Decline Of Rome Quotes

The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.

Strip back the beliefs pasted on by governesses, schools, and states, you find indelible truths at one's core. Rome'll decline and fall again, Cortés'll lay Tenochtitlán to waste again, and later, Ewing will sail again, Adrian'll be blown to pieces again, you and I'll sleep under the Corsican stars again, I'll come to Bruges again, fall in and out of love with Eva again, you'll read this letter again, the sun'll grow cold again. Nietzsche's gramophone record. When it ends, the Old One plays it again, for an eternity of eternities.

It was an inflexible maxim of Roman discipline that good soldier should dread his own officers far more than the enemy

You are dying. I see in you all the characteristic stigma of decay. I can prove to you that your great wealth and your great poverty, your capitalism and your socialism, your wars and your revolutions, your atheism and your ­pessimism and your cynicism, your immorality, your broken-down marriages, your birth-control, that is bleeding you from the bottom and killing you off at the top in your brains—I can prove to you that those were characteristic marks of the dying ages of ancient States—Alexandria and Greece and neurotic Rome.

Stories are bulls. Writers come of age full of vigor, and they feel the need to drive the old stories from the herd. One bull rules the herd awhile but then he loses his vigor and the young bulls take over. Stories are nations, empires. They can last as long as ancient Rome or as short as the Third Reich. Story-nations rise and decline. Governments change, trends rise, and they go on conquering their neighbors. Stories are people. I'm a story, you're a story . . . your father is a story. Our stories go in every direction, but sometimes, if we're lucky, our stories join into one, and for a while, we're less alone.

Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire said that the following five attributes marked Rome at its end: first, a mounting love of show and luxury (that is, affluence); second, a widening gap between the very rich and the very poor (this could be among countries in the family of nations as well as in a single nation); third, an obsession with sex; fourth, freakishness in the arts, masquerading as originality, and enthusiasms pretending to be creativity; fifth, an increased desire to live off the state. It all sounds so familiar. We have come a long road since our first chapter, and we are back in Rome.

Strip back the beliefs pasted on by governesses, schools, and states, you find indelible truths at one's core. Rome'll decline and fall again, Cortes'll lay Tenochtitlan to waste again, and later...the sun'll grow cold again. When it ends, the Old One plays it again, for an eternity of eternities.

The Rome he has been trained to serve, the Rome of Augustus and Germanicus, was gone. In its place stood Neronopolis, ruled by a megalomaniac brat.

...we can endure neither our vices nor the remedies needed to cure them.

Once the monarchy was abolished, a decree was passed that there would be no more kings in Rome.

Before bedtime the children wanted to play at the fall of Rome, which was their new favorite game. They joined hands and spun and declined and fell until they were dizzy, and then they rose and did it again.

Jefferson did not detail his objections, but he likely was irked by Montesquieu’s conclusion that a major cause of Rome’s decline was Epicurean thought.

In the second century of the Christian Æra, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind.

Resting on what's considered great has always been a recipe for decline. I remember touring Rome with a guide who pointed out one marvelous achievement after another of the first Roman emperor, Augustus. Augustus was said to have inherited a city of brick and left a city of marble, with twelve entrances on twelve hills. He built nearly a thousand glorious new structures - bridges, buildings, monuments, and aqueducts. As we marveled at the remnants of Augustus's grand designs, our guide exclaimed with pride that this era marked the pinnacle of Rome's greatness. What came next?' I asked. After an awkward silence, the guide said, 'Slow ruin.

What happened? It took Gibbon six volumes to describe the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, so I shan’t embark on that. But thinking about this almost incredible episode does tell one something about the nature of civilisation. It shows that however complex and solid it seems, it is actually quite fragile. It can be destroyed. 

What are its enemies?
 
Well, first of all fear — fear of war, fear of invasion, fear of plague and famine, that make it simply not worthwhile constructing things, or planting trees or even planning next year’s crops. And fear of the supernatural, which means that you daren’t question anything or change anything. The late antique world was full of meaningless rituals, mystery religions, that destroyed self-confidence. And then exhaustion, the feeling of hopelessness which can overtake people even with a high degree of material prosperity. 

There is a poem by the modern Greek poet, Cavafy, in which he imagines the people of an antique town like Alexandria waiting every day for the barbarians to come and sack the city. Finally the barbarians move off somewhere else and the city is saved; but the people are disappointed — it would have been better than nothing. Of course, civilisation requires a modicum of material prosperity—

What civilization needs:

confidence in the society in which one lives, belief in its philosophy, belief in its laws, and confidence in one’s own mental powers. The way in which the stones of the Pont du Gard are laid is not only a triumph of technical skill, but shows a vigorous belief in law and discipline. Vigour, energy, vitality: all the civilisations—or civilising epochs—have had a weight of energy behind them. People sometimes think that civilisation consists in fine sensibilities and good conversations and all that. These can be among the agreeable results of civilisation, but they are not what make a civilisation, and a society can have these amenities and yet be dead and rigid.

It seemed that out of every tear of a martyr new confessors were born, and that every groan on the arena found an echo in thousands of breasts. Caesar was swimming in blood, Rome and the whole pagan world was mad. But those who had had enough of transgression and madness, those who were trampled upon, those whose lives were misery and oppression, all the weighed down, all the sad, all the unfortunate, came to hear the wonderful tidings of God, who out of love for men had given Himself to be crucified and redeem their sins. When they found a God whom they could love, they had found that which the society of the time could not give any one, -- happiness and love.

The ultimate triumph of Christianity was aided by the internal drive within Roman paganism toward some kind of monotheism. By 150 A.D., whatever vitality had once existed in ancient polytheism had mostly declined, and the gods played little or no role in individual lives. The state temples to the old gods became civic centers rather than religious entities. "But paganism went about reforming itself. It drew upon the Alexandrian mystical form of Platonism, taught by Plotinus -- what we call Neoplatonism -- to conjure an image of the deity as a single spiritual fountain of life that fructifies the world. "This Neoplatonic monotheism became popular in aristocratic circles in fourth-century Rome and gave such renewed vitality to paganism that the triumph of Christianity had to be bolstered by state proscription of this latter-day monotheistic paganism. By 390, Roman paganism was almost as close to monotheism as was Christianity.

In the second century of the Christian Æra, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth,

What is it that Aristotle said: ‘Republics decline into democracies, and democracies degenerate into despotisms.’ We have approached that day.

the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth,

might perhaps be more conducive to the virtue, as well as happiness, of mankind, if all possessed the necessaries, and none the superfluities,

In reality, Rome had grown too big for lots of people to handle its vast affairs any longer by committee.  

The narrow policy of preserving, without any foreign mixture, the pure blood of the ancient citizens, had checked the fortune, and hastened the ruin, of Athens and Sparta. The aspiring genius of Rome sacrificed vanity to ambition, and deemed it more prudent, as well as honorable, to adopt virtue and merit for her own wheresoever they were found, among slaves or strangers, enemies or barbarians.

the history of Rome presents very few transactions of a similar nature; most of her wars having either been terminated by absolute conquest, or waged against barbarians ignorant of the use of letters.

During the age of Christ, of his apostles, and of their first disciples, the doctrine which they preached was confirmed by innumerable prodigies. The lame walked, the blind saw, the sick were healed, the dead were raised, daemons were expelled, and the laws of Nature were frequently suspended for the benefit of the church [...] But the sages of Greece and Rome turned aside from the awful spectacle, and, pursuing the ordinary occupations of life and study, appeared unconscious of any alterations in the moral or physical government of the world. Under the reign of Tiberius, the whole earth, or at least a celebrated province of the Roman empire, was involved in a preternatural darkness of three hours. Even this miraculous event, which ought to have excited the wonder, the curiosity, and the devotion of mankind, passed without notice in an age of science and history. It happened during the lifetime of Seneca and the elder Pliny, who must have experienced the immediate effects, or received the earliest intelligence, of the prodigy. Each of these philosophers, in a laborious work, has recorded all the great phenomena of Nature, earthquakes, meteors, comets, and eclipses, which his indefatigable curiosity could collect. Both the one and the other have omitted to mention the greatest phenomenon to which the mortal eye has been witness since the creation of the globe.

