kenshiroIT
02-22-2006, 01:21 PM
Hi to yall I found this interesting article on the web (look at the link below) wery wery nice.
enjoy!
The Lessons of the Roman Empire for America Today
by J. Rufus Fears, Ph.D.
http://www.heritage.org/Research/Pol...ophy/hl917.cfm
December 19, 2005
I am honored to give a lecture named after Russell Kirk, who told us to ponder the permanent things, such as history and human nature. It is about human nature and history that I want to speak to you this afternoon.
We are on patrol today in Iraq. Men and women of the United States armed forces in armored vehicles patrol the streets of Baghdad. They pass in the way of so many who have come before them: the Egyptian charioteers of Ramses II, the Macedonian phalanx of Alexander the Great, the Roman legionnaires of Cae*sar and Trajan, the Crusaders of Richard the Lion-Hearted, the legionnaires of Napoleon, the Camel Corps of Lawrence of Arabia.
All of these have come through the Middle East. Many of them have come with the best of intentions, by their lights, to bring stability, even freedom to the Middle East. All have passed away. The Middle East has been the graveyard of empires.
In the course of history, we have come to take up that burden. We live in a time as momentous as that of the American Revolution, the Civil War, the days after Pearl Harbor. In each of these watersheds in our his*tory, we have not only taken up the burden, but we have advanced the cause of freedom.
In the American Revolution, we saw to it that a nation could be established under liberty and law. In the American Civil War, we purged ourselves of the great evil of slavery so that we could go on and become a model for the world. In World War II and the Cold War that followed, we advanced the cause of freedom so that today, more people live in free*dom than at any other time in history. That is the result of America bearing this burden.
I think that September 11 is just as important a date as Pearl Harbor, and we now advance into a new and dangerous era. Think of Winston Churchill when he said how Britain set out across unknown seas, through uncharted waters towards unknown shores, guided only by the beacon of freedom. We have another guide, and that is history and the les*sons of history. For the founders of our country, his*tory was the most important single discipline that every citizen of a free republic should study.
Historical Information vs. Historical Thought
I want to talk to you about historical thought. There is a great deal of historical knowledge around today. We are awash with books on history, massive biographies about historical figures. Information on history is much broader than ever before, but there is very little historical thought across both spectrums in the political world.
As Lord Acton said, historical thought is far more important than historical knowledge. Historical thought is using the lessons of history to under*stand the present and to make decisions for the future. In other words, it was by using history as an analytical tool and making use of the lessons of his*tory that our founders brought our Constitution into being.
Ponder the miracle of that Constitution. When it was drafted, we were 13 little republics struggling along the eastern seaboard. When George Wash*ington wanted to go somewhere, he went exactly the same way that Cicero did: He walked, he sailed, he rode a horse. If he wanted to send a message, it went the same way that Cicero sent one or Caesar sent one: by horse, by sail, by walking.
That same Constitution gives us liberty, law, and prosperity, though we are now the superpower of the world. We could sit down right now, and with your laptop you could correspond with the Antipodes of Australia. We live in a world of technology that would have amazed even Benjamin Franklin.
They were able to create this Constitution because they learned from history, and the history that was most instructive for them was the history of the Roman world, the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire. They crafted our Constitution to reflect the balanced constitution of the Roman Republic, with the sovereignty of the people guided by the wisdom of the Senate, with a powerful exec*utive in the form of the commander in chief, the consul. But they also understood, with the Romans, that no constitution, however good on paper, would work unless it was vitalized by civic virtue, by the willingness of each individual to sub*ordinate his own good to the good of the commu*nity as a whole. To use an old-fashioned word, patriotism must vitalize every constitution.
The founders hoped that, in America, we would see these virtues of ancient Rome, and they knew that under such a constitution the United States would grow into an empire. They already spoke of a rising empire of America. They hoped that Rome of the republic would be our enduring model, but they feared, and rightly so, that one day, perhaps today, our model would be Rome of the Caesars, Rome of the first and second centuries A.D. For Rome of the Caesars and the United States today are the only two absolute superpowers that have existed in history.
