The best defence against conspiracies, it would seem from both Livy and Tacitus, is fortune, an irrefutable force impervious to contradiction. Yet, it is hollow comfort to concede that the powder keg of contingency is doused by something so intractable as luck. When our Roman sources are unable to claim a world free from conspiracies, such crafted apprehension is a cautionary tale that aims to govern the shadowy territory between the insecurity of a world vulnerable to absurdism and the reassurance of a world governed by the invisible and therefore undeniable (if unprovable) forces of conspiracy.
V. Pagán – ‘Conspiracy theories in the Roman Empire’, in Paranoia within Reason: A Casebook on Conspiracy as Explanation (1999), p. 533
In spite of the copious supply of fuel, heat and oxygen necessary to ignite a fire, it was believable that Nero started it for his own purposes. Rather than admit a frightening truth, that Rome was vulnerable, it was easier to accept that Nero instigated the fire. It was easier to fear tyranny than contingency.
Ibid., p. 538
Whether Nero or the Christians, a conspiracy theory that explains the cause of the fire seduces because it is a radical counter-thesis to chance as an epistemic artefact of causality. It works because it explains (slightly) better than what Denis Feeney calls the ‘portentious arithmetic’ (Feeney, D. (2007) Caesar’s calendar: ancient time and the beginning of history, Berkeley: University of California Press: 106) that Tacitus holds in disdain:
There were those who noted the start of this conflagration arose on the fourteenth day before the Kalends of Sextilis, on which the Senones too ignited and captured the City; others have gone to such trouble as to total the same number of years, months and days between each of these conflagrations.
[…] Between the infamous sack of Rome in 390 B.C.E. by the Senones and the fire of 64 C.E., there had passed 418 years, 418 months and 418 days. Such a metaphysical explanation appeals because it allows the Romans to project evil on the conspirators without direct interaction that would result in moral contamination.The seemingly objective mathematical facts confine the evil and prevent good citizens from being directly allied with the conspirators (on ‘metaphysical’ conspiracy theories, see Butter, M. (2014) Plots, designs, and schemes: American conspiracy theories from the Puritans to the present, Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter: 55).
Mark Fenster describes the appeal of eschatology and millennialism, the theological belief in the end of human history and the return of Christ that inaugurates a glorious age lasting 1000 years (Fenster, M. (2008) Conspiracy theories: secrecy and power in American culture, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 197). Such a belief appeals because it is an accessible narrative frame that explains the past, present and future, and this kind of thinking is a form of historiography that articulates and circulates a method of historical interpretation, a general theory of historical agency and an underlying conceptual structure that makes human history intelligible. It is an actively resistant cultural practice that challenges explanations of historical actions, agents and forces. In such an interpretive system, even the most negligible detail can signify consequences of great import.
Ibid., p. 539
Conspiracy theory is most virulent when it promises to dismantle the forces of chaos and pointlessness in the world, and in this we may have more in common with the ancient Romans than we may wish to acknowledge.
Ibid., p. 540
См. также Ф. Кермодъ о случайномъ въ поэтикѣ.
Все это стоитъ учитывать, изслѣдуя конспирологическія теоріи об эпидеміи коронавируса.