lew@ihuxr.UUCP (Lew Mammel, Jr.) (04/05/84)
This is from Livy's EARLY HISTORY OF ROME: [Of Romulus] In his view the rabble over whom he ruled could be induced to respect the law only if he himself adopted certain visible signs of power; he proceeded, therefore, to increase the dignity and impressiveness of his position by various devices, of which the most important was the creation of the twelve lictors to attend his person. Some have fancied that he made the lictors twelve in number because the vultures, in the augury, had been twelve; personally, however, I incline to follow the opinion which finds for this an Etruscan origin. The death of Romulus: Such, then, were the deeds of Romulus, and they will never grow old. One day while he was reviewing his troops on the Campus Martius near the marsh of capra, a storm burst, with violent thunder. A cloud enveloped him, so thick that it hid him from the eyes of everyone present; and from that moment he was never seen again upon earth. The troops, who had been alarmed by the sudden storm, soon recovered when it passed over and the sun came out again. Then they saw that the throne was empty, and, ready though they were to believe the senators, who had been standing at the king's side and now declared that he had been carried up on high by a whirlwind, they none the less felt like children bereft of a father and for a long time stood in sorrowful silence. Then a few voices began to proclaim Romulus's divinity; the cry was taken up, and at last every man present hailed him as a god and son of a god, and prayed to him to be for ever gracious and to protect his children. However, even on this great occasion there were, I believe, a few dissentients who secretly maintained that the king had been torn to pieces by the senators. At all events the story got about, though in veiled terms; but it was, moreover, given further credit by the timely action of a certain Julius Proculus, a man we are told, honoured for his wise counsel on weighty matters. The loss of the king had left the people in an uneasy mood and suspicious of the senators, and Proculus, aware of the prevalent temper, conceived the shrewd idea of addressing the Assembly. 'Romulus,' he declared, 'the father of our City, descended from heaven at dawn this morning and appeared to me. In awe and reverence I stood before him, praying for permission to look upon his face without sin. "Go," he said, "and tell the Romans that by heaven's will my Rome shall be capital of the world. Let them learn to be soldiers. Let them know, and teach their children, that no power on earth can stand against Roman arms." Having spoken these words, he was taken up again into the sky.' This was written around 29 BC, giving it comfortable precedence over the Gospels. The described events were c. 750 BC. I find the parallels quite suggestive, and they are bolstered by the significance that Rome had in the minds of the founders of Christianity as the ultimate wordly power. I would imagine "The City of God" was meant to stand in contra- distinction to Rome. It's a wonder that this was overlooked by Graham with his list of avatars. Compare the following statements of Elaine Pagels in THE GNOSTIC GOSPELS with Livy's description of Proculus's speech: Whatever we think of the historicity of the orthodox account, we can admire its ingenuity. For this theory - that all authority derives form certain apostles' experience of the resurrected Christ, an experience now closed forever - bears enormous implications for the political structure of the community. First, as the German scholar Karl Holl has pointed out, it restricts the circle of leadership to a small band of persons whose members stand in a position of incontestable authority. Second, it suggests that only the apostles had the right to ordain future leaders as their successors. Here we have sort of an Anthropic Principle of the Resurrection: the events had to occur as they did to establish the Church. Oh well, a friend of mine read all this stuff and told it to me :-) Lew Mammel, Jr. ihnp4!ihuxr!lew