A Lesson from History

My wife Cheryl and I took a trip to Europe this past fall. The places we visited in Austria, Hungary, France, and Spain were peaceful and beautiful and saturated with history. It was a wonderful trip.

Yet I felt a pervasive sadness that derived from the history of the places we chose to visit. Vienna, a place of music, was where Hitler staged his ‘cultural’ or art exhibition that shortly thereafter kicked off his demented quest for ‘empire’ and the second World War. Beautiful Budapest on the Danube River was pocked with impact marks from the Russian machine gun bullets that sought the lives of the residents of that city in the 1956 uprising against the oppressive communist occupation. Nearly every city in France we visited had the ‘ghosts’ of the fallen in WW I and WW II, besides the fortifications of centuries’ older castles. We saw huge chateaus that were built for the insatiable egos or desires of those who controlled the wealth of the country. In Spain we visited lavish Moorish/Muslim mosques and palaces in Cordoba and Granada and Toledo and Madrid. These places were built on the backs of slave labor and peasants for the pleasure of decadent conquerors. And in both France and Spain (and in a previous trip to England and Italy) we saw huge Catholic cathedrals that now sit largely empty except for tourists.

I recently read a book on world history (‘A History of Knowledge’ by Charles Van Doren) and was struck with a lesson from Roman history that we might do well to remember. The Roman Republic was established sometime around 500 BC and developed a relatively virtuous and just government for about 500 years. The years between about 150 BC and the time of Augustus Caesar (63 BC – AD 14) were considered by historians to be the high period of classical (Greco-Roman) civilization. But by this time the Roman Republic had fallen to the corrupt, despotic and totalitarian rule of the Caesars of what became the Roman ‘Empire.’

Historian Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire “believed that the apex not just of Roman but world history had been reached during . . . the eighty-two years from [AD] 98 to [AD] 180.” After that there was a “relentless decline” until it was no more when the barbarians from the East rampaged through and there followed the Dark Ages from about the middle of the fifth century AD to about the year 1000.

I think the ‘apex’ could have been reached at the time of Christ had the Jews really realized who this man was.

Roman men from Lucretius and Cicero, from shortly before the coming of Christ throughout the last of the years of the Republic and most of the years of the Empire, though loving ‘law’ and debating incessantly about how to live together in peace and freedom could never get it right. Citizens of Rome became vitiated and materialistic and the ‘guarantee’ of security at the cost of tyranny by their politician string of Caesars was the price they paid. Of course a soft and vitiated people and their corrupt leaders could not even get security.

“The later Roman empire had been dedicated to power, wealth, and worldly success. It had been a long time since anyone had paid much attention to the warnings of men like Cato, who had lived in a republic based on moral virtue that seemed utterly unreal to modern Romans. These moderns, by and large, lived more luxuriously than any peoples before them, enjoying all that the world could provide and paying little heed to the demands of Christianity….” (Van Doren, p.95)

Strong and just leaders, the Romans found, were very hard to come by. And for the people to maintain their moral virtue, well, that just didn’t happen either.

As for today’s need for just political leadership, the Arab uprisings of the Middle East today, in country after country, provide bloody example.

Good leadership and good people and a willing adherence to just law are the only things that will preserve a society.

Our own country should be aware of that as well.

God save the United States of America.