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CHAPTER 1
THE HABITS OF HIGHLY HEROIC ROMANS
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Many decades ago, the Roman people threw off the yoke of monarchy and exiled their arrogant king, Tarquin the Proud. In response, the Etruscan king, Lars Porsena, besieged the city of Rome in an attempt to reinstate Tarquin and squash the infant republic. It took acts of the greatest heroism ever witnessed to convince the invader that he could never win. You can have no better examples of the characteristics that have made the Romans the most successful people the world has ever seen.
The first concerns a young Roman of noble birth, Gaius Mucius. The ongoing blockade meant that food became scarce and the price of what little there was went sky-high. Mucius thought it was outrageous that Rome, having finally rid itself of its hated king, was now being besieged by the Etruscans whom they had often defeated in battle. He resolved to avenge this insult by carrying out a feat of great bravery. He decided to penetrate the enemy camp on his own and try to assassinate the foreign king. But after he had thought it over, he was worried that if he went without being specifically ordered to do so by the consuls, he might be spotted by the Roman guards and arrested as a deserter trying to flee the city in her hour of need.
So he went to the senate. 'Senators,' he cried, 'I am determined to swim across the river Tiber and enter the enemy's camp to carry out a glorious deed.' The senate could not but approve of so valiant a wish. Concealing a sword in his robe, Gaius therefore set out. When he reached the enemy camp, it happened to be payday and the soldiers were crowded round the royal tent where the money was being distributed. Gaius went and stood in the thickest part of this crowd. There he saw two men sitting on the royal platform. The problem was that they were both dressed almost identically and even looked similar. One was obviously the king but the other must have been an attendant. Gaius could not ask someone which was which, of course, because then he would have given the game away so he left it to luck to decide. He ran up to the two men and struck the nearest one dead. He tried to attack the other but was immediately jumped upon and seized. Sadly, fortune was not inclined to help on this occasion and it became clear that he had merely killed one of the king's attendants and not the king himself. Now he was hauled up before him.
Even here, in the highest danger, Gaius's great spirit was such that he was able to inspire more fear than he felt. 'I am a citizen of Rome,' he said firmly. 'I am called Gaius Mucius and I treat death with the same disdain, whether I am killing the enemy or he is killing me. Bravery is part of Roman nature, as is suffering in silence, and I am not a lone wolf. Behind me stretches a never-ending line of men with the same passion for glory. So you, King Porsena, must decide. Do you want to carry on a war where you will have to fight for your life every hour of every day? Where you will find a hidden enemy constantly lined up to attack you? This is the war we Romans will wage against you!'
The king turned puce in anger. But he was also terrified at the thought of this kind of clandestine warfare being waged against him personally and threatened to burn Mucius alive if he did not tell him the details of what Rome was planning against him. Mucius laughed grimly. 'Look and learn at how we Romans will do anything in the hunt for glory,' then he plunged his right hand into a fire burning in a brazier on the side. With no motion, not a sound, or even a bead of sweat, Mucius stood while his hand was roasted in the flames. The king leapt up in astonishment and ordered the guards to pull Mucius away from the fire. 'You have hurt yourself more than you have me,' he said. But he was impressed. 'If you were one of my soldiers I would praise you to the skies,' he said, 'but, as a prisoner, all I can do is honour you by allowing you to go back to Rome.' Then Mucius reciprocated this generous treatment: 'You honour courage. So let me tell you openly what no torture could ever have extracted from me. Three hundred Romans, the flower of our youth, have sworn to attack you in this way. The task fell to me first but each will come in turn until fortune finally gives us the opportunity we need to kill you.'
The king was so unnerved by the prospect of facing hundreds of assassination attempts that he sent envoys with peace proposals to the Romans. Mucius himself returned to Rome, where the senate rewarded him with some land west of the Tiber, which came to be known as the Mucian meadows. The people of Rome gave him the nickname 'Lefty' to mark the loss of his right hand.
The second hero to show you what it takes to be a true Roman is Horatius Cocles. In the same way that Mucius thought nothing of burning off his hand to prove his toughness, many other Romans have voluntarily engaged in single combat in order to decide a battle, even though this has sometimes meant certain death. These heroes have thought nothing of sacrificing their own lives to save those of their fellow Romans or to save the republic.
