On the Lessons of Marcus Aemilius Scaurus.

 

Curmie couldn’t find an image of MAS,
so here’s a picture of his theatre

Curmie isn’t sure why he started thinking about our title character of late.  Maybe it’s because of two different Dan Sullivans running for Senate from Alaska.  If so, it would be because the most famous Marcus Aemilius Scaurus isn’t the one Curmie wants to talk about.  Our guy is the son of his better known father of the same name.  But it’s Marcus the Younger (hereafter, MAS) who is the Godfather of money in politics.  So that could be it, too… and it’s what this piece is about.

You should not, Gentle Reader, feel the slightest embarrassment if you’ve never heard of MAS (or his dad, for that matter).  Curmie knows about him only because he’s a theatre historian.  Our source is Pliny the Elder, who was, shall we say, not a fan.

MAS became aedile in 58 BCE.  That job, a sort of combination of city manager and public works supervisor, carried considerable power but no salary, so it was restricted to those rich enough to be able to hold that position without pay.  Pliny declares that MAS’s “aedileship may perhaps have done more than anything to undermine morality, and whose powerful ascendancy may have been a more mischievous achievement on the part of his stepfather Sulla than the killing by proscription of so many thousands of people.”

Nope, not a fan.  But here’s the relevant part:

As aedile he constructed the greatest of all the works ever made by man, a work that surpassed not merely those erected for a limited period but even those intended to last forever.  This was his theatre, which had a stage arranged in three stories with 360 columns…. The lowest story of the stage was of marble, and the middle one of glass (an extravagance unparalleled even in later times), while the top story was made of gilded planks.  The columns of the lowest story were… each 38 feet high.  The bronze statues in the spaces between the columns numbered 3,000….

As for the auditorium, it accommodated 80,000…. The rest of the equipment, with dresses of cloth of gold, scene paintings and other properties was on so lavish a scale that when the surplus knick-knacks that could be put to ordinary use were taken to Scaurus' villa at Tusculum and the villa itself set on fire and burnt down by the indignant servants [most translations say “slaves”], the loss was estimated at 30,000,000 sesterces.

OK, but how much is a sesterce?  Well, obviously, we can’t translate directly, but what Curmie has been able to piece together is that a daily wage was about three sesterces, perhaps a little less.  So, the props, wall hangings, and assorted tchotchkes were worth about 10,000,000 times the daily wage of an average Roman.  In other words, it would take that everyday citizen over 27,000 years to earn just the cost of the non-structural stuff, even working seven days a week.  That doesn’t count the marble, glass, gilded wood, etc., or, indeed, the labor costs associated with building the theatre.

This, by the way, was for a space that was apparently used for only a few days.  The first permanent theatre in Rome was constructed three years later by Pompey the Great.  Why would MAS spend that kind of money on a temporary structure?  Well, apparently for two reasons, both ultimately boiling down to this: because he could. 

There’s conspicuous consumption, a variation on the theme of the arrogance associated with wealth.  Today’s equivalent would be “The problem is that for $5,000, the most you’ll be able to buy [at Mar-a-Lago] is a hamburger and maybe a small dessert.”  It’s the other argument that’s more interesting: the implicit if not explicit argument that anyone that rich would be unbribable and therefore more likely to work for the benefit of the citizenry rather than of special interests. 

Who knows?  That might even have been true in ancient Rome.  Even in this country, folks named Vanderbilt and Stanford founded universities—real ones, not like Oral Roberts or Liberty.  Even the Koch brothers didn’t concentrate wholly on right-wing politics; they also funded medical research, supported cultural institutions, and otherwise did things that actually helped someone other than themselves.

The new wave, though, the Trump/Musk/Ramaswamy/Bezos clique, are quite willing to accept bribes, and have seldom if ever done anything other than attempt to further enrich themselves... or, if they were feeling particularly charitable, their families, their cronies, and occasionally their sycophantic followers, although this last group is always hastily discarded when they are no longer useful.  In this way, 21st-century rich folks are not quite the same as ol’ MAS, who at least gave the people a nice theatre space for a few days while strutting his affluence.

They’re remarkably similar to MAS, though, in that they believe that money ought to be a primary influence in determining who has political power.  Whether it should be or not, it damned sure is.  For better or worse (mostly the latter), money is indeed a major influence.  MAS was indeed elected as praetor (a step up from aedile) after his publicity stunt.  (No, correlation doesn’t necessarily mean causation, but…) 

Back in 2010, SCOTUS proclaimed, in what is undoubtedly the worst decision in Curmie’s lifetime, that money is somehow speech (no, that’s not what “money talks” means) in the Citizens United case.  Thus, whereas there’s a limit ($3500 at present: still a fair amount of money in Curmie’s world) on how much an individual can donate to a political candidate’s campaign, there are two loopholes: candidates can spend as much of their own money as they choose, thereby giving a significant advantage to the billionaire class, and contributions to Super PACs are unlimited.

Thus, Elon Musk can spend $446 million (so far) to buy the midterm elections.  No, those PACs technically can’t work directly with a candidate’s campaign, but if you really think, Gentle Reader, that all those often mendacious ads about what an awful person James Talarico is aren’t de facto encouraging you to vote for the utterly despicable Ken Paxton, then your 6th grade diploma ought to be revoked.  Curmie doesn’t care if the official buy comes from the Pedophile Protectors of America or whoever instead of Paxton’s campaign per se.

But, as we did with Rome, let’s look at that cost figure in context.  The median household income in the US in 2025 was $87,460.  In other words, it would take that family roughly 5100 years to make as much money as a South African-born asshat who almost certainly was in the country illegally back in the ‘90s has already spent just on this year’s elections.  In what universe is this an intelligent system instead of one designed to keep the billionaire class in power at the expense of the rest of us?

Of course, the most direct assault on that particular part of the status quo comes in the form of California’s Proposition 40, which would tax the assets of billionaires.  Whether this is a good idea or not in either political or pragmatic terms is open for debate.  What isn’t is that a one-time 5% tax on a billion dollars would have literally no appreciable effect on the day-to-day life of the folks footing the bill were the measure to pass (it almost certainly won’t, by the way).  The idea that someone might have to struggle by on a mere $950,000,000 (at least!) in assets does not send shivers up Curmie’s spine.  He’s pretty sure those folks could still afford to Supersize their Big Mac combo meal if they wanted to.

Looked at a different way: there’s been over $140,000,000 spent on the campaign to defeat this referendum.  That’s a fair amount of money in Curmie’s neighborhood, and he suspects that it is in yours, too, Gentle Reader.  Even if all that money came from a single billionaire worth “only” a single billion, that poor, destitute creature would somehow have to make do on a mere $860 million, or roughly what the median family would take almost 10,000 years to accumulate even if they had literally no expenses.  Curmie’s heart bleeds for them.

This is where Curmie calls upon the time-honored modifiers aligned with arguments that begin with the words “not all…”  There are some exceptions to "billionaires are assholes": Melinda Gates and Taylor Swift both get a pass, for example.  One suspects a handful of others ought to, as well.  But not the majority. Those folks adopted most of the Marcus Aemilius Scaurus playbook… all but the actually providing literally anything in return part.  Curmie does not advocate eating the rich, however.  They’d be put to much better use as fertilizer, along with the other kinds of shit.