Books: Antic amid Antiquity

ROME FOR OURSELVES (244 pp.)—Aubrey Menen—McGraw-Hill ($15).

The irreverent writer in an irreverent age runs the risk of being an invisible man writing in invisible ink. Impish, antic Aubrey Menen has retained high visibility by spoofing the solemn and the sacred from pukka sahibs (The Prevalence of Witches) to Hindu epics (The Ramayana). In Rome for Ourselves he takes on another highly worshipful subject—the Eternal City. Tonic in tone and eclectic in vision, Menen’s superbly illustrated Rome is an amusingly literate exercise in debunkmanship, the art of using the past while appearing to abuse it.

Were the ancient Romans men of austere probity, superior soldiers, masters of government? Is Rome a temple of the classic spirit? Was the Renaissance Italy’s finest hour? Humbug, all humbug, says Menen in effect. As he sees it, ancient Rome’s writers and pseudo sages produced a kind of corporate image of what the Romans wanted to be like, and subsequent historians have simply perpetuated it. Then as now, he implies, la dolce vita, the sweet life of lavish and cynical corruption, was close to the heart of Roman reality.

Parvenus & Lunatics. The earliest Romans, despite their reputation for solid, simple virtue, were “frippish” and “tinkled and gleamed with jewelry in every part of their bodies. . . If any of them did lead the simple life, it was for the same reason many of us have led it—they hadn’t the money to do otherwise. Those who had. lived like lords.” The lawgivers renowned for political genius were to “the Romans themselves a subject of hilarity and despair,” and the empire “was run on a system of looting rendered merciful by corruption.” The stalwart Roman soldiery took 121 years to subdue Sicily and the boot of Italy and, says Menen, the army never took to the business of empire building in a big way until mercenaries were employed. By contrast, he argues, the soldiers of Islam conquered about 20 times the territory in one-fourth the time.

Rome, the city of grandiose ruins, was “erected by parvenus,” new-rich “imperial lunatics” with no hint of classical restraint: “Whatever is classical is subtly proportioned. The proportions of a building such as the Colosseum are as subtle as those of a Greenland whale.” As for the Renaissance, Rome and the Italians were impervious to it, says Menen, until the Arabians sparked “the rebirth of learning” by rediscovering mathematics and the great Greek texts. Italy’s Renaissance princes kept scholars as show-off status symbols (“The scholars cost more than a dog, but not always more than a horse”). It was intellectually absurd, feels Menen, to call on Italy for a burst of Renaissance creativity after World War II. However, “the Italians, who are an obliging people, did their best and produced an original line in beach pants for women.”

More than Malice. And so it goes. From the popes to the Etruscans, from the dome of St. Peter’s to the keys of St. Peter, Author Menen looses his iconoclastic polemics with great high glee. In his own mischievous eyes, Menen is right, because he has left out all the considerable evidence that would make him wrong. But the book is more than a labor of malice, for Anglo-Indian Aubrey Menen has lived in Rome for years and believes that “the crimes and follies of mankind have produced the most beautiful city on earth.” Author Menen’s upside-down vision permits him to be fair to the oft-despised beauties of the baroque and, more importantly, enables him to be just to the vulgar thrust and vitality of contemporary Rome with its motor scooters and jukeboxes.

For traditionalists, this book is bound to be highly irritating. But whole cultures from Tokyo to Athens are trying to shake off the dust of a “glorious” past they frequently find choking, and to them, Rome for Ourselves may seem a bracing manifesto written as it is “not for saints or classical scholars, or for those who feel the past was better than our own times. It is for ourselves, we who live in the 20th century: we who have seen everything, suffered everything and believe very little. For Rome is our city, and the only one for us in the world, in which we, in a thinking mood, can feel at home.”