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For a brief moment, urbs aeterna, the eternal city of Rome, provided me with the means for escaping reality underneath contemporary European sky. Big city will always be chaos, and nothing but chaos, but where Beginnings lay uncovered, civilized man will find pieces of tranquility and rest as well. In other words, what brought me here was not only the conference I had been invited to speak at, but also the nostalgic mood all of us who came for the conference had a share in. A hundred years ago, Oswald Spengler, among others, had foreseen the Decline of the West. Now, as more and more people had begun to realize, we stood at the process’ end, and so we could only strive to gain, once again, a fresh view of the first stumbling steps of Western thought. Moreover, as the dominion our ancestors had enforced upon the world was seriously crumbling, we no longer had to endeavor to avoid supremacism at all costs. Instead, we could look back with a clearer mind, from the viewpoint of the impending end, back towards what at least in some ways was a beginning, with a last hope of redemption. At least that was what I wanted to do.

The conference:  

To my surprise, I had been invited to become a member of the Scandinavian Plato Society (Platonselskabet) some years earlier. This was an honor, since the members were mostly elderly and some of them highly esteemed in Academic Circles. Two founding fathers were still living, the world-famous Finnish Platonist Holger Thesleff and the Norwegian Egil A. Wyller, known as the founder of a modern version of the ancient doctrinal school called henism (henologi, from Greek hen, one, so nothing to do with hens, although reportedly Wyller had been invited to speak of hens to some country in Africa at least at one occasion…). The conference I had been invited to was organized by the society and held at Villa Lante, the Finnish Institute in Rome. Only some days before my flight to Rome, I had finished a first fuller version of my thesis on Herodotus and the question of the originating of political philosophy in Ancient Greece. Therein, I had proposed, and to the best of my knowledge strived to defend, a historical theory singling out three essential phases in the development of political thinking towards political theory and political philosophy proper. Moreover, as it did not seem that far-fetched anymore, I had strived to credit the theory with contemporary relevance, namely with regard to the reawakening consciousness of the downfall of the West. With my presentation at the conference, my ambition was, in fact, to summarize the full content of my thesis.

However, as I began my presentation with going back in time to the earliest traces of organized religion predating sedentary life, I never got further than to the first evidence of the beginnings of political theory. As a matter of fact, most of my argumentative arsenal was consumed by my attempt to lay bare different varieties of divine authorizations of social orders, and by my effort to establish an identification between, on the hand, an ancient form of de facto secularized rational, on the other hand, the primeval detachment from the different types of authorizations of the social status quo, which all had been legitimized ultimately with reference to a sphere beyond the human. In my view, it was this ”aboriginal secularization”, a process which was finalized, as it seemed, in Ancient Greece, which had enabled the further development of the triad of political thinking, political theory and political philosophy, in the proper ancient meanings of the terms (of course, not all forms of thought can be classified as essentially political, or else anything could be conceived of as forming political theory or philosophy, although the modern concept of the political seem to allow for just this all-encompassing politicization…). Even though I only got halfway through my material, I think I managed to create at least some wonder and excitement among my auditors (I also managed to put one person to sleep).

Afterwards I faced divided response. Most of the Norwegians, and at least one of the Danish, were clearly on my side. Skepticism was, however, certainly present as well. One of the more experienced Danish researchers took a stand, exclaiming that sweeping historical theories of the kind my work represented were bound to face serious objections. I responded that I agree, but that my thesis will provide a pre-emptive strike against all such potential rejections. Then I left the stage quickly.  

 Roman onomastics:

During my stay in Rome, my accommodation was not provided by the Finnish Institute (Villa Lante), but by the bigger and more secure Swedish Institute. This was a lucky strike, as it turned out that Villa Lante had an angry caretaker, with the habit of throwing invited guests out from the property (at the Swedish Institute, on the contrary, I was allowed to stay one additional day in the private guest-room of the director of the institute). Also staying at the Swedish Institute was another PhD student in Classics at Uppsala University, namely Mr. T. Years before, Mr. T. and I had both been studying Classics in Helsinki, and at the moment Mr. T worked on a thesis on Roman female names. As a person, Mr. T was ambitious, but at the same time relatively easy-going. Moreover, he had always struckme as a man, who would probably never experience any problems with getting where he wanted to be in life. Consequently, he had been granted a scholarship for a full six months in Rome, as well as free accommodation for himself and for his girlfriend in a spacious apartment at the institute. Obviously, his name-collecting task needed a proper milieu.       

When I first had heard of the subject of Mr. T’s thesis, the choosing of it had seemed to me like a highly opportunistic move. In my mind epigraphy, and particularly onomastics, could be likened to the role played by predicate logic within the field of theoretical philosophy. Both were highly formal, and in Finnish academia both had a history of predominance continuing well into the present. However, as I became better acquainted with Mr. T., I started looking into his actual subject of research, and I could sense some of its attraction. The development of the Roman name-system could be conceived of as forming its own well-rounded historical process. The high-point, the akmê, befell, then, in the beginning of the imperial period, with the principate of Augustus and the break-through of the three-name form, the trianomina (praenomen, nomen, cognomen: think of Marcus Tullius Cicero as an early representative).

