Nor would the household of the roman imperial family have been
recognizable in the idealized renderings of a virtuous roman republic composed
by the historian Livy and the poet Virgil, the texts to which the emperor looked
for the evidence of a golden age. to read Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars (Rome,
page 84) is to encounter clinical studies of domestic dysfunction and discontent—
Caligula committing incest with each of his three sisters, Agrippina the Younger
poisoning her husband, Nero sending assassins to kill his mother—almost as
marvelous as the ones made sacred by the authors of the old testament—Cain
murdering Abel, Lot copulating with his daughters, the Almighty Father adored
as a vengeful tyrant never happier than when busy at the task of slaughtering
his progeny. All in all, a collection of family portraits more nearly resembling
those grouped around Charles Manson (Spahn Ranch, page 166) and Jim Jones
(Jonestown, page 143) than those posted under a Christmas tree with Cliff
Huxtable and Archie Bunker.
The mourners at the bier of America’s lost family values like to construe them
as immutable laws of nature, comparable to the force of gravity or the speed of
light. The notion is reduced to an absurdity on the opening of the nearest history
book, even the ones admitted to the fourth-grade classrooms in texas. The story
of Western civilization is for the most part a collection of tales told by, for, and
about the ruling families whose smile was fortune and whose frown was death.