By an absolute superpower I mean a nation that is dominant militarily, politically, economically, and culturally. The United States is absolutely dominant militarily, politically, economically, and we dominate the world culturally. We may never produce a Beethoven or a Bach, a Goethe or a Shakespeare. That is not how our culture dominates. It is our music, our McDonald’s, our popular culture that spreads all over the globe. Look at a terrorist. He will be holding someone hostage while wearing sneak*ers, Mickey Mouse tee-shirt on, listening to terrible music and dreaming of a McDonald’s when this is all over. That is how our culture rules the world.
The Roman Empire: A Vast Superpower
The Roman Empire of the first and second cen*turies A.D. was just such a superpower. It stretched from the moors of Scotland out to the Tigris and Euphrates River valleys of Iraq today, and from the North Seas of Germany to the sands of the Sahara.
If you were going to take a trip through the Roman Empire in the second century A.D., you would start off in the United Kingdom, cross over to Belgium and Holland, through Germany and France, on down to Switzerland and Austria, and to Hungry and Roma*nia and Bulgaria, down through what was Yugoslavia and to Greece and then on to Turkey, through Syria, Lebanon, into Iraq, Jordan, Israel, Egypt. We would pass on into Libya, into Tunisia, Algeria, and up into Morocco and then on up into Spain.
If you were to take that journey today, even in the day of the euro, you would need to change your money at least a dozen times, you’d need a dozen visas, and there would be places you would not want to go. But in those days, one language—the language of Rome, Latin—carried you anywhere in that empire. Or it could be Greek, which was equally an official language of the empire.
With the Greek language, St. Paul could travel all over the eastern Mediterranean, preaching and talk*ing himself out of trouble, for there was also one set of laws that governed that vast empire. When St. Paul is arrested and the tribune gets ready to give him a beating, Paul says, “You can’t beat me; that is a violation of my civil rights as a Roman.” The tribune says, “Let me see your citizenship papers,” and Paul shows them to him, and the tribune says, “Where did you get those? How did you get them? They cost me a huge bribe to get to be a Roman citizen.” Then he’s worried that Paul is going to bring him up on charges of violating his civil rights.
So the law of Rome protects you all over this vast empire, and there is one currency, the currency of Rome. There is this vast geographical expanse and within it a peace and prosperity that many of those areas would not know again until the 20th centu*ry—and some of those areas still do not know today—under the immense majesty of the Roman Empire. It was a time so peaceful that the Roman historian Tacitus in the second century A.D. com*plained that there were no wars in his days, and thus he could not write about the glories the way that his predecessor Livy had been able to.
Presiding over all was the Roman emperor. He was the commander in chief. The office of emper*or—imperator means nothing but commander in chief—had evolved out of the executive power of the consul of the old republic, and the Roman Empire of the first and second century A.D. brought forth a series of leaders with few equals in history.
Whenever you’re talking about Rome, you must fight against the nonsense of a movie like Gladiator. You must fight against the nonsense of this program called Rome, some degraded spectacle on HBO.
Julius Caesar; Augustus; the grim and remorse*less Tiberius, who governed the provinces with fairness and justice; Vespasian; Titus, the darling of the Roman people; Nerva; Trajan; Hadrian; Antoni*nus Pius; and Marcus Aurelius—small wonder that Gibbon, who knew the history of Rome, wrote that if a person were to pick that one period in the his*tory of the human race when mankind was happi*est, he would, without hesitation, take that period of the second century A.D.
In addition, Rome had a small but efficient civil service that educated its members to this burden of governing with justice and with individual free*dom: men like Pliny the Elder and his nephew, Pliny the Younger, the finest kind of civil servant, and a bureaucracy so efficient and so capable that monstrosities like Caligula and Nero were nothing but a small blip on the scale of imperial progress and the guarantee of individual rights.
