On Forgotten Glories
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Highlights
- The point is this: through all these struggles, through the constant threat of invasion, conquest, and extinction, the Romans held on to their sense of grandeur.
- Motivation comes from the stories we tell ourselves. The sacrifice, will, cohesion, discipline, and steadfastness the future will demand of us cannot be summoned if we don’t think our own story matters.
- Our vision of the future sets both its possibilities and its limits. I would argue that the Roman experience teaches us the following: that, like them, we should accept no limits in time nor in space, but seek “empire without bounds”.
- What the experience of cultural blending across the Mediterranean world under the Romans also shows is that it is not the case, as we seem to have forgotten after the rise of 18th-century nationalist ideology, that identity is fundamentally about inherited characteristics and shared descent. It is much more complicated — and much more up to our volition than that.
- These are all actions — something anyone can do, and that anyone can adopt, as many did. This is why, I believe, Roman culture had such wide appeal and lasting impact. It was fundamentally universal, and fundamentally inclusive, without surrendering its distinctiveness.
- I think much needless suffering and harm could be avoided if more of us were to remember Rome’s example here — that it is possible for identity to be distinctive, inclusive, and unified — that, in other words, having a strong cultural identity is not synonymous with excluding people according to their bloodlines and place of origin, and that being inclusive is not synonymous with cultural relativism. Achieving this at scale is one of Rome’s great forgotten glories.