As Mr. T’s onomastic collection grew ever more impressive (comprising by now more than 100,000 named Roman persons), and as texts relating to these began to appear in my inbox, I came to understand something of the significance of naming with regard to the whole complex of Roman social stratification. If one knew what to look for, the form in which a person had been named would, for example, instantly tell whether that person was freeborn, freed or a slave. Given additional information, as family ties, it became possible to determine, then, how in Rome “the mark of birth” could be diminished by choosing, for example, a cognomen from the matrimonial line, instead of following the patrimonial line, which remains the most common custom in our patriarchic world. This all was not altogether without interest, and allowed me to grasp something new of the significance of names and naming in ancient societies. Onomastics did not seem like an altogether empty form anymore. 

Imperial re-deification:

From what I have been able to gather, there seems to be consensus, among anthropologists and historians of religion, that the common religiously-authorized principle for the formation of early forms of more organized co-living, as well as for civilizations proper, is that of sacred kingship. This means that early sedentary man, in most or all cases, lived under a rule crystallized in the body of one man, a holy man, in the sense that the rule symbolized by him was legitimized by a conception relating his person more or less intimately to the sphere of the divine. To this, I have added that the ultimate divine legitimation of the human order seems to have been ever-present also in such early civilizations, as for example in the societies of the Archaic Age of Ancient Greece (ca. 800-500 B.C.), where monarchy was absent. My thesis is that it is first with the beginning of the Classical Age in Greece (ca. 500-300 B.C.) that the deification of the human order is undone. As I have conjured, this happened with the establishment of the first direct democracies (ca. 460 B.C) and the concomitant realization that there are fundamentally different, but respectably applicable, social orders, that these alternative orders are all man-made, and that, in fact, the cosmic or divine sphere cannot in the least be referred to with regard to legitimation. This fundamental shift in political thought is what I have been referring to above as “aboriginal secularization”, and which I understand as the quintessential awakening force of both political theory and political philosophy in their earliest, meaning Greek, forms.

As the democratized Greek city-states lost their independence (338 B.C: Chaeronea), the earliest forms of political theory and political philosophy, Classical Political Theory and Classical Political Philosophy, were struck with a deadly blow as well. What happened, then, to aboriginal secularization? Here, it is important to note that ancients counterparts to secularization cannot be equaled with the modern notion: not in any ancient society, apart from some spurious atheistic utterings, seems there to have occurred anything amounting to a socially relevant move towards conscious disregard of religious authority. On the contrary, the gods, and more generally things divine, seem always to have been reckoned with as both originators as well as guarantors of social life. Throughout Antiquity, this holds true, we may assume, with regard to both Greece and Rome. This does not mean, however, that in actual political practice, and in the political thought stemming from it, religion would have remained always and everywhere an effective embedded force.

In the Constutional Debate of the Histories of Herodotus’ (Hdt. 3.80-82), the Classical constitutional forms, democracy, oligarchy and monarchy, were played out against each other for the first time. They were judged, then, with regard to their respective merits and disadvantages, but with only minimal reference to religious considerations. Further, in the Roman Republic how are we to understand, for example, the claim of Polybius, according to which “fear of the gods” (Greek: deisidaimonia) was used by the ruling bodies as a mean to pacify the populace (Polyb. 6.56.6-11)? Could it be that in many political situations, in political discussion, and in theoretical and philosophical considerations, in ancient Rome as well as in Greece, the role of religion was confined to a simple mean to achieve political ends, such as could answer to the ever-present need of maintaining the social status quo? And did there ever, in ancient times, prosper a political thinking inherent with the potential to affect real social change, or was this potentiality broken as soon as it was achieved, and has it remained buried ever since?   

***

For his stay in Rome, Mr. T had, naturally, been provided with a card allowing him free access to all the city’s museums. One day, while he was sat in the library, Mr. T was so kind as to borrow me this magic card, and so I could access the Forum Romanum without cost.

Straight through the Forum cuts the Roman holy road, the Via Sacra, dominated by the imposing triumphal arches of the Roman Emperors Titus Flavius Vespasianus and Septimius Severus. On the side of the holy road, seriously overshadowed by the arch of Severus, stands an anonymous rectangular building. It is the Roman Senate.  

Nascetur pulchra Troianus origine Caesar

A Trojan Caesar will be born with an illustrious beginning

imperium oceano, famam qui terminet astris

who may bind his rule with the ocean, his fame with the stars

Iulius, a magno demissum nomen Iulo.

Julius, a name derived from the great Iulus. (Verg. Aen. 1.286-288).

 With Divus Augustus the imperial re-deification of the human order was completed, and ancient secularization came to an end. The notion of the sacred monarch had triumphed once again.

Ancient works:

Herodotus: Historiae.

Polybius: Historiae.

Vergilius: Aeneis.