Three Components of Freedom
For the Romans understood that freedom really is an ideal of three components, which are not all mutually inclusive: national freedom, freedom from foreign domination; then political freedom, the freedom to vote and to choose your magistrates; and finally, individual freedom, the freedom to live as you choose as long as you harm no one else.
National freedom was largely extinguished under the Romans, and many said it was a good thing, for in the ancient world it had brought noth*ing but war and turmoil. Political liberty was more extended than has sometimes been thought, because the Romans believed in a decentralized form of government. The emperor made all the decisions for foreign policy, but there was a great deal of local self-control. But it was individual free*dom, the freedom to live as you choose, that had a guarantee and extension under the Roman emper*ors that it had never had before under the old free city-states of Greece and the Roman Republic.
All of this was guarded by one of the best and one of the most cost-efficient armies in history—360,000 Roman soldiers guarded this vast frontier. The empire was connected by a superb network of mag*nificent Roman roads that you can still travel over today. In Rome you can see a bridge built in 63 B.C. that still carries traffic. All over that empire, every day, pure water was brought through aqueducts that gave the ordinary Roman a larger supply of fresh pure drinking water, with all that means for hygiene, than an inhabitant of Chicago or Paris had in 1920s.
And for all of this the ordinary Roman worked only two days a year to pay his taxes, because the emperors understood that with the money left in the hands of the individuals, it was then invested.
This brought prosperity under a free market economy and an economic unity that the Mediter*ranean world would not see again until our own day. Cities from London in Britannia, Pergamum in Asia Minor, Alexandria in Egypt, Cologne in Ger*many became flourishing centers of trade. If you were redecorating your house in Rome, you could have marble cut in Egypt, Thessaly in Greece, and Numidia in North Africa shipped to your house and installed in a matter of months.
It was a time of social mobility. You could begin life as a slave, purchase your freedom, and go on to become a billionaire by the standards of the day. It was also an age of cultural diversity. The Roman emperors believed that it was part of their mission to foster the culture of others. So Roman emperors built temples to the gods of Gaul, to the gods of Egypt—in fact, most of the great temples you see today as you go up the Nile are results of the Roman age in Egypt. The Roman emperor was wor*shipped as Pharaoh by the people of Egypt. At the same time, they believed that every nation, every empire must be bound together by a common set of cultural values founded in religion.
Their common set of cultural values was the her*itage of classical Greece, and Rome became the bearer of the culture and civilization of Greece. The plays of Euripides and Sophocles were performed in the theatres of Spain and Pompeii to audiences which could understand them put on in the origi*nal Greek. Thucydides became the model for the historian Tacitus, even as Herodotus had been the model for the historian Livy. The sculptures of clas*sical Greece informed and shaped the sculptures of the Roman Empire, even as the Pantheon was built to portray new spiritual values but building upon the great architectural legacy in Greece.
The Romans believed there must be an imperial divinity, Jupiter Optimus Maximus, the supreme god who had given an empire to the Roman people. His temple decorated the forum of every Roman city throughout that vast empire. To honor the gods of Rome, by the year 212 A.D., every freeborn inhabitant of the Roman Empire became a citizen, protected by the laws of Rome, for it was also an age of creativity and innovation in which the cul*tural foundations for the next thousand years of European civilization were laid.
In architecture, the Pantheon, designed by the Emperor Hadrian—warrior, administrator, archi*tect, poet—expressed in concrete the new concept of monotheism, of one god who governs the entire universe the way one emperor governs the world. There in the Pantheon, with its use of space to con*vey a mystical religious experience, was laid the foundation for the Gothic cathedrals of medieval Europe or Hagia Sophia in Constantinople.
In narrative art, the column of Trajan, built to celebrate his victories over the Dacians in 105 and 106, laid the foundation for 1,000 years of Chris*tian art in which, for those who could not read, the narrative of divine achievement and of virtue and salvation was laid out in pictures.
