Words&Dirt

“‘So, do we get more secure as we get older?’

‘Some do.  I have.  Though I have also detected a sort of long-term tidal action in that and a lot of other emotional states.  For real-time centuries I will feel, say, gradually more secure in myself, then for the next few centuries I’ll feel less certain.  Or over time I’ll go from thinking I know pretty much everything to realising I know next to nothing, then back again, and so on and so on.  Overall, it approximates a sort of steady state, I suppose, and I am by now quite entirely used to such periodicity and allow for it.  Similarly, I seem to oscillate between times of feeling that nothing matters, when I tend to act riskily, foolishly––often on a whim––and intervening periods when I feel that everything matters, and I become cautious, risk-averse, fearful and paranoid.  The former attitude believes in a sort of benign fate, thinking I am just somehow destined to live for ever, while the latter believes in statistics, and a cold, uncaring cosmos, and cannot quite believe that I have lived as long as I have while ever thinking that life is just a hoot, and taking risks and behaving rashly is worth it just for the fun of tweaking the nose of the universe.  The former state has a sort of cheery contempt for its opposite, while the latter is simply terrified of its obverse.  Anyway, my point is: come back in a century or two and I might not seem so sure of myself.’

‘In a century––in a few years––I’ll be with everybody else in the Sublime.’

‘Best place for all of us.  I’d go myself but longevity has become such a habit.’”

––The Hydrogen Sonata, by Iain M. Banks, pg. 319-20

“Sulla had given the Romans their first glimpse of what it might mean to be the subjects of an autocrat, and it had proved a frightening and salutary one.  This was a discovery that could never be unmade.  After the proscriptions, no one could doubt what the extreme consequences of the Roman appetite for competition and glory might be, not only for Rome’s enemies but for her citizens themselves.  What had once been unthinkable now lurked at the back of every Roman’s mind: ‘Sulla could do it.  Why can’t I?’

The generation that succeeded him would have to give their own answer to that question. In doing so they would serve to define how Sulla himself was best to be judged: Had he been the savior or destroyer of the constitution? Terrible though he had proved himself to be, the dictator had also labored hard to restore the Republic, to ensure that he would have no successor. Historians of future generations, inured to perpetual autocracy, found fantastical the idea that anyone should voluntarily have laid down supreme power. Yet Sulla had done it. No wonder that his own contemporaries found him such a baffling and contradictory figure. When he died––most probably of liver failure––no one could even agree on how to dispose of his body. One consul wanted to award him a state funeral, the other to deprive him of funereal honors altogether. Fittingly, it was the threat of violence that served to resolve the debate. A huge escort of veterans assembled to bring their dead general from Campania, and the people of Rome found themselves ‘as terrified of Sulla’s army and his corpse as if he were still alive.’ No sooner had the body been laid on a huge pyre in the Campus Martius than a strong wind came gusting across the plain, whipping up the flames. And no sooner had the corpse been consumed by the flames than it started to rain.

Sulla stayed lucky to the very end.”

––Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic, by Tom Holland, loc. 1755-68