hand of the past, he wanted a rapid, revolutionary change in Russia, a regime change countering the malign revolution of the Bolsheviks, but just as dramatic. He thought this both possible and desirable because he expected the new, ‘democratic’ regime to be democratic in the modern sense: a regime in which progressive-minded secular elites would lead the people to life modeled on the ideas of Enlightenment rationalism—technocratic, urban, internationalist. As Solzhenitsyn observes, Sakharov represented the democratic socialism that lost, violently, to the dictators of the proletariat in 1917, individuals who detested tyranny but also despised Russia —the Russia of Orthodox Christianity and farming villages, priests and peasants.

Such a revolution would not only bring violent conflict, Solzhenitsyn warned. It would also fail because its organizers did not understand what a regime is, and therefore would prove inept in founding one. A regime is more than a set of purposes, however ‘enlightened’ they may be. A regime is more than a set of institutions, however intricately designed. A regime is a way of life. What kind of democracy can ignore the way of life of a country’s people, those persons who wield sovereignty in any democratic regime worthy of the name? Without the patient cultivation of a way of life conducive to popular self-government, a regime change in the name of democracy must either dissolve into anarchy or lead the way to a new oligarchy—or both, in a fatal circle of self-destruction.

Solzhenitsyn completed the first volume of Between Two Millstones in 1978. [3] Volume Two consists of three such chronological sections, covering the periods 1978-1982, 1982-1987, and 1987-1994, the year when he and his family returned to Russia. He wrote each segment during the last year of each period of time, giving his memoir a ‘diaristic’ or contemporaneous quality, wherein he sets down his thoughts soon after the events he recounts, providing a sort of step-by-step assessment of his years in exile. Readers encounter a great-souled Russian and Christian man in medias res, as he thinks, feels, lives his way through the years of separation from his beloved homeland.

He launches his numerous and sharp criticisms of America from an underlying platform of gratitude. Where else was he, where else could he have been, so productive? In Vermont he lived in the “happy solitude” a writer needs, “and I never ceased to be surprised and grateful,” as “the Lord had indeed put me in the best situation a writer could dream of, and the best of the dismal fates that could have arisen, given [Russia’s] blighted history and the oppression of our country for the last sixty years.” Under the American regime he “was no longer compelled to write in code, hide things, distribute pieces of writing among my friends.” [4] He could conduct research freely. “I did not have to rush from pillar to post to survive,” having royalties from the worldwide sales of his books protected by copyright law and the right to the keep his earnings. With this “total independence”—broader “in scope and more effective than freedom alone”—the busy life of commercial republicanism “has flowed past me, having no effect on the rhythm of my work.” 

Unlike the Communists, Americans never attempted to separate him from his family. His wife and sons united with him; “the very spirit of our family and the unceasing, impassion work Alya and I were doing together also had its effect on our sons, ” as “they grew up friends, with a sense of family unity and teamwork.” “The alien environment,” too, “bound them together,” with “a consciousness of our unusual burden” as exiles, but exiles with a profound and noble mission: “to fill in the Russian history that’s been lost” for the sake of the Russians who would someday find themselves liberated from Communist tyranny. This purpose “communicated itself to all three of them.” “When you are immersed in a once-in-a-lifetime piece of work, you don’t notice, aren’t aware of other tasks.” “If the truth about the past were to rise from the ashes in our homeland today, and minds were honed on that truth, then strong characters would emerge, whole ranks of doers, people taking an active part—and my books would come in useful too,” restoring not only a true sense of the past but the moral compass that can only point ‘due North’ if magnetized for that.

By “happy solitude,” then, Solzhenitsyn means anything but being alone, or even being alone with God. He shows the reader how he and his wife could become the most intimate of collaborators in the work. “I have never in my life met anyone with such an acute lexical feel for the specific word needed, for the hidden rhythm of a prose sentence, with such taste in matters of design, as my wife, sent to me—and now irreplaceable—in my insular seclusion, where the brain of one author with his unvarying perceptions is not enough.” The Red Wheel‘s Russian steppes-like vastness required a second set of eyes, a mind with an unerring sense of direction, to prevent Solzhenitsyn from wandering off track, circling around to unintended repetition, losing himself in unclarity. “Living in isolation, it would have been impossible to manage such a massive job adequately. Alya didn’t allow me to lose my faculty of self-criticism,” “subject[ing] every phrase to scrutiny, as I did myself.” It was America, and Vermont in particular, that enabled the Solzhenitsyns to live the way of life they needed to live to continue and above all to continue their spiritual, moral, and political calling, and to complete the work they were called to.

