Does the Early Roman Principate (27 BC-AD 96) Sound Familiar? Part Three

Victor Davis Hanson

In the world of Petronius, cynicism rules. No one is who he professes to be—not bankrupt poets and pretentious intellectuals, not virtuous widows, not innocent youth.

All are Epstein schemers of a sort of like our internet influencers and nobodies who become somebodies with vast audiences in the millions. Petronius’s cosmos (like ours) does not mind crassness and crudity. Indeed, a Diddy or the Kardashians or the creepy Jack Schlossberg would fit right in the social scene in the Bay of Naples—a sort of ancient Malibu, Palm Springs, or Palm Beach—before the AD 79 eruption of Vesuvius.

Their money buys sex, access, and status, despite their questionable characters. In the dinner scene of the Satyricon, exotic food and quack medicine are ubiquitous.

So are nudity and gratuitous sex.

The nuclear family and the old Italian ideal of an agrarian nuclear homestead of 3–4 children, idealized in the Eclogues and Georgics, are gone, vanished in the new world of massive latifundia (Trimalchio, who comments freely on the beauty of boys and women, cannot remember how many thousands of acres he owns).

Sex in all these works, especially those of Petronius and Juvenal, is seen not so much as perverse, but as everyday—whether gay, bi, or hook-up straight sex. Mostly, it is transactional: the younger, more attractive, and poorer partners enduring—or often exploiting—the aggressive sexual advances of the older, richer, and less attractive. Sex toys, erectile dysfunction, sexual assault, and voyeurism are ubiquitous topoi and sort of boring.

But unlike our assumptions, the younger (see the Milesian Tale, “The Pergamum Boy” in the Satyricon) are just as culpable or perhaps more manipulative than their older sexual partners. (In this Roman century, power is seen all with youth, looks, energy, and ambition, not with age, aging, weariness, and complacency.)

There are great emphases in Suetonius and Tacitus on the decadence, plotting, poisoning, and promiscuity of royal families of the Julio-Claudians and Flavians, akin to what we read about in the Daily Mail about the British Royal family, or the sickness of the Hollywood elite, or in the stories of what went down at Diddy’s or Epstein’s get-togethers. Paris Hilton, Charlie Sheen, and Britney Spears have their ancient counterparts in the Agrippinas and Caligulas.

I think California is our first new Rome.

Nowhere are there more homeless and poor and more rich and decadent. Nowhere is the law more ignored by some and layer upon layer imposed on others. Nowhere are there more fads, cults, alternate lifestyles, and trends, and nowhere are people more unhappy.

Everywhere everyone knows what is necessary to save us from Romanization, and everyone knows like Livy that the necessary medicine would be worse than the disease.

It is sort of like the freewheeling easy destruction of the border and the welcoming in of 12 million unaudited aliens to spread out over the U.S. wherever they wish, often on the public dime and with half a million criminals among them. It is easy to destroy laws, customs, and traditions, almost impossible to restore them.

So, the cure of securing the border, finishing the wall, ending sanctuary cities, enforcing existing immigration laws, and rounding up and deporting the millions of illegals is likewise seen as worse than the disease of open borders.

California, in other words, is our first imperial Roman state, with others to follow.

In this century of abundance, wealthy women are often divorced, between successive marriages, or just bored with their cuckolded husbands who married them for their money or name. Lesbianism, slumming, and abortions are ubiquitous.

Elite women are more attracted to the muscular classes for sex, such as slaves, gladiators, and legionnaires. References to sex potions, aphrodisiacs, pansexuality, and what we would call pedophilia predominate. Jewelry is obsessed upon by the rich, as well as exotic make-up, dyes, and perfumes imported from the East.

Certain taboo subjects in our own age are unabashedly highlighted as the symptoms of a society too rich and free for its own good. Masculine women and effeminate men predominate as signs of the fall of Republican values. Transgender and cross-dressing are oddly quite common and almost universally deplored as signs of the decadent times. So are foreign cults, those of Isis and Cybele especially.