vaznetti | John Winchester and Roman values

This is not the meta I'm supposed to be writing, but it is something I've meant to write for a while.

I've said a few times that while Sam and Dean may well be Greek, John Winchester is a Roman through-and-through. And then I forget that other people might not know exactly what I mean by that, so here it is.

1. Husbands and wives.

In book 2 of the Aeneid, Aeneas loses his wife and promptly rushes right back into a burning city full of men who want to kill him to look for her, and refuses to leave until her ghost appears to him, assures him that she's OK, and tells him to get the hell out before something bad happens to him. This struck me as a very Roman thing to do -- first, to expect your wife to be able to look out for herself, but also, to go back for her. I contrasted Aeneas' actions with what one might expect from a Greek hero -- who would certainly run into a burning city to rescue a male friend or relative, but probably not a wife (which is probably related to the way the heroes in Greek myth are always worried that their wives are going to try to kill them.) Roman marriage was a good deal more of a partnership than marriage in most other ancient societies, and affection and devotion between husband and wife were, if not always present, at least not considered a sign of moral deviance.

I do have Aeneas in the back of my mind when I think about John, much of the time -- the way they both lose everything at the same time as they lose their wives, the utter helplessness of their grief -- Aeneas reaching out to Creusa three times, and three times having her shade slip through his fingers -- the way they have to remake their lives into something they would never have wanted for themselves, the way their sons serve to keep them moving forward.

Aeneas says, once or twice, that the men who died at Troy were luckier than him; I suspect that if it weren't for Sam and Dean, John would wish himself dead with Mary, as well.

2. Paternal power

Even the Greeks, who were pretty big supporters of patriarchy and its works, thought that Roman fathers had an excessive amount of power over their children.[1] A child whose father is alive legally owns no property -- a daughter might be given a dowry or a son might be given an allowance to live on, but they don't really possess that property. They may act like adults out in the world -- a man might hold office or serve as a soldier or have a public career of some sort -- but within the house they're not adults; they're just part of the father's estate. The Latin for this institution is patriapotestas, which just means "paternal power." They sometimes guessed that most of their public institutions were rooted in it or related to it somehow.

Like most fathers in the ancient world, the Roman father has the right to decide that a newborn child should be exposed (in other words, be left outside to die); unlike other fathers, a Roman father supposedly had the right to kill a child at any later time as well. In point of fact, we have almost no evidence that this ever happened; in the stories we do have in which fathers kill their sons, the father is always acting as a magistrate (an elected official) and punishing a public crime, like treason. We have one example of a father killing a daughter, but it's represented as a horrific and desperate choice. Fathers do have a range of other domestic punishments available -- sending children off to the countryside in a kind of exile, for example, or cutting off that allowance -- and can apply them for any kind of reason, although it was usual to get advice from friends or family before doing anything. Ultimately, though, a Roman father's power is absolute and autocratic, and remained constant until he died: a man might be consul (that is, hold the highest office in the Republic) and still owe his father absolute obedience.

At the same time, it's clear that Roman fathers took their responsibilities to their children very seriously: a Roman father who decides to educate his children himself rather than buying or paying a tutor for them is considered to be doing the right thing. Fathers were responsible for how their children turned out, in the end, and wanted their sons in particular to be like them or better than them. Roman fathers appear to have paid a lot of attention to the happiness of their children, as well, both sons and daughters, and it's very clear that absolute paternal power could be accompanied by unconditional paternal love. If Roman children are in some way just dependent offshoots of their father... well, that has two sides.

Incidentally, I use "children" on purpose. Sons might come in for more paternal pressure than daughters did, but it's clear that fathers had very strong emotional bonds to daughters as well -- perhaps even more than sons.

Do I even need to explain how John fits into this? Obsessive, autocratic, controlling and, one rather feels, almost unable to draw a line between himself and his sons -- except by disinheriting the one who tries to claim his independence, which is also a typically Roman reaction. It was an all-or-nothing kind of world.

I remember as well that some of the commentary on John's decision to sacrifice his life for Dean's in IMToD described it as... well, as John taking away a choice from Dean. Something about him being autocratic even in death. Of course, from the Roman perspective, Dean doesn't actually get a choice about whether he'll live or die -- the choice is his fathers, not his. I suspect it didn't even occur to John that Dean should have a say in the matter. That's why they call it the power over life and death: if Roman fathers had had a way to grant life to their sons other than the obvious, they would have used it too.

[1] This is because for the Greeks, patriarchy is about women, whereas for the Romans it's about children; by the Late Republic, Roman men appear to have pretty much given up on telling their wives what to do. Wives are perhaps the only people within the immediate family with whom Roman men can have an equal relationship.

3. War, duty and love

The most important quality a Roman man can have is virtus; this gets translated as "virtue" sometimes, but it's really military excellence rather than moral excellence. The Romans prided themselves at being good at warfare (as well they should: they didn't conquer the whole Mediterranean world by accident), and they organized their political system, at least in the early Republic, around the military. But virtus isn't about pure force -- it's moderated by discipline and by that other peculiarly Roman virtue, pietas.

The thing about pietas is that it means duty and it means love: the Romans sometimes have trouble telling the two apart. That probably has something to do with the way Roman family relationships involve love and obedience in equal measure, and that translates into Roman public life -- you owe a duty to the state and to the gods as well as to your family, and the three are equally important. And (coming back to Aeneas), if what you want, or what will make you happy, isn't what these demand, well, too bad. Aeneas would rather have died at Troy, have founded a little copy of Troy somewhere in the east, have stayed with Dido -- well, tough. That's not what Rome needs.

That John falls back on military values when his world turns upside-down is pretty clear to me. But I think that the balance between love and duty -- or rather, the inability to disentangle the two -- is also very typical of John, especially in his relationship to his sons -- the way keeping them safe is such a high priority for him that he seems to sacrifice his emotional closeness to them. He doesn't distinguish between his love for them and his duty to them, or theirs to him, whereas they do see a distinction (see John's response to Sam's desire to be his own person). Throw in his compulsive need for them to match his virtus (Roman fathers want their sons to outdo them), and I think you have the values John has tried to transmit to his children, by his own example.

Pietas sometimes seems an unappealing value: it's not a gentle kind of love. It's more about what you need than what you want, and if it takes your life, well, it takes your life. There's you, and there's what's necessary, and there's what you have to sacrifice: the thing is that the Romans see that as love. And so, I think, does John.

So yes, a Roman through and through, or at least, a particular kind of Roman: the kind of Roman the Romans liked to think they were. No wonder I fell hard for the character.