We like to think there was a time, more epic than ours, where people had free will and control over their destinies.
Every major ancient world culture believed this, though most could not utter this aloud, much less write it down, for they lived under true tyranny. Typically, such views could be espoused openly only in times of upheaval and chaos, such as those of Plato and Chuang Tzu. Afterward, those who valued their lives and the lives of their family members would do best to avoid criticizing their rulers altogether.
Local kings and despots are highly sensitive. If their subjects are less than thrilled to live under their rule, then why let them live at all?
Only when the rulers were supremely confident in their power was the idea that better times had existed before allowed to spread. Only when the throne is supremely stable are people allowed to mock and challenge it openly. Thus, one of the most openly mocked and reviled rulerships was, ironically, among the most prosperous and stable in history: The Roman Empire.
The great times that came before, depending on which culture you ask, would have been the brilliant days of Classical Athens, the mythical age of the Druids, the reigns of David and Solomon, the empire of Cyrus the Great, Homeric Troy or [insert long-forgotten golden age here].
Whatever the reference point, it always happened before the Romans took over. Afterwards, all areas of life had to be mass-engineered and scaled to work across an empire spanning most of the known world. This makes everything boring and mediocre, from copies of Greek statues to watered-down religions. And it happened in all aspects of power that matter. Military, political, religious.
Rome was the first major triumph of the mechanized process over the individual.
They did this through brutal standardization.
Take warfare: up until this point, the individual warrior or warrior pair was largely held to be the supreme military unit. From charioteer to champion, epics are sung about individuals and their sidekicks striving onto the battlefield and felling many foes, mostly because said foes came at him one at a time, pausing to announce their family heritage and divine patrons. The typical imperial legionary, on the other hand, was a faceless member of Rome’s lowest classes, a small cog in a miles-long meat grinder rolling across the battlefield.
Of course, this is an overgeneralization, but the Celts and Germanic peoples still fought in the old style, and many kings and generals emulated Alexander the Great's example of leading from the front. The point is that most militaries still believed in the power of the single noble warrior, which meant they did not obsess as much over disciplining the many grunts, which meant they had no chance against the collective might of Caesar’s legions.
Unlike the free-wheeling warrior nobles they frequently faced, the Romans drilled, drilled, and drilled the individuality out of their soldiers until combat was treated no differently than pitching camp or building aqueducts. All were engineering problems to be solved. And they solved them so well that many of their camps developed into full-blown cities like Cologne in Germany.
When it came to solo combat moves, the legionary did not have to know more than a few stabbing motions and how to raise their shields. Nor did the average stale bread-rationed, water-drinking legionary have to be physically bigger than their milk-chugging, protein-enhanced enemies. What set the Romans apart was their mastery of group combat mechanics.
Moving in synchronized formation with fellow legionaries was what really mattered. Knowing when to stab and when to switch places once their stabbing arms got tired gave the legionary an edge over the lone warrior who could go ten rounds with any man but not with a fresh new man each round.
A legion moving in unison functioned much more like a well-oiled crop harvester than a Homeric hero, and this was the key to their military success. This, and the fact that they could continue to field armies and adapt to losses, meant you might beat them once, but rarely twice.
As King Pyrrhus once said after his famous “Pyrrhic Victory” at Asculum, “If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined.”
The Roman approach to warcraft was also applied to statecraft.
Governors often robbed their provinces blind but left just enough that the people wouldn’t rebel too hard. Systems were put in place to let the people feel they were heard and honors regularly showered upon ambitious overachievers, even though things mostly went the way the emperor and his elite ruling class wanted things to go.
When it came to the arts, Rome unabashedly aimed at the lowest common denominator. Instead of the height of dramatic or artistic genius displayed by Aeschylus or Praxiteles, you have gladiatorial bloodsports and cheap Roman copies of statues supported by marble tree trunks.
It reached even into the realm of religion: “Catholic” means “universal” or “standard.” Imperial authorities took several popular cults across the empire ranging from Mithra to Messianic Judaism, stripped them down and defanged them for mass adoption.
Bottom line: In standardizing everything, the Romans became the standard against which everyone rebelled.
The Jews complained they weren’t spiritual enough, while Greeks complained they weren’t cultured enough. The Egyptians considered them too barbaric, while the Huns and Scythians thought them over-civilized. The Romans themselves didn’t care, so long as you showed up to the games and payed your taxes like obedient subjects of the empire.
And now it’s happening again.
Today, we find ourselves once more in a global culture whose pretensions to be anything other than an empire are rapidly falling away.
Just ask Gaddafi. Oh wait, you can’t anymore.
Perhaps the reason men are constantly thinking about the Roman Empire these days is because they recognize the cheap dopamine hits of legal drugs, extreme sports, and pseudo-social media as the bread and circuses 2.0 of an empire they can’t escape or overthrow.
An empire that seems to persist no matter how poorly its monetary policy is handled or how badly it loses wars against so-called “stone age Afghan hill tribes.”
An empire as vanilla as the 55th McDonald’s in Dubai or the 11th bust of Caesar in Pompeii.
An empire that, in the words of sci-fi prophet Philip K. Dick, “NEVER ENDED.”
Next week: an anti-Nazi loser of World War II writes a very different sci-fi novel teaching you how to deal with global tyranny.
Yup, give them enough Bread and Circus, and the masses will stay complacent. A little Soma (Brave New World), tends to help as well.
Enjoyed this week's essay.