Carus, taking off a cap which he wore to conceal his baldness, assured the ambassadors, that, unless their master acknowledged the superiority of Rome, he would speedily render Persia as naked of trees as his own head was destitute of hair.

Lucius Sergius Catilina was an altogether more formidable opponent. He was one of a line of able and rebellious young aristocrats during the declining years of the Roman Republic who refused to settle down after early indiscretions and enter respectable politics as defenders of the status quo. They usually joined the populares. Sometimes they did so out of youthful idealism and intellectual conviction, but others were simply rebelling against family discipline. They often badly needed money.

A hung jury, however, suggests that any decline was not overwhelming; and, in common with most historians, I believe the empire was still very powerful at the end of the fourth century. Unfortunately, a series of disasters was soon to change things.

but it was reserved for Augustus to relinquish the ambitious design of subduing the whole earth, and to introduce a spirit of moderation into the public councils. Inclined to peace by his temper and situation, it was easy for him to discover that Rome, in her present exalted situation, had much less to hope than to fear from the chance of arms; and that, in the prosecution of remote wars, the undertaking became every day more difficult, the event more doubtful, and the possession more precarious, and less beneficial.

If our general wishes to lead us to the banks of the Tyber, we are prepared to trace out his camp. Whatsoever walls he has determined to level with the ground, our hands are ready to work the engines: nor shall we hesitate, should the name of the devoted city be Rome itself.

With the decline of Italian agriculture and the provision of subsidized corn for the urban masses in the capital, Sicily was Rome’s most important provider of cereals and it was essential to ensure stability of its supply and price. The oldest of Rome’s provinces, the island had been won from the Carthaginians in 241 and, as tribute, its communities were required to export gratis 10 percent of their corn harvest to Rome. If more was needed, it could be acquired by compulsory purchase. It was the Quaestors’ job to calculate the price and the quantity of extra corn to be bought.

The pilgrimage of Italy, which I now accomplished, had long been the object of my curious devotion. The passage of Mount Cenis, the regular streets of Turin, the Gothic cathedral of Milan, the scenery of the Boromean Islands, the marble palaces of Genoa, the beauties of Florence, the wonders of Rome, the curiosities of Naples, the galleries of Bologna, the singular aspect of Venice, the amphitheatre of Verona, and the Palladian architecture of Vicenza, are still present to my imagination. I read the Tuscan writers on the banks of the Arno; but my conversation was with the dead rather than the living, and the whole college of Cardinals was of less value in my eyes than the transfiguration of Raphael, the Apollo of the Vatican, or the massy greatness of the Coliseum. It was at Rome, on the fifteenth of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted fryars were singing Vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the City first started to my mind. After Rome has kindled and satisfied the enthusiasm of the Classic pilgrim, his curiosity for all meaner objects insensibly subsides.

Whoever has known the spiritual beauty of the Under­ground Church cannot be satisfied anymore with the emptiness of some Western churches. I suffer in the West more than I suffered in a Communist jail because now I see with my own eyes Western civilization dying. Oswald Spengler wrote in Decline of the West: You are dying. I see in you all the characteristic stigma of decay. I can prove that your great wealth and your great poverty, your capitalism and your socialism, your wars and your revolutions, your atheism and your ­pessimism and your cynicism, your immorality, your broken-down marriages, your birth-control, that is bleeding you from the bottom and killing you off at the top in your brains —can prove to you that there are characteristic marks of the dying ages of ancient states—Alexandria and Greece and neurotic Rome. This was written in 1926. Since then, democracy and civilization have

The provinces, long oppressed by the ministers of the republic, sighed for the government of a single person, who would be the master, not the accomplice, of those petty tyrants. The people of Rome, viewing, with a secret pleasure, the humiliation of the aristocracy, demanded only bread and public shows; and were supplied with both by the liberal hand of Augustus. The rich and polite Italians, who had almost universally embraced the philosophy of Epicurus, enjoyed the present blessings of ease and tranquillity, and suffered not the pleasing dream to be interrupted by the memory of their old tumultuous freedom.

The theologian,” says Gibbon, “may indulge the pleasing task of describing religion as she descended from heaven, arrayed in her native purity; a more melancholy duty is imposed upon the historian:— he must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption which she contracted in a long residence upon earth among a weak and degenerate race of beings.

The author called us to re-examine assumptions bequeathed to us from Greece and Rome. Just as a bridge built by the Roman Empire might have held up tolerably for centuries under foot traffic but crumble under the weight of a modern truck, the author cautions that classical thinking had limits exposed by contemporary events and certainly exposed by the modern world.

... I opened the door to a knock and found a ashen-faced messenger quailing at the prospect of facing an undead witch who was, as I shortly learned, the talk of Rome. The poor man thrust a package into my arms, declined any payment, and fled with such alacrity that I waited to make sure did not fall headfirst down the steps before stepping back inside my apartment.

I told her stories. They were only a sentence long, each one of them. That’s all I knew how to find. So I told her broken stories. The little pieces of broken stories I could find. I told her what I could. I told her that the Global Alliance had issued more warnings about the possibility of total war if their demands were not met. I told her that the Emperor Nero, from Rome, had a giant sea built where he could keep sea monsters and have naval battles staged for him. I told her that there had been rioting in malls all over America, and that no one knew why. I told her that the red-suited Santa Claus we know — the regular one? — was popularized by the Coca-Cola Company in the 1930s. I told her that the White House had not confirmed or denied reports that extensive bombing had started in major cities in South America. I told her, “There’s an ancient saying in Japan, that life is like walking from one side of infinite darkness to another, on a bridge of dreams. They say that we’re all crossing the bridge of dreams together. That there’s nothing more than that. Just us, on the bridge of dreams.

The provinces, long oppressed by the ministers of the republic, sighed for the government of a single person, who would be the master, not the accomplice, of those petty tyrants. The people of Rome, viewing, with a secret pleasure, the humiliation of the aristocracy, demanded only bread and public shows; and were supplied with both by the liberal hand of Augustus. The

As with Rome, the fall of Constantinople happened only after its rulers had started devaluing the currency, a process that historians believe began in the reign of Constantine IX Monomachos (1042–1055).8 Along with monetary decline came the fiscal, military, cultural, and spiritual decline of the Empire, as it trudged on with increasing crises until it was overtaken by the Ottomans in 1453.

One of the first Italians to give a name to the reawakened interest in Greek and Roman learning was the poet Petrarch, who announced early in the 1340s that poets and scholars were ready to lead the cities of Italy back to the glory days of Rome. Classical learning had declined, Petrarch insisted, into darkness and obscurity. Now was the time for that learning to be rediscovered: a rebirth, a Renaissance.

Rome’ll decline and fall again, Cortés’ll lay Tenochtitlán to waste again, and later, Ewing will sail again, Adrian’ll be blown to pieces again, you and I’ll sleep under Corsican stars again, I’ll come to Bruges again, fall in and out of love with Eva again, you’ll read this letter again, the sun’ll grow cold again. Nietzsche’s gramophone record. When it ends, the Old One plays it again, for an eternity of eternities.

A perpetual stream of strangers and provincials flowed into the capacious bosom of Rome. Whatever was strange or odious, whoever was guilty or suspected, might hope, in the obscurity of that immense capital, to elude the vigilance of the law. In such a various conflux of nations, every teacher, either of truth or of falsehood, every founder, whether of a virtuous or a criminal association, might easily multiply his disciples or accomplices.

