Shine, Perishing Republic
When I see things like this it makes me shake my head. Not because I am intolerant. If you want to get your freak on, by all means do so. It’s just that I get the distinct sense that this is what the late Roman Republic must have been like, as all the bizarre Eastern mystical cults spread while the ennui and boredom of life forced people into stranger and stranger associations.
Most people tend to think it was the imperial period, during Caligula’s and Nero’s reigns that the moral life of Rome was terribly decadent–it was politically decadent, no doubt, but morally? Not what it was a hundred years before.
In reality it was the late Republican era that was decadent par excellence. Auguries and foreign gods proliferated as much as orgies and Bacchic Rites while poets such as Catullus’ wrote of Caesar’s (female and male) conquests. Caesar is reputed to have been one of Catullus’ lovers. Republican virtue was drowned in wine, sex and the worship of foreign deities, one of which would wash over the Mediterranean Basin and transform the world.
But lurking in that decadence was a counter-attack from the conservative forces of Rome’s old civic religion. Augustus was an example of that, of sorts, in his exhortations late in his life that the young marry, have more children, be more family oriented. Sound familiar?
The sprouting and proliferation of cults and strange entertainments was crazy in the late Republican period, although limited to the upper classes. The head count still suffered as they must, while the powerful did what they could. And now, we live in a kind of global imperial twilight, our life and times, I suppose, but now the blue and red of dusk turns violet and crimson until purple night covers our dying republic.