Additionally, I have built. The Temple of Augustus, barely begun by Tiberius, I have finished, as I
have the theater of Pompey, the walls of Syracuse. Canals have been started, and amphitheaters, and
old palaces, Temples, cities, and the like have begun under my hand.
The common theme to these acts and labors is restoration. The restoration of law, and of
property, and of morals, these are worthy acts of an emperor. They indicate a wish to have the world
properly ordered, unified, and just under the gods. They are not merely administrative but political acts
- designed to set a political tone, to aim not just at the comfort of the res publica but of a new and
proper direction for it.
There is an absurdity in the previous statement. Did you catch it? The astute ones will have. If it
does not appear to you within a few moments, please let it pass. I am not so cruel as I am reported.
The absurdity is thus: nothing new can ever be proper. What is proper to a thing is what
accrues to it according to its nature, and its nature accrues according to its origin - to the point at
which it becomes itself. Something new can only thus be contrary, or at best irrelevant, to this origin,
and so to the nature of the thing. The new means disruption - destruction in miniature, then in
maximum. This is all rather obvious.
So when I speak of a new and proper direction, I am actually speaking of the restoration of
something very old. Something that existed at the foundation of the Roman State, but was cast aside,
feebly replaced, and now restores itself like Theseus returning from the paths of the dead. I speak of
the position held by Romulus himself. I speak of the monarchy.
The state is a thing. It functions well or badly, brings benefit or detriment to it's target. It
represents a vast people organized under a single name, a single law, a single principle of reality. It
claims part of the earth and expends human lives to demonstrate these claims. It has its own internal
needs and logic. And yet men will pretend it is abstract, some Platonic Form somehow quickening the
embers of men's hearts. They will not have the state embodied by a single man, because they fear it's