Rome

In his “Bleat” today Lileks noted how many cultures over the years had taken Rome as their nominal model. We don’t seem to have quite that urge here in the US (novus ordo etc), and they seem to have finally lost it in Western Europe (though it is hard to tell from a distance, with me not being familiar with the literature). We’ve pretty well passed them on almost all counts by now.

Rome held the imagination for a long time, and it isn’t too hard to see why.

They were rich. They could build houses and cities and roads in almost an offhand way that couldn’t be equaled through the years of chaos, and even the years of the new nations until fairly recently.

They were great builders whose relics endured, so there were always plenty of reminders. In addition, most of those relics were buildings of peace. The intervening years had plenty of castles, but until those became merely quaint they were grim reminders of the ubiquity of war. In A Distant Mirror Tuchman calls the builders of the Coucy keep “the greatest builders since Rome.” They weren’t, really—they were specialists in castles, and wouldn’t have known how to cast a concrete harbor or build an aqueduct to save their souls. Roman engineering was surprisingly good for people who didn’t have calculus. (Or did they? So much has been lost, and Archimedes came so close, that I would not be shocked to learn that Greek and Roman math had gotten as far as Newton.)

After so many years it was easy to forget that most Roman battles had been in civil wars, and remember only that for centuries a man could travel unafraid, protected by unseen distant forts. That must have seemed a golden age to travelers later.

And it was easy to forget the many lapses from the ideal, and remember only the ideals of justice. Our fashion is to detail the failures and injustices, but perhaps the happy memory is more fair. Without trust you have little trade and many fortresses. Without at least an attempt at administering uniform justice there is no trust. That ideal, and the attempt to achieve it, seems to have created that necessary order and trust that lasted for a surprisingly long time in the face of bureaucratic ineptitude and draconian economic laws. Without the ability to make and enforce contracts you cannot build an enterprise much bigger than a family. They did.

Add to these the fact that, for whatever cynical political reasons, Rome tried to care for its poor, providing bread and water and sewers. Who had that luxury after it fell? The skeletons tell us that the rich and powerful during the centuries of chaos after the collapse lived worse than peons under Rome.

Nothing lasts forever, and I suspect that includes the current civilization of the West. In everything but longevity it has surpassed Rome. I wonder if it will pass the torch gracefully, or shatter and leave behind a thousand-year yearning for vanished glory.