Ronald Syme — actually, Sir Ronald Syme — is not a household name in America, but perhaps it ought to be. Syme (1903-1989) was a New Zealand-born classicist, later an Oxford don, who is in many quarters regarded as the greatest historian of ancient Rome. He wrote a biography of Sallust and a two-volume biography of Tacitus, who, in the time of the emperors, was himself the greatest historian of Rome. With a book called The Roman Revolution (1939), Syme turned round the standard interpretations of Roman history, demonstrating that Augustus, the first undisputed monarch of Rome, was, in his pretensions to restoring the Roman Republic, a brilliant fraud. As for the Roman constitution, Syme called it “a screen and a sham.” No one has come along since to disprove his bold claim.
I was reading The Roman Revolution when I came across the chapter “Political Catchwords,” and realized that it is a vade mecum, a guide or handbook, on the use of the language of politicians, one that belongs alongside George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.” Syme’s “Political Catchwords” is perhaps better than Orwell’s justly famous essay in that it supplies a context for the way political catchwords are used. The context is the time of the rise of the young Octavianus, later to be known as Augustus, as he aligns himself with various factions in Rome to defeat, first, the assassins (Brutus, Cassius, et al.) of his adoptive father Julius Caesar, and then Marcus Antonius (or Mark Antony), all on his way to a forty-year reign that put paid to the Roman Republic.
The time was one, Syme tells us, in which persons, not programs, came before the people for judgment; it was a time, also, without laws against slander or libel. Everyone accused everyone else of anything and everything. The law of contradiction was suspended. “Marcus Antonius [for example] was not merely a ruffian and a gladiator, a drunkard and a debauchee — he was effeminate and a coward.” The want of distinguished ancestors, or the stain of having had family in trade (or worse yet, on the stage), the shame of a municipal origin outside Rome— anything and everything could be used against an aspiring politician. Syme rather regrets the end of this free-for-all with the end of the Roman Republic and the emergence of emperors, which saw all power pass to one man and freedom of speech curtailed. “That was not the worst feature of monarchy,” he writes, “it was the growth of servility and adulation.”
Until such time, hypocrisy, dissimulation, self-acclaimed virtue were, rather as in our time, the order of the day in the public utterances of politicians. Syme reports that Senator Piso, for example, “to public view seemed all eyebrows and antique gravity,” while in reality he was “rapacious and obscene.” (Match him up with a contemporary senator at your convenience.) The people were supposed to be ultimately sovereign, but in fact “oligarchy ruled through consent and prescription.” In our day it could be argued that anyone who has served more than two terms in the U.S. Senate qualifies as a modern oligarch.
But the key, one might say the Orwellian, point is that in Roman times “vocabulary was furbished up and . . . the relation between words and facts was inverted.” Everyone, each party, claimed libertas, or liberty, for its side. The word, Syme reports, “was most commonly invoked in defence of the existing order by individuals or classes in enjoyment of power and wealth,” but everyone enjoyed its use. “Nobody ever sought power for himself or the enslavement of others without invoking libertas and such fair names.” All but the rarest of politicians was in business for himself.
Next in common use was the word “peace.” To attain that lofty and pacific goal Roman political figures of the day were all-too-ready to kill — sometimes in vast numbers.
Love of country was the standard under which all Roman politicians marched. Patriotism was not merely the last but also the first refuge of political scoundrels. However different their discrete views, Roman political figures claimed to be willing to die (though they much preferred the other fellow to do the dying) for love of country. Behind their actions Cicero, Pompeius, Crassus, Caesar, all asserted the noble motive of patriotism. “The dynast Pompeius,” Syme writes, “sacrificed his ally Caesar to the oligarchs out of sheer patriotism. Octavianus, to secure recognition and power, was ready to postpone for the moment a sacred vendetta [against Caesar’s murderers]: his sincere love of country was loudly acclaimed.”
Then as now, politicians rushed to claim that true virtue lay with them. “There was no limit,” writes Syme, “to the devices of fraudulent humanitarians or high-minded casuists.” Does the following, for example, resemble a contemporary politician’s relentless invocation of executive privilege: “Extraordinary commands were against the spirit of the constitution — but they might be necessary to save the State. Of that the Senate was supreme judge. What if it had not lent its sanction? Why, true patriots were their own Senate.”
Orwell concluded his “Politics and the English Language” by noting that “Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” He added that one cannot change all this immediately, but one “can at least change one’s own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase . . . into the dustbin where it belongs.”
Over the past twenty centuries, as Ronald Syme makes splendidly clear, we haven’t had much luck in doing so.
Joseph Epstein, a contributing editor, is the author most recently of A Literary Education and Other Essays.