In science, it was the age of Galen, whose text*books would still be the basis of European medical education in the 15th century. It was the age of Ptolemy, who drew his map of the world as he knew it. Ptolemy’s calculations were slightly off, and he showed that China was closer to Europe than it really was; and poring over that map, Chris*topher Columbus came to the conclusion that he could sail to the West and come to China.
It was the age of spirituality in which, from emperor down to peasant in the field, the soul became the prime concern. It was the age in which monotheism began to grow and develop and cults of “Savior Gods” arose and individual salvation became the central concern. It was the age which would give birth to both, ultimately, Islam and Christianity.
And it was the age in which Roman law laid the foundation for the system of jurisprudence that still governs half the world. Roman law was the creation of an earlier republic now refined for a world empire. This was the age of Roman jurists like Ulpi*an, who founded the law of this empire on the ide*als of natural law, that all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain unalien*able rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That was jus naturale, the law of God based upon absolute right and wrong. It was their job as jurists, and then as practical judges, to translate that into the jus gentium, the law of mankind, or into the jus civile, the law of the indi*vidual empire of Rome; but its foundation was still the ideal: that all men are created equal.
Rome, Germany, and the Middle East
This was the creativity of the Roman Empire in this age of individual freedom and prosperity. For two centuries it achieved its goal, but it would ulti*mately decline and fall, and the question is, why? Historical events come about because of human decisions that are made, and the Romans failed to solve two critical issues of foreign policy: the Mid*dle East and Central Europe.
The Romans began their intervention in the Mid*dle East in the second century B.C. They came first out of a sense of self-defense: to bring order and stability to that region. They then became enmeshed in the politics of the region, and by the first century B.C., they attempted to establish client states based upon fundamental Roman institutions including a degree of political liberty. They then found themselves drawn into military occupation and then into direct rule until, by the second cen*tury A.D., almost the entire Middle East was under Roman direct annexation.
But there was still the problem of Iran. That vast empire was basically passive as long as it was left alone by the Romans, but Julius Caesar had a solu*tion for Parthia, for the empire of Iran, and it was conquest. In 44 B.C., he was planning the expedi*tion, first to conquer Parthia and then to swing back through the Black Sea region and conquer and annex all the Germanic tribes.
He was assassinated, and his successor, his adopted son Augustus, perhaps the shrewdest statesman ever to live, decided that Parthia was too much for the Romans to absorb. He came up with an exit strategy by which the Parthians and the Romans would recognize spheres of influence, and Iran stayed outside of the Roman domination.
But the Middle East became a quagmire for the Romans—civil war in Judea, trouble in Egypt— and the Romans poured in more and more of their treasure and stretched the limits of their army as far as they could be stretched. It became a constant drain, and, more than that, it became a drain upon the focus of the emperors. As a result, they neglect*ed Central Europe. Again, by a decision made by Augustus, the Romans failed to absorb the Ger*manic tribes, divided into numerous ethnic groups but all ferocious warriors and fiercely independent.
Then the imponderable happened.
In the third century A.D., Iran changed from a passive to a powerfully offensive nation under a revitalized religion, a monotheist religion, the wor*ship of Ahura Mazda, the Lord of Truth, the reli*gion that had once been prophesied by Zoroaster. Iran began to sweep into the frontiers of the Roman Empire, which were too stretched in terms of its military and other commitments. As a result, the Persian forces swept right through the fairest prov*inces of the Roman East. At the same time, the Ger*manic tribes formed new federations and coalitions and swept into the Roman Empire in the West, including Gaul and Britain.
Rome recovered from this crisis, but in a form that left it utterly different than before. It had once rested upon the back of a strong and vigorous and loyal middle class. Now every aspect of Roman society became rigid, formalized. The army became ever larger, ever more inefficient; the bureaucracy became ever larger to collect ever more taxes; and the very spirit and, ultimately, the loyalty of the middle class was destroyed. Finally, in the seventh century A.D. under the banners of Islam, the East swept all the way into Spain. In Italy, barbarian German chieftains sat in the half-ruined palaces of the Caesars.
enjoy!
