Pax Romana Eternal

Rome has the name "eternal city", and its easy to see why. Everywhere you go, you're reminded of this cities grandiose past. Why today alone, I've seen artifacts ranging from 500 B.C to 1930 A.D. And, they are still part of the city -- the people build buildings around them, on top of them, next to them and live their lives as if these ruins were just how life really "is". It makes any other city in the world (with likely some notable exceptions) boring in comparison; no one has all of this as Rome does. It lived thousands of years ago, lived through good and bad times, and still lives today. It is in one word, eternal.

Lets start Rome off with a story about her. Picture this, you live in a beautiful Mediterranean world on the banks of a river where rolling hills, the mountains, and the flatlands are all around you. Beauty is everywhere, and part of your every day life. It never gets cold, only rainy in the winter. The summers are warm and hot (personal experience: try drinking 6L of water a day to survive. Yes, that's right, 6L.) Your food is rich, vegetable sweet, and the land is plentiful and young. Its culturally founding the Italic peoples, those who settled here in this land thousands of years ago.

You live in a center of an empire that spans the known world. You could be in a senator, a philosopher, an artist, an emperor or a slave. You are the culture that is the center of existence, of beauty and legends, poems and art, buildings that challenge the mind -- all expected of you. Statues to the deities of all kinds (Romans had nearly 30,000 of them to keep happy), monuments, staircases, oblesiks, and scrollwork -- always more scrollwork to see.

The beauty of the natural form of body, the conquest of man over man, man over animal, man over nature, all making you believe that the flesh was Nature's greatest achievement. The eccentricities, the natural precision of man flesh, the beauty and grace were what perfected the beautiful world you lived in, a paradise. [On a side note: naked male statue count, 47. naked female statue count, 8. Clearly we know which gender the Greeks thought was most beautiful. Yes, I said Greeks, the Romans "acquired" their statues -- its a long story. Also note: Greeks may like washboard abs, but seriously lacked an ideal of "horselike" attributes]

Beyond art, and to your architecture. Engineering tall monuments, colossal stadiums, defying gravity and physics so far that even today we still have not recovered from your loss O' Rome [Yet we can put a man on the moon]. Your work lasted, millennium after millennium. And in these places you held games of violence and decadence where emperors of men made you decide the living fate of another. All for fame, fortune, and self worth. Here in this beautiful blissful paradise, where the glory of your empire could be brought to you and reminded how far your bounds spread out. [Romans brought in animals from every part of the world to fight here]

Limitless were your self centered philosophies. You lavished in gardens, built palaces atop hills and temples and pillars to gods you did not know. And over time, the Romans asked questions of the stars, debated senselessly on meaningless topics, sat in cold towers of stone and believed that the center of everything revolved around you. For could it not be any other way?

And in all your secularism, your wisdom, your selfish gloating, the lust of women (or men), the greed, power, wealth and all the world's treasure and all the world's might -- at your fingertips. Alas, O' Rome, your empire of these things did not stand, for now you are simply this: crumbled statues, fallen pillars, ruined temples. All of those things you had could never stand the test of time -- for deceit, malice, contempt, greed, and decay never do.

But in your belly O' Rome, a seed was planted and it grew. And looking upon you as the center of these wicked things, the root of the problem, the planters chose you. A great mercy was shown upon you, for only 1000 years did you have to wait in silent decay. For out of this, the lair of sin in the ancient world, the a great Gift was bestowed upon you to rule again. But this time, it is not to be the same way.