almost 2500 years ago, and so little has changed, if anything at all.
I found reading plutarch’s lives of sulla and marius quite depressing due to the close similarities of some of the issues in rome and today.
Human nature has changed little, if at all in its fundamentals. Over 2000 years ago, Titus Livy, in the introduction to his monumental history of Rome remarked that his purpose in writing was “to trace the progress of our moral decline, to watch, first, the sinking of the foundations of morality as the old teaching was allowed to lapse, then the rapidly increasing disintegration, then the final collapse of the whole edifice, and the dark dawning of our modern day when we can neither endure our vices nor face the remedies needed to cure them.”
The people of Rome could do neither and night fell in the Western world for a thousand years.