Recent stories of note:
“Profiles in Power”
Gregory Hays, The New York Review of Books
“True or not” is a phrase that crops up repeatedly in Gregory Hays’s review of two books by Mary Beard on Roman emperors and a book by Peter Stothard on the Roman Vitelli family. Hays identifies a trend in current Roman historiography where colorful, almost certainly apocryphal anecdotes about the Caesars are not dismissed out of hand, as was done in the twentieth century, but instead are analyzed as indicative of how the imperial office was understood by the Romans. Stothard’s book Palatine: An Alternative History of the Caesars, which culminates in an account of the short reign of the most famous scion of the Vitelli, Aulus Vitellius, explains that the emperor’s proverbial gluttony, while plausible enough in itself, served in Roman times above all as a metaphor that we still use today: to represent the appetite or taste for power. If the Caesars have proven to be so influential in Western art and culture, it is because the stories about how the imperial court looked, smelled, tasted, and sounded—whether true or not—reveal how absolute power, both overt and disguised, manifests itself.
“The Anatomy of Constitutional Despair”
Paul Moreno, Law & Liberty
Jill Lepore’s recent book, We the People, is the latest salvo in the ongoing progressive war against the Constitution, which factions of the Left have been waging for well over a century. Lepore argues that the Constitution, along with the authority delegated by the framers to the Supreme Court, is unfit for dealing with contemporary challenges such as climate change. Particular targets of her ire are the legal difficulties of the amendment process and originalism, which together have made updating the Constitution practically impossible. In his review, Paul Moreno shows how narrow Lepore’s understanding of originalism really is, including in the infamous case of Dred Scott. While the Constitution is not perfect and should not be blindly worshipped, a quick look at our cousin across the pond suffices to show that in the present circumstances a written Constitution is infinitely preferable to an unwritten Constitution. The former provides legal mechanisms for preventing government overreach, while the latter, in the hands of ideologues, might as well be a legal fiction in an age when some Western truths are no longer as self-evident as they seemed in the eighteenth century.
“A dashed clever fellow”
Tim Lake, The Times Literary Supplement
One of the several aunts who “snooter” Bertie Wooster, the protagonist of P. G. Wodehouse’s brilliant series, describes him as a “brainless poop who ought to be given a scholarship at some good lunatic asylum.” Nowadays, thirty years after the fantastic BBC adaption of Jeeves and Wooster, it is even harder to take Bertie seriously, given Hugh Laurie’s genre-defining face acting. Despite his goofiness, however, time and time again Wooster displays a genuinely impressive knowledge of English literature and poetry, combined with a surprising degree of good sense, as Tim Lake points out. Nonetheless, Wooster’s intelligence and status always appear as comically inadequate compared to the genius of his servus callidus. As Roger Kimball pointed out twenty-five years ago, the novels can be read in light of Wodehouse’s skepticism and dislike of the elitist English literary establishment. For Lake, this aversion ultimately stems from Wodehouse’s bitterness at being denied an Oxbridge education—his father refused to pay the tuition—a feeling of rejection that was only amplified by the subsequent condescending judgements of the literary elite toward his work. One wonders which character Wodehouse identified himself with more, the brilliant man with a plan for any occasion, but who is a social inferior, or the well-meaning, erudite, and charming gentleman, who keeps advocating for himself and his choices, but is misunderstood and remains an object of ridicule.
