So Caesar took human sacrifice from the Gauls and introduced it to the
Romans as entertainment. It is fairly well acknowledged that Rome, like
the modern Corporation, had to expand in order to survive but what is not
mentioned all that much is that the height of Rome began with the Coliseum
and continued in spite of the lead pipes for the water and lead blooms for
the wine until the power in the blood sport finally stopped flowing 300
years after Constantine and the Holy Roman Empire's inception.
On can even make a good case for Caesar as the founder of the first La
Scala with it's excess and grandeur. He elevated it from a minor death
ceremony to a grand public Orghast for the community and his deification.
Then they sacrificed him.
After the fall of Rome, the grand excess disappeared until the Camarata
and Florence began to explore the roots of Greek Math and its correlation
to Music. Not long after their feeble attempts stymied due to lack of
funds, the gold began to come in from (you guessed it) the conquest of
America, where they once again stopped human sacrifice and used it as an
excuse to kill and steal them blind and fund the opera in Venice.
After that it was a straight shot to Verdi and Puccini and today Muti is
at La Scala and Abbado has conquered Berlin and Vienna. Meanwhile America
has never recovered from funding the last five hundred years of Caesar's
model for the Impresario or is it Entrepreneur?
Regards
Ray Evans Harrell, artistic director
The Magic Circle Opera Repertory Ensemble of New York
mcore@idt.net
At de Lange said:
> Once he got control over Gaul, he began to tap the force, intelligence and
> enthusiasm of the Gallic people. He began to do things untypical of any
> Roman officer. He lightened the tributes of the Gauls to Rome, mitigated
> slavery, forbade human sacrifices, supressed the Druids, initiated schools
> in rural communities and encouraged Gauls to make their own regional laws
> rather than waiting upon Rome to set the pattern. In other words, rather
> than trying to make Gaul a Roman province according to Roman templates, he
> helped them to emerge into a powerful province in a way which suited them.
>
> So great was his success that he was elected as Caesar by the Roman
> senate. The rest is common history. He died at the hands of someone who
> feared a future based on his success.
>
> But we have to look at Gaul to see the deeper meaning of his success. In
> all the other provinces Rome had to fight continually against rebellion.
> But in Gaul within a couple of generations the people even transformed
> their germanic mother tongue to give birth to a strange, "singing" form of
> Latin, namely Old French. They even became masters themselves in
> top_to_bottom organising, supplementing their own culture of
> bottom_to_top, thus increasing their creativity. Eventually, many
> centuries later when Itally could not sustain the Roman Empire anymore, it
> shifted from Italy to France. In the early eight hundreds these Francs
> under Charlemagne managed to accomplish something which Rome never could,
> namely to crush the lower Franconians and Saxons under their heels.
>
> Unfortunately, Charlemagne, great as he was, did not do it in the way as
> Caesar did it himself more than eight centuries earlier. Thus a struggle
> for freedom and federalism was initiated which would ego up to modern
> times. Charlemagne thought of these Franconians and Saxons as savages with
> no civilisation. But Caesar thought of the Gauls as fellow humans with
> great potential. Both were great leaders. But who was the greatest?
>
> At de Lange <amdelange@gold.up.ac.za>
--"Ray E. Harrell" <mcore@idt.net>
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