|
【collation】
Rome took everything from the Etruscans. Etruscan engineers showed them how to drain the marshes where Rome now stands and channel the water into underground sewers. Etruscan architects and builders laid out the Roman forum as a public square in the 7th century BC. The Romans owed everything to the Etruscans they would one day turn on them, crush their beautiful cities and defame their memory. It would be the first step on Rome’s path to empire.
Most of what we know about the birth of Rome comes from the work of one man, one of Rome’s greatest historians, Livy. He lived in the reign of the Emperor Augustus over 700 years after the city was founded. The glory of Rome was at its height. But Romans were already haunted by the specter of decline. The empire was emerging from decades of civil war. Bitterness and political intrigue were rampant. Decadence, greed and profiteering were the order of the day. To men like Livy, raised on the Roman Stoic virtues of valor, loyalty and self-sacrifice, it seemed the spirit of Rome was rotting.
I feel that indulgence has brought us, through every form of sensual excess, to be morbidly attracted to death in all its forms. Rome is at the dark dawning of an age in which we can neither endure our vices nor face the remedies needed to cure them. ----Livy.
A cure was what Emperor Augustus was looking for. He cracked down on dissent and passed laws to punish immorality. He was determined to reform the empire and force a return to Roman family values. Bawdy poets like Ovid who wrote The Art of Love were banished to the Asian steppes. When his own daughter Julia was rumored to have slept with half the Senate, Augustus banished her as well.
Livy saw in Augustus or in Octavian a chance for the world to finally settle down and get back to business. What made Rome great to begin with? You gotta go back and look. Who were the heroes of the past that made Rome the city she was?
I hope that history may be the best cure for a sick mind. At least, it can remind us of what we once were and show us the depth to which we are now sinking.
|