In Power and Persuasion in Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire, The Curti Lectures for 1988, Peter Brown Describes the change of rhetorical relations between ruler and ruled in the fourth and fifth centuries. The eastern Roman world which would become Byzantine saw the rise of imperial power, loss of local autonomy, and emasculation of the traditional notables. The elaborately ornamented speech of the fourth century (always mocked in histories of rhetoric as the empty sign of sycophantic impotence) is presented by Brown as an important social bond, the sign that all of elite society across the huge empire did in fact share something of value, the crucial rhetorical paideia that made them human beings and authorized civic relations. By the sixth century, Brown tells us, the Christian bishops have replaced the earlier "philosophers" as local powers subservient to an increasingly divine, mystical Emperor. Although the bishops are from the same class and paideia as the "philosophers," the rhetoric has changed. Now the figure of sunkatabasis, "condescension," is the supreme good. As God condescended to walk the earth as man, so the rest of mankind (increasingly distant from the divine earthly ruler) must appeal to the Emperor to act like God and condescend to their needs.

The Protagonists of Douglas Coupland's recent novel Microserfs, young programmers at Microsoft Corp., see "Bill," the not yet old Bill Gates, founder of the corporation and richest American, as a similarly mystical figure. A quick check of hourly stock quotations not only traces the value of their options, but also of Bill's enormous wealth. For him, a few points can mean hundreds of millions of dollars. The legends of Bill are all based on sunkatabasis, his ordinariness, which can only be seen as benevolent imperial condescension. There is a peculiar ambiguity in this. On the one hand, these characters believe that they are masters of a new universe, bishops in the electronic church. Their faith involves stamping out the paganism of the old mechanical order. They have their own language, their own sense of the holy, and a distinct relationship to all aspects of everyday life. Ritual is crucial. At the same time, they see themselves, as the title of Coupland's novel implies, as serfs, which invokes a different social system, the decentralized world of feudalism. They and we seem to be once again at the historical point where late antiquity gave way to early feudalism. And they display the same ambivalence about their status as bishops, who rule, lead, encode, while playing at the same time the role of servant of the meek, a serf.

The subjects, on the other hand, feel a puzzled awe, a desire for the magic of condescension. So we read, for example, of the mayor or Redmond, Washington (home of Bill's corporation, Microsoft) who had met Bill and Hillary Clinton, but never met Bill, and would have liked to do so. She had never even requested a meeting. Said Rosemary Ives, "I'd like to ask him, if he could wave a magic wand over the city of Redmond, what would he like it to be like in 20 years" (Dallas Morning News 19 Aug. 95, 1F). Mayor Ives shares a common paideia with the Clintons, the language and understanding of politics, in which everyone, however lowly, has something of value to offer the other. It is apparently different with the mayor and Bill. His status requires nothing from her as mayor, although he may want her to buy a copy of Windows 95. If he speaks to her, it will have no meaning unless he chooses to do so. Her prayers have been transmitted by the Seattle Times, where the article I have cited originated. Will her prayers be answered? In this minor instance, at least, Jean Baudrillard's steamy words come true.

Baudrillard's words typically weight the forms at the expense of content; style becomes thought. So he is no longer a commentator on the postmodern scene, but a part of it like Rosemary Ives. Her belief in sorcery, Bill's visionary foresight and magic wand (no need for Freud here--that can be part of another discussion), is the substance of Baudrillard's sweaty and overwrought hyperbole.

To describe the social process in which magic and the baroque enter to dominate a world where the political is declining we must turn again to the late Roman Empire, where the note began. Although it ostensibly describes prose that is sixteen centuries old, the third chapter of Auerbach's Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946) spells out to a striking degree the stylistic and social aspects of the grotesque, sadistic, and highly sensory images Baudrillard employs. The subject of the chapter is a description of a riot in Rome by the fourth-century historian Ammianus Marcellinus. The governor defies the angry mob.

This crowded, writhing, opaque style of sixteen centuries ago is not that of classical antiquity. Above all, it aims to capture the senses through imagery, yet it is nevertheless highly moralistic. The same must be said of our contemporary, Baudrillard's, style. Compare with Ammianus's text his passage on the masses as that which shatters the mirror of the social.

Auerbach's stylistic description of Ammianus's world is as suggestive regarding Baudrillard as Peter Brown's description of rhetorical changes in the Late Roman world is regarding Bill. The social links between ruler and mass are broken. Charisma and displays of force replace the common understanding of elites. This discourse is relentlessly dark and pessimistic.

Today, popular discourse has stopped referring to its place in time. The "twenty-first century," toward which witless politicians are "building bridges" and other vapid metaphors, is not a place of dreams, hopes, or fears, not even a place outside of history, but rather the continuation of a history that has stopped. Of course, it is only our cultural imagination that has paused, perhaps for a rest after the feverish centuries since romanticism. We have nom idea what comes next, or put better, what we want to come next. So all we can say about ourselves is that we are late. Late-twentieth century, late modernism, late capitalism (as the Marxist faithful call it) seem to link us to late antiquity, to Ammianus Marcellinus and Byzantium. As Shakespeare did not say, lateness is all. But what about the other half of the phrase "late antiquity?" Are we antique, or possibly antiques? I cannot imagine an age that thought of itself as antiquity. Surely the fragmentation of Rome and the translation eastward of the imperium was, for them, a problem of modernity. And this is what it is hard to be--Modern. Easier at times to feel antique, surrounded by the horded antiques of a "late" culture.

Yeats, an undisputed modern in his day (and ours) also saw Byzantium as a reference point, as I have placed it here. For him it was "no country for old men," but rather a world of images, artifices, forms.

The opulent darkness of his vision, not altogether different in tone from Baudrillard's ambivalence, heralded two Dark Ages--the one, the age of violence and ignorance that followed Rome, and another, our age of violence and learned superstition, world war and totalitarianism, that was to come.

In our age of late antiquity, Bill may serve as emperor only at the expense of the political, so politics becomes a desperate theater in which the goal is not to effect change, but to be noticed at all. Here, perhaps, is the difference between our age and the end of the ancient world. Both ages are seeing the sudden decline of the political, a decentralization that verges on atomization. But mystical charisma once part of governing is today reserved for a private man, a college dropout, Bill, while the president is at best a rather clownish figure. Whether this is a benefit, the healthy fruit of the end of history, or the harbinger of a new dark age, remains to be seen. Most likely, it will prove to be both at once.

Brown, Peter. Power and Persuasion in Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire, The Curti Lectures for 1988.

Coupland, Douglas. Microserfs.

Dallas Morning News 19 Aug. 95, 1F.

Baudrillard, Jean. In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities.

Auerbach. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. 1946.

Yeats. Sailing to Byzantium