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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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