Lost Causes

I woke up feeling like the 38 Degrees that was burning within me – hot, weak and not in the best state of mind. I feel the sickness run amok through my veins, teasing every tissue in my body, sapping the very last ounces of strength from the earthen meat upon which it feats upon – in a state of delirious merry making, all at my expense . It is in this state of things that I sort to cheer up my dropping spirits and began searching to for a movie to watch, and there I came upon it – Attila the Hun.

But it wasn’t Attila that fascinated me, it was his nemesis – Flavius Aetius

Aetius comes from the a long tradition of men defending lost causes – men like Socrates (who sought to inspire the thirst for knowledge in his fellow Athenians, but was make to drink hemlock for his troubles); Gustav Stresemann (the statesman who sought to save the doomed Weimar Republic); Lin Zexu (who valiantly resisted British aggression during the Opium War) just to name a few.

Aetius was in Edward Gibbon’s words, ‘the last of the Romans’. Such an accolade was vested in him because he was indeed the last of the Romans who was able to grasp the geo-political situation of the known world and possessed the military astuteness that brought about Roman dominance for centuries.

But Aetius’ Rome, wasn’t the Rome that was once the dominant superpower. It was a Rome knocking upon death’s kneel – teething with social problems, threats from Barbarians to the borders of the Empire, rampant corruption and vicious power struggles that had earlier split the empire into two. There were two Romes that Romans knew of – the present Rome and the glorious Rome of the past. As most Romans struggled to merge the two, Aetius was clearly aware of the differences that lay between illusion and reality. He recognize that Rome was feeble and weak, and it was past it’s days where it could deploy it’s legions to every corner of the empire to impose Rome’s might upon those willing to challenge it. He knew the new realities required him to play a tacit game of statesmanship – the ability to play one against another, to divide and rule, while hopefully buying the much needed time and resources Rome needed to recuperate it’s former greatness.

Although Aetius was willing to accept and challenge the realities, it was only right that eventually reality caught up with him. The jealousy of his Emperor Valentine III over Aetius’ military achievements and affection he possessed amongst the Senators and the plebs drove the Emperor to assassinate Rome’s last standing hope. The dagger’s thrust brought with it the final nail on the Empire’s casket.

But Ateius’ determination to carry on the course of a seemingly failed enterprise lives on to inspire. He realized, like the others before and after him, that the road was murky and impassable, but he defiantly took that realization in his stride, and held onto the belief that one’s destiny lied not in grim perception, but in the belief of one’s ability to alter the inevitable, to change one’s realities while not expediting it as idealism.

We need such hope today, such hope that is intermixed with astute determination to alter our realities. To be bearers of lost causes and not be afraid to fail in the process. And should we fail, at least we did mark our destinies with our own hands and pour scorn upon fate's hideous work.