Latin Lessons

Analogies are frequently drawn between the Roman empire and the West. Permeated by a fuzzy-minded anti-Americanism, the accompanying predictions are usually dire, involving fire-and-brimstone pronouncements about the West’s manifold sins, heinous corruption and inevitable fall. Perhaps it’s time to consider the “Roman analogy” properly. It’s not just that the Romans have exerted such an influence on our world (I refer you to that noted scholarly source, The Life of Brian, for a remarkably comprehensive response to the question, “What have the Romans done for us?”). More important, however, is the fact that critical lessons remain to be gleaned from the history of Rome. What, in other words, can the Romans still do for us? What can we learn from Rome? There are unexpected answers to these questions, but first some misconceptions in the commonly held view of Rome and its civilisation need to be swept away. Let’s tackle a few.

Misconception 1: the nasty Romans were all ethnically Roman and lived in Rome. There’s one fact here, it did all start in Rome. On the banks of the Tiber, small groups (including several different tribes) did come together to make a people called Latins. Even more intermingling occurred when the Latins and the previously dominant Etruscans merged to make one people (Roman aristocratic families proudly traced their lineage back to the Etruscan nobility; Emperor Claudius, for example, wrote a—now sadly-lost—history of the Etruscans, whom he acknowledged as forebears). Being “Roman” involved, even from the start, a measure of ethnic complexity. Our perception of the Roman empire as a monolithic racially-based entity is just wrong-headed, based as it is on a concept of the nation-state that the Romans themselves would not have recognised.

In the early days of Roman history, Roman citizenship was restricted to those claiming descent from the original Latin people. However, this was gradually extended to Rome’s environs, to all Italy, and eventually, at the empire’s height, to its farthest reaches. Provincial citizens came to be able to exercise political power right up to holding the position of emperor. “Rome”, the city, was the heart of the empire and the beacon of culture and civilisation for the known world; but “Roman” was an attribute that could apply in its most distant outposts. In far-off Romano-Britain, for example, a