Rome, and the Day It Wasn’t Built In

My head keeps saying This isn’t a political blog… this isn’t a political blog…

My heart, though, can’t deny the huge chunk of me myself which is political…

Short version: I have voted in ten Presidential elections. That’s 36 years. For nine of those elections, I have watched the returns on TV and read about them the next day and thought to myself, alternatively:

• Oh no. The evil bastard won…!
  OR
• Well, maybe he’s not perfect — but at least the evil bastard didn’t win…!

We were at a “watch party” last night. When the clock rolled over at 11:00 — when the West Coast polls closed — and the networks started making their calls, I completely lost it: sobbing, laughing, fighting the sobs and giving into the laughter. (The Missus finally suggested that I go into the bathroom and splash some cold water on my face. It helped.) But the tremors continued, off and on, until I fell asleep at around 1:30am. (They resumed this morning, every time the reality struck me anew.)

[getting a grip on self]

I just want to share a little bit of classical history with you right now. It goes back to at least the third century BC, in the ancient city of Rome.

The Roman Republic was still new. Once a year, a festival took over one of the circuses — the gigantic stone open-air arenas — in the city. It was a minor two-week festival, celebrated not at the famous Circus Maximus but at the smaller Circus Flaminia.

The festival’s name: the ludi plebeii, or “plebeian games.” Not much is known of their purpose but, according to Religion in Archaic and Republican Rome and Italy, by  Edward Bispham and Christopher John Smith:

The ludi plebeii… represented plebeian freedom — either from the Tarquins or from the patricians.

The Tarquins were a royal family — the last kings of Rome, despots who were thrown out on their ear, a couple of centuries earlier, to make way for the founding of the Republic.

The patricians, of course, were the more privileged, wealthiest and most powerful non-royal class of citizens.

The plebeians? Mere middle-class citizens: workers, shopkeepers, peasants, small landowners.

As for the Circus Flaminia, it was built by and named in honor of the third-century (BC) Roman politician Gaius Flaminius. About him, we know this:

As tribune of the plebs in 232 BC, he passed a plebiscite which divided the land south of Ariminium, which had been conquered from the Gauls decades before, and gave it to poor families whose farms had fallen into ruin during the war… During his term [as director of the census, or censor in the word’s original meaning] he arranged for the Via Flaminia to be built from Rome to Ariminium, established colonies at Cremona and Placentia, reorganized the Centuriate Assembly to give the poorer classes more voting power, and built the Circus Flaminia on the Campus Martius.

Oh, I almost forgot one detail about the ludi plebii. The two-week celebration began every year on November 4.