Beacon Lights of History, Vol 3: Ancient Achievements by John Lord · Mentor New York

Pagan Society, Part 1

·26 min·2 clips

The Roman elite were not satisfied with bronze statues unless they were covered with plates of solid gold.

The praise comes first. Lord treats antiquity as no easy target. In art, literature, philosophy, law, government, cultivation, military strength, and aesthetic culture, Greece and Rome could stand beside modern nations in many outward ways. He does not sneer at the achievement. He credits will, courage, perseverance, genius, and luck, not borrowed strength. Then he turns hard. The Roman Empire, especially, becomes for him a place where the surface gleams and the social life underneath is sick. Luxury carries the case. Silver couches, gold-covered carpets, rare down, expensive suppers, and rooms littered with lilies and roses are not just decoration in this account. They are evidence. Crassus, Apicius in Trajan's time, and Juvenal appear as scale markers for appetites that have grown almost imperial. The banquets do a lot of work here. Provinces are ransacked for fish, fowl, and game, while the great no longer seem ashamed of indulgence. Lord's anger lands hardest on the noble class. Pride, insolence, inhumanity, selfishness, and scorn are their manners, though he allows exceptions. Even friendship gets dragged down. A great man can offer a meal that demands flattery and sycophancy, then keep the better wine for himself. The rot spreads through the house. The same class violates chastity and decorum, scourges slaves, degrades wives and sisters, backs demoralizing sports, and grows rich through usury and monopolies. Patronage looks tainted too. Sculpture and painting get rewarded when they feed vanity or passion, while literature receives little reverence. Religion fares no better. The nobles, in Lord's telling, have no real reverence for it, and ridicule becomes another symptom of exhausted seriousness. Slavery closes the charge. Actors, musicians, physicians, captives, debtors, Greeks, people from Asia Minor and Syria, Gauls, people from the African deserts, white and black people all end up inside the same brutal institution. Intelligence does not save anyone. A refined Greek may still have to serve a capricious Roman without pay, thanks, favor, or redress. Lord's verdict is bleak: a class with no worthy object becomes degraded, dangerous, and ready to be plundered when danger comes.

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Ancient grandeur is set against a hard judgment on the decay beneath it.

Pagan Society, Part 1 makes a firm case that ancient grandeur and social decay belonged together. John Lord opens with Greece and Rome in art, literature, philosophy, laws, government, military strength, and cultivated taste, then turns to the less flattering life beneath that…

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You want Rome judged by luxury, slavery, and moral collapse.

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