Why Rome Endures Part III: Imagination
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As the contributors Ned and Nathan wrote previously, Rome endures to them for two main reasons: law and experience. They both write about something very real for anyone who has studied and visited the Eternal City. Rome, as a city and a historical artifact, endures because of its charm and because of the stamp Roman society has put on the modern world.
Behind both of those observations is the reason I believe Rome endures most of all: it contains a distinct imagination. The word “Rome” conjures up images of empire and conquest, larger than life emperors, and a political longevity that is difficult to fully appreciate. It was Hollywood before Hollywood, and is sometimes still too sensational to believe.
“Rome” also conjures the city, and with it all the landmarks that have been handed down through the generations: the Forum, the Colosseum, the Pantheon, the catacombs, and so on. The general streetscape of the city’s historical center, the centro storico, has probably changed very little over the last two millennia.
Weaving its way through the rise and fall of the Empire is Christianity. As the seat of the Roman Catholic Church, Rome’s status as a holy city is assured. The Church inherited many of the roles and institutions of the Empire and its influence in maintaining Roman traditions is unparalleled; Latin persists in the medical and legal fields, but only in the Catholic Church is it still an official language.
Studying the Romans — and here I am speaking distinctly about the ancient inhabitants of the Empire — is like studying ourselves. We see ourselves in them, sometimes to an uncomfortable degree. As Mary Beard wrote in SPQR:
Roman history also demands a particular sort of imagination. In some ways, to explore ancient Rome from the twenty-first century is rather like walking on a tightrope, a very careful balancing act. If you look down on one side, everything seems reassuringly familiar: there are conversations going on that we almost join, about the nature of freedom or problems of sex; there are buildings and monuments we recognise and family life lived out in ways we understand, with all their troublesome adolescents; and there are jokes that we 'get.’ On the other side, it seems completely alien territory. That means not just the slavery, the filth (there was hardly any such thing as refuse collection in ancient Rome), the human slaughter in the arena and the death from illnesses whose cure we now take for granted, but also the newborn babies thrown away on rubbish heaps, the child brides and the flamboyant eunuch priests.
Rome looms so large in the Western imagination that it’s difficult to pin down any particular subject that stands above the rest. But there are perhaps a few areas that are the most fascinating and that stand out more than the others.
For instance, consider the title of Pontifex Maximus. This was the chief priest for the ancients that had a long history even before the Republic, but was eventually absorbed into the imperial office by Augustus Caesar. Today it is one of the titles of the Pope.
Or consider this: the Western Romans existed as a functional state for almost one thousand years between the establishment of the Republic in 509 B.C. and the fall of the Western Empire in 476 A.D. The East existed another thousand years until 1453. A two thousand year polity is so far outside the human experience that it is difficult to fully contextualize — and yet, impossibly, the Romans did it.
Or this: that at the Empire’s greatest territorial extent in 117 A.D. it encompassed about 12 percent of the global population, higher even than today’s Europe (9.78 percent).
Or this: the Pantheon, completed in 125 A.D., is still the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world.
Or this: the Cloaca Maxima, a sewer system in Rome constructed perhaps as early as 600 B.C., is still in use today.
Or this: we do not actually know when the Roman Senate stopped convening.
Or this: no state has ever again ruled the Mediterranean to the extent Rome did.
The list goes on.
The Roman imagination — Church, city, state, emperors, gladiators, legions, and all — is vast, and so is the human propensity to wonder. That is why Rome endures.