Plutarch, more thoughts

I just finished reading about Numa Pompilius, an early King of Rome.  He was supposedly a reluctant ruler, more interested in prayer and contemplation than power.  Supposedly.  Of course, that image just made him even more in demand as a ruler, so he got the throne.  Plutarch regards him as a pretty good King.  It's always hard to be sure with such a long remove and so few reliable records, but one thing he has going for him is that he didn't go to war, which makes him a standout among Roman rulers.  Also, he tried to do something about tribal divides, so he encouraged the Romans to organize themselves along lines of professional guilds and economic classes rather than ethnicity.  Today his embrace of economic class over ethnic identity would make him a right-winger because, hell, I dunno, the modern world is weird.

I've just started reading about Solon of Athens.  Plutarch pays a lot of attention to how Solon and others tried to address disparities between rich and poor.  When I grew up, I absorbed a worldview in which rule by the rich had been traditional (which, yeah, pretty much) and paying close attention to economic inequality was a very modern thing, with a Marxist legacy.  To read a Dead White Male (we'll leave aside whether modern racial labels make sense for ancient people of the Mediterranean, and just stipulate that classical writers are regarded as white and Western by many of their critics and proponents) who approves of rulers paying attention to economic class is...well, it's surprising.  In retrospect it's nothing shocking (poverty and wealth have always been salient to human experience) but the lessons imparted to children are generally the lessons of history's winners (i.e. rulers), and history's winners wanted us to think that paying lots of attention to class (outside of certain charitable avenues) is a modern aberration dating to Marx.  I don't know that anybody ever explicitly told me that older rulers wisely ignored economic inequality, but few told me that they did, and most (on both the left and right) implied that attention to class is a Marxist thing (and God knows Marxism was a shit show).

Until a few years ago I would have said that ignoring classical rulers' and writers' concerns with inequality was a right-wing project. I certainly don't recall any of the "We must pay more attention to our Western Cultural Heritage!" types banging on about it. They're from the political camp more interested in tax cuts, after all. Now, with identity foremost in the minds of many on the left (at least in my professional world), seeing a Classical writer (with a capital C, being a person with a big name) care about economic class and praise rulers who paid attention to the problem feels a bit transgressive. I feel like if I pointed this out too loudly, instead of being the guy who is pointing out truths that rich conservatives don't want you to hear, I'd be the guy saying "All lives matter" in response to a diversity campaign.

The world is weird right now.