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QuoteReplyTopic: Augustus: 31 BC to 14 A.D. Posted: 24-Feb-2009 at 03:11
AUGUSTUS
After watching the two part series “Augustus” on SBS TV(17 and 24 June 2008--11:40 p.m. to 1:15 a.m.) in the last two weeks as another academic year was coming to an end in school systems across the northern hemisphere; after teaching Roman history at a post-secondary technical college in Western Australia in the late 1980s and early 1990s; after studying Roman history in high school as part of the grade eleven curriculum in Ontario in 1960-1961 and in the first year of my liberal arts degree in university in 1963-1964 forty-five years ago; after taking an interest in the field of classical studies since those 1960s, albeit a peripheral one among the many subjects that were part of the general and interdisciplinary studies I taught and the general studies in the social sciences and humanities that I read—after all this, in the early evening of my life, as the years of my late adulthood crept along incrementally more quickly, it seemed, with every passing year, I felt like writing this prose-poem. I wanted to try to fit Augustus, Octavian as he was also known, the first Roman Emperor, into a historical context relevant to today, at least relevant to how I had come to see the comparisons and contrasts between Augustus and his time as well as my time, my age and my life. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 27 June 2008.
Rome had conquered the world, well, a big chunk of it in the middle East, north Africa and what is now Europe, in the quarter millennium from 250 BC to the time of Christ.
Was it a set-up? Setting the world up for the periodic intervention of the divine into human affairs, giving a stage for the spread of the message that would and did change that mise en scene forever. And are we being set up again, in our age and time in the midst, now, of this greatest of spiritual dramas in the world’s history, so very unbeknownst to the generality of men, creeping, as it now is, along the edges of society as that message did 2000 years ago before it captured western civilization for a 1000 years?
The most precious Being ever to appear in the world of creation appears from time to time and the light of the Unseen shines above the horizon of celestial might only to be denied, opposed and disputed with in vain words to try to invalidate His claim.1
In the century, 1450 to 1550, European society was rapidly transformed.(1) The monopoly held by the then dominant institution, the Catholic Church, was placed in serious dispute. Ten million books were produced in the decade Columbus sailed the Atlantic to the New World raising all sorts of questions and doubts about legitimate authority. Medieval society, seemingly stable and secure in 1450, was anything but. The stability was only a veneer. The world that my years of pre-pioneering-travelling and pioneering-traveling attempt to describe in both an indirect and direct, both a discursive and an intuitive, both a personal and analytical way in my memoirs, if it continues in the same direction for much more of this century, will indeed tell the story of an even greater transformation. The church, religion and the nation, the state, democracy and Christianity, highly entrenched in 1953 may, by 2053, prove to be based on outworn shibboleths and historical anachronisms.
The transformation, the tempest, that was unleashed with the coming of the Bab and Baha'u'llah in the nineteenth century, such is my view, and that has been blowing through my life time, my pioneering days, these earliest generations under the guidance of the Universal House of Justice, with continued force, deranging the world's equilibrium and 'uprooting its institutions'(2) is leaving the world, at least so it seems to me after the passing of more than forty years of pioneering(1962 to 2009), unable to undertake the fundamental reorientation(3) required without a great deal of suffering and despondency. -Ron Price with thanks to (1)James Davidson and William Rees-Mogg, The Sovereign Individual, MacMillan, NY, 1997, p.99; (2)Shoghi Effendi, The Promised Day is Come, 1976(1941), p.1; and (3)The Universal House of Justice, ""Letter to the World's Religious Leaders," April 2002, p.3.
These questions did not exist for me the year I got my first baseball glove, my mother saw that ad in the Burlington Gazette and they finished that temple in Chicago………
.....but the world was changing under my feet as I grew into a man and then into an old man. It was all becoming irrelevant, first that hopeful, Communism, then one day, it would appear, democracy emerging as it had when Shaykh Ahmad was in his last years in Arabia preparing himself for his role as precursor to the Promised One.
As the Holy Church gained ascendancy from 390 to 420 and lost it from 1490 to 1520, so will there be in my day a deliberate and decisive break with religion and the ideology of the nation state: and this Faith I have come to believe--- Where will it be in all this?
Ron Price 2 August 2002 (updated for All Empires History Forum)
Ron Price has been married for 47 years(in 2014) and a teacher for 35. He has been a writer and editor for 15, and a Baha'i for 55(in 2014).
Apologia, maybe it had to do with his own words, such as;
"As the Holy Church gained
ascendancy from 390 to 420
and lost it from 1490 to 1520,
so will there be in my day a
deliberate and decisive break
with religion and the ideology
of the nation state: and this
Faith I have come to believe---
Where will it be in all this?"
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