Few Russian émigrés could join them, although there were some million and a half of them living in the West. “Clearly, we are not able to hold out when dispersed—it’s a defect in the Russian spirit: we become weak when not close together, in serried masses (and being told what to do).” The pull of the democratic republican regimes wrenched the Russianness out of almost all his countrymen, as they became “absorbed into alien soil, bringing up an alien generation.” “Russia’s salvation” can “only come from whatever Russia itself does within its borders,” too often by means of “a powerful hand to bring us together” and not from carefully cultivated self-government, which remained Solzhenitsyn’s preference from beginning to end. At this point, in 1982, he could only place his hopes in the “village prose” writers, the best-known of whom was Valentin Rasputin, men who faithfully sketched life in the countryside, among Russian country folk. The émigré writers, by contrast, too often aped their Western counterparts, wasting their time at ‘literary conferences,’ and at their best only rising to the level of Vladimir Nabokov’s brilliant but shallow avant-gardism or Andrei Sinyavksy’s satire. It was Sinyavksy, along with the ex-Communist dissident writer Lev Kopelov and the Paris-based novelist and translator Olga Carlisle, who built a cage around Solzhenitsyn’s reputation in the West, calumniating him as “a monarchist, a totalitarian, and anti-Semite, an heir to Stalin’s way of thinking, and a theocrat”—never mind the incommensurability of the items on the list.

In this, they reinforced American, and Western, confusion of the Soviet regime with the Russian nation. This helps to account for “the malice toward Russia” Solzhenitsyn often saw in his exile. “What brutes, they say, those Russians, not able to resist Communism while we [the West] managed to hold out.” The dogged secularism of the Russian exiles finds its enthusiastic echo among “the hostile pseudo-intellectuals” of the West. Despite his independence in America, Solzhenitsyn, and despite his freedom from house searches and interference with his writing, “I am not genuinely free” here, as writing is one thing but publishing another, and he was having trouble publishing his current writings in the United States. Between the United States and Russia under Soviet Communism, “the world is big, but there’s nowhere to go,” caught as he was between “two millstones.”

Despite venomous claims to the contrary, as a Christian Solzhenitsyn eschewed Russian nationalism, especially in the increasingly coarse and inept forms it took in the years just prior to the 1917 revolutions. At that time, “Russian nationalists emerged, of the kind who rushed to renounce Christianity” as well as socialist internationalism. Nationalists of this type “call on us to renounce our historical memory, to adopt a new paganism, or else be ready to adopt any faith you like from Asia.” In their more malignant forms, they do indeed incline to fascism. Not Solzhenitsyn. 

It was the repulsiveness of such a nationalism and the degradation of “the Bolsheviks’ murderous steamroller” that the “generous, educated ‘pan-humanism'” of Sakharov resisted. He was brought up in “that very milieu”; as a result, “he considers even the idea of nationhood, any appeal to the nation rather than the individual, a philosophical error.” “In nothing that he’d ever said or written was there any whiff of a recollection that our history was over a thousand years old. Sakharov does not breathe that air.” His genius at physics has only accentuated his intellectual and spiritual abstraction from the concrete nature of his own country. He looks at the Russian bear, with its ferocity, its love of its own, its determination, its restlessness—all of its characteristics, good and bad—as if it were a set of molecules in motion, not much different in that way from any other creature in the forest. His hopes for Russia were indistinguishable from the hopes of secular intellectuals in the West: “infinite scientific progress; universal (in other words not national) education for all; the need to overstep the bounds of national sovereignty, a single world legislation; a supranational world government; and economic development that mustn’t remain within the purview of the nation,” which must not “be in charge of its own way of life.” “What must such a worldview inevitably come down to? Nothing but ‘human rights,’ of course”—specifically a “human-rights ideology,” or “rights elevated”—some might say degraded—to “the rank of an ideology.” But ideas unmoored to the realities of life in a specific community can only derange any community they attempt to rule, and fail to rule; they amount to “our old friend anarchism.” But as the pre-revolutionary statesman Pyotr Stolypin understood, alone among his generation of Russian politicians, “civil society cannot be created before citizens are, and it is not the freeing up of rights that can cure an organism comprising a sick state and a sick people but, before that, medical treatment of the whole organism.”  Sakharov averred that true “homeland is freedom,” offering a ‘modern’ parallel to the apolitical Roman-Epicurean mot, “Where I am happy, there is my homeland.” “But if homeland is nothing more than freedom” (or nothing more than happiness), “why the different word?” 

