Wednesday
“While America Burns, Trump Builds Himself a Colosseum,” Thom Hartmann declares on his blog The Hartmann Report before citing the Roman poet Juvenal. “The UFC spectacle is more than a cage fight;” he writes; “it’s a monument to corruption, self-enrichment, and the imperial Roman politics of bread and circus.”
Referring to Satire X: The Vanity of Human Wishes, Hartmann elaborates:
There’s an ancient phrase for governing this way, and it isn’t a compliment. The Roman poet Juvenal, watching his republic rot into empire, sneered that a people who once handed out commands and legions had shrunk their whole appetite down to two things, panem et circenses, bread and circuses.
Keep the mob fed and entertained with a little blood, and they’ll never notice the men in charge stripping the place down to the studs.
Vanity of Human Wishes was much admired by such satirists as John Dryden, Jonathan Swift, and Samuel Johnson. (Johnson’s greatest poem, “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” is a brilliant imitation.) Given Rome’s record of emperors since Augustus, Juvenal is understandably more acerbic than his gentle forerunner Horace, and while I myself have always leaned more towards Horatian satire, DJT has threatened to make a Juvenalian out of me.
Satire X is broken into such sections as “Be Careful What You Ask For,” “The Emptiness of Power,” “The Penalties of a Long Life,” and “And as for Good Looks.” The bread and circuses line appears in “Emptiness of Power” and refers to the fickle mob.
The context is the fall of Sejanus, the head of the Praetorian Guard for 17 years and counselor to the emperor Tiberius. When Tiberius retired to Capri, Sejanus took over administrative control of the empire. Juvenal observes that if Fate, in the figure of the Etruscan goddess Nortia, has ruled differently, Sejanus might even have become emperor. Instead, upon orders from Capri, he was accused of treason and executed. Juvenal describes the mob’s reaction to the fall of men in high positions:
The wheels of their chariots are smashed, and broken to pieces,
With axes, while the legs of their innocent horses are shattered.
Now the flames roar, the bellows hiss, and the head idolized
By the people glows in the furnace, flames crackle around the huge
Sejanus, the face of the man who was number two in the world
Is converted to jugs and basins, turned to pots and frying pans.
Deck your houses with laurel, lead a great bull whitened with
Chalk up to the Capitol: come see Sejanus dragged along by
A hook, everyone’s celebrating! “Look at the lips, look at the
Face on that! You can take it from me, he was never a man
That I liked.” “But what was the crime that brought him down?!
Who informed, what’s the evidence, where are the witnesses?”
“That’s all irrelevant; a lengthy and wordy letter arrived from
Capri.” “That’s fine answer enough.”
I think of how a mob suddenly turned on Vice President Mike Pence, brought in to shore up Trump’s evangelical base, in response to a not-so-wordy directive from the White House. Other men and women elevated by Trump should take note.
Whether this mob will ever turn on Trump himself remains to be seen. They have certainly failed to live up to the informed citizenry that Thomas Jefferson envisioned as the bulwark of democracy. Here’s Juvenal again, hearkening back to a time when the people—or at least the Senate—had a say in Roman affairs:
They shed their sense of responsibility
Long ago, when they lost their votes, and the bribes; the mob
That used to grant power, high office, the legions, everything,
Curtails its desires, and reveals its anxiety for two things only,
Bread and circuses.
Two thousand years ago Juvenal foresaw how politics as entertainment would replace politics as civic responsibility.
What’s striking about Trump is that he provides only entertainment. As Hartmann sardonically notes
,The Roman emperors understood the deal they were making with the public: bread and circuses, panem et circenses, the cheap grain and the gladiator games delivered together, because if you fed them and entertained them they wouldn’t ask awkward questions about the empire. Trump has inverted the formula. He’s keeping the circus and taking away the bread.
I wonder if even some in MAGA will see a privately staged cage fight as degrading “the people’s house.”
At the end of his satire, Juvenal tells us what we should wish for in an era of greed and self-aggrandizement. You’ve probably heard it: Mens sana in corpore sano or “a healthy mind and a sound body”:
You should pray for a healthy mind in a healthy body.
Ask for a stout heart that has no fear of death,
and deems length of days the least of Nature’s gifts
that can endure any kind of toil,
that knows neither wrath nor desire and thinks
the woes and hard labors of Hercules better than
the loves and banquets and downy cushions of Sardanapalus.
What I commend to you, you can give to yourself;
For assuredly, the only road to a life of peace is virtue.
Imagine if we all dedicated ourselves to living a life of virtue.
Added note: During Trump’s first term I applied Samuel Johnson’s imitation of Satire X to him and his sycophants. Think of figures like Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, and Tulsi Gabbard in the following lines:
Unnumber’d suppliants crowd Preferment’s gate,
Athirst for wealth, and burning to be great;
Delusive Fortune hears th’ incessant call,
They mount, they shine, evaporate and fall.
On every stage the foes of peace attend,
Hate dogs their flight, and Insult mocks their end.
