AUGUSTAN AGE

I watch the HBO series Rome each Sunday. As I am a novice student of Roman history and fan of HBO I settle in each Sunday evening and enjoy the show. It’s racy and violent, but it’s entertaining and I do love Roman history.

The series Rome began with Julius Caesar’s rise, short reign and violent death and is now in the early reign of his nephew and adopted son, Octavius (soon to be Caesar Augustus, 31 B.C. - 14 A.D.) and his Triumvirate partners Marc Anthony and Marcus Lepidus. Caesar Augustus’ rise was a continuation of a sort of revolution in the new Imperial Rome (imperial since Julius Caesar’s ill-fated reign). Augustus became a strong leader willing to change the status quo of what he considered immoral behavior.

Rome had no formal, written constitution. Instead it relied on an oral tradition of laws called the "mos maiorum," "the way of our ancestors". As the laws weren’t written down the mos maiorum were a matter of social traditions, mores, and general policies. They were Rome’s national character. The things that made one "Roman" and which had disappeared during the rule of too many corrupt and inept people.

Caesar Augustus came along, fortified his position as supreme ruler and launched what was called a 'nouus annus', a new age by passing laws to return Rome to a stricter adherence to the mos maiorum.

According to Wikipedia the “eight cornerstones” of the Roman Way were:

Fides: fidelity, loyalty, faith
Pietas: piety, devotion, patriotism, duty
Religio: religious scruple, reverence for higher power(s), strictness of observance, conscientiousness precision of conduct
Disciplina: discipline, diligence
Constantia: firmness, steadiness;
Gravitas: seriousness, dignity, authority
Parsimonia: frugality
Severitas: strictness in the moral sense

His reign as sole ruler of Rome became known as the Augustan Age—a shining time in the culture’s history.

These ideals were the foundation on which the Romans (who imitated the preceding Greeks) built a functioning society, spread their views, art, language, style, and societal structure around the known world, conquered and ruled 2,300,000 sq.mi of land, and lasted from 753 BC to 476 AD. It was the careless disregard of these “way of our ancestors” that began and exacerbated the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Each time they disregarded the mos maiorum internal strife followed. They decayed from within and finally fell—never to rise again—when the Germanic chieftan Odoacer defeated and executed the (western) Emperor Orestes.

While I do not advocate the emulation of the Roman Empire or the Roman Republic that preceded the imperial age, I do think we should give a long look to the mos maiorum. The foundation stones that underpin any good, long-lasting and just society.

Do we still have those eight “cornerstones” beneath our cutlure? Do we respect these things? Loyalty? Piety? Dignity? Or do we mock them? Do we spit on them and reward the opposite behavior? Do we teach them (parents, schools, businesses, and societal organizations)? Do we exhibit them as our national trait or character? Constantia? Disciplina? Religio? Or have we removed these things so that we have no national character? Did someone who did not agree with them make us take them down and put them away in a drawer someplace? Are we a new Greatest Generation or have we already surrendered our national character? And if we are a hollow shell of a culture, is there a chieftain just ahead to will topple our empire?

We need strong leaders (not despots or emperors, of course), willing to stop our current slide into decline and reverse it by re-adopting and strengthening our national character. Strong leaders in our families, neighborhoods, towns and cities, schools, sports teams, businesses and governments to reestablish a national mos maiorum—rebuild our cornerstones and provide some stability if our culture is to continue and grow and prosper.

HOMEWORK:
Make a checklist of the mos maiorum and click off the ones you think we, as a nation, still honor. Then do it for your state, city/town, any organization to which you belong, and lastly those which you personally honor and keep.