A Pillar of Iron: A Novel of Ancient Rome

by Taylor Caldwell

Caesar, though a patrician and a soldier, himself, belonged to the populares (popular) party, and claimed to be a great democrat and a lover of the masses, whereas he and Cicero well understood that he despised them. Cicero, as a middle-class (“new”) man, was at odds with this prevaricating and hypocritical attitude of “my dear young friend, Julius,” who thought his own hypocrisy very amusing. Cicero, himself, was never a hypocrite; at all times he was a “moderate,” the man of the middle way, a believer in the intrinsic honor and decency of the common man, a man who loved freedom and justice and mercy and kindness. It was inevitable, then, that he should be assassinated.

Only the good die young

The keepers of the genealogies will invent noble blood for the lowest of freedmen, if the weight of the gold is enough.”

Buying your royalty

Men had strong color when they stood alone. Cities destroyed the faces of men, rendering them featureless.

Strong color stands alone

the lessons were to teach the boy skepticism of all insistently stated opinions,

Insistent opinions

“He does not live on Olympus,” said Archias, with a smile. “Nor does He live in Israel, though the Jews assert He does, with arms, when necessary.” Archias found the Unknown God easier to believe in than in the multitude of Eastern, Grecian, and Roman Gods.

God not in Israel, tho' Jews sometimes insist--with arms

“The Greek gods are poetry,” said Archias one day to his pupil. “The Romans appropriated our gods, and renamed them. But they removed their poetry. Minerva is a bad-tempered shrew and her virginity astringent, but Pallas Athene is armed and noble wisdom and her virginity like marble in moonlight.” Marcus always listened uneasily to any attack on Romans, however good-natured. “Our gods have been perverted by man,” he said, “and given man’s temper by man. It was not always so in our history. Why must man eventually degrade even his gods?”

Gods reduced by men

There was a smell about the city which invigorated him and which lay under the welter of stenches. He loved the shops, the fora, the sound of life and bustle, the teeming people, the façades of temples, the lofty single pillars bearing upon their tops the statues of heroes or the figures of winged deities driving chariots, the mighty fanned steps rising everywhere from street to upper street, the odors of frying fish and baking pastries and roasting meats and wines that gushed from the doors of inns, the crowded porticoes, the sudden brief clamor of music coming from small theatres as the musicians practiced, the air of might and business, the government buildings swarming with avid bureaucrats, the circuses always surrounded by mobs holding tickets aloft no matter the hour of the day, the clangor of traffic daily growing more dangerous, the whinny of horses, the clatter of wheels, the shouts, the rushing of women from doorway to doorway, the sight of the sun on red brick, the well-paved streets on which children played at all hours, and the general vociferous and roaring voice of power.

Not her longest sentence, either

virtue and good manners did not necessarily draw friends to one, nor did greatness of heart and mind. In fact, he discovered, these very qualities often had a repellent effect, most men being what they are by nature. An evil man was more bearable to the majority of men than a good man, who was a constant reproach and therefore to be despised.

Goodness as a reproach is despised

“It is wrong to bring children up in an atmosphere solely of family and fraternal affection, without enlightening them that beyond the safe walls of home there lives a world of Godless, dishonorable, and amoral men, and that these men are in the majority.

Evil the majority

the day of the dictator is almost upon us again, not the dictator of old, but the dictator who wishes illimitable power, prolonged power, over Rome. Rome is not what once she was. We are fast approaching the day when Rome will not be swayed by the temperate middle-class but by the rich, who will preside over whining and bottomless bellies, and slaves. Each serves the other, satisfies the other’s appetite, in an evil symbiosis. For the rabble’s votes the powerful man will betray Rome.

The rich and the rabble

true patriotism is sickening under our very martial banners.

Patriotism sickening

Women were the balance wheel of life, and if that balance were no more man would revert to beasthood.

