Thanks fieldmarshaldj. Any similarities are superficial and/or coincidental. This kind of thing comes up a lot.
Posted on 05/20/2019 7:19:12 PM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
Sometime around A.D. 60, in the age of Emperor Nero, a Roman court insider named Gaius Petronius wrote a satirical Latin novel, “The Satyricon,” about moral corruption in Imperial Rome. The novel’s general landscape was Rome’s transition from an agrarian republic to a globalized multicultural superpower.
The novel survives only in a series of extended fragments. But there are enough chapters for critics to agree that the high-living Petronius, nicknamed the “Judge of Elegance,” was a brilliant cynic. He often mocked the cultural consequences of the sudden and disruptive influx of money and strangers from elsewhere in the Mediterranean region into a once-traditional Roman society.
The novel plots the wandering odyssey of three lazy, overeducated, and mostly underemployed single young Greeks: Encolpius, Ascyltos, and Giton. They aimlessly mosey around southern Italy. They panhandle and mooch off the nouveau riche. They mock traditional Roman customs. The three and their friends live it up amid the culinary, cultural, and sexual excesses in the age of Nero.
Certain themes in “The Satyricon” are timeless and still resonate today.
The abrupt transition from a society of rural homesteaders into metropolitan coastal hubs had created two Romes. One world was a sophisticated and cosmopolitan network of traders, schemers, investors, academics, and deep-state imperial cronies. Their seaside corridors were not so much Roman as Mediterranean. And they saw themselves more as “citizens of the world” than as mere Roman citizens.
In the novel, vast, unprecedented wealth had produced license. On-the-make urbanites suck up and flatter the childless rich in hopes of being given estates rather than earning their own money.
The rich in turn exploit the young sexually and emotionally by offering them false hopes of landing an inheritance.
Petronius seems to mock the very world in which he indulged.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailysignal.com ...
Thanks fieldmarshaldj. Any similarities are superficial and/or coincidental. This kind of thing comes up a lot.
My take has been that the most valid analogy to Rome with America is that both states found out that a Republic is an excellent form of government for a relatively culturally homogenous people forming a nation, and an impossible form of government to maintain when running an empire ruling (or heavily controlling) many other nations.
A massive influx of those who don’t want to assimilate and are only there for the economic benefits doesn’t help a damn bit, of course.
But a Republic didn’t work for Rome very well once it expanded too far, into the spaces left after the defeat of Carthage- and after WW2 we’ve faced the same problem; we essentially had/have an empire stretching across a big chunk of the globe, and the lean, non intrusive and moral type of government designed by the founders didnm’t work for that.
The Western Empire and Rome itself fell around 400 AD, overrun by waves of Goths and other barbarians. The Eastern Empire survived another thousand years until Islam conquered it.
Europe is repeating that destruction with waves of “migrants”, in an act of civilizational suicide. We have been doing the same with mass immigration, legal as well as illegal, with California being the example of what is coming for the rest of the country.
The most obvious similarity is the pacification of The Mob by Bread and Circuses, or Welfare and Internet/Cable in our case.
As long as cable is up and the EBTs refill every month, I think folks will be too apathetic to start anything major.
Once one or the other fails, it’s on. Bored or hungry people are dangerous.
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