During Porsena's siege of Rome, Horatius Cocles was engaged in combat with two of the enemy at the far end of the simple bridge over the Tiber that sat in front of the town. Suddenly he saw large enemy reinforcements moving forward towards him. Fearing they would be able to force their way over the bridge and enter the city itself, Cocles turned and called to the Roman troops behind him to get off the bridge as fast as they could and cut the ropes which supported it. While they carried out his order, Cocles stood at the entrance to the bridge and single-handedly kept the enemy at bay even though he was wounded many times. The enemy themselves were astonished at his strength, endurance and courage. Once the ropes were cut and the bridge had fallen into the river, Cocles hurled himself into the river even though he was wearing his full armour, deliberately drowning himself rather than be taken alive. He had no regard for his own safety, solely for his country and for the glory that future generations would attach to his name.
If there is one thing that has made Rome great, it is this: that young Roman men are inspired to emulate the noble deeds of their ancestors such as Mucius and Cocles. What lessons can you who live in softer, more luxurious times learn from these models of great Romanness? What principles can you apply to your own lives to make you more like them? This is not the kind of information you can find taught in schools. But you can find it in this book.
Can you ever hope to live up to the example of Mucius? The answer is an emphatic yes. To be sure, you may not be able to prove your mettle in so flaming a fashion. But does that mean you are destined to be subservient and a failure? The answer is an emphatic no. Fortune may have condemned you to live in an age of rust and iron, when men have no chests, but that does not mean you have no opportunities to display your inner steel. Does your barbarian blood also condemn you to ignominy? All men are descended from distant ancestors who have had some impact on their behaviour, to a greater or lesser extent. You cannot escape your family. But the true glory of a man is his character. It exercises a power greater than wealth and secures honour and fame. The Romans worked hard to inculcate and develop these personal virtues. It is this habit of glory that I believe I can teach even the lowest slave.
And, in truth, there have been countless examples of men of the lowest rank who have raised themselves up in life. A former slave of mine started out in one of the chain gangs on one of my estates in central Italy. I quickly spotted his capacity for hard work and his eagerness to please and promoted him to the position of overseer. After many years of loyal service I finally rewarded him with his freedom and some land. Now this lowly man – his friends call him 'the farmer' – is master of his own modest household and possesses several slaves of his own.
Even emperors can be made outside Rome. Did not the deified Trajan himself, one of the wisest and most glorious emperors, whose army crushed the Dacians and who campaigned as far as the Euphrates in the East, whose booty paid for the great forum bearing his name, and to whom the senate gave the title of 'Best Emperor' – did he not come from Spain?
What is the secret to such success? In a word, it is piety. Those who acquire it and display it in all aspects of their life find themselves swept on to ever-higher achievements. Indeed, I have never known anyone who can be described as truly pious who did not achieve noteworthy success. On the other hand, I have never known any individual to distinguish himself, or to accumulate any reasonable level of personal wealth, who did not display piety. From these two facts I have drawn the following conclusion: that piety is more important for self-development than anything else, and certainly more important than what one learns in the usual forms of education.
What is piety? In short, it is the inner force that compels us to do our duty to our parents, to our country and to our gods. Its roots lie in the total authority that a father rightly holds over his children. Romulus granted this power, which was valid until the father's death. It gave him the power to imprison his son, beat him or chain him as he saw fit. If the father thought his son should work on a farm, then so be it; if he felt his daughter should marry, then she did as she was told. Back in those days, the father could kill his children or even sell them into slavery. All successful men owe their achievements ultimately to their fathers.
If my character has only a few blemishes, if few can accuse me of being greedy, mean or debauched, then it is all thanks to my father. He loved the land and thought little of anything you could learn at school. Instead, he whisked me off to Rome to be taught the skills a noble's son would need. If you had seen me then you would have thought me a raffish fop: dressed in the finest woollen toga, he spared no expense in showing me how to behave properly. I would be mad to be ashamed of a father like him. I certainly won't defend myself, like many do, by trying to blame all my weaknesses on him. In fact, I say the opposite. If I had the chance to go back in time and hand-pick my own parents then I'd still be happy with the ones I had.
Being a father is not easy. Sometimes the state must come first. Some Roman fathers when in office have, contrary to every natural feeling and impulse, executed their own sons because they placed a higher value on the interests of their country than on the ties of nature that bound them to their offspring. The great Lucius Junius Brutus, for example, who first founded our great republic when he led the uprising to drive out Tarquin the Proud and was elected one of the first consuls, found himself in the position of having to oversee the punishment of a group of conspirators who were attempting to reinstate the exiled king, a group containing his two sons Titus and Tiberius. This group of rich young nobles had been able to do whatever they wanted under the monarchy because they had been in the king's favour and could rely on his personal influence to help them. But now that they were all equal before the law they found their behaviour constrained and they complained that it had turned them into slaves. Kings could hand out patronage, but the law was deaf to flattery. They had therefore connived with the former king to bring about his return but the group's plot was betrayed. They were sentenced to be flogged and then executed. So inexorable was the law that it required the holder of the consular office to impose the punishment. He who should never have witnessed such a thing was destined to be the one to see it duly carried out.
