Sublime

Formerly the law was a religious decision; it passed for a revelation made by the gods to the ancestors, to the divine founder, to the sacred kings, to the magistrate-priests. In the new code, on the contrary, the legislator no longer speaks in the name of the gods. The decemvirs of Rome receive their powers from the people. The people also investe

1. A secularly shifting balance-of-power configuration of political actors governed by negotiated contractual relationships that systematically favored previously weaker parties, rather than theological axioms


2. The beginnings of what we’d call a technocracy in the form of the culture of

Concerning Locke, for example, Rommen writes, “Locke substitutes for the traditional idea of the natural law as an order of human affairs, as a moral reflex of the metaphysical order of the universe revealed to human reason in the creation as God’s will, the conception of natural law as a rather nominalistic symbol for a catalog or bundle of indivi

“In every civil war,” says a Greek historian, “the great object is to change fortunes.”579 Every demagogue acted like that Molpagoras of Cios,580 who delivered to the multitude those who possessed money, massacred some, exiled others, and distributed their property among the poor.

The game of power politics in Italy was unbelievably complex. The minor princes, mostly self-made tyrants, allied themselves now with one of the larger States, now with another; if they played the game unwisely, they were exterminated. There were constant wars, but until the coming of the French in 1494 they were almost bloodless: the soldiers were

But the search for a Roman reality behind the charges very much misses the point of these texts: they are the product of an ideology that represented the struggle against tyranny in terms of a struggle against the Jews.