“So much unites Sakharov and me: we were the same age, in the same country; we both rose up at the same time, uncompromising against the prevailing system, fought our battles at the same time and were vilified at the same time by a baying press; and we both called not for revolution but for reforms.” All this notwithstanding, “What divided us was—Russia.” Russia as distinct from the West, as distinct as Orthodox Christianity is from Roman Catholicism and the Protestantism of Wittenberg and Geneva, and as distinct as all forms of Christianity are from the ideology of modern scientism. 

Against the ethos of the modern West, in Europe, in America, and among ‘modernized’ Russians, Solzhenitsyn did not retreat but rather advanced into his own thinking and writing—advanced by returning to the men and women of the revolutionary time. The most important dimension of his exile in the United States is also the hardest to convey to readers, namely, the experience of writing The Red Wheel. The historical figures who peopled his novel preoccupied not only his waking thoughts but his dreams. He had vivid dreams of Czar Nikolai II, dreams in which he discussed Russian foreign policy and the royal succession (“he shook his head sadly that no, [his son] Aleksei could not rule as czar”). He dreamt of generals and agitators, monarchists and Bolsheviks. There was nothing mystical in this: “Surely this was bound to happen when I was spending hours looking at pictures of them, pondering them, thinking myself into their characters.” “For me, they had become the most contemporary of contemporaries and I lived with them day in, day out for weeks and months at a time, an many I quite simply loved as I wrote their chapters. How could it be otherwise?” At the same time, every character must be inserted, as in life, into “the framework of events” as they actually occurred. “If an author sets himself no such objective, all he can do is surrender to an irresponsible play of the imagination.” Irresponsibility was never Solzhenitsyn’s moral métier, it may be safely said.

Given his capacious yet intense, precisely focused spiritual and intellectual task, all the more dispiriting was the response of American literati and journalists to the translations of Solzhenitsyn’s previous work, much of it now appearing in English for the first time. While the new edition of The Oak and the Calf, his memoir of his years struggling against Communism while living in Russia, evoked “dead, dogmatic formulas” of condemnation from the Soviet press, this “mechanical” critique suggested “no personal animosity towards me,” only the reflexive defense of a nearly played-out regime, an empty ritual. But “I was not inveighed against with such bile, such personal, passionate hate, as I was now by America’s pseudo-intellectual elite.” Solzhenitsyn challenged their unimpeachable moralistic amoralism, their moral relativism. How, they demanded indignantly, “could I be so certain I was right”? Does Solzhenitsyn not know that “no one is in possession of the truth, indeed the truth cannot exist in nature, all ideas have equal rights”? “And since I do have that certainty, I must imagine myself a messiah.” “Here is the cavernous rift between the Western Enlightenment’s sense of the world and the Christian one.”

How to respond? Ignore it, as much as possible. “I easily resisted the temptation in the West to become a mere exhibit, a tub-thumper,” a ‘public intellectual.’ “I buried myself in my work, I didn’t bother anyone.” That didn’t stop the noise from “the irrepressible gutter press,” by which Solzhenitsyn doesn’t mean the gossip mags (which, thankfully, mostly passed him over for the more profitable targets, the celebrity entertainers and politicians) but the “creeping host,” the popular press—such publications as Paris-Match, France-Soir, and Stern, their reporters (as it were) annoying him with their “petty scurrying”—with their “tiny sorties on so many little legs,” a “creeping horde” of untiring writer-ants. “In any corner of the earth, any degenerate reporter can write any lies whatsoever about me—this is what their sacred freedom consists of! their sacred democracy! How am I to live here?” Worse, the lies in the Western press were more likely to be believed than those of the notoriously propagandistic Soviet press. To this were added frivolous but draining lawsuits by persons eager to tap into those newly-available publications royalties. 

True, it was not the Gulag. “What was this compared to the fact that others of my fellow-countrymen were being oppressed every day?” Yet no real writer can fail to understand. “The insignificance of the conflict compared to the work in hand was the killer. Indeed, that’s what they mean by it’s not the sea that drowns you but the puddle. It was the Western puddle now.” And that “puddle” might grow into a sea, “deluging not just me but the whole of Russia in waves of calumny, setting the all-too-ready West against her.” Or, shifting metaphors, “convincing the West that Russia and Communism had the same relationship as a sick man and his disease was clearly not in my power.” The “policy-makers” in Washington, London, Paris, and Berlin “actually understand [this] very well; they just won’t say it out loud,” for fear of offending the professional ginners-up of public opinion, ever aiming at flattering their readers’ sense of superiority to those benighted Russians. “The only efforts it’s sensible to make are very moderate: to create, in whatever way possible, a more benign attitude to the real Russia.” With the election of Ronald Reagan to the U. S. presidency in 1980, a man who well understood the difference between Russia and its current regime, a man who understood the regime to be transient, the nation long-lasting, Solzhenitsyn hoped for a step forward in this task. Unfortunately, one of Reagan’s principal foreign-policy advisers, Richard Pipes, had made his academic bones by propounding the thesis that Russia produced Russian Communism, that the regime followed logically from the state. Pipes delayed and eventually helped to block a proposed meeting between Solzhenitsyn and the president.