The decision by the ruling elites in ancient Rome—dominated by a bloated military and a corrupt oligarchy, much like the United States—to strangle the vain and idiotic Emperor Commodus in his bath in the year 192 did not halt the growing chaos and precipitous decline of the Roman Empire. Commodus, like a number of late-Roman emperors, and like Trump, was incompetent and consumed by his own vanity. He commissioned innumerable statues of himself as Hercules and had little interest in governance. He used his position as head of state to make himself the star of his own ongoing public show. He fought victoriously as a gladiator in the arena in fixed bouts. Power for Commodus, as it is for Trump, was primarily about catering to his bottomless narcissism. He sold public offices to the ancient equivalents of Betsy DeVos and Steven Mnuchin. Commodus was replaced by the reformer Pertinax, the Bernie Sanders of his day, who attempted in vain to curb the power of the Praetorian Guards, the ancient version of the military-industrial complex. The Praetorian Guards assassinated Pertinax three months after he became emperor. The Guards then auctioned off his position to the highest bidder. The next emperor, Didius Julianus, lasted sixty-six days. There would be five emperors in AD 193, the year after the assassination of Commodus. Trump and our decaying empire have ominous historical precedents.

In the eighteenth century, with the growth of publishing and with the intellectual climate of the Enlightenment, there was a great demand for new historical writing. The greatest product of this was The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a massive six-volume work published between 1776 and 1788, precisely between the American Revolution and the French Revolution. The context is important, as the author Edward Gibbon was examining not only the greatness of Rome, but the forces which brought about its decay. ...... Gibbon's interpretation of history was controversial, especially in its examination of the growth of Christianity, but his accurate scholarship and engaging prose style have made The Decline and Fall the most enduring work of history in English. In the eighteenth century, history is seen as a branch of belles-lettres, and it subsumes within it scriptural authority on the one hand, and fictional narrative on the other. History is, in effect, the new secular authority of the Enlightenment, and comes to be a very wide-ranging category of writing.

Yorick's Used and Rare Books had a small storefront on Channing but a deep interior shaded by tall bookcases crammed with history, poetry, theology, antiquated anthologies. There was no open wall space to hang the framed prints for sale, so Hogarth's scenes of lust, pride, and debauchery leaned rakishly against piles of novels, folk tales, and literary theory. In the back room these piles were so tall and dusty that they took on a geological air, rising like stalagmites. Jess often felt her workplace was a secret mine or quarry where she could pry crystals from crevices and sweep precious jewels straight off the floor. As she tended crowded shelves, she opened one volume and then another, turning pages on the history of gardens, perusing Edna St. Vincent Millay: "We were very tired, were very merry, / We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry..." dipping into Gibbon: "The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay..." and old translations of Grimm's Fairy Tales: "They walked the whole day over meadows, fields, and stony places. And when it rained, the little sister said, 'Heaven and our hearts are weeping together...

Love affairs in a modern sense occurred in classical times only outside of official society. The shepherds whose happiness and woe in love is sung by Theocritos and Moschus, such as Daphnis and Chloë of Longos, all these were slaves who had no share in the state and in the daily sphere of the free citizen. Outside of slave circles we find love affairs only as products of disintegration of the sinking old world. Their objects are women who also are standing outside of official society, hetaerae that are either foreigners or liberated slaves: in Athens since the beginning of its decline, in Rome at the time of the emperors. If love affairs really occurred between free male and female citizens, it was only in the form of adultery.

After a decent resistance, the crafty tyrant submitted to the orders of the senate; and consented to receive the government of the provinces, and the general command of the Roman armies, under the well-known names of PROCONSUL and IMPERATOR.5 But he would receive them only for ten years. Even before the expiration of that period, he hoped that the wounds of civil discord would be completely healed, and that the republic, restored to its pristine health and vigour, would no longer require the dangerous interposition of so extraordinary a magistrate. The memory of this comedy, repeated several times during the life of Augustus, was preserved to the last ages of the empire, by the peculiar pomp with which the perpetual monarchs of Rome always solemnized the tenth years of their reign.

The ancient Romans built elaborate networks of pipes to deliver water where they wanted it to go. The networks were a marvel. But many of the pipes were made of lead, and the water carried the lead along with it. One school of thought regards this as part of the reason for the decline and fall of Rome: lead poisoning gradually took its toll, impairing the thought and judgment of many Romans, especially at the top. The theory is much disputed; perhaps it contains no truth. But as a metaphor it is irresistible. We have built networks for the delivery of information—the internet, and especially social media. These networks, too, are a marvel. But they also carry a kind of poison with them. The mind fed from those sources learns to subsist happily on quick reactions, easy certainties, one-liners, and rage. It craves confirmation and resents contradiction. Attention spans collapse; imbecility propagates, then seems normal, then is celebrated. The capacity for rational discourse between people who disagree gradually rots. I have a good deal more confidence in the lead-pipe theory of the internet, and its effect on our culture, than in the lead-pipe theory of the fall of Rome.

In any event, should you doubt that your knowledge of Western history is distorted by the work of these distinguished bigots, consider whether you believe any of the following statements: The Catholic Church motivated and actively participated in nearly two millennia of anti-Semitic violence, justifying it on grounds that the Jews were responsible for the Crucifixion, until the Vatican II Council was shamed into retracting that doctrine in 1965. But, the Church still has not made amends for the fact that Pope Pius XII is rightfully known as “Hitler’s Pope.” Only recently have we become aware of remarkably enlightened Christian gospels, long ago suppressed by narrow-minded Catholic prelates. Once in power as the official church of Rome, Christians quickly and brutally persecuted paganism out of existence. The fall of Rome and the ascendancy of the Church precipitated Europe’s decline into a millennium of ignorance and backwardness. These Dark Ages lasted until the Renaissance/Enlightenment, when secular scholars burst through the centuries of Catholic barriers against reason. Initiated by the pope, the Crusades were but the first bloody chapter in the history of unprovoked and brutal European colonialism. The Spanish Inquisition tortured and murdered huge numbers of innocent people for “imaginary” crimes, such as witchcraft and blasphemy. The Catholic Church feared and persecuted scientists, as the case of Galileo makes clear. Therefore, the Scientific “Revolution” occurred mainly in Protestant societies because only there could the Catholic Church not suppress independent thought. ► Being entirely comfortable with slavery, the Catholic Church did nothing to oppose its introduction in the New World nor to make it more humane. Until very recently, the Catholic view of the ideal state was summed up in the phrase, “The divine right of kings.” Consequently, the Church has bitterly resisted all efforts to establish more liberal governments, eagerly supporting dictators. It was the Protestant Reformation that broke the repressive Catholic grip on progress and ushered in capitalism, religious freedom, and the modern world. Each of these statements is part of the common culture, widely accepted and frequently repeated. But, each is false and many are the exact opposite of the truth! A chapter will be devoted to summarizing recent repetitions of each of these statements and to demonstrating that each is most certainly false.

The VCs were prolific. They talked like nobody I knew. Sometimes they talked their own book, but most days, they talked Ideas: how to foment enlightenment, how to apply microeconomic theories to complex social problems. The future of media and the decline of higher ed; cultural stagnation and the builder’s mind-set. They talked about how to find a good heuristic for generating more ideas, presumably to have more things to talk about. Despite their feverish advocacy of open markets, deregulation, and continuous innovation, the venture class could not be relied upon for nuanced defenses of capitalism. They sniped about the structural hypocrisy of criticizing capitalism from a smartphone, as if defending capitalism from a smartphone were not grotesque. They saw the world through a kaleidoscope of startups: If you want to eliminate economic inequality, the most effective way to do it would be to outlaw starting your own company, wrote the founder of the seed accelerator. Every vocal anti-capitalist person I’ve met is a failed entrepreneur, opined an angel investor. The SF Bay Area is like Rome or Athens in antiquity, posted a VC. Send your best scholars, learn from the masters and meet the other most eminent people in your generation, and then return home with the knowledge and networks you need. Did they know people could see them?