Women the balance of life

men do not forgive those whom they have injured.

unforgiving

True modesty and humility excite contempt, as does all truth. It is affectation, and histrionics, which impress even the intelligent. Think always that you must impress magistrates, then hypocrisy will come naturally to you. Remember that a lawyer, to be successful, must be an actor, with an actor’s sensitivity for his audience.

Modesty excites contempt

men make laws which are convenient for their political factions and for themselves, when it is necessary. ‘Unchanging law!’ Laws change as men need them to change; as I have said, law is a harlot.”

Law is a whore

Cinna, who prates of democracy and liberty and the Constitution of our nation and who is a monstrous despot, revived that law for he knows where his power lies, the exigent rascal! He nominated himself Consul every year, without consulting the people whom he alleges he loves. He will reduce taxes and debts, he declares, and he has done so, to our economic ruin, and the bareness of our treasury which has been looted for wars and the benefits of foreign dependencies and nations. We can be certain of one thing, my dear: this temporary alleviation of taxes will result in greater taxation and final collapse. It is pure bookkeeping. But are the people concerned with budgetry, and the hard fact that one cannot spend what one does not have, without bankruptcy? No! They cry ‘Hail!’ to the tyrant, Cinna, for an immediate gain at the expense of the nation.”*

It is pure bookkeeping

They paid their taxes to the last penny. They will have forged records to prove it, and where is the tax-gatherer who will dare dispute their assertions? He knows he would not be safe from poison or more unpleasant means of assassination or reprisal. It is understood by all reasonable men that the powerful do not pay taxes in the fashion of helpless citizens.”

The powerful do not pay taxes

When a nation becomes corrupt and cynical, and prefers the rule of men and not the rule of law, it has entered upon destruction, notably its own. That is history. We have entered on the age of despots, as other nations so entered. Man never learns from the history of nations which died in the past. He pursues the same path to death. It is his nature, which is inherently evil. Let us consider the tribunes, the representatives of the people. Who receives the votes of the people, the virtuous man or the evil man who is extravagant in his promises? The evil man, invariably.”

When a nation becomes corrupt

when priests abdicate to civil authority and to tyrants they have abandoned God and man.

When priests abdicate to tyranny

nation which has reached the abyss which now confronts Rome, by her own willing, her own fatness and ambition and greed, never retreats from that abyss. The leper cannot remove the marks of his disease; the blind man cannot restore his sight; the dead man cannot rise again. “You have thought me evil, the image of dictatorship. But I am what the people deserve. Tomorrow, I shall die as all men die. But I tell you that worse men than myself will follow me! There is a more inexorable law than any law ever made by man. It is the law of death for corrupt nations, and the minions of that law are already stirring in the wombs of history. There are many who are alive today, young and lustful and without faith. They will not fail. So passes Rome.” He lifted his goblet and drank it to the last drop in a sad and reckless gesture. “I drink to the corpse of Rome.”

Drink to the corpse of the nation

“Men of honor in these days,” he said to his father, “are like the bird who feigns to have a broken wing to lead astray the destroyer who would despoil her nest and murder her children. We have but broken wings. The destroyer will prevail.”

Birds feigning broken wings

written by Lucretius, who is still almost a boy?: “‘No single thing abides, but all things flow, Fragment to fragment clings; the things that grow Until we know and name them, By degrees They meet and are no more the things we know. Thou, too; O Earth—thine empires, lands and seas— Least with thy stars of all the galaxies, Globed from the drift like these, like these thou too Shalt go. Thou art going, hour by hour, like these. Globed from the atoms, falling slow or swift, I see the suns, I see the systems lift Their forms, and even the systems and their suns Shall go back slowly to the eternal drift. Nothing abides. Thy seas in delicate haze Go off; those mooned sands forsake their place, And where they are shall other seas in turn Mow with their scythes of whiteness other bays.’”

Here poor misguided Caldwell tries to show the father of modern physics as a believer--in truth, this poem shows the opposite.

