And compare Jeremiah 25:10:
Moreover I will take from them the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride, the sound of the millstones and the light of the lamp. 11 And this whole land shall be a desolation and an astonishment ...
I don’t think that Rome does today, either. It did in the days that John wrote the Revelation.
Neither does or did Jerusalem or Cincinnati.
In any apparent sense, none of those cities currently rule over the kings of the earth.
Rome is the only candidate from John’s era. And it is a certainty, and because of that, it must be considered a candidate.
One important question for me is this: what was the dominant religion of Rome at the time John wrote Revelation?
It certainly was NOT Christianity.
We’ve heard of the pantheon of Roman gods, but was there a dominant expression of that religion? a dominant worship?