The Lessons of the Roman Empire for America Today
by J. Rufus Fears, Ph.D.
http://www.heritage.org/Research/Pol...ophy/hl917.cfm
December 19, 2005
I am honored to give a lecture named after Russell Kirk, who told us to ponder the permanent things, such as history and human nature. It is about human nature and history that I want to speak to you this afternoon.
We are on patrol today in Iraq. Men and women of the United States armed forces in armored vehicles patrol the streets of Baghdad. They pass in the way of so many who have come before them: the Egyptian charioteers of Ramses II, the Macedonian phalanx of Alexander the Great, the Roman legionnaires of Cae*sar and Trajan, the Crusaders of Richard the Lion-Hearted, the legionnaires of Napoleon, the Camel Corps of Lawrence of Arabia.
All of these have come through the Middle East. Many of them have come with the best of intentions, by their lights, to bring stability, even freedom to the Middle East. All have passed away. The Middle East has been the graveyard of empires.
In the course of history, we have come to take up that burden. We live in a time as momentous as that of the American Revolution, the Civil War, the days after Pearl Harbor. In each of these watersheds in our his*tory, we have not only taken up the burden, but we have advanced the cause of freedom.
In the American Revolution, we saw to it that a nation could be established under liberty and law. In the American Civil War, we purged ourselves of the great evil of slavery so that we could go on and become a model for the world. In World War II and the Cold War that followed, we advanced the cause of freedom so that today, more people live in free*dom than at any other time in history. That is the result of America bearing this burden.
I think that September 11 is just as important a date as Pearl Harbor, and we now advance into a new and dangerous era. Think of Winston Churchill when he said how Britain set out across unknown seas, through uncharted waters towards unknown shores, guided only by the beacon of freedom. We have another guide, and that is history and the les*sons of history. For the founders of our country, his*tory was the most important single discipline that every citizen of a free republic should study.
Historical Information vs. Historical Thought
I want to talk to you about historical thought. There is a great deal of historical knowledge around today. We are awash with books on history, massive biographies about historical figures. Information on history is much broader than ever before, but there is very little historical thought across both spectrums in the political world.
As Lord Acton said, historical thought is far more important than historical knowledge. Historical thought is using the lessons of history to under*stand the present and to make decisions for the future. In other words, it was by using history as an analytical tool and making use of the lessons of his*tory that our founders brought our Constitution into being.
Ponder the miracle of that Constitution. When it was drafted, we were 13 little republics struggling along the eastern seaboard. When George Wash*ington wanted to go somewhere, he went exactly the same way that Cicero did: He walked, he sailed, he rode a horse. If he wanted to send a message, it went the same way that Cicero sent one or Caesar sent one: by horse, by sail, by walking.
That same Constitution gives us liberty, law, and prosperity, though we are now the superpower of the world. We could sit down right now, and with your laptop you could correspond with the Antipodes of Australia. We live in a world of technology that would have amazed even Benjamin Franklin.
They were able to create this Constitution because they learned from history, and the history that was most instructive for them was the history of the Roman world, the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire. They crafted our Constitution to reflect the balanced constitution of the Roman Republic, with the sovereignty of the people guided by the wisdom of the Senate, with a powerful exec*utive in the form of the commander in chief, the consul. But they also understood, with the Romans, that no constitution, however good on paper, would work unless it was vitalized by civic virtue, by the willingness of each individual to sub*ordinate his own good to the good of the commu*nity as a whole. To use an old-fashioned word, patriotism must vitalize every constitution.
The founders hoped that, in America, we would see these virtues of ancient Rome, and they knew that under such a constitution the United States would grow into an empire. They already spoke of a rising empire of America. They hoped that Rome of the republic would be our enduring model, but they feared, and rightly so, that one day, perhaps today, our model would be Rome of the Caesars, Rome of the first and second centuries A.D. For Rome of the Caesars and the United States today are the only two absolute superpowers that have existed in history.
