“Septimius Severus,” Roman, about AD 193-200, the British Museum
For the ultimate erudite lesson in “those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” we take you to school with the Don herself, Mary Beard, a Cambridge classics professor and my blogging buddy at A Don’s Life, who brings us news from the second century A.D.: One Lucius Septimius Severus has just become the the first African-Roman emperor of Rome.
As Mary tells it:
Like Obama he was of mixed race—his father from Libya, his mother of
European descent. He too had an outspoken and determined wife,
from Syria. And his first task on coming to the throne in 193 AD was to
deal with a military disaster in Iraq (“Parthia,” as it was then known)….Did the success of Septimius Severus show that race no longer mattered
in Roman politics? And is there a message in his story for the new President-elect?If so, the message is a double-edged one. A few more African-Romans did
make it to the higher echelons of the imperial government (in many
cases members of the emperor’s own family, or his wife’s friends). But
on the wider view, it was not so much that his race did not matter, but
that the Roman upper class and the Roman media made sure that it simply
was not seen….No one is suggesting, of course, that Obama’s publicity team will
attempt, literally, to whiten the image of the 44th President.
But the “Septimius Severus problem” is already clear enough….The more you present
Obama as any other president, and peddle the self-congratulatory
clichés about the end of a raclal divide at the highest pinnacle of
American politics, the more you are simply refusing to see that for
most people in the U.S. and the rest of the world race does still matter.
The Don has more of interest to tell us (including some musings on the Margaret Thatcher problem), but you’d best read it on her own site (linked above the quote) and then surf over to the website of the British Museum, which owns the above-pictured statue of the mixed-race emperor/general, “where he looks
slightly more “African” than in most,” as Mary wrote me.
Or you can click on today’s British Times Online and read an Op-Ed by a former student of Mary’s who went on to better things, becoming a stand-up comedian (inspired no doubt by Beard’s own sense of humor). Haynes opines:
the modern incarnation of the Emperor Titus, who ruled the Roman Empire
from AD 79-81, before death cut his reign tragically short. [I hope she’s not suggesting a parallel there!]This is
Suetonius: “Titus had such winning ways—perhaps inborn, perhaps
cultivated subsequently, or conferred on him by fortune—that he
became an object of universal love and adoration.”…Then I realised that almost all leading politicians are reworked emperors. You just have to match them up.
And she proceeds to do so for a roster of recent politicos, including Tony Blair (Augustus), Gordon Brown (Tiberius), and let us not forget, Richard Nixon (Caligula).
We Americans, of course, know nothing of ancient history, so we look to our own nation’s antecedents: Is Obama the new Lincoln or is he FDR?
I think he’s sui generis. You can’t pigeonhole him, which is what makes him special. For now, I’m proud of what my country has done. It remains to be seen what the man can do with the hope and goodwill that he’s inspired in the many who find something in his variegated background and accomplishments that they can relate to as their own—even if they’re classicists!
For me (and the NY Times‘ Michiko Kakutani), what resonates most is his canny appreciation for the power of words. We’ll likely experience more of that today.