This worship of the sacred fire did not belong exclusively to the populations of Greece and Italy. We find it in the East. The Laws of Manu as they have come to us show us the religion of Brahma completely established, and even verging towards its decline; but they have preserved vestiges and remains of a religion still more ancient—that of the sacred fire—which the worship of Brahma had reduced to a secondary rank, but could not destroy. The Brahmin has his fire to keep night and day; every morning and every evening he feeds it with wood; but, as with the Greeks, this must be the wood of certain trees. As the Greeks and Italians offer it wine, the Hindu pours upon it a fermented liquor which he calls soma. Meals, too, are religious acts, and the rites are scrupulously described in the Laws of Manu. They address prayers to the fire, as in Greece; they offer it the first fruits of rice, butter, and honey. We read that “the Brahmin should not eat the rice of the new harvest without having offered the first fruits of it to the hearth-fire; for the sacred fire is greedy of grain, and when it is not honored it will devour the existence of the negligent Brahmin.” The Hindus, like the Greeks and the Romans, pictured the gods to themselves as greedy not only of honors and respect, but of food and drink. Man believed himself compelled to satisfy their hunger and thirst if he wished to avoid their wrath.

Tracing the career of the Teuton through mediaeval and modern history, we can find no possible excuse for denying his actual biological supremacy. In widely separated localities and under widely diverse conditions, his innate racial qualities have raised him to preeminence. There is no branch of modern civilization that is not of his making. As the power of the Roman empire declined, the Teuton sent down into Italy, Gaul, and Spain the re-vivifying elements which saved those countries from complete destruction. Though now largely lost in the mixed population, the Teutons are the true founders of all the so-called Latin states. Political and social vitality had fled from the old inhabitants; the Teuton only was creative and constructive. After the native elements absorbed the Teutonic invaders, the Latin civilizations declined tremendously, so that the France, Italy, and Spain of today bear every mark of national degeneracy. In the lands whose population is mainly Teutonic, we behold a striking proof of the qualities of the race. England and Germany are the supreme empires of the world, whilst the virile virtues of the Belgians have lately been demonstrated in a manner which will live forever in song and story. Switzerland and Holland are veritable synonyms for Liberty. The Scandinavians are immortalized by the exploits of the Vikings and Normans, whose conquests over man and Nature extended from the sun-baked shores of Sicily to the glacial wastes of Greenland, even attaining our own distant Vinland across the sea. United States history is one long panegyric of the Teuton, and will continue to be such if degenerate immigration can be checked in time to preserve the primitive character of the population.

The division of Europe into a number of independent states, connected, however, with each other by the general resemblance of religion, language, and manners, is productive of the most beneficial consequences to the liberty of mankind. A modern tyrant, who should find no resistance either in his own breast, or in his people, would soon experience a gentle restraint from the example of his equals, the dread of present censure, the advice of his allies, and the apprehension of his enemies. The object of his displeasure, escaping from the narrow limits of his dominions, would easily obtain, in a happier climate, a secure refuge, a new fortune adequate to his merit, the freedom of complaint, and perhaps the means of revenge. But the empire of the Romans filled the world, and when the empire fell into the hands of a single person, the world became a safe and dreary prison for his enemies. The slave of Imperial despotism, whether he was condemned to drag his gilded chain in rome and the senate, or to were out a life of exile on the barren rock of Seriphus, or the frozen bank of the Danube, expected his fate in silent despair. To resist was fatal, and it was impossible to fly. On every side he was encompassed with a vast extent of sea and land, which he could never hope to traverse without being discovered, seized, and restored to his irritated master. Beyond the frontiers, his anxious view could discover nothing, except the ocean, inhospitable deserts, hostile tribes of barbarians, of fierce manners and unknown language, or dependent kings, who would gladly purchase the emperor's protection by the sacrifice of an obnoxious fugitive. "Wherever you are," said Cicero to the exiled Marcellus, "remember that you are equally within the power of the conqueror.

These senators and representatives call themselves “leaders.” One of the primary principles of leadership is that a leader never asks or orders any follower to do what he or she would not do themselves. Such action requires the demonstration of the acknowledged traits of a leader among which are integrity, honesty, and courage, both physical and moral courage. They don’t have those traits nor are they willing to do what they ask and order. Just this proves we elect people who shouldn’t be leading the nation. When the great calamity and pain comes, it will have been earned and deserved. The piper always has to be paid at the end of the party. The party is about over. The bill is not far from coming due. Everybody always wants the guilty identified. The culprits are we the people, primarily the baby boom generation, which allowed their vote to be bought with entitlements at the expense of their children, who are now stuck with the national debt bill that grows by the second and cannot be paid off. These follow-on citizens—I call them the screwed generation—are doomed to lifelong grief and crushing debt unless they take the only other course available to them, which is to repudiate that debt by simply printing up $20 trillion, calling in all federal bills, bonds, and notes for payoff, and then changing from the green dollar to say a red dollar, making the exchange rate 100 or 1000 green dollars for 1 red dollar or even more to get to zero debt. Certainly this will create a great international crisis. But that crisis is coming anyhow. In fact it is here already. The U.S. has no choice but to eventually default on that debt. This at least will be a controlled default rather than an uncontrolled collapse. At present it is out of control. Congress hasn’t come up with a budget in 3 years. That’s because there is no way at this point to create a viable budget that will balance and not just be a written document verifying that we cannot legitimately pay our bills and that we are on an ever-descending course into greater and greater debt. A true, honest budget would but verify that we are a bankrupt nation. We are repeating history, the history we failed to learn from. The history of Rome. Our TV and video games are the equivalent distractions of the Coliseums and circus of Rome. Our printing and borrowing of money to cover our deficit spending is the same as the mixing and devaluation of the gold Roman sisteri with copper. Our dysfunctional and ineffectual Congress is as was the Roman Senate. Our Presidential executive orders the same as the dictatorial edicts of Caesar. Our open borders and multi-millions of illegal alien non-citizens the same as the influx of the Germanic and Gallic tribes. It is as if we were intentionally following the course written in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The military actions, now 11 years in length, of Iraq and Afghanistan are repeats of the Vietnam fiasco and the RussianAfghan incursion. Our creep toward socialism is no different and will bring the same implosion as socialism did in the U.S.S.R. One should recognize that the repeated application of failed solutions to the same problem is one of the clinical definitions of insanity. * * * I am old, ill, physically used up now. I can’t have much time left in this life. I accept that. All born eventually die and with the life I’ve lived, I probably should have been dead decades ago. Fate has allowed me to screw the world out of a lot of years. I do have one regret: the future holds great challenge. I would like to see that challenge met and overcome and this nation restored to what our founding fathers envisioned. I’d like to be a part of that. Yeah. “I’d like to do it again.” THE END PHOTOS Daniel Hill 1954 – 15

