Rome did not fall in a day
The saying, Rome was not built in a day, is meant as an excuse for why whatever is being demanded from someone also cannot be achieved promptly: “No, I haven’t mowed the lawn yet, but Rome wasn’t built in a day,” or “In fact, I haven’t finished entering these three receipts into my expense report, but Rome wasn’t built in a day,” and so on. The truth tends to be that when hard things get accomplished, smart people will gather before chalkboards or in machine shops and such like and make things happen. Consider the time from concept to design to deployment of B-29 bombers and the first nuclear weapons that realized the promises that strategic bombing made in the years between the two world wars. Or the not even a decade necessary to get from political speech to the Moon.
Indeed, several years are more than twenty-four hours, but the principle remains that if motivated people are sufficient smart—or is that smart people are sufficiently motivated—much can be done in a hurry. The same was not true about building cathedrals in Europe in the middle ages, but perhaps large blocks of stone cannot be moved in a day. Technology is a force multiplier if it is available.
The same observation might be made about Rome’s decline and fall, something that got its start when Octavian and Mark Antony defeated Brutus and Cassius at Philippi in 42 B.C.E. and continued until 476—or was it 1453, with various rump states claiming title after each of those dates? Or it may have been in 1917 with the end of the Romanov dynasty, a series of monarchs who called themselves Caesars (Tsars) thanks to having married into the family of the last emperor of Byzantium to have reigned in that city.
In any case, it took some time. And it is an interesting parlor game—no, I don’t get invited to a lot of parties. Why do you ask?—to wonder at what point, at what day the end was inevitable. There were Romans all along who bemoaned the decline of morals and civic spirit that they observed and found little that they could do about. But was there a definite point at which the entity that was Rome could not be saved?
The answer to my thinking is 42 B.C.E., though such an empire may not have been sustainable at all, given the limits of communications and the inefficiency of the taxation system of the ancient world. The ability to move resources about to deal with threats on the borders, to build infrastructure in the interior, and to sustain large populations were all both integral to Rome’s successes and were among the causes of ultimate collapse when the empire rammed up against the boundaries of what was possible with each of these in the period.
But the one thing that Rome never seemed able to provide a lasting answer to was what it meant to be a Roman. In the early days, this was a simple question: a citizen of the City and its immediate environs, with all that entailed. As the republic—the res publica, the affairs of the people—expanded and transformed itself by stumbling into control of territory after territory into an empire, citizenship broadened, taking in more and more peoples around the Mediterranean and the continent of Europe without carrying along with it the original identity.
Constantine tried to solve the problem by making Christianity the official religion—one god (sort of), one emperor (yeah, right), one people (not even close)—and we can debate endlessly whether this choice made any sense, but I can understand his impulse.
Something that Constantine did not have to worry about was being labeled a Roman supremacist—his response would perhaps have been, “Sic. Et?”—but it is worth emphasizing here how a monoethnic or monocultural state has only ever worked with small nations, and even with the ancient Greek city-states, unity of language and culture only went so far toward holding such small communities together. And in case libertarians read this and think that tiny countries are an ideal, I remind everyone that those city-states were conquered by Alexander and then by the Romans after having exhausted themselves in squabbles with their neighbors.
So what, then, is humanity to do? Are we condemned to high water marks of civilization, followed by declines of varying length into dark ages?
We do have advantages over the ancient Romans. As I pointed out above, technological limits made their empire unwieldy, whereas we are able to speak words around the world in an instant and to have them carried out within a day if all we have to send is a companionable agent or within weeks if we must insist. The machinery of global government exists.
To make it a success requires us to commit to a second human discovery or invention, depending on one’s perspective, namely the concept of human rights. For the ancient Roman, family, tribe, and city were the basic units of society. In contemporary liberal democracies, the individual has taken on that status. While today’s critics deplore this, the data show—see Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Natures for a thorough examination—that we live in the least violent, healthiest, and most equitable period in human existence. I do mean every one of those assertions. We also happen to have the most rapid transmission of rumors and images, making the facts feel like fiction, but in reality, we live the longest, have the greatest access to information, and are given the most opportunities of any generation.
And if we want to keep this going, we must commit to both human rights and human progress as our civic ethos or religion. Constantine’s solution could not imagine a world without rigid hierarchies, and sufficient shocks brought the structure down. A culture that values personal autonomy and collective effort, that works for the flourishing of every one of us, and that tolerates the exploitation of no one is the best chance for a lasting civilization.
That Rome neither rose nor fell in a day is a hopeful fact and a caution. Whatever conditions may be at present, they are likely not proof of inevitable doom, nor are the permission to settle. There is the view among some social movements that the revolution must always continue, and in one sense, this is a fine way of seeing things. Projects reach conclusions, but the work of building itself must never end. That, ultimately, is the best reading of the phrase, Rome was not built in a day.