In Part Three Solzhenitsyn chronicles the core years of the Reagan Administration, 1982-1987. He began them with visits to Japan and Taiwan, rimland bulwarks against the Communist regimes in Moscow and Peking. “In Japan, I discovered that you cannot fall in love with a country if its food is incompatible with you.” He also found Japanese religiosity perplexing. “The Japanese use Shintoism for all their happy occasions—but Buddhism for anything sad, and for funerals. All Japan’s cemeteries are Buddhist; there is no other kind.” He asks, “Is this an encouraging sign for the future of humanity, or a recognition that both religions are inadequate?” Both exemplify “divine worship,” and “undoubtedly” so. But in visiting the shrines he experienced “a pervasive sense of extreme otherness, an abyss between us.” “What is God’s intent” in separating the human race by religion? He remarks the presence of Orthodox believers, finding it “touching to see Japanese people in an Orthodox church and to hear our hymns in Japanese.” Many Western readers will be equally moved, as they do not know that Solzhenitsyn was a ‘liberal’ when it came to religious toleration, though scarcely a relativist.

Still, the foreignness of Japan struck him. “I traveled to Japan hoping to make sense of the Japanese character; its self-restraint, industriousness, and capacity for small-scale but intensive work. But, oddly, I experienced there an insurmountable alienation. Just you try and understand them.” He satisfied himself with attempting to convince them that Communist China wasn’t a land of peace, debating former Vice-Minister for Foreign Affairs Shinsaku Högen, who claimed that “China was a kindred country to Japan, and Communism there was not all that dangerous” because the Chinese “are a very intelligent people,” one “moving in the direction of progress.” For his part, Solzhenitsyn “sought passionately to prove that it was just the same kind of Communism as in the Soviet Union, that Communism was the same the world over.” From the vantage point of nearly forty years later, one can see that the Chinese Communists were indeed more intelligent than the Russian ones, but their notion of progress consists in keeping the Chinese Communist Party firmly in power, and in expanding that power assiduously, by no means neglecting military power.

In Taiwan, the food was better and so was the reception, his hosts having had every reason to share Solzhenitsyn’s revulsion at Chinese Communism. No Shintoism there—only Buddhism, whose “pursuit of immensity and quantity is hard to understand; I cannot grasp how it is connected to the transience of existence, which they preach.” And of course Confucianism, which reminded Solzhenitsyn a bit of Tolstoy. Although the Taiwanese responded to his anti-Communist message with enthusiasm, the president was too cautious to meet with him, fearful of needlessly offending Peking or Moscow. “The Taiwan government would like to achieve success without taking any risks.” In his speech he hinted that the United States might someday abandon Taiwan (Americans were still optimistic about relations with ‘the Mainland’), and it would be a bold thing to deny that possibility, even as Americans have awakened themselves to the malignity of the regime there.

Completing his journey to three geostrategic island nations, Solzhenitsyn went to Great Britain, meeting with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. She set him straight on the preponderance of nuclear forces favoring the Soviets, saying that a rapid buildup by the West would solve that problem; by 1987, as he wrote this section, he saw that “with Reagan’s help, she turned out to be right.” He wanted to criticize her for defending the minor British colony on the Falkland Islands against seizure by the current Argentine despot, thinking that “this insignificant bit of land” could hardly be worth the bloodshed on both sides. But as always his capacity for imagining himself ‘into’ the person in front of him prevailed: “Thatcher had such an awful cold and such a hoarse voice that I couldn’t launch that debate.” He chalks up her policy to “personal pride” and a desire for “success for her party” in the impending parliamentary elections.” “I left feeling a bitter sympathy for her,” but determining to “abandon all hope of ever urging any politician to make ethical decisions.” He was right not to engage her, but it isn’t hard to see Thatcher’s defense, indeed on moral grounds. If the Conservative Party government was leading to British economic revival and to successful resistance to Soviet plans for Europe (as it was), and a Conservative Party electoral victory was indispensable to the continuation of her government (as it was), and if what Solzhenitsyn calls a “fine and noble” relinquishment of the Falklands was likely to hurt her party’s chances (as she evidently thought), then why was the Falklands War not an important act in fighting the Soviet regime Solzhenitsyn deplored? 