By an absolute superpower I mean a nation that is dominant militarily, politically, economically, and culturally. The United States is absolutely dominant militarily, politically, economically, and we dominate the world culturally. We may never produce a Beethoven or a Bach, a Goethe or a Shakespeare. That is not how our culture dominates. It is our music, our McDonald’s, our popular culture that spreads all over the globe. Look at a terrorist. He will be holding someone hostage while wearing sneak*ers, Mickey Mouse tee-shirt on, listening to terrible music and dreaming of a McDonald’s when this is all over. That is how our culture rules the world.
The Roman Empire: A Vast Superpower
The Roman Empire of the first and second cen*turies A.D. was just such a superpower. It stretched from the moors of Scotland out to the Tigris and Euphrates River valleys of Iraq today, and from the North Seas of Germany to the sands of the Sahara.
If you were going to take a trip through the Roman Empire in the second century A.D., you would start off in the United Kingdom, cross over to Belgium and Holland, through Germany and France, on down to Switzerland and Austria, and to Hungry and Roma*nia and Bulgaria, down through what was Yugoslavia and to Greece and then on to Turkey, through Syria, Lebanon, into Iraq, Jordan, Israel, Egypt. We would pass on into Libya, into Tunisia, Algeria, and up into Morocco and then on up into Spain.
If you were to take that journey today, even in the day of the euro, you would need to change your money at least a dozen times, you’d need a dozen visas, and there would be places you would not want to go. But in those days, one language—the language of Rome, Latin—carried you anywhere in that empire. Or it could be Greek, which was equally an official language of the empire.
With the Greek language, St. Paul could travel all over the eastern Mediterranean, preaching and talk*ing himself out of trouble, for there was also one set of laws that governed that vast empire. When St. Paul is arrested and the tribune gets ready to give him a beating, Paul says, “You can’t beat me; that is a violation of my civil rights as a Roman.” The tribune says, “Let me see your citizenship papers,” and Paul shows them to him, and the tribune says, “Where did you get those? How did you get them? They cost me a huge bribe to get to be a Roman citizen.” Then he’s worried that Paul is going to bring him up on charges of violating his civil rights.
So the law of Rome protects you all over this vast empire, and there is one currency, the currency of Rome. There is this vast geographical expanse and within it a peace and prosperity that many of those areas would not know again until the 20th centu*ry—and some of those areas still do not know today—under the immense majesty of the Roman Empire. It was a time so peaceful that the Roman historian Tacitus in the second century A.D. com*plained that there were no wars in his days, and thus he could not write about the glories the way that his predecessor Livy had been able to.
Presiding over all was the Roman emperor. He was the commander in chief. The office of emper*or—imperator means nothing but commander in chief—had evolved out of the executive power of the consul of the old republic, and the Roman Empire of the first and second century A.D. brought forth a series of leaders with few equals in history.
Whenever you’re talking about Rome, you must fight against the nonsense of a movie like Gladiator. You must fight against the nonsense of this program called Rome, some degraded spectacle on HBO.
Julius Caesar; Augustus; the grim and remorse*less Tiberius, who governed the provinces with fairness and justice; Vespasian; Titus, the darling of the Roman people; Nerva; Trajan; Hadrian; Antoni*nus Pius; and Marcus Aurelius—small wonder that Gibbon, who knew the history of Rome, wrote that if a person were to pick that one period in the his*tory of the human race when mankind was happi*est, he would, without hesitation, take that period of the second century A.D.
In addition, Rome had a small but efficient civil service that educated its members to this burden of governing with justice and with individual free*dom: men like Pliny the Elder and his nephew, Pliny the Younger, the finest kind of civil servant, and a bureaucracy so efficient and so capable that monstrosities like Caligula and Nero were nothing but a small blip on the scale of imperial progress and the guarantee of individual rights.