The young nobles were all tied to posts. But none was watching them: all eyes were turned to the consul's children and to the consul himself. The consuls took their seats, the lictors were told to inflict the penalty. They beat the young men's bare backs with rods and then they beheaded them. During the whole exercise, the father's face showed how he was really feeling, with grimaces and cries escaping from his lips. But the father's stern resolution was even clearer. He was determined to do his duty and oversee the execution.
That is the kind of determination that won Rome an empire. It is the mark of a good leader to put the interests of the mission first. To be sure, the unwavering courage of a Cocles is a benefit as is the self-control of a Mucius. Fortune is usually on the side of the brave in the same way that the winds and the waves help the skilful sailor. But it is the decisiveness and sense of responsibility that makes a true leader. This will make men follow you into an inferno if you so command them. As the elder Scipio said, when somebody asked why he was confident that his troops could defeat Carthage on their own on North African soil: 'There is not one of my men who would not jump from a high tower into the sea if I ordered him to.'
There are many causes of failure. Some are born into bad families and cannot escape from their influence. Others are born into good families but suffer a bad upbringing. Some lack purpose or ambition. Others procrastinate through fear. Some make bad choices in their wives. Others lack a suitable patron to help them on their way. But perhaps the greatest cause of failure is to lack the ability to get other people to do things willingly for you. Many try to force others to carry out their commands through fear. But, as the saying goes, a drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall. Encouragement and respect gained through example will make people do what would otherwise never be in their own interest.
So far I have spoken only of men. But barbarian women also have much to learn from their Roman counterparts. Naturally, it is the case that women have a far narrower range of virtues than men. It is difficult for women to win praise in new areas of endeavour because their lives have less diversity in terms of opportunities. Their skills are defined by the unchanging requirements demanded by the home. For that reason, praise for a good woman is both simple and formulaic: her goodness does not need a variety or novelty of words to express it. Rather it is sufficient, when women have performed the same few deeds well, to praise them as a group. But despite that, some women do stand out as deserving individual praise, none more so than my mother. In modesty, moral integrity, chastity, obedience, wool-making, diligence and loyalty she is the equal to all other excellent women nor does she come second in terms of virtue or wisdom. She was faithful to her husbands and fair to her children (I was her child by a second marriage to a father now long since dead).
That war against Porsena, which has already furnished us with two fine examples of Roman heroes, can also provide us with a shining beacon of female behaviour. Indeed, it was the example of Mucius that inspired some women to seek public honour. As part of the agreement that ended the war between Rome and Porsena, a group of Roman hostages, both girls and boys, were handed over to ensure that the terms of the treaty were kept. One of the hostages was a young woman named Cloelia. But she fled the enemy camp, taking with her a band of other female hostages. First she made her escape by horse, then by swimming across the Tiber amid a hail of enemy spears. Not one of the girls was injured and Cloelia returned them all to their families. Once her escape had been noticed, Porsena demanded her return alone of all the escapees, a demand to which the Romans agreed. Once she had been returned, though, Porsena was, as he had been with Mucius, so impressed by her bravery that he allowed her to select half of the remaining hostages and for them to be freed and returned alongside her to Rome. Ignoring the Roman girls, she chose only the Roman boys so that they would be able to continue the war. Her singular devotion to duty meant that the Romans gave Cloelia an honour usually reserved for men: they erected a statue of her riding a horse, which was placed at the top of the Sacred Way.
If you, whether man or woman, are to aspire to these great heights, then you must, as the Delphic Oracle said, know yourself. Know your weaknesses and where you need to improve. Set yourself targets and push yourself to achieve them. Do you wish to be a praetor or a consul? Do you want to own many slaves? Do you desire a virtuous wife? All these things this book will help you do.
But such an increase in self-awareness and performance comes at a cost. The secret to Roman success cannot be obtained without paying a price, although the price is far less than its value. It will take hard work. The longer I live the more I am certain that the great difference between the weak and the powerful is energy, an invincible determination to win glory whatever the personal consequences. Not even emperors can escape the necessity for hard work. When Hadrian said to a woman who was hassling him for a hearing that he did not have the time, she replied simply, 'Then don't be emperor.' Study it carefully and you will find that this book provides you with all you need to Romanise all areas of your life. I have asked hundreds of the richest and most powerful Romans of my acquaintance for their opinions on what brings success. You too will be able to think like one of them.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Release Your Inner Roman"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Jerry Toner.
Excerpted by permission of Abrams Books.
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