“On the way back from England, Alya and I came to a firm agreement: now, finally, I would draw inward to work.” No more traveling, no more interviews. “Not a peep!” “Falling silent was also right for another reason: who was I to judge the West? I’d neither devoted my full attention to studying it nor observed it much at first hand.” [5] Far from the self-righteous ‘messiah’-figure his enemies depicted, Solzhenitsyn came away from his experience of foreign countries, East and West, with a deepened Christian humility. “I’ve fallen silent since 1983—towards both sides” in the Cold War. “In actual fact, the problems of the twentieth century cannot all be laid at the door of current politics,” anyway; “they’re a legacy of the three preceding centuries.” Only in the welcome, “boundless silence” of his home in exile, in the Vermont woods, could he read, write, deepen and refine his thoughts, work with his wife (“my soulmate”), consider his boys as they grew up in America but with an eye toward returning to their native country. “I still have my full strength—it must have been given me for a reason.”

Although Solzhenitsyn intended to withdraw from contemporary controversies, his enemies had other ideas, preferring to drag him in. He describes this aspect of his struggle with the apt phrase, “ordeal by tawdriness.” “Tawdriness is the preferred weapon of baseness, when outright violence is unavailable.” The Soviet rulers assassinated characters when they could not assassinate persons, a technique Lenin taught them, one he had learned from reading Marx. It was hardly unknown in the West, as seen in the work of Solzhenitsyn’s American biographer, Michael Scammel. “Uniformly lacking in elevated emotional and intellectual understanding,” taking “a low view of lofty subjects,” Scammel proceeded by two methods: first “to reduce my actions, movement, feelings, and intentions to the mediocre”—motives “that make most sense to the biographer himself”; second, to side with Solzhenitsyn’s detractors on all key issues, “probably not out of malice towards me but because, by his reckoning, it’s the best way to secure” the ‘sane and balanced,’ ‘even-handed’ stance of objectivity. In other words, Scammel was a journalist. So, for example, in Solzhenitsyn’s refusal to meet the celebrated Jean-Paul Sartre, a shameless apologist for a then-quirky brand of Marxism-cum-Heideggerianism which has now come into its own in the European and North American universities, Solzhenitsyn ‘must’ have been motivated by “a combination of pride and timidity.” “He doesn’t allow that I might have simply despised Sartre.”

From the ‘Left,’ the ubiquitous Sinyavsky never let up, calling Solzhenitsyn “a cancer on Russian culture” and insinuating that he was a warmongering anti-Semitic religious fanatic. This sort of thing even reached the floor of the United States Congress, where the solons reasoned along these lines: Solzhenitsyn has defended Stolypin; Stolypin was assassinated by Dmitri Bogrov, who was Jewish; Solzhenitsyn has condemned Bogrov; ergo, Solzhenitsyn must be anti-Semitic. The syllogism isn’t air-tight, but America’s Radio Liberty, which broadcast into the Soviet Union, was reprimanded for reading portions of August 1914 on air, thus presenting the work of an author who (in the locution of one Congressman) could be perceived as anti-Semitic.

Meanwhile, from the ‘Right,’ a much less prominent writer, Lev Navrozov, whose main journalistic outlet was the widely-unread New York City Tribune, managed to mount a conspiracy theory according to which Solzhenitsyn was really a Soviet Fifth Columnist, a KGB plant sent out to deceive the West. “Right-leaning America was rattled, became alarmed—and began to distance itself from that Solzhenitsyn.” I rather think Solzhenitsyn exaggerates Navrozov’s influence, but this is understandable. First, the firmly anti-communist Tribune may have had many New York City Russian émigrés in its readership. More important, “Alya suffered from this constant assault on us—suffered acutely,” as he, “unlike me,” “felt she really lived in this country” as the one who packed the children off to school in what was for them “their only country,” and where they heard questions and perhaps taunts from their classmates. Despite their agreement in 1982, by 1986 “Alya wanted me now to start actively defending myself.”

It was the Soviet regime that came to the rescue, unintentionally and sooner than expected. Even timely. A massive effort such as The Red Wheel may be easy to start, but it is damnably hard to finish—not only in the sheer volume of work involved, but in knowing when to stop the narrative. In a sense, he might have taken it to August 1918, a full four years after the ‘guns of August’ precipitated the events leading to revolution. But no: “By May 1917,” five months before the Bolsheviks took control, “the liberal ‘February fever'”—the euphoric intoxication of the people after the overthrow of czarism and the apparent triumph of democracy—was “utterly supine, sickly, doomed—anyone could come along and seize power, and the Bolsheviks did.” He could finish the novel with April 1917. Clearly, this would mean finishing the book with stern warning against precipitous democratization when Communism in Russia would join its czarist enemy in the proverbial dustbin of history. 