The kingdom of Bosnia forms a division of the Ottoman empire, and is a key to the countries of Roumeli (or Romeli). Although its length and breadth be of unequal dimensions, yet it is not improper to say it is equal in climate to Misr and Sham (Egypt and Syria). Each one of its lofty mountains, exalted to Ayuk, (a bright red star that * The peace of Belgrade was signed on the first of September, 1739. By this peace the treaty of Passarowitz was nullified, and the rivers Danube, Save, and Una re-established, as the boundaries of the two empires. See note to page 1. always follows the Hyades,) is an eye-sore to a foe. By reason of this country's vicinity to the infidel nations, such as the deceitful Germans, Hungarians, Serbs (Sclavonians), the tribes of Croats, and the Venetians, strong and powerful, and furnished with abundance of cannon, muskets, and other weapons of destruction, it has had to carry on fierce war from time to time with one or other, or more, of these deceitful enemies—enemies accustomed to mischief, inured to deeds of violence, resembling wild mountaineers in asperity, and inflamed with the rage of seeking opportunities of putting their machinations into practice; but the inhabitants of Bosnia know this. The greater part of her peasants are strong, courageous, ardent, lion-hearted, professionally fond of war, and revengeful: if the enemy but only show himself in any quarter, they, never seeking any pretext for declining, hasten to the aid of each other. Though in general they are harmless, yet in conflict with an enemy they are particularly vehement and obstinate; in battle they are strong-hearted ; to high commands they are obedient, and submissive as sheep; they are free from injustice and wickedness; they commit no villany, and are never guilty of high-way robbery; and they are ready to sacrifice their lives in behalf of their religion and the emperor. This is an honour which the people of Bosnia have received as an inheritance from their forefathers, and which every parent bequeaths to his son at his death. By far the greater number of the inhabitants, but especially the warlike chiefs, capudans, and veterans of the borders, in order to mount and dismount without inconvenience, and to walk with greater freedom and agility, wear short and closely fitted garments: they wear the fur of the wolf and leopard about their shoulders, and eagles' wings in their caps, which are made of wolf-skins. The ornaments of their horses are wolf and bearskins: their weapons of defence are the sword, the javelin, the axe, the spear, pistols, and muskets : their cavalry are swift, and their foot nimble and quick. Thus dressed and accoutred they present a formidable appearance, and never fail to inspire their enemies with a dread of their valour and heroism. So much for the events which have taken place within so short a space of time.* It is not in our power to write and describe every thing connected with the war, or which came to pass during that eventful period. Let this suffice. * It will be seen by the dates given in page 1, that the war lasted about two years and five months. Prepared and printed from the rare and valuable collection of Omer EfFendi of Novi, a native of Bosnia, by Ibrahim.* * This Ibrahim was called Basmajee^ the printer. He is mentioned in history as a renegado, and to have been associated with the son of Mehemet Effendi, the negotiator of the peace of Paasarowitz, and who was, in 1721, deputed on a special em-, bassy to Louis XV. Seyd Effendi, who introduced the art of printing into Turkey. Ibrahim, under the auspices of the government, and by the munificence of Seyd Effendi aiding his labours^ succeeded in sending from the newly instituted presses several works, besides the Account of the War in Bosnia.

If we truly leave C hristianity behind, we must give up the idea that human history has a meaning. Neither in t h e ancient pagan world nor in any other culture has h uman his­ tory ever been thought to have an overarching significance. In Greece and Rome, i t was a series of natural cycles of growth and decline. In India, it was a collective dream, endlessly repeated. The idea that history must make sense is just a Christian prej udice

But why did Rome fall? We have far too many answers. There is the intellectual answer: Montesquieu said that the Romans conquered the world with their republican principles, they changed their principles to fit an empire, and the new principles destroyed it. There is the moral answer: license, luxury, and sloth, a decline in character and in discipline. The Christian answer of Saint Augustine: Sinful Rome fell to prepare for the triumph of the City of God. The rationalist answer of eighteenth-century freethinkers: Christianity, teaching nonresistance, other-worldliness, disarmed the Romans in the face of the barbarians. The political answer: Caesarism, loss of public spirit, the failure of the civil power to control the army. The social answer or answers: the war of classes and the institution of slavery, which suppresses incentives toward change and progress. The economic answer: trade stagnation, low productivity, scarcity of gold and silver. The physical answer: soil depletion, deforestation, climatic change, drought. The pathological answer: plague and malaria, or even lead poisoning from cooking pots and water pipes. The genetic and racial answers: the dwindling of the old Roman stock through war and birth control and its mingling with Oriental and barbarian breeds. And the biological-cyclical-mystical answer: An empire is an organism, and like a living creature, it must pass through stages of growth, maturity, and decline, to death.

The professional soldier gains more and more power as the general courage of a community declines. Thus the Pretorian guard became more and more important in Rome as Rome became more and more luxurious and feeble

What happened? It took Gibbon six volumes to describe the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, so I shan’t embark on that. But thinking about this almost incredible episode does tell one something about the nature of civilisation. It shows that however complex and solid it seems, it is actually quite fragile. It can be destroyed. What are its enemies? Well, first of all fear – fear of war, fear of invasion, fear of plague and famine, that make it simply not worthwhile constructing things, or planting trees or even planning next year’s crops. And fear of the supernatural, which means that you daren’t question anything or change anything. The late antique world was full of meaningless rituals, mystery religions, that destroyed self-confidence. And then exhaustion, the feeling of hopelessness which can overtake people even with a high degree of material prosperity. There is a poem by the modern Greek poet, Cavafy, in which he imagines the people of an antique town like Alexandria waiting every day for the barbarians to come and sack the city. Finally the barbarians move off somewhere else and the city is saved; but the people are disappointed – it would have been better than nothing. Of course, civilisation requires a modicum of material prosperity – enough to provide a little leisure. But, far more, it requires confidence – confidence in the society in which one lives, belief in its philosophy, belief in its laws, and confidence in one’s own mental powers. The way in which the stones of the Pont du Gard are laid is not only a triumph of technical skill, but shows a vigorous belief in law and discipline. Vigour, energy, vitality: all the great civilisations – or civilising epochs – have had a weight of energy behind them. People sometimes think that civilisation consists in fine sensibilities and good conversation and all that. These can be among the agreeable results of civilisation, but they are not what make a civilisation, and a society can have these amenities and yet be dead and rigid. So if one asks why the civilisation of Greece and Rome collapsed, the real answer is that it was exhausted.

For primitive societies in Toynbee’s schema, the depredations of an empire such as imperial Rome or Victorian Britain presented a stark choice: between “being carcass or vulture.”51 But Toynbee suggested that civilization itself, already in the stage of disintegration, also faces a fateful decision. It must either abandon its imperial ambitions and risk complete internal collapse and revolt by its hungry underclass, or transform itself into an all-encompassing universal state. The universal states like imperial Rome form the most spectacular stage of Toynbee’s process of decline, “when a disintegrating civilization purchases a reprieve by submitting to forcible political unification.” But even with its vast colonial empire and its sweeping claims to universal dominion, the declining civilization remains split along an inner and an outer axis.

Toynbee proposed first of all staking the future of humanity on the United Nations, the successor to the League of Nations. If Toynbee the ancient historian saw America as the new Rome—brutal, ambitious, and expansive—then the United Nations was the modern equivalent of the confederations of Greek city-states banded together for mutual defense in the pre-Hellenistic world to promote universal peace while avoiding the hegemony of a single power. Of course, as Toynbee knew, these leagues had not been very successful. They had broken down in petty squabbles and remained vulnerable to marauding outside states (like Macedonia and Rome herself). But Toynbee was willing to overlook these details, since the ultimate goal in the nuclear age had to be reconciliation rather than confrontation: “Mankind must become one family or destroy itself.” Privately he added, “One has to admit history is against us…. I can’t think of a single case of the cooperative method having done the trick.” But in Toynbee’s perspective, which was rooted in Bloomsbury of the twenties, being good was more important than doing good. It was one’s intentions, not the results, that ultimately counted most. As the decline of the West accelerated, Toynbee asserted, world government was “a foregone conclusion.” The only alternative was nuclear catastrophe: “Mankind has to choose between political unification and mass suicide.

As in the Christian Dark Ages following imperial Rome’s collapse, Stavrianos argued, the coming collapse of Western hegemony will release nonwhite peoples from cultural and economic bondage and launch a new era of peace and prosperity.

