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June 25, 2016, 10:20:18 PM |
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Imperial Rome just is, or was. What matters, is who decides? and the choices they make. Sometimes there is an unavoidable outcome.
You choose to use a fiat system and that brings rape and pillage as a lifestyle choice, and forces the expansion of a small village into an Empire in a winner takes all game of Monopoly. That, in turn, expands language, law, and lending, all systems with Complexity, as a net benefit to the community. I'd argue that it was Rome's ability to engineer better weapons of war, civil, and industrial systems that gave them the edge. Their habit of slaughtering everything within cities opposed to their rule was consistent with their need for growth at any cost. Debt can be a hard master.
Margaret Thatcher famously said that "The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money." Arguably, the same thing happened to Imperial Rome, and they weren't socialists, were they? So, problems everywhere, why?
Regarding Catiline, I would bracket him between Sulla and Julius Caesar. Both Sulla and Julius Caesar staged successful coups, suggesting that there was an underlying cause that promoted charismatic leaders to seize power. Whether Catiline's rise to challenge the State and his summary execution were inevitable remains in doubt. I'd also be cautious about Catiline's character weaknesses because summary execution prevents any examination of the case for the defence, and character assassination is often a precursor to political murder. Cicero's actions suggest there was more to the story than history has recorded. His actions re-wrote Roman Law to simply read "Might is Right". But all this is for now, mere speculation and suspicion, an intriguing possibility. All this was prior to Imperial Rome, begging the question, what changed?
The Romans were engineers without equal in their time. They built six storey tenements among other civilian enterprises, an unsurpassed feat until Otis introduced the safety elevator in 1853. Otis lifts enabled the building of today's skyscrapers. What sets the old tenements aside from, say, the Partheon, is the need for that kind of expertise within the population. That skill, and language, and law, and lending, all require an informed population.
My recent post suggested that the era of Bread and Circuses, brought a time when hunger for knowledge was discouraged among the mass of the Roman population. The Roman elite imported Greek tutors for their education or spent time in Greece. I'd guess that Roman engineering education was provided by the Army to their recruits only. Once Rome's Army became deskilled the breadth of engineering knowledge fell also.
I'll quote Henry Ford in support of this: "It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning."
Did Catiline attempt revolution?
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