Friday, September 17, 2004

Charity Alert: The Rainforest Site: Help Save Our Rainforests!

Weather: Ragged blue to slate gray skies all week!

Wildlife: The two tiny deer grazed by our bedroom window, and brought their mom with them.

Overheard on Campus: We were getting drunk, and I called her a bitch and she called me a whore, and we haven't been on the best of terms since then. Hmmm - makes sense.

Monday, September 13, 2004

Weather: Damn house is NEVER gonna get painted with all this rain.

Wildlife: Two extremely small baby Whitetail Deer were grazing just off the back deck the other morning. We thought they might be dogs at first.

Charity Alert: The Animal Rescue Site : Feed an Animal in Need

In the Community: We got free passes for a valley-wide home show. It was fun! I'll tell you that the Habitat For Humanity house had a floor plan that was equal to other, more expensive, homes and better than some others. There's a dichotomy here in this under-regulated area between poorly-planned housing developments and poorly-planned mansions in the woods. Poor planning will bite all property owners no matter how much money they might have had before they bought their houses.

Media Watch: The very talented Urmila Matondkar in Ek Haseena Thi, co-starring with Saif Ali Khan. It was a Bollywood crime movie, with a slow start and a belabored, crappy ending, but the acting was very good. Fan sites for Bollywood actors can be obsessional or stupid, but these are somewhat informative --
Urmila Matondkar - Actress
Urmila Matondkar - OK fan site
Yet another book about the Roman Empire -- it's a textbook actually, that I bought at a garage sale -- fairly linear and straightforward, with much-appreciated paragraphs about original sources. I find myself reading more about the Caesars and gradual disintegration of the Hellenistic civilization in my middle age than I read about the rise of the empire when I was young.
The author emphasized the historical mystery of what caused the Roman Empire to fall. I wonder why it was so strong for so long a time. Most of what we read today are stories of treachery within and conflicts without.
This particular author points to the half-century between the ruin of the Severan Dynasty (AD 235) and the reorganization of the empire by Diocletan (AD 284) as a critical period where the abovementioned forces became such a part of the Mediterranean world's existence that the temporary recoveries of Diocletian and Constantine did little or nothing to reverse the depopulation, thieving, invasions, and civil warfare which marked those times.
One thing that supports his point is the degradation of sculpture that shows in the examples of the portrait busts from Marcus Aurelius (circa AD 170) to Caracalla (AD 211) to Constantine (AD 324). Elegance and surity of craft gradually disappears -- quite a few art historians solemnly declare the Arch of Constantine to be proof that the ancient world itself had passed away by the early 4th Century A.D.
(They may be exaggerating, and the author of this book disagrees with them.)
I personally see the actual extinction of the craftspeople and artists who made the great classical monuments from these examples. Their skills were lost in Europe until they were painstakingly re-created the 15th Century A.D.
The author also wrote about the negative effect of wealthy upper classes in the Imperium literally bribing their way out of contributing to public needs or services, and shifting the burden to the general public -- ruining whatever middle classes were in existence.
I have a sinking feeling about today's society as our government takes on the supposedly-discredited folly of empire, and an all-too-similar class war occurs right now. It's dangerous to draw parallels with modern problems and the Roman world, but basic math works in this case, or any other case in history.
My opinion of Severus and his progeny is that they were active contributors to every problem that afflicted the long-suffering people of the empire. Severus showed up as a strongman after the assassination of Commodus, but subjected the Mediterranean to warfare without relief -- primarily to maintain his own power.
(There are African-American scholars who hold up Lucius Septimius Severus as an example of an ancient African of distinction -- I'm not sure of his race, or if that even means anything, but he WAS from North Africa.)
Those scholars who point to the death of Marcus Aurelius (last of the "Good Emperors" and Commodus' father) in AD 180 as the beginning of the empire's decline might just be the most correct, but it took almost 300 more years before total collapse ensued in the west -- meaning that short-lived, brutal German kingdoms finally took over the map of Europe. Ignorance, superstition, misery, poverty, and chaos became the way of life, and we call those times "Dark Ages" with good reason. My ancestors sure made a botch of things, despite the ugly things written about the Romans and their heirs.
The Roman Empire
AFTERTHOUGHTS: When I was a teenager I read the novel Julian by Gore Vidal. It was a best-seller at the time, and painted a vivid portrait of the late empire in middle-brow prose. Looking back, I see Vidal's picture of the 4th Century as a mirror-image of his own privileged society in the 20th Century, but he's not the only one to project his world onto the lost Roman world! Others include General Lew Wallace, the Durant brothers, Robert Graves, Lloyd C. Douglas, and innumerable bathrobes-and-slippers movie-makers like C.B. DeMille, Delmer Daves (Demetrius & the Gladiators with fabulous Julie Newmar dancing the "timeless hoochie-koo"), and even Ridley Scott, who should have known better. (At least Russell Crowe became a star as a result of Scott's morbid fantasy Gladiator.)