Upon the proper use and conservation of sexual force the progress of civilization itself depends. All history shows that just in proportion as the sex instinct is kept sacred, pure, and the life essence properly used and converted into creative, productive power, does a nation reach a high state of civilization. Wherever this instinct becomes generally perverted, as it did in ancient Rome, people become devitalized, lose their physical and mental stamina, and rapidly deteriorate. Where it is protected by virtue and purity of life, the nation rises in the scale of civilization; where it is abused, perverted, the nation sinks to the level of low-flying ideals.

Cultures are organisms," Spengler explains, "and world-history is their collective biography." Like any other vital organism, then, each culture goes through the stages of youth, maturity, and decline. "Culture is the prime phenomenon of all past and future world-history." "Every Culture has its own Civilization...The Civilization is the inevitable destiny of the Culture....Civilizations are the most external and artificial states of which a species of developed humanity is capable. They are a conclusion, the thing-become succeeding the thing-becoming, death following life, rigidity following expansion, intellectual age and the stone-built, petrifying world-city following mother-earth and the spiritual childhood of Doric and Gothic. They are an end, irrevocable, yet by inward necessity reached again and again." Thus, while the culture is a period of ebullient creativity, the civilization that inevitably follows is a period of reflection, organization, and search for material comfort and convenience. For example, classical Greece was the culture; imperial Rome the civilization. From the beauties of Greek poetry to the imperialism of Roman law, we now live in the civilization of Western ("Faustian") culture and cannot avoid the consequences. Among these Spengler foresaw the "megalopolis," the city of faceless masses, the omnipotence of money, and a new Caesarism.

The obsession with decline found on the alt-right today comes from a long conservative line of thought, who regularly drew upon books like Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the eighteenth-century text that tied Rome’s collapse to sexual decadence. Camille Paglia’s work, greatly admired by Milo, is preoccupied with this same causal link between homosexuality, promiscuity, gender fluidity and civilizational decline.

By the end of the century Rome seemed as powerful and stable as ever. But below the surface the foundations were cracking, and through the fissures new ideas and new institutions were thrusting themselves. The cities are everywhere in decline; trade, industry, and agriculture bend under the weight of taxation. Communications are less safe, and some provinces are infested with marauders, peasants who can no longer earn a living on the land. The Empire is gradually dissolving into units of a kind unknown to classical antiquity, which will some day be brought together in a new pattern, feudal and Christian. But before that can happen generations must pass, while the new absolutism struggles by main force to keep the roads open, the fields in cultivation, and the barbarian at bay.

In one of his later volumes, Earth, book XXXV, Pliny tells the story of a goldsmith who brought an unusual dinner plate to the court of Emperor Tiberius. The plate was a stunner, made from a new metal, very light, shiny, almost as bright as silver. The goldsmith claimed he’d extracted it from plain clay, using a secret technique, the formula known only to himself and the gods. Tiberius, though, was a little concerned. The emperor was one of Rome’s great generals, a warmonger who conquered most of what is now Europe and amassed a fortune of gold and silver along the way. He was also a financial expert who knew the value of his treasure would seriously decline if people suddenly had access to a shiny new metal rarer than gold. “Therefore,” recounts Pliny, “instead of giving the goldsmith the regard expected, he ordered him to be beheaded.” This shiny new metal was aluminum, and that beheading marked its loss to the world for nearly two millennia. It next reappeared during the early 1800s but was still rare enough to be considered the most valuable metal in the world. Napoléon III himself threw a banquet for the king of Siam where the honored guests were given aluminum utensils, while the others had to make do with gold.

The decline of the baths was due more directly to the fall of Rome than to the rise of Christianity, but there is no denying that the three events—one apparently mundane, but close to the heart of Roman civilization, and two with vast, long-term consequences—were intertwined

The abolishment of all individual nations’ governments and borders 2. The abolishment of all private property 3. The abolishment of all inheritance 4. The abolishment of all Patriotism 5. The abolishment of all Religion---except the one they will offer 6. The abolishment of all family and marriage 7. The culling of mankind down to a more manageable number of not more than 500 million. “A total world population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal." -Ted Turner, Audubon magazine interview 1996, founder of CNN, Club of Rome/Bilderberg Group member, major United Nations donor and supporter, and big time proponent of the Great Plan

By having the self-confidence to apply the methods of scientific inquiry to human situations, they developed several new scholarly fields. In his magisterial study of the Enlightenment, Peter Gay states that Montesquieu invented sociology in The Spirit of Laws, that Edward Gibbon founded the modern writing of history with The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and that Adam Smith did the same for economics with The Wealth of Nations.57 (Xenophon’s Oeconomicus might from its title appear to claim to be a foundational document, but it really is about how to manage a household, which is what the word means in Greek.)58 Gay does not mention it, but Hume’s essay on “The Populousness of Ancient Nations” also was an early venture into creating the field of demography. Another Scot, James Hutton, came up with an astonishing new way to think about time, and so invented modern geology, a subject to which we will return. It is noteworthy that several of these innovative scholarly ventures—the ones by Montesquieu, Gibbon, and Hume—were rooted in the studies of the history of Rome.

A couple of weeks before, while going over a Variety list of the most popular songs of 1935 and earlier, to use for the picture’s sound track – which was going to consist only of vintage recording played not as score but as source music – my eye stopped on a .933 standard, words by E.Y. (“Yip”) Harburg (with producer Billy Rose), music by Harold Arlen, the team responsible for “Over the Rainbow”, among many notable others, together and separately. Legend had it that the fabulous Ms. Dorothy Parker contributed a couple of lines. There were just two words that popped out at me from the title of the Arlen-Harburg song, “It’s Only a Paper Moon”. Not only did the sentiment of the song encapsulate metaphorically the main relationship in our story – Say, it’s only a paper moon Sailing over a cardboard sea But it wouldn’t be make-believe If you believed in me – the last two words of the title also seemed to me a damn good movie title. Alvin and Polly agreed, but when I tried to take it to Frank Yablans, he wasn’t at all impressed and asked me what it meant. I tried to explain. He said that he didn’t “want us to have our first argument,” so why didn’t we table this conversation until the movie was finished? Peter Bart called after a while to remind me that, after all, the title Addie Pray was associated with a bestselling novel. I asked how many copies it had sold in hardcover. Peter said over a hundred thousand. That was a lot of books but not a lot of moviegoers. I made that point a bit sarcastically and Peter laughed dryly. The next day I called Orson Welles in Rome, where he was editing a film. It was a bad connection so we had to speak slowly and yell: “Orson! What do you think of this title?!” I paused a beat or two, then said very clearly, slowly and with no particular emphasis or inflection: “Paper …Moon!” There was a silence for several moments, and then Orson said, loudly, “That title is so good, you don’t even need to make the picture! Just release the title! Armed with that reaction, I called Alvin and said, “You remember those cardboard crescent moons they have at amusement parks – you sit in the moon and have a picture taken?” (Polly had an antique photo of her parents in one of them.) We already had an amusement park sequence in the script so, I continued to Alvin, “Let’s add a scene with one of those moons, then we can call the damn picture Paper Moon!” And this led eventually to a part of the ending, in which we used the photo Addie had taken of herself as a parting gift to Moze – alone in the moon because he was too busy with Trixie to sit with his daughter – that she leaves on the truck seat when he drops her off at her aunt’s house. … After the huge popular success of the picture – four Oscar nominations (for Tatum, Madeline Kahn, the script, the sound) and Tatum won Best Supporting Actress (though she was the lead) – the studio proposed that we do a sequel, using the second half of the novel, keeping Tatum and casting Mae West as the old lady; they suggested we call the new film Harvest Moon. I declined. Later, a television series was proposed, and although I didn’t want to be involved (Alvin Sargent became story editor), I agreed to approve the final casting, which ended up being Jodie Foster and Chris Connolly, both also blondes. When Frank Yablans double-checked about my involvement, I passed again, saying I didn’t think the show would work in color – too cute – and suggested they title the series The Adventures of Addie Pray. But Frank said, “Are you kidding!? We’re calling it Paper Moon - that’s a million-dollar title!” The series ran thirteen episodes.