Three Components of Freedom
For the Romans understood that freedom really is an ideal of three components, which are not all mutually inclusive: national freedom, freedom from foreign domination; then political freedom, the freedom to vote and to choose your magistrates; and finally, individual freedom, the freedom to live as you choose as long as you harm no one else.
National freedom was largely extinguished under the Romans, and many said it was a good thing, for in the ancient world it had brought noth*ing but war and turmoil. Political liberty was more extended than has sometimes been thought, because the Romans believed in a decentralized form of government. The emperor made all the decisions for foreign policy, but there was a great deal of local self-control. But it was individual free*dom, the freedom to live as you choose, that had a guarantee and extension under the Roman emper*ors that it had never had before under the old free city-states of Greece and the Roman Republic.
All of this was guarded by one of the best and one of the most cost-efficient armies in history—360,000 Roman soldiers guarded this vast frontier. The empire was connected by a superb network of mag*nificent Roman roads that you can still travel over today. In Rome you can see a bridge built in 63 B.C. that still carries traffic. All over that empire, every day, pure water was brought through aqueducts that gave the ordinary Roman a larger supply of fresh pure drinking water, with all that means for hygiene, than an inhabitant of Chicago or Paris had in 1920s.
And for all of this the ordinary Roman worked only two days a year to pay his taxes, because the emperors understood that with the money left in the hands of the individuals, it was then invested.
This brought prosperity under a free market economy and an economic unity that the Mediter*ranean world would not see again until our own day. Cities from London in Britannia, Pergamum in Asia Minor, Alexandria in Egypt, Cologne in Ger*many became flourishing centers of trade. If you were redecorating your house in Rome, you could have marble cut in Egypt, Thessaly in Greece, and Numidia in North Africa shipped to your house and installed in a matter of months.
It was a time of social mobility. You could begin life as a slave, purchase your freedom, and go on to become a billionaire by the standards of the day. It was also an age of cultural diversity. The Roman emperors believed that it was part of their mission to foster the culture of others. So Roman emperors built temples to the gods of Gaul, to the gods of Egypt—in fact, most of the great temples you see today as you go up the Nile are results of the Roman age in Egypt. The Roman emperor was wor*shipped as Pharaoh by the people of Egypt. At the same time, they believed that every nation, every empire must be bound together by a common set of cultural values founded in religion.
Their common set of cultural values was the her*itage of classical Greece, and Rome became the bearer of the culture and civilization of Greece. The plays of Euripides and Sophocles were performed in the theatres of Spain and Pompeii to audiences which could understand them put on in the origi*nal Greek. Thucydides became the model for the historian Tacitus, even as Herodotus had been the model for the historian Livy. The sculptures of clas*sical Greece informed and shaped the sculptures of the Roman Empire, even as the Pantheon was built to portray new spiritual values but building upon the great architectural legacy in Greece.
The Romans believed there must be an imperial divinity, Jupiter Optimus Maximus, the supreme god who had given an empire to the Roman people. His temple decorated the forum of every Roman city throughout that vast empire. To honor the gods of Rome, by the year 212 A.D., every freeborn inhabitant of the Roman Empire became a citizen, protected by the laws of Rome, for it was also an age of creativity and innovation in which the cul*tural foundations for the next thousand years of European civilization were laid.
In architecture, the Pantheon, designed by the Emperor Hadrian—warrior, administrator, archi*tect, poet—expressed in concrete the new concept of monotheism, of one god who governs the entire universe the way one emperor governs the world. There in the Pantheon, with its use of space to con*vey a mystical religious experience, was laid the foundation for the Gothic cathedrals of medieval Europe or Hagia Sophia in Constantinople.
In narrative art, the column of Trajan, built to celebrate his victories over the Dacians in 105 and 106, laid the foundation for 1,000 years of Chris*tian art in which, for those who could not read, the narrative of divine achievement and of virtue and salvation was laid out in pictures.
