"I hope I shall always possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain (what I consider the most enviable of all titles) the character of an honest man, as well as prove (what I desire to be considered in reality) that I am" George Washington, in a letter to Alexander Hamilton August 28, 1788
On this date, January 10, back in 49 B.C., Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, cast the die, and waded into an unending series of metaphors as well as a civil war that he won unless you count the bit where he was assassinated.
Especially in an era where cultural literacy is being lost, if not actively buried, it’s important to remember what crossing the Rubicon meant technically. The Rubicon is a shallow river in northeastern Italy, the crossing of which is not necessarily memorable as a rule. But (assuming the name has not wandered in the last 2000 years, which is a matter of some dispute) crossing it was a very big deal back in Caesar’s day because it was the frontier between the conquered Roman province of Cisalpine Gaul, and Italy proper. And while appointed governor held military authority ("imperium") in the provinces, only elected magistrates could do so within Italy itself given its proximity to Rome on which, just possibly, a man with soldiers under his command might suddenly march to seize power or some such.
For instance Julius Caesar. Caesar led his 13th legion ("Gemina") into Italy for the specific purpose of seizing power. And when he did so, he uttered the once-famous phrase "alea iacta est" ("the die is cast") meaning he had gambled everything and it was now too late to turn back because for an appointed governor to bring soldiers into Italy was open revolt and a capital offence.
Generally speaking if we use the metaphor today with any concept of its meaning, we refer simply to a decisively bold act. But there is a bit more to it, and it is less unequivocally praiseworthy. The reason crossing into Italy, over the Rubicon or any other otherwise insignificant marker, was a capital offence was that it was an attack on established authority and moreover in Caesar’s day, as Rome was still a Republic albeit very rickety by that point, an attack on civilian rule by those meant to be defending it instead.
The crucial political problem, then, now and always, has been to create a government able to protect liberty without being able to threaten it. It is by no means a simple problem or it would have been solved more often including in Rome. But Caesar’s contribution was to shove it aside in favour of the question of which strongman should rule, whose answer is far simpler but far less satisfactory.
The main difficulty through history is that most governments have been too weak to sustain themselves against invasion or upheaval even when plenty strong enough to oppress their citizens in the average course of events. You could not solve the former problem by further strengthening it without making the latter even worse. And you could not solve the latter without making the former worse.
The Romans did better than a lot of people, sustaining a Republic for nearly five hundred years. It had its flaws, both in its internal law and in its tendency to expand without regard for the niceties of law or justice, although it was on the whole a great deal better than its rivals in foreign as in domestic policy. But it caromed between anarchy and tyranny until the latter finally prevailed decisively, alternating the two problems rather than finding a solution that transcended them.
Not until medieval parliaments, backed by an alert and armed citizenry, did a more stable and attractive solution emerge, one we still enjoy today although its foundations are showing worrisome cracks and signs of crumbling. And so when we recall that in crossing the Rubicon Caesar cast the die once and for all, we should recall not merely his admirable boldness and directness but also his understandable but regrettable determination to bury popular government which, after the conspirators buried him, did succeed in the persons of Augustus, Tiberius and on down through the imperial centuries.
Like a few other great conquerors, such as Alexander and Napoleon, Julius Caesar has always seemed to me to combine military genius and political adroitness with a curious vagueness about what it was all for. And while it takes nerve to cross the Rubicon and courage is in principle a virtue, it was not in Caesar’s case directed to a praiseworthy end.
He once asked an artist the secret of his brilliant painting. "The reply was as concise as it was comprehensive - 'Know what you have to do, and do it'... in every direction of human effort... I believe that failure is less frequently attributable to either insufficiency of means or impatience of labour, than to a confused understanding of a thing actually to be done..." John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture
"There are few words which are used more loosely than the word 'Civilization.' What does it mean? It means a society based upon the opinion of civilians. It means that violence, the rule of warriors and despotic chiefs, the conditions of camps and warfare, of riot and tyranny, give place to parliaments where laws are made, and independent courts of justice in which over long periods those laws are maintained. That is Civilization— and in its soil grow continually freedom, comfort, and culture. When Civilization reigns, in any country, a wider and less harassed life is afforded to the masses of the people. The traditions of the past are cherished, and the inheritance bequeathed to us by former wise or valiant men becomes a rich estate to be enjoyed and used by all." Winston Churchill in 1938, quoted in Daniel Hannan Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World
In my latest National Post column I express shock at people's wish to be shocked, and at where they do and don't go to satisfy this weird desire.
January 2nd was not a great day for the Roman Empire back in 366 AD. For on that date a Germanic tribe called the Alemanni crossed the frozen Rhine river. It wasn’t the first time they invaded the Empire nor the last. But it was part of an ominous movement of barbarians from east to west that overwhelmed the overstretched defences and led to the sack and "fall" of Rome.
In fact the Alemanni had been trouble for the Romans for centuries, manageable much of the time as barbarian ferment on the borders generally was. And to be fair the Romans had behaved badly toward the Alemanni on occasion as well as the reverse. But what strikes me as interesting here is the way this tribe rocketed across the stage of history and fell into the orchestra pit but somehow kept their name on the program.
You see, the Alemanni were given a pretty bad beating by the Franks under Clovis I in 496 AD in the squabbling over the ruins of Rome. And after exactly 250 years of Frankish rule they launched an uprising that didn’t work out well at all, with all their nobles executed. Which was pretty much the end of them except to linguists, who still talk about Alemanic dialects of High German in, for instance, Baden-Württemberg (which unless you’re German you had to Google it too). And, speaking of language, in the French word Allemagne which means, of course, Germany.
Now it is no secret that relations between the French and the Germans have not always been smooth. Indeed the common nickname "Boche" is a French word for "rascal" or perhaps something a bit stronger (and semi-literally means "cabbage head"). And then there’s "Hun" and so on. But the French to this day use the moniker of a violent and disruptive tribe for the entire nation of Germany.
Odd, really, given that "France" and "French" come from the Franks who were, uh, this Germanic tribe who came west and… Oh well. There was a lot of that going on at the time. And in fact the Franks were on the side of the Romans more often than not and in a very real sense could and did claim to be the heirs of the Roman Empire rather than its conquerors, including founding the Holy Roman Empire under Charlemagne.
So the Franks did better overall than the Alemanni even if the European country they named got rather the worse of recent contests with the latter despite getting Alsace back after World War I which includes part of by now very historic Alemannia. But I suppose the Alemanni might be happy to know that although crushed and dispersed, they are not entirely forgotten and their name is still spoken with a mixture of apprehension and grudging respect almost 1,300 years after that unfortunate uprising and nearly 750 years since even the duchy of Alemannia went away.
"Abandon all hopelessness, ye who enter here" Dale Ahlquist opening the 2006 Chesterton Conference in St. Paul, MN
"The mark of a great historical event is that it changes people or, more precisely, the way they think, so that they are never quite the same again." John Kenneth Galbraith, The Liberal Hour