By the middle of 1986 the Solzhenitsyns were hearing reports of Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev’s apparent preparations for as yet unspecified changes in the country. He seemed to be attempting to gather support from writers (Communist Party loyalists, to be sure) for reform. “What on earth was going on?” “A new way of life,” Alya ventured to say. He released Sakharov, although it was true that the physicist had announced his opposition to President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, a.k.a. ‘Star Wars,’ as his adversary Senator Edward Kennedy called it, adroitly making a defensive weapons program sound like a preparation for warfare waged from outer space. Nonetheless, Solzhenitsyn sensed “the internally driven collapse of Communism,” which he had long predicted—death from premature decrepitude, because its earthly ‘religion’ has proved short on spiritual endurance; “the pool of willing sacrifices for the sake of a radiant future has run out and, resting on their laurels, both bosses and foremen have turned swinelike.” And the economy had failed. Indeed, Gorbachev’s “only success has been his cult in the West,” a cult that has maintained itself in the subsequent decades.

“Will God allow us to return to our homeland, allow us to serve? And will it be at a time of its new collapse, or of a sublime reordering?” With this dyad (we can now see) Solzhenitsyn was too ‘apocalyptic.’ Neither utter collapse nor sublimity awaited; reordering did, but it has proven unsublime. Having served as “a sword of division” (as a Christian often will do) for so many years, Solzhenitsyn hoped now “to bring together everyone” his heart could reach, “to act as a hoop binding Russian together.” “That, after all, is the real task.”

In the final section of his book, Solzhenitsyn recounts the event of 1987-1994, the year of his family’s return to Russia. But before departing from Part Three, two additional insights Solzhenitsyn came to during those years demand attention—one spiritual, the other moral. While preparing a speech in response to receiving the Templeton Prize (established “to call attention to a variety of persons who have found new ways to increase man’s love of God or man’s understanding of God,” according to the brochure he received), he determined to use the occasion to deepen his own “understanding [of] earthly life as a stage in the development of eternal life,” aiming at ending one’s earthly life “on a morally higher level than that dictated by one’s innate qualities.” In this, “a fellow countryman came to my aid,” Igor Sigorsky, the aircraft designer, “who also happened to be interested in the philosophy of creation.” Sharing Solzhenitsyn’s mathematical and scientific background, Sikorsky suggested a train of thought that led Solzhenitsyn to “grasp why suicide is such a great sin: it is the voluntary interruption of growth”—of the spiritual growth attained by facing our suffering squarely and opening our soul to God—the “pushing away of God’s hand,” the hand that would injure us for our own good, then guide us toward seeing that suffering prepares mind and heart for God, for precisely that task of moral heightening, of overcoming the sins that beset every human soul.  

On a major moral issue that came under heightened scrutiny during the Reagan years, Solzhenitsyn considers nuclear weapons. The West, America particularly, “had immorally introduced the atom bomb to the world—when they were already victorious!—and dropped it on a civilian population.” As so often with Solzhenitsyn, however, he brings an important nuance to this often-heard criticism. In his Templeton address “I came out against” U.S. “nuclear achievements” and indeed against “the whole idea of a nuclear umbrella.” At the same time, and unlike the ‘nuclear freeze’ advocates in the United States and the anti-nuclear protestors in Western Europe (the latter obviously “being fueled by the Soviets”), he argued that that “the moment it reached for the diabolical gift of the nuclear bomb, the West went out of its mind” in the sense that such “fine men of the West” as Bertrand Russell, George Kennan, Averell Harriman, and dozens of others” started to urge “their compatriots to make more, more, and still more concessions to Communism, anything to ensure there was no nuclear war.” “I never believed there would be: it would obliterate the Creator’s plan for humanity.” But it might lead to the moral and political collapse of Western resistance to the Soviet empire.