In science, it was the age of Galen, whose text*books would still be the basis of European medical education in the 15th century. It was the age of Ptolemy, who drew his map of the world as he knew it. Ptolemy’s calculations were slightly off, and he showed that China was closer to Europe than it really was; and poring over that map, Chris*topher Columbus came to the conclusion that he could sail to the West and come to China.
It was the age of spirituality in which, from emperor down to peasant in the field, the soul became the prime concern. It was the age in which monotheism began to grow and develop and cults of “Savior Gods” arose and individual salvation became the central concern. It was the age which would give birth to both, ultimately, Islam and Christianity.
And it was the age in which Roman law laid the foundation for the system of jurisprudence that still governs half the world. Roman law was the creation of an earlier republic now refined for a world empire. This was the age of Roman jurists like Ulpi*an, who founded the law of this empire on the ide*als of natural law, that all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain unalien*able rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That was jus naturale, the law of God based upon absolute right and wrong. It was their job as jurists, and then as practical judges, to translate that into the jus gentium, the law of mankind, or into the jus civile, the law of the indi*vidual empire of Rome; but its foundation was still the ideal: that all men are created equal.
Rome, Germany, and the Middle East
This was the creativity of the Roman Empire in this age of individual freedom and prosperity. For two centuries it achieved its goal, but it would ulti*mately decline and fall, and the question is, why? Historical events come about because of human decisions that are made, and the Romans failed to solve two critical issues of foreign policy: the Mid*dle East and Central Europe.
The Romans began their intervention in the Mid*dle East in the second century B.C. They came first out of a sense of self-defense: to bring order and stability to that region. They then became enmeshed in the politics of the region, and by the first century B.C., they attempted to establish client states based upon fundamental Roman institutions including a degree of political liberty. They then found themselves drawn into military occupation and then into direct rule until, by the second cen*tury A.D., almost the entire Middle East was under Roman direct annexation.
But there was still the problem of Iran. That vast empire was basically passive as long as it was left alone by the Romans, but Julius Caesar had a solu*tion for Parthia, for the empire of Iran, and it was conquest. In 44 B.C., he was planning the expedi*tion, first to conquer Parthia and then to swing back through the Black Sea region and conquer and annex all the Germanic tribes.
He was assassinated, and his successor, his adopted son Augustus, perhaps the shrewdest statesman ever to live, decided that Parthia was too much for the Romans to absorb. He came up with an exit strategy by which the Parthians and the Romans would recognize spheres of influence, and Iran stayed outside of the Roman domination.
But the Middle East became a quagmire for the Romans—civil war in Judea, trouble in Egypt— and the Romans poured in more and more of their treasure and stretched the limits of their army as far as they could be stretched. It became a constant drain, and, more than that, it became a drain upon the focus of the emperors. As a result, they neglect*ed Central Europe. Again, by a decision made by Augustus, the Romans failed to absorb the Ger*manic tribes, divided into numerous ethnic groups but all ferocious warriors and fiercely independent.
Then the imponderable happened.
In the third century A.D., Iran changed from a passive to a powerfully offensive nation under a revitalized religion, a monotheist religion, the wor*ship of Ahura Mazda, the Lord of Truth, the reli*gion that had once been prophesied by Zoroaster. Iran began to sweep into the frontiers of the Roman Empire, which were too stretched in terms of its military and other commitments. As a result, the Persian forces swept right through the fairest prov*inces of the Roman East. At the same time, the Ger*manic tribes formed new federations and coalitions and swept into the Roman Empire in the West, including Gaul and Britain.
Rome recovered from this crisis, but in a form that left it utterly different than before. It had once rested upon the back of a strong and vigorous and loyal middle class. Now every aspect of Roman society became rigid, formalized. The army became ever larger, ever more inefficient; the bureaucracy became ever larger to collect ever more taxes; and the very spirit and, ultimately, the loyalty of the middle class was destroyed. Finally, in the seventh century A.D. under the banners of Islam, the East swept all the way into Spain. In Italy, barbarian German chieftains sat in the half-ruined palaces of the Caesars.