The 'New' Rome?

It's Sunday evening and another weekend has flown by full of errands and duties and distractions. And full of thoughts of Sandy and hopes that her move from apartment to new home is going as planned. So I just realized that I hadn't fulfilled my duty to blog365 today, so here I am. Blogging. Not painting. I wish I had a clone I could send out there into the wide, wide world and run all the errands and fulfill all the duties and suffer all the distractions so I could paint. Just paint. And blog, when the time is right. But .. it. don't. work. that. way.

The thing about painting, for me anyway, is that you don't just say "Ooo, I've got five minutes, I think I'll paint some." It takes time to set up, mentally and physically, time to develop the vision of just exaclty what you're going to accomplish in the session, time to actually do the work and time to clean up after the session. It takes Time. Uninterrupted Time. And unless you can see a clear block of uninterrupted time available, don't even THINK about getting started; because all you're going to do is frustrate yourself.

But all of that isn't really what I wanted to blog about. Part of the distraction this weekend has revolved around the recent death of the brother of a friend of mine and Annie's. And helping to clean out his house. A sad and somber task. But that isn't what I want to blog about either. It's this book. Actually, it's the five volume "The History of Private Life", Philippe Aries and Georges Duby, General Editors. Given to me by our friend. For helping.

In Roman times, children were 'raised' or 'exposed' at the whim of the father. When a child was born, the midwife would place the child on the ground. The father would then either pick up the child, thereby acknowledging the child as his own and that he would raise it, or decline to do so, signalling that the child was to be 'exposed' - and if no one 'adopted' the exposed child, it would die. There could be many reasons to expose a child. Poverty. Too many mouths to feed already. Death of the mother during child birth. The Romans, apparently, assigned no right to life to a fetus. They were puzzled, the Romans were, that the Egyptians and the Jews and the Germans valued and raised each and every child. This, and more, is covered in detail in the first three pages of the first chapter of the first book.

I am stunned. I am so taken aback. Rome. The ideal. Rome. The civilization we are supposed to be the 'new one' of. Rome. Supposedly the basis of western civilization. What kind of morality was this that children, life, motherhood - all the things that we have always valued - didn't mean anything. What did they teach their children that they would grow into people that would allow an infant to perish - for ANY reason? On purpose.

I never knew this stuff. I have always thought myself to be relatively well informed and well read and educated. Obviously, I haven't been as eriudite as I had thought. I am just so shocked by what I have suddenly discovered about a civilization I had once admired. I now know I must temper my admiration with the knowledge that there was an ugly and unexplored side to 'Rome' that will forever affect how I view their society. They weren't so cool after all. They were, in fact, morally bankrupt. And that gives yet another reason for their fall. If we are the 'New Rome', perhaps we need to look more carefully 'over our shoulder', look closer for the lessons we should have learned. And hold our children just a little closer, just a little tighter.