Instead, however, it was that empire which collapsed, an empire ruled by the charming but inept Mikhail Gorbachev. (“He had nothing—just the inertia of Communist Party succession.”) “Gorbachev was giving speeches laden with promises, but clinging on frantically to Party power and the banner of Lenin.” It should have been obvious to anyone with an acquaintance with the history of the Soviet Union that Gorbachev’s so-called economic liberalization was nothing more than a dusted-off version of Lenin’s New Economic Policy of the 1920s—window-dressing gestures toward capitalism intended to draw in Western investors, who alone could prop up a failing socialism. And this went on with more than a hint of Stalinism lurking in the wings, if needed: Gorbachev “had entrusted the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the head torturer of the Georgian KGB.” The centerpieces of Gorbachev’s propaganda campaign were “Perestroika” (“restructuring”) and “Glasnost” (“openness”). “No one, it seemed, even in the Soviet Union, understood what, exactly, [perestroika] consisted of.” Local cooperatives and small village enterprises were envisioned, implemented, but almost immediately dissolved. Meanwhile, in the bureaucracy, “all the old nomenklatura” remained in place, “us[ing] the nation’s wealth to line their own pockets.” Swinelike they may have been, but Gadarenian they were not; they had no intention of throwing themselves off a cliff. “Glasnost” was more promising; Solzhenitsyn had called for it, some twenty years before. And Russians did talk freely. “Yes, they talked, oh how they talked—but was anyone doing anything?” Well, no. “Everything that was being done (apart from Glasnost getting under way) was so insubstantial, shortsighted, or even damaging that it was clear they were beginning to thrash about: they had no idea where to go next”—un-Gadarenian, indeed.

“In the meantime, all over the West, Soviet Perestroika and Glasnost were giving rise to unabated jubilation.” Solzhenitsyn’s silence perplexed the pundits. But it simply registered a discreet refusal to be bamboozled. His own books remained on the proscribed list, a fact that made “openness” look rather less wide-bordered than the Kremlin wanted it to seem. The excuse, as usual, was that Solzhenitsyn was too dangerous to read. As usual, Sinyavsky chimed in, complaining that Solzhenitsyn was “against” Perestroika, although Solzhenitsyn had neither said nor written anything about it. “With renewed vigor the essayist threw himself into an international tour to oppose me, and neglected no opportunity.” Sinyavsky updated his usual tropes: “Solzhenitsyn is the standard-bearer of Russian nationalism!” “He’ll return in triumph and take the lead in a clerical fascist movement!” He “is a racist and monarchist, and in five years he’ll be running Russia!”

For his part, Sakharov attempted more constructive activity, standing for a seat in the new national Congress, where Gorbachev quite literally silenced him on one memorable occasion simply by turning off his microphone. The move backfired. “During the course of the Congress, Sakharov won for himself the role of de facto leader of the opposition,” winning the role of the “persecuted defender” of the Russian people. “Thus the year 1989 marked the finest hour of Sakharov’s life.” Unfortunately, his actual proposals for Russian regime change were ill-conceived. He wanted to replace the over-centralized pseudo-federalism of the Soviet Union with what would have amounted to a loose system of sovereign states, each with its own citizenship, monetary system, armed forces, and police agencies, each “independent of central government” but, tellingly, “subject to the laws of a World Government” and thus not genuinely sovereign at all. As in all ‘act locally, think globally’ formula, this one deprecated the middle ground, the nation-state. “Russia would have been fatally splintered and weakened” by Sakharov’s plan, lacking as it did “even a scintilla of consciousness of Russia’s history and its spiritual experience?” Sakharov died soon afterwards. “In his Christian smile and his sad eyes, something fatal, unavoidable, had always been reflected.”

The Communist regime “had allowed the whole body of our country, its whole population, to become rotten.” In turmoil under these conditions, it isn’t the cream that rises to the top but the “scum.” Preoccupied with his great novel, “I had not rendered any useful assistance against the tumult and confusion of minds in the Soviet Union, either in untangling the mess of ideas or giving practical advice.” Although “the collapse of the Soviet Union was irreversible,” and a good thing, too, “how could we prevent historical Russia also being destroyed in its wake?” Solzhenitsyn’s pithy Rebuilding Russia, which he now wrote, recommended “moral cleansing,” “self-limitation,” and, institutionally, a real not phony reconstruction of local institutions of self-government. [6] Gorbachev condemned the book as, somehow, monarchist, knowing that he could rely on the reputations Solzhenitsyn’s enemies had already constructed both Solzhenitsyn himself and for Gorbachev himself. “I was not too late,” Solzhenitsyn remarks; “I was too early.” Time would indeed tell, whether Gorbachev’s scam would endure.

It didn’t, and Boris Yeltsin ousted Gorbachev. “But Yeltsin could not discern any overarching sense of history, or any of the splendid prospects opened up by this successful coup; it seemed that the only significance he saw in it was his victory over the man he hated, Gorbachev.” Under his less-than-vigilant eye, the rulers of the several ‘republics’ of the ‘federation,’ formerly “Communist masters,” now “turned into fervent nationalists and, one after the other, proclaimed ‘sovereignty and separation'”—reaffirming borders drawn not by the several nations but by Lenin and Stalin, who had deliberately mixed existing nations in order to keep them from launching any successful rebellion against the Soviet Union. 