{T}here is a very discernible gulf between political history and actual history. If this were not true, then we would all be afforded the opportunity to choose between different libraries much as we have the ability to choose different political parties.

This period of decline is exemplified by decadent leaders such as the notorious Emperor Nero (who used a citywide fire in Rome to confiscate land to build an expansive palace), Louis XIV (who expanded the Palace of Versailles while productivity fell and people endured hardships at the height of his power), and the Ming Dynasty’s Wanli Emperor (who withdrew from actively governing and focused on the construction of his own immense tomb).

Senators will also have been pleased to witness the declining importance of the people—

There is something unique that unites the capitals of ancient empires. Just think of Rome, Venice, or Vienna, to give three examples. Once places of immense power and wealth, these great cities fell into decline and were condemned to a sweet irrelevance. Once open, cosmopolitan, and multiethnic, they are now provincial and self-absorbed. Proud of their past but trapped in it. Tourists treat these cities like open-air museums or amusement parks, enjoying the beautiful millenary patina without seeing beyond the surface.

Even Rome, during its decline, never reached the depths to which America has already sunk.

Tell me, Philostratus, do you subscribe to the school of philosophy that holds mankind is in a state of continual decline, beginning with the supermen of a long-ago Golden Age and descending to the present, so that each generation is a little less hardy, a little less touched with the original fire of creation than the last, so that we dwindle in vigor and lifespan from father to son? In that case, I shall be lucky to live as long as … as you.

Always, before, whenever one culture went into decline, there were others ready to take up the slack. If Rome toppled, there was light shining in Constantinople, then the Baghdad Caliphate and in China. If Philippine Spain turned repressive, Holland welcomed both refugees and science. When most of Europe went mad, in the mid–twentieth century, the brightest minds moved to America. When America grew self-indulgent and riven by new civil war, that migration sloshed and shifted East.

What is wrong with modern civilization which produces at the roots these signs of sterility and racial decadence? But this is nothing new, it has happened before and history is full of examples of it. Imperial Rome in its decline was far worse. Is there a cycle governing this inner decay and can we seek out the causes and eliminate them? Modern industrialism and the capitalist structure of society cannot be the sole causes, for decadence has often occurred without them. It is probable, however, that in their present forms they do create an environment, a physical and mental climate, which is favourable for the functioning of those causes. If the basic cause is something spiritual, something affecting the mind and spirit of man, it is difficult to grasp though we may try to understand it or intuitively feel it. But one fact seems to stand out: that a divorce from the soil, from the good earth, is bad for the individual and the race. The earth and the sun are the sources of life and if we keep away from them for long life begins to ebb away. Modern industrialized communities have lost touch with the soil and do not experience that joy which nature gives and the rich glow of health which comes from contact with mother earth. They talk of nature’s beauty and go to seek it in occasional week-ends, littering the countryside with the product of their own artificial lives, but they cannot commune with nature or feel part of it. It is something to look at and admire, because they are told to do so, and then return with a sigh of relief to their normal haunts; just as they might try to admire some classic poet or writer and then, wearied by the attempt, return to their favourite novel or detective story, where no effort of mind is necessary. They are not children of nature, like the old Greeks or Indians, but strangers paying an embarrassing call on a scarce-known distant relative. And so they do not experience that joy in nature’s rich life and infinite variety and that feeling of being intensely alive which came so naturally to our forefathers. Is it surprising then that nature treats them as unwanted step-children?

Rome rose with the idiom of Caesar, Ovid, and Tacitus, she declined in a welter of rhetoric, the diplomat's language to conceal thought', and so forth. [...] A people that grows accustomed to sloppy writing is a people in process of losing grip on its empire and on itself.

Böhm-Bawerk declared that the cultural level of a nation is mirrored by its rate of interest. In the ancient world, interest rates charted the course of great civilizations. In Babylon, Greece and Rome interest rates followed a U-shaped curve over the centuries; declining as each civilization became established and prospered, and rising sharply during periods of decline and fall.57 Very low interest rates appear to have been the calm before the storm. In the early Neo-Babylonian period (700–630 BC) rates on silver loans fell to a low of 8.33 per cent. By early fifth century BC, after Babylonia fell to the Persians, they spiked above 40 per cent.58 In similar fashion, interest rates in eighteenth-century Holland reached a nadir shortly before the Dutch Republic was overrun by Revolutionary France. Given the extraordinarily low interest rates of the early twenty-first century, this is not a comforting thought.

For organizational behavior expert Charles Handy, the S-curve is the essential form of how businesses, social organizations and political systems develop over time, “it is the line of all things human.”7 Tech analyst Paul Saffo advises to “look for the S-curve,” noting that the uptake of new technologies—from personal robots to driverless cars—is destined to follow its shape.8 Scholars have used the sigmoid curve to describe the rise and fall of ancient civilizations like the Roman Empire, but also to predict modern-day shifts, such as the decline of the United States as a global superpower.9 In the field of systems thinking, the authors of the Club of Rome’s 1972 report The Limits to Growth put the S-curve at the heart of their analysis.10 More recently, economist Kate Raworth has shown that mainstream economics assumes that GDP growth follows an “exponential curve left hanging in mid-air,” when the reality is that it is far more likely to level off into the shape of the S-curve.

Immediately, like a fond old roué, I sought to introduce Danny to what used to be called the finer things of life. I brought him—my God, I burn with shame to think of it—I brought him to the Institute and made him sit and listen while I lectured on Poussin’s second period in Rome, on Claude Lorrain and the cult of landscape, on François Mansart and the French baroque style. While I spoke, his attention would decline in three distinct stages. For five minutes or so he would sit up very straight with his hands folded in his lap, watching me with the concentration of a retriever on point; then would come a long central period of increasing agitation, during which he would study the other students, or lean over at the window to follow the progress of someone crossing the courtyard below, or bite his nails with tiny, darting movements, like a jeweller cutting and shaping a row of precious stones; after that, until the end of the lecture, he would sink into a trance of boredom, head sunk on neck, his eyelids drooping at the corners and his lips slackly parted. I covered up my disappointment in him on these occasions as best I could. Yet he did so try to keep up, to seem interested and impressed.

The ancient Romans built elaborate networks of pipes to deliver water where they wanted it to go. The networks were a marvel. But many of the pipes were made of lead, and the water carried the lead along with it. One school of thought regards this as part of the reason for the decline and fall of Rome: lead poisoning gradually took its toll, impairing the thought and judgment of many Romans, especially at the top. The theory is much disputed; perhaps it contains no truth. But as a metaphor it is irresistible. We have built networks for the delivery of information—the internet, and especially social media. These networks, too, are a marvel. But they also carry a kind of poison with them. The mind fed from those sources learns to subsist happily on quick reactions, easy certainties, one-liners, and rage. It craves confirmation and resents contradiction. Attention spans collapse; imbecility propagates, then seems normal, then is celebrated. The capacity for rational discourse between people who disagree gradually rots.

No totalitarian authority nor authoritarian state can tolerate those who have an absolute by which to judge that state and its actions. The Christians had that absolute in God’s revelation. Because the Christians had an absolute, universal standard by which to judge not only personal morals but the state, they were counted as enemies of totalitarian Rome and were thrown to the beasts.

