Roderick Pendleton

Our minds contain no significant political or philosophical idea that is not either derived from the thinking of men who wrote in Greek and Latin or the product of our efforts to learn from the political and cultural experience of Greece and Rome. That is why the evolution of political theory in the past six hundred years could be fully traced by merely recording the changing attitude of historians toward the great men and events of antiquity. For example, one of the first symptoms of the conception of the state that is held, consciously or unconsciously, by all of our contemporary Liberals appeared a century ago in the Roman History of the great German scholar, Theodor Mommsen, and was expressed in his judgment of such figures as Cicero, Caesar, and the rulers whom we call the early Roman emperors, although in their own day their power was concealed by a series of legal fictions and they posed as merely the executive arm of the constitutional Republic.

Tiberius, the stepson whom Augustus finally adopted and designated as his successor in his nominally elective office, is often said to have been “rehabilated by modern scholarship.” His personal life and character have indeed been “vindicated” by some of the most learned whitewash artists of our time, who have in effect concealed the whole in a mass of details, and have thus obscured in their writing, and perhaps avoided in their own thinking, the central problems of politics. The great merit of Dr. Gregorio Marañón’s Tiberius, the Resentful Caesar (Duell, Sloan and Pearce, $3.75) is that—despite numerous errors in details—it presents an objective and realistic study of Tiberius as a man, explaining his behavior without exaggeration or apology, in terms of the eternal facts of human nature.

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Our minds contain no significant political or philosophical idea that is not either derived from the thinking of men who wrote in Greek and Latin or the product of our efforts to learn from the political and cultural experience of Greece and Rome. That is why the evolution of political theory in the past six hundred years could be fully traced by merely recording the changing attitude of historians toward the great men and events of antiquity. For example, one of the first symptoms of the conception of the state that is held, consciously or unconsciously, by all of our contemporary Liberals appeared a century ago in the Roman History of the great German scholar, Theodor Mommsen, and was expressed in his judgment of such figures as Cicero, Caesar, and the rulers whom we call the early Roman emperors, although in their own day their power was concealed by a series of legal fictions and they posed as merely the executive arm of the constitutional Republic.

Tiberius, the stepson whom Augustus finally adopted and designated as his successor in his nominally elective office, is often said to have been “rehabilated by modern scholarship.” His personal life and character have indeed been “vindicated” by some of the most learned whitewash artists of our time, who have in effect concealed the whole in a mass of details, and have thus obscured in their writing, and perhaps avoided in their own thinking, the central problems of politics. The great merit of Dr. Gregorio Marañón’s Tiberius, the Resentful Caesar (Duell, Sloan and Pearce, $3.75) is that—despite numerous errors in details—it presents an objective and realistic study of Tiberius as a man, explaining his behavior without exaggeration or apology, in terms of the eternal facts of human nature.