The Latifundia

Christopher Jolliffe compares the political and societal chaos during the decline of the Roman Republic with today’s world, highlighting the rise of populism amid collapsing traditional structures.

One of the more colourful figures of the late Roman Republic was Publius Clodius Pulcher, a famous rival of Cicero, who in 63 BC was tried for the capital offense of sacrilege after dressing in drag to infiltrate a women-only ritual in reverence for the goddess Bona Dea. His objective was to seduce the wife of Caesar, Pompei, and while unsuccessful, his actions led to their subsequent divorce. It was political machination of the most bizarre sort, full of strange legal wrangling, reminiscent of the earlier part of Clodius’s career, whereby he aspired to be adopted by a plebian family in order to apply for a political office restricted to members of that class. Late Roman Republican politics, replete with what today we call lawfare, brings to mind an adage of Nicolás Gómez Dávila, that “dying societies accumulate laws like dying men accumulate remedies.”

Thanks to Star Wars, which manages to give the sort of reductionist high school account of the decline of the Roman Republic and of Weimar Germany that only today’s popular culture could provide, the general public is well attuned to this sort of thing. After all, there is no greater fear in our fanatically demotic and ostensibly egalitarian societies than the Mandate of Heaven. Shrewd observers note the sort of obtuse legalism taking place in the United States to curtail Trump as not unlike the trial of Clodius, or an attempt to paint him as a latter-day Cataline. No doubt, if they could strangle him without trial like Cataline’s conspirators, they would, and to imagine Trump falling in battle surrounded by the types of January 6 would make an amusing spectacle. We are not there yet, but there are other discomforting signs that lend weight to Gramsci’s maxim, that “the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

Who can look at our mass migration, in the name of cheap labour and eternal economic growth, without seeing the shadow of the Latifundia that characterised all of post-Punic Wars Rome? Pliny the Elder lamented the end of the Roman small-hold farmer, replaced entirely by slaves. Slaves competed for labour, and great landowners bought all the land when those left of the Roman middle class, depleted by decades of military service, couldn’t hold onto their estates. Slaves and great wielders of capital are united in that they, for opposite reasons, have minimal stakes. One has been dispossessed; the other is so much the opposite that, unless they are peculiarly oriented in character, they are more interested in a new villa or a new investment than they are in the health of the society that makes their life possible. The latter embody the distinction drawn by Aristotle between noble aristocracy and corrupt plutocracy.

Today, we have a housing crisis caused by that same plutocratic spirit, aided by a cosmopolitan ethos that declares nowhere belongs to anybody in particular. We have not enslaved entire Gallic tribes, because Indian and Chinese elites make better customers. Seventy-one percent of Californian houses are now bought by the Chinese; lines outside auctions and rental properties in Australia reflect the full variegated mass of the subcontinent. We will not vote our way out of this conundrum along our current milquetoast lines, any more than the Romans could. Too many are making too much, and too few can boast of a clear mind or deep thoughts. We await a populares instead, who, like every successful revolutionary, will unite the mass of the disenfranchised working and middle classes behind a single vanguard. Once both those groups are joined, there is no political force on earth that can stop them: not lawyers nor constitutions, neither convention nor tradition, not even great privation. Today’s optimates fear the likes of Trump because he is the wrong answer to the right question. It is probably only a matter of time, and the postmodern versions of bread and circuses can entertain only so long.

The Roman Republic took nearly a century to die, if you map it from the Gracchi to Caesar; our own course seems far quicker. Republican sentiment — neither the anti-monarchic type nor the GOP type, but what the Romans meant by the word, this public thing — appears dead in the West. Its assassins are the same, a ruling class that forgot noblesse oblige. You can gauge this via whatever metric you like: the exhaustion with which we treat political events, the headlines produced by what passes for our literati, the bizarre preoccupations of our elites, the “general mood.” There is a sense of icebergs coming directly for our bow, a sense that Western peoples have not had since at least the end of the Cold War. Geopolitics is only a small part of this; there have always been enemies abroad. It’s the sense of discord within that drives this unease, discord that has deep roots but has only really begun delivering its fruit in the past decade.

Crisis is nothing new; life on earth is largely about meandering from one crisis to another. Western crises, economic or political or otherwise, were in the past rendered nonfatal by two things: a robust civil society and an intelligentsia that, with notable exceptions, were able to cleave to a common course. Politics would swirl around these things, but while they held, you could avoid Robespierre and Hitler equally. Post-war politics in Germany, among the working and the middle class alike, came to regard both those things as treasonous; in Revolutionary France, those forces themselves tacked sail toward revolution. Today’s civil society is eroded, and our intelligentsia is hostile to anything prior to themselves, which is everything except progressive fantasies that vary from the childish to the diabolical. There are no sea charts to suggest into what waters this will lead us.

The Roman Republic died in the end because it was not worth saving: the spirit of this public thing was not even worth disinterring. Whatever it had been before the Punic Wars, it was no longer; it had become a society of optimates and slaves. Anybody who has read any reactionary literature recognises this style of thought is in vogue, because society seems to be in the hands of our enemies, and the words of Corneliu Zelea Codreanu ring loud: “If I had but one bullet and were faced by both an enemy and a traitor, I would let the traitor have it.” One might be apprehensive about a new Caesarism — history is full of warnings — and yet increasingly view it as inevitable. The questions are who and when, and what form the infant will take when at last it is born.

(This article was first published here.)