90 Minutes on the Roman Empire - 90 Minutes, #2

How one city built a world — and why we are still living in it.

Read this sentence out loud: "I went by the calendar, passed a senator and July, paid in cash, read the novel and went home to the republic." Almost every other word in it comes from Rome. An empire that fell fifteen centuries ago still speaks through your mouth every day — and you no longer hear it.

It began as nothing. A cluster of huts on hills beside a river, one of dozens of unremarkable Italian towns, with no sign that this one would end up ruling from rainy Britain to the deserts of Egypt. It did not get there through luck or through cruelty; other cities had plenty of both and vanished. Rome won with the sword and held what it had won through organization.

In ninety minutes this book travels the whole road. The republic that cut power in two and put a one-year clock on it. The legion that beat braver armies through discipline, and built the roads it marched on. Hannibal, and why Rome could lose every battle and still win the war. Caesar, and the daggers that saved nothing. Augustus, who took absolute power while insisting that nothing had changed. The arena, the emperors both brilliant and deranged, and the slavery that paid for all the splendor. And at the end the slow, unglamorous exhaustion of a giant that had grown too heavy for its own systems — with the year 476 as a convenient line rather than a thunderclap.

Thirteen short chapters. No dates to memorize. And the Rome of the screen — the endless orgy, the doomed gladiator, the empire that supposedly died of its own immorality — is separated carefully from what the evidence actually supports.

Rome never really disappeared. The alphabet in front of your eyes, the law above your life, the arch over your head: we have simply stopped recognizing it.

Part of the 90 Minutes series: a whole vanished world, handed to you in the time of a long walk.