Of all this, Western journalists remained unknowing. They simply wanted to know if Solzhenitsyn favored what they supposed was “Russia’s move to a market economy.” “Americans are genuinely unaware of the existence of Russia, even before the great October Revolution”—not literally, of course, but in the sense of “the whole mass of Russian history and Russian problems since the end of the nineteenth century,” upon which Solzhenitsyn had spent his life considering. “To Americans, did there exist, apart from the Market, any other characteristic, any trait, any aspect of a nation’s life?” Admittedly knowing America little more than Americans knew Russia, Solzhenitsyn would have found the answer to that question in President Washington’s Farewell Address, had he studied it. There, he would have seen that Americans very often want commercial, not political relations with foreign countries. But this doesn’t prevent them from defending their own political union, which, as Washington shows, consists of much more than a free-trade zone, though it does consist of that.

“In 1992, the gigantic, historic Russian Catastrophe began to unfurl: the nation’s life, morality, and social awareness unraveled, unstoppable; in culture and science rational activity ceased; school education and childcare descended into a fatal state of disorder.” He had “feared this,” but had he foreseen it? “Not this particular form of collapse—no. But I did see that the situation could go astray and become another February [1917]—that had for a long time been my greatest fear.” Together, the rivals Gorbachev and Yeltsin and precipitated and then accelerated the collapse. 

“But just where in Russia were the Russian patriots? Alas!—the patriotic movement these days had become hopelessly entangled with Communism.” This, because initially Stalin had linked the survival of the Communist regime against Hitler’s onslaught to a rhetorical appeal to the defense of the ‘Russian homeland,” a strategy that Communist scoundrels in the several ‘republics,’ including Russia proper, had lately resorted to, giving the world yet another instance of the old riposte about patriotism and scoundrels. For his part, Yeltsin managed to triple the size of the already “ponderous apparatus of the Soviet state,” making it look “like either a monster or a joke.”

In December 1993, at the age of 75, Solzhenitsyn learned that he could return to Russia. But there was one more blow, the worst yet. In March 1918 his oldest son died suddenly, leaving his wife and infant daughter. “We buried him in the Orthodox corner of the ever-green Claremont cemetery” in Vermont. “And so we left a tomb in America. Such was our farewell.”

“I had to get to Russia in time to die there.” And not only to die. “I’m thirsting to get involved in Russian events—I have the energy to get things done.” And he will return to political allies his enemies do not have. “I count as friends the vastnesses of Russia. The Russian provinces. The small and medium-sized towns.” “And if people come to understand Russia’s interests rightly, my books could also be needed much later, when there has been a more profound analysis of the historical process,” an analysis illuminated by the God who will not fail.
 

 

 

Notes

1. Mahoney is the author of the best introduction to Solzhenitsyn’s thought in English: The Other Solzhenitsyn: Telling the Truth About a Misunderstood Writer and Thinker (Notre Dame: St. Augustine’s Press, 2014).
2. On this website, see “Solzhenitsyn on the Russian Revolution,” a discussion of his March 1917: The Red Wheel, Node III, Book I.
3. For discussion see “The Temptation of the West: Solzhenitsyn in America,” on this website.
4. In his own day, V.I. Lenin denounced “the accursed Aesopian language” he had undertaken when writing his anti-czarist polemics in the years before the Bolshevik Revolution; see his Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Preface. Such a response to ‘logographic necessity’ is one of the very few commonalities between the Marxist Lenin and the Christian Solzhenitsyn. 
5. This wise self-admonition, like many such, didn’t prove easy to uphold. Some pages later, balking at applying for U.S. citizenship, Solzhenitsyn asks, rhetorically, “Really, what sort of country is America? Naïve (although supposedly so enlightened and democratic): through a clutch of its professional politicians, it blithely betrays itself on a daily basis, yet will fly into a sudden brief fury—but an utterly blind one—and destroy whatever is in its path.” He is thinking especially of such phenomena as vigilante actions by Americans against Russian churches and families in response to Soviet outrages overseas, as when a Russian Orthodox church was vandalized in response to the Soviet destruction of a Korean airliner. “Russian soil may not be accessible to me for a long time to come, perhaps until death, but I cannot sense American soil as my own.”
6. On this website see “Solzhenitsyn on Russian Reconstruction” for discussion of Rebuilding Russia and The Russian Question at the End of the Twentieth Century.