If men remained stupid then all their bannered and shouting armies were but the senseless march of the jungles, all their laws would be inscribed in dust, and all their boast would be but the echo of beastly voices, and all their cities would be inevitably inhabited by the lizard and the owl, the wild ass and the snake, the silent rubble of fallen pride.

The silent rubble of fallen pride

he began to discover that prudence can sometimes be compliance, and that just anger should not be always restrained in the name of reason. The world had need of ruthless and even raging fire as well as the sweet voice of rationality and diplomacy.

The world has need of rage

You know of Job? A most dolorous man, most persecuted, defamed, reviled, and suffering. And a man of the most furious and affecting eloquence. He was just and virtuous, above all other men, yet God permitted Satan to afflict him in order to demonstrate to Satan that some men cannot be moved from their seat of probity and devotion and morality. The contest was very unfair. Job was but a man, the mouse between God and evil. You would think they would not descend to the torment of so small a creature. I feel very strongly about Job; my heart burns with indignation and compassion for him.

Job

In spite of all that he had done, Sulla had loved his country. Crassus loved nothing but himself and money. He was enormously rich and a shrewd financier. He trafficked in slaves and money-lending. There was not a single Way to make money which he had not employed. Now that he was the richest man in the Republic he found himself restless. True, money brought power. But the power of money in a republic was somewhat restricted by law, and though it brought influence it was not enough for such as Crassus.

Does "crass" derive from Crassus?

Romans did not trust Sicilians, for they were wily. But Marcus trusted them and took their brown hands in his and smiled affectionately into their eyes. “One day I shall return and live always among you,” he said. They kissed his hands and wept honest tears, they who were by nature not honest.

So, Caldwell exposes her prejudices--geez

The most terrible temptation we have is to leave the fight.

The worst temptation

To the mature and thinking man tomorrow was the stony road that led only to frustration and extinction and the eternal question: Wherefore am I living, and to what purpose, and to what end? Why should I, tomorrow, take up again what I lay down today?

Tomorrow the stony road

“When a nation becomes so demoralized and corrupt and angerless as Rome, then that nation is lost forever,” said Marcus. “Then come the Caesares.”

‘Men of ambition neither listen to reason nor bow to public or legitimate authority, but chiefly resort to corruption and intrigue in order to obtain supreme power and to be masters by force rather than equals by law. Such men inevitably become slaves to the mob, so therefore the slaves of such capricious and ignorant rabble are themselves, at the last, no longer men of power.’

Ambitious men

A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and he carries his banners openly against the city. But the traitor moves among those within the gates freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears no traitor; he speaks in the accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their garments, and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation; he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city; he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared. The traitor is the carrier of the plague. You have unbarred the gates of Rome to him.

Survive fools but not traitors

Rome bestrides the earth in terror and fury, and where her iron feet pound death trickles from the wounded earth and every wall and mountain resounds with her hoarse and bestial voice.”

In terror and fury

What empires lay fetal in the womb of time, still blind, still formless, still deaf, not yet stirring, which would be born as Rome had been born, and would die as she had died? All that was in the universe, Aristotle had averred, is not diminished nor increased by time. All that was is and forevermore will be, nothing added, nothing taken away, though galaxies would disappear and new rainbowed universes flash into being, and new suns rise on new planets—and, on this small world new nations would be born and would be forgotten before the sun and the moon passed away. To these nations, then, Rome was a legacy, a law, a tomb, and an omen. Ah, let them remember Rome, lest they share her fate!

What fetal empires

governments resort to war to silence internal discontent and unite a nation against a ‘foe,’ or to bring a false prosperity to the State when its finances are declining and corruption has wholly seized the politicians. War is particularly loved of tyrants; it diverts a people from just complaint against them. It also enhances the powers of tyrants, for then in a state of emergency, as they call it, they can impose even more onerous restrictions upon liberty.

Why governments war