Sidonius lives in a world already half barbarian, yet in the year before the Western Empire falls he is still dreaming of the consulship for his son. Why did they not realize the magnitude of the disaster that was befalling them? This is indeed a question almost as absorbing as the question why their civilization fell, for au fond it is perhaps the same question.

In the first place the process of disintegration was a slow one, for the whole tempo of life was slow and what might take decades in our own time took centuries then. It is only because we can look back from the vantage point of a much later age that we can see the inexorable pattern which events are forming, so that we long to cry to these dead people down the corridor of the ages, warning them to make a stand before it is too late, hearing no answering echo, 'Physician, heal thyself!' They suffered from the fatal myopia of contemporaries. It was the affairs of the moment that occupied them; for them it was the danger of the moment that must be averted and they did not recognize that each compromise and each defeat was a link in the chain dragging them over the abyss.

But if the gradualness of this process misled the Romans there were other and equally potent reasons for their blindness. Most potent of all was the fact that they mistook entirely the very nature of civilization itself. All of them were making the same mistake. People who thought that Rome could swallow barbarism and absorb it into her life without diluting her own civilization; the people who ran about busily saying that the barbarians were not such bad fellows after all, finding good points in their regime with which to castigate the Romans and crying that except ye become as little barbarians ye shall not attain salvation; the people who did not observe in 476 that one half of the Respublica Romanorum had ceased to exist and nourished themselves on the fiction that the barbarian kings were exercising a power delegated from the Emperor. All these people were deluded by the same error, the belief that Rome (the civilization of their age) was not a mere historical fact with a beginning and an end, but a condition of nature like the air they breathed and the earth they tread Ave Roma immortalis, most magnificent most disastrous of creeds!

The fact is that the Romans were blinded to what was happening to them by the very perfection of the material culture which they had created. All around them was solidity and comfort, a material existence which was the very antithesis of barbarism. How could they foresee the day when the Norman chronicler would marvel over the broken hypocausts of Caerleon? How could they imagine that anything so solid might conceivably disappear? Their roads grew better as their statesmanship grew worse and central heating triumphed as civilization fell.

But still more responsible for their unawareness was the educational system in which they were reared. Ausonius and Sidonius and their friends were highly educated men and Gaul was famous for its schools and universities. The education which these gave consisted in the study of grammar and rhetoric, which was necessary alike for the civil service and for polite society; and it would be difficult to imagine an education more entirely out of touch with contemporary life, or less suited to inculcate the qualities which might have enabled men to deal with it. The fatal study of rhetoric, its links with reality long since severed, concentrated the whole attention of men of intellect on form rather than on matter. The things they learned in their schools had no relation to the things that were going on in the world outside and bred in them the fatal illusion that tomorrow would be as yesterday, that everything was the same, whereas everything was different.

By the time Jesus began a new movement within Judaism, Greek philosophy had begun to spread into Palestine and the lands surrounding it. Rome’s polytheistic religion may have been able to fold in the repurposed Greek deities, but Christianity forbade that. Arising from monotheistic Judaism, it viewed devotion to the Greek and Roman gods as pagan practices from which followers of Christ must abstain. As Christianity grew in influence— spreading into Greece and other parts of the Roman Empire—beliefs in the ancient gods of Greece and Rome began to decline. Centuries later, Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, giving the Christian church a much greater foothold. With this power, the Empire began to close temples and establish laws to prevent worshipping the false gods of the Pantheon. In 380 CE, Emperor Theodosius I issued the Edict of Thessalonica, instituting Christianity as the Roman Empire’s official state religion. Though a few pockets of polytheistic belief survived in the following centuries, this edict essentially ended the practice of the Greek religion. Zeus/Jupiter had lost his throne to Christ.

Cahokia was one big piece in the mosaic of chiefdoms that covered the lower half of the Mississippi and the Southeast at the end of the first millennium A.D. Known collectively as “Mississippian” cultures, these societies arose several centuries after the decline of the Hopewell culture, and probably were its distant descendants. At any one time a few larger polities dominated the dozens or scores of small chiefdoms. Cahokia, biggest of all, was preeminent from about 950 to about 1250 A.D. It was an anomaly: the greatest city north of the Río Grande, it was also the only city north of the Río Grande. Five times or more bigger than any other Mississippian polity, Cahokia’s population of at least fifteen thousand made it comparable in size to London, but on a landmass without Paris, Córdoba, or Rome.

Machiavelli’s fusion of Polybius and Aristotle yielded a future of gloom. The Romans had read Polybius to discover how a great empire would be doomed if it failed to keep Aristotle’s balance of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy—the One, the Few, and the Many. Machiavelli’s reading was far more pessimistic. Not just Rome, but every free society is doomed from the start. Real republics exist in real time, not on some eternal plane like Plato’s literary version. “All human affairs are ever in a state of flux and cannot stand still,” the Discourses explains, meaning that every society will experience either constant improvement or decline.

The following five attributes marked Rome at its end; first, a mounting love of show and luxury; second, a widening gap between the very rich and the very poor; third, an obsession with sex; fourth, freakishness in the arts, masquerading as originality and enthusiasms pretending to be creativity; and fifth, an increased desire to live off the state. ~ Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) in his Decline and Fall

The new Late Antiquity is in part a deliberate corrective to a previous bias, which assumed that the entire Roman world declined in the fifth century, because this is what happened in the West. Relocating the centre of the world in the fourth to eighth centuries to Egypt, the Levant, and Persia is a stimulating challenge to our mental framework and cultural expectations.

There is, however, an obvious problem in imposing, on the basis of eastern evidence, a flourishing Late Antiquity on the whole of the late Roman and post-Roman worlds. In the ‘bad old days’ western decline at the end of Antiquity was imposed on the eastern provinces. Now, instead of all the different regions of the empire being allowed to float free (some flourishing in the fifth to eighth centuries, others not), a new and equally distorting template is being imposed westwards.

The royal sepulchre, adorned with the splendid spoils and trophies of Rome, was constructed in the vacant bed; the waters were then restored to their natural channel; and the secret spot, where the remains of Alaric had been deposited, was forever concealed by the inhuman massacre of the prisoners, who had been employed to execute the work.

Some portion of the Gothic treasures might be the gift of friendship, or the tribute of obedience; but the far greater part had been the fruits of war and rapine, the spoils of the empire, and perhaps of Rome.

Penance (Scripture selection — Joel 2:12-13) The name of Gene Hamilton may be new to you if you are not from the archdiocese of New York or have not read A Priest Forever by Father Benedict Groeschel (published by Our Sunday Visitor in 1998). Gene was a seminarian for that archdiocese at St. Joseph’s Seminary, Dunwoodie. From all accounts he was a fine student, a friendly, sincere young man, eager to be a priest. He was diagnosed with cancer, and the final years of his life were a real cross for him — pain, decline, hopes way up after surgery and treatment only to have them dashed with another outbreak. In his brave struggle a saint emerged, and I use that word purposefully. In his pain, agony, and dwindling strength, a man of deep faith, indomitable hope, and genuine love arose; a seminarian of prayer, who never complained, thought more of the needs and difficulties of others than his own. A man driven by one desire: to be united with Jesus in his passion and death, hopefully, yearning to do so as a priest. There was a lot of longing for a miracle by his family, brother seminarians, friends and admirers; many, including doctors and other medical personnel, told the young man, “You’re going to beat this, Gene.” Dozens who just knew he was too good, too innocent, too pure and holy to die so young and painfully, prayed for his recovery. In January of 1997, Gene Hamilton was too ill to come on the pilgrimage here to Rome with the men from Dunwoodie. Bishop Edwin O’Brien, realistic and thoughtful man that he is, with the late Cardinal John O’Connor, approached the prefect of the Congregation for Catholic Education, the dicastery of the Holy See under which seminaries come, for permission to ordain