The Romans of Tiberius

I can't remember who it was, but someone famous was once asked if they could live in any historical era, what would it be, and where.

They said, Rome. During the early part of the reign of Tiberius.

His view was, that the Roman people of that particular period in time were the happiest people who had ever lived.

And I've always held that thought.

Tiberius wasn't such a bad Emperor, as Emperors go. He was a fairly down to earth kind of guy and a good administrator. A simple soldier in many ways. He wasn't much into the flatteries of sycophants. He even made the senate promise they would resist the temptation to deify him after his death and name September after him. After all, logic dictated they would.

The Rome of Tiberius was a time when Rome was largely at peace. Rome had no major enemies. The Empire expanded relatively easily, getting richer by the day. The arts flourished, culture flourished, the plebs were happy. The wealth just kept rolling in.

Nobody really lamented the Republic. Gone were the old civil strifes and dissensions. Most Romans undoubtedly felt that being ruled by an emperor was- good. They'd never had it so good.
In fact, NOBODY had ever had it so good.

And that was true. What they believed was true.
No one in human history before them, had had life so good. No city had ever been so well built, its citizens so well catered for. No city had ever enjoyed such opulent wealth.
PEOPLE had never lived such easy lives.

And it hadn't yet gone wrong.
That was the point. It hadn't yet got tainted.

The Romans partied. Why shouldn't they?
And vice was still- innocent.

Caligula and Nero were yet to come.
Rome had not faced its shocks yet.

That innocence of a people, that belief that things could only ever get better, is something I don't think any human beings have ever enjoyed since. I don't think a people since have ever had a chance to FEEL so innocently about their new found luxury, to really party it up as the Romans then did. Their orgies were the first orgies, and they must have thought 'We can. We'll do it because we can'.

Morale. I guess that's the point. The morale of the Rome of Tiberius must have been a pleasure just to bask in.



And it makes me reflect about the effects of history on culture as a whole. After all, we all live together. And we accept that events in the life of an individual effect his individual psyche. Is it not therefore true that major events can affect the collective psyche?

And sometimes I wonder if our society isn't in some way suffering a major Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. That it can't quite heal itself from.

War.

Time was it only affected a few.

But not in the twentieth century.

I wonder if the strain of a century where the entire global population was somehow involved either in actual live war, or the continual threat of Armageddon hasn't left the world as a whole in a state of shellshock. The Somme, Ypres, The Blitz, Stalingrad, Hiroshima, then four decades of everyone knowing that the world could literally end tomorrow.

And we saw the horrors of Auschwitz. And the Gulag. And Cambodia.

Non stop. Non stop killing and destruction in our midst. Was this a century where people grew up with hope for the future?

We went through six years where no one in the globe cannot have failed to notice there was a war to the death raging. And surely that had an effect on every human being alive. Surely those alive passed on that resonance to those after them?

Collectively, isn't it an emotionally scarred humanity that entered the twenty first century?

A humanity that had no real faith in itself any more. Because it had spent so long living in the shadow of the horrors it was capable of.

And I wonder just how much this lies at the root of so many of society's ills. The fact the society as a whole is still traumatised. Traumatised by what we've done to eachother of late.
I wonder if human morale has ever been much lower than it is today.

I like to think Obama has raised that, and yes, it's a good thing, but he's really only one step forward to counteract the two steps back the finance crisis has put world morale in.

We don't have faith in our future. We don't have faith in ourselves. We hate our species.



I like to think that a moment will come in the future, when the capitalist cycle truly has gone, when the sort of future I dream of comes to pass, where humanity is enjoying a state of living GLOBALLY in a way it has never had it before. And peace reigns globally for the first time ever.
And, freed of the archaic and obsolete moral codes of the past, mankind once again gets to feel like the Romans of Tiberius.

It won't last for ever of course. That brief period of abandoned exuberance will go stale one day as new moral codes get thrashed out to fit the new era. Things will go wrong somewhere.

But to have that morale. That things are better than they've ever been and they're STILL going to get better.

I'd like to think my children could live to see such a time.