Volume 3 of the monumental Story of Civilization, CAESAR AND CHRIST depicts the rise of Rome from a crossroads town to empire. The world’s first republic, Rome spread its civilization over the Mediterranean and western European world.
The Pax Romana broke some heads. Jews felt the scourge in Judea, where Jesus of Nazareth met a dissident’s death. His agony foreshadowed the Empire’s over the next few centuries. — Book promo @ goodreads.com
Does this history rhyme with what has been happening in the West during the past 100 years?
Rome was becoming not the industrial or commercial, but the financial and political, center of the white man’s world. Equipped with such means, the Roman patriciate and upper middle class passed with impressive speed from stoic simplicity to reckless luxury; the lifetime of Cato (234-149) saw the transformation almost completed. Houses became larger as families became smaller; furniture grew lavish in a race for conspicuous expense; great sums were paid for Babylonian rugs, for couches inlaid with ivory, silver, or gold; precious stones and metals shone on tables and chairs, on the bodies of women, on the harness of horses. As physical exertion diminished and wealth expanded, paid a thousand sesterces for the oysters served at a meal; another imported anchovies at 1600 sesterces a cask; another paid 1200 for a jar of caviar. Good chefs fetched enormous prices on the slave auction block. Drinking increased; goblets had to be large and preferably of gold; wine was less diluted, sometimes not at all. Sumptuary laws were passed by the Senate limiting expenditure on banquets and clothing, but as the senators ignored these regulations, no one bothered to observe them. “The citizens,” Cato mourned, “no longer listen to good advice, for the belly has no ears.” The individual became rebelliously conscious of himself as against the state, the son as against the father, the woman as against the man. A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within. The essential causes of Rome’s decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars.
Do you have any accomplishments at your last job?
I’m personally responsible for several new rules in the employee handbook.
Impressive! You wrote them?
That’s not what I said.
LOL