The other day I went to a wedding.
It was at a spot overlooking the sea, on a cloudy day, and a few small drops were blowing in on the breeze.
I was enjoying myself – in a suit and fancy shoes, surrounded by a diverse and well-dressed crowd, all of whom were occupied with more important things than trying to talk to me.
Staring off at the sky, I was happy just being outside, having my usual transcendental experience of nature.
The waves were pounding on the rocks below.
Then Morena interrupted.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
I snapped back to the wedding scene – a restaurant on the coast, south of Barcelona, full of British people, Indians and others. Some girls in frilly dresses, some guys wearing turbans, some guys wearing kilts. Some just wearing regular suits, like me.
“Oh, you know…” I said. “Just thinking about the Roman Empire.”
That was a lie. Actually, I was thinking about Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire.
But I have a dumbed-down public persona – maybe you do, too – who tries to come up with less-controversial things to say at parties, and thinking about the Roman Empire is an established internet meme that sounds a bit less weird than thinking about Genghis Khan.
More people came and sat down.
The rain held off, mostly. The bride and groom were married under an umbrella.
But unfortunately, there were onlookers for my brief exchange with Morena, so I spent the rest of the evening being introduced as The Guy Who’s Thinking About the Roman Empire.
Sorry Genghis… or, should I say, Temüjin.
The Khan and Mr Chorizo
Looking up at the sky, in fact, I’d been thinking about this scene from the book Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford…
“…Upon reaching the center of Bukhara, Genghis Khan rode up to the large mosque and asked if, since it was the largest building in the city, it was the home of the sultan. When informed that it was the house of God, not the sultan, he said nothing. For the Mongols, the one God was the Eternal Blue Sky that stretched from horizon to horizon in all four directions. God presided over the whole earth; he could not be cooped up in a house of stone like a prisoner or a caged animal, nor, as the city people claimed, could his words be captured and confined inside the covers of a book. In his own experience, Genghis Khan had often felt the presence and heard the voice of God speaking directly to him in the vast open air of the mountains in his homeland, and by following those words, he had become the conqueror of great cities and huge nations.”
— Jack Weatherford, 2004. Excerpt here.
In a way, I’m a lot like Genghis Khan. I mean, one small way: we both like being outside.
In fact, the Khan spent very little time in cities, or buildings of any kind. When he and his horde would roll up on some town, they’d slaughter anyone they could with arrows. But then, the Khan would go back out to the steppe while his men did the pillaging. I find that to be relatable.
Mongols and modern dating
I recently read yet another article by a woman who is attractive and has her life in order – a real catch, in her mind – but who spends a couple of decades rejecting men for a series of stupid reasons… And eventually finds herself at a certain age, alone, and wondering where all the good men have gone.
I think of Genghis Khan, or more precisely, of his wife Börte, when I read these sorts of lamentations.
Börte, who was kidnapped by a neighboring tribe just after her wedding. Who was re-kidnapped several months later (and heavily pregnant) when young Temüjin came to her rescue – this was long before he was the Khan.
Temüjin raised Börte’s baby, Jochi, as his own son, although the timing makes his paternity dubious. And later, in one of history’s great romantic gestures, he exterminated the tribe who had kidnapped his young bride.
Where have all the good men gone?
And more importantly, what would Börte think of our modern dating scene?
We have no way of knowing. But her husband went on to have many wives and concubines, to father untold numbers of children… and to ban the practice of bridal kidnapping within his empire.
A complex character, in other words.
Marcus Aurelius’ blanket
To be fair, I think about Rome quite a bit, too.
Often this takes the form of one of Marcus Aurelius’ quotes, like this one, about managing your circle of control:
“You have power over your mind – not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”
Or this one, about dealing with jerks:
“When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly.”
Or this one, about being useful despite the fleeting nature of existence:
“Do not act as if you had ten thousand years to throw away. Death stands at your elbow. Be good for something while you live and it is in your power.”
When my monkey mind starts to make excuses about why I don’t really need to go to jiu jitsu, or to work out, I often think about the fact that Aurelius himself sometimes wanted to stay in bed in the mornings, rather than getting up to be the Emperor of Rome for another day:
“At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: ‘I have to go to work […] What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for — the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?'”
All those quotes are from Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, written when he was Emperor in the second century – mostly, it would appear, as reminders to himself rather than as a document he intended for publication.
Roman monuments in Barcelona and Spain
If you’ll permit me a small tangent, I’d like to spend a few lines talking about some of the monuments left behind by the Roman empire here in Spain.
In that way I can justify (to myself) the time I’ve spent writing this article with a flimsy Spain tie-in.
Ready?
The other day, I had lunch on Via Augusta, a bit of the old Roman road linking the south of Spain with Italy. Originally stretching from Cádiz to the French border and then leading (as one would expect) to Rome, here in Barcelona it’s just a broad street in a part of town I could never afford to live in.
Downtown, the Museo de Historia de Barcelona has a few columns from a Roman Temple and also what some consider to be the largest underground Roman ruins anywhere.
Elsewhere in Catalonia, the city of Vic has a Roman temple which is in good shape, and Tarragona has a few Roman ruins as well.
Two things that are famous around Madrid are the Roman Causeway (la calzada romana) in the mountains outside Cercedilla, and the Aqueduct of Segovia, which is very impressive, and was in use until 1973.
(Also check out the much later Alcázar de Segovia and have some roast suckling pig if you’re in the area. It’s a short trip on the high-speed train from Madrid.)
And out in Extremadura, there’s quite a bit of Roman architecture in Mérida – which is also home to the Museo Nacional de Arte Romano. Extremadura is great, and highly under-rated as a tourist destination. (See also: Cáceres and Trujillo.)
I will say that I like reading about the history of Rome quite a bit, but the monuments can be underwhelming.
Some (like the aqueducts) are pretty impressive, but others are little more than stone foundations these days, and you need a lot of imagination to turn them into anything exciting.
Drawing lines in the sandbox
Later, back at the beach wedding, dinner has come and gone.
People inside are dancing. The guys in turbans are off at a corner table watching a boxing match on someone’s phone. I’m outside, again, talking to a gentleman who seems to have some rather specific political opinions.
At one point, he suggests that most of the people thinking about the Roman Empire are “red pill guys” who are fans of Andrew Tate.
Luckily, Morena turns up at that point and I use her as an excuse to wander off. My non-controversial public persona is really getting a workout here.
As I’ve mentioned before, the whole “left wing vs right wing” thing is a game I’m not particularly interested in playing. But it’s election season over in the US, and your average anglo-saxon is busy defending lines in that little left-right sandbox as if his (or her) life depended on it.
“Red pill” seems to be a term that comes up from time to time in the political conversation, too.
But what, exactly, does it mean?
A bit later, I pull out my phone and google to find out if I’m a “red pill guy” or not.
Down the “red pill” rabbit hole I go…
I don’t know much about Andrew Tate – I thought he was mostly popular among teenagers, actually – but what I find on red pill Reddit makes me think that there are a lot of introverts out there who get rejected by girls a few times and end up very angry.
I can relate to that, too.
If you’re a young man who’s a bit socially awkward, it really can seem like the deck is stacked against you. The status game is tough, and if you’re short or chubby and shy, you’re probably not winning it.
Rob Henderson, (author of the brilliant memoir Troubled which is – among other things – about his journey through the American class system) points out that the dating market is the last vestige of the Darwinian struggle… the only one that most of us, in the modern world, experience. And we’re really not prepared for it.
The Romans lived that Darwinian struggle every day – and so did the Mongols.
But a modern guy, who’s bought into the idea that as long as you get good grades and learn to “be nice” everything will work out – well, that guy has no idea what’s in store for him once he moves out of Mom’s house.
I, therefore, think about Roman legions being decimated out in Gaul whenever I read something that suggests that many young men in the modern world have never experienced physical exertion, or faced any sort of difficulty at all, outside of things like math tests.
(Decimation was a form of punishment for cowardly or insubordinate units in which groups of ten soldiers were made to draw lots. The loser was beaten to death by the other nine, and discipline was thus maintained.)
After reading a full article on Britannica about the topic, I’m fairly certain I’m not a red pill guy – largely because blaming feminism for my problems wouldn’t be very stoic. So, I go back inside the venue for some cake.
History nerds in the Darwinian struggle
The point of this article, I guess, is that I am a dork who thinks about history books at parties.
And also, that we’ve built a society so comfortable that we’ve mostly forgotten about the life-or-death struggle for survival and social position that our ancestors knew so well.
It’s impolite to talk about the status game in a society that pays so much lip service to “equality”.
That’s how you get exercises in doublethink like this recent article in La Vanguardia, which says that educated women want men who believe in egalitarian values, and in the very next sentence, states that those women are hesitant to “date down” by going out with someone without a college degree.
Dating down? But I thought we were all equal!
I suspect that Genghis Khan had few such illusions, out there in 12th century Mongolia. Same with Julius Caesar, back in his day. Those guys got to fully experience the Darwinian struggle in a way that 21st-century Western urbanites like myself can’t really fathom.
(The Khan, as a young man, killed his own half-brother in a dispute over a fish. And Caesar, famously, was stabbed to death soon after declaring himself dictator. Those were different times.)
And that’s probably what I think about the most, when I think of Rome, or of the Mongols – that all our problems and political strife today aren’t that bad, compared to what people in the past went through.
Happy election season, y’all!
Yours,
Daniel AKA Genghis Chorizo.
P.S. One reason I resist labels like “left wing” or “red pill” is because I know how marketing works, and deep in my soul I feel like I should strive to be more than just a faceless member of some ideology’s target demographic. Life is complex, and I’d prefer not to buy into a whole stack of opinions just because they’re popular among people I know. Now, you might not consider the Democratic Party to be a marketing organization, but they hire call centers full of telemarketers, send out direct mail campaigns, use email marketing and all the rest. The deliverable is a bit more abstract, but they are, in the end, doing marketing to a target audience. And I refuse to take such things 100% seriously. How ’bout you? Leave me a comment, right here…
P.P.S. Speaking of Rome (and Greece, I suppose), I’ve actually got a whole article about my pursuit of the Stoic Virtues on here as well. And I also talked about Genghis Khan and Börte in my article about the changing concept of romantic love. Or, if you’re feeling hungry, maybe check out my love affair with Spanish cuisine. Enjoy!
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