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<\/a><\/p>\nStrange question.\u00a0 Firstly, the US is only 236 years old as a nation and the EU is only 19 years old in its current form.\u00a0 It’s a bit too soon to be predicting their total catastrophic collapse just because they have been going through a recession for a handful of years.That aside, the question implies that because entities (plural) that traced their political origin to the city state of Rome lasted for “1,300 years” this must mean “the Romans” were somehow “right” about something or other.\u00a0 Exactly what they must have been “right” about is not made clear, but I assume it’s something to do with how to run a state.<\/p>\n
My counter-question would be “which ‘Romans’?”<\/p>\n
Rome began as a city state ruled by a monarchy and an aristocracy.\u00a0 Were these the Romans who were “right”?\u00a0 Then the monarchy was overthrown and it became an aristocratic oligarchy with a limited form of republican democracy.\u00a0 How about those “Romans”?\u00a0 Then it became an increasingly corrupt plutocracy where rich aristocratic powerbrokers shared power while maintaining a fa\u00e7ade of republican democracy.\u00a0 Those “Romans”?\u00a0 Then it became an effective military dictatorship which paid lip service to a remnant of the earlier fa\u00e7ade of republican democracy?\u00a0 How about those “Romans”?\u00a0 Then it was ruled by a deeply unstable succession of military juntas.\u00a0 Those “Romans”? Then it was stabilised by another powerful military dictatorship, headed by an absolute monarch modelled on eastern, Persian-style rulers.\u00a0 Finally it dwindled into a succession of monarchs often manipulated by bureaucrats, many of whom were little more than puppets.\u00a0 Which of these “Romans” were the ones that were “right”?<\/p>\n
And “right” about what, exactly?<\/p>\n
Rome at its height (the “military dictatorship which paid lip service to a remnant of the earlier fa\u00e7ade of republican democracy” mentioned above) sustained itself by a constant series of aggressive wars of expansion and conquest, which brought vast quantities of booty and slaves into the Empire’s rather ramshackle economy and boosted tax revenues.\u00a0 This involved the devastation and slaughter of whole territories and the oppression and usually brutal subjugation of their population.\u00a0 The Roman historian Tacitus acknowledged that the Empire was little more than robbery and banditry on a vast scale when he put these words in the mouth of a British chieftain:Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium; atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant!<\/i><\/p>\n
(To plunder, butcher, steal, these things they misname Empire: they make a desolation and they call it peace!)<\/p>\n
Any resistance to Rome was ruthlessly crushed.\u00a0 In briefly mentioning a small uprising and its quashing, the historian Josephus casually mentions that the Roman governor of Syria ended the campaign by crucifying 2,000 people.\u00a0 During the siege of Jerusalem in 70 AD, anyone caught fleeing the city – men, women and children – were crucified in the sight of the walls.\u00a0 The soldiers were crucifying so many people each day that they got bored and so started trying to find new and amusing poses in which to attach them to the crosses.\u00a0 In the end they surrounded the city with such a vast sea of crucified corpses that they effectively deforested the hills and ran out of timber to make crosses from.<\/p>\n
The Roman economy was based on slave labour.\u00a0 The Empire was so dependent on slavery that any rebellion by slaves was the greatest fear of the Roman elite and slave uprisings were crushed with particular brutality.\u00a0 The Spartacus uprising ended with a line of crosses from Rome to Capua – a distance of 132 miles.\u00a0 The life of a slave depended on who bought them and where and how they lived.\u00a0 The body slave or scribe of a rich man could live a life that was very pleasant.\u00a0 But for every one of those there were thousands who toiled in misery in mines, quarries and foundries, usually living lives that were dangerous, expendable and short.\u00a0 A man once invented a mechanical way of hauling heavy marble columns and showed it to the Emperor Vespasian.\u00a0 He was impressed, but rejected the scheme on the grounds such mechanisms would leave the slaves with nothing to do.\u00a0 Once founded on slavery, the Romans had to keep their millions of slaves busy to keep them subjugated.<\/p>\n
The benefits of Roman civilisation came at a heavy price in taxation.\u00a0 Studies of peasants in ancient Judea show that they were economically crippled by the weight of the taxes they had to pay – this is why “tax collectors” are depicted as the scum of the earth in the gospels.\u00a0 Farmers who had previously been able to make a decent subsistence living as freeholders increasingly fell into debt and regularly had to become day labourers just to survive.<\/p>\n
The Roman attitude towards religion was tolerant (mostly), so long as your religion conformed to their idea of what was “proper”.\u00a0 This meant it had to be sufficiently like theirs or sufficiently “ancient”.\u00a0 Any other form of religion was considered superstitio <\/i>and was banned and could be ruthlessly crushed.\u00a0 The druids, the Bachanalians, the Manichaeians and the Christians all suffered savage persecution at the hands of Roman authorities.<\/p>\n
The gladiatorial games that were a major part of Roman society – Emperors kept the people happy with “bread and circuses” – were not just entertainments but statements about Roman dominance.\u00a0 Animals and people were brought into arenas from distant lands to die as a way of demonstrating the power and reach of the Roman domain.\u00a0 The idea that a strong people should enjoy seeing blood shed was also a key part of the thinking behind gladiator displays, even if they were not all to the death.<\/p>\n
So was this culture of plunder, slavery, oppression, subjugation, colonial domination, persecution, murder and death what the Romans were “right” about?\u00a0 And is the question really implying that somehow this (to us) rather vile and murderous kind of regime would be a recipe for stability?\u00a0 Because that strikes me as weird and disturbing.\u00a0 Misty-eyed, romantic images of the Roman Empire as a nice place with shiny buildings and wise rulers reigning over a happy and stable domain of merry peasants crumbles at the first exposure to a detailed study of history.\u00a0 It wasn’t like that at all.<\/p>\n
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\nHarry Newton who eyes a stockmarket suddenly seriously being affected by the drop in Euro — making it far harder for U.S. companies to export. Hence the decline in the market value, today. Don’t look at today’s ticker. Go for a walk. Play tennis. Take your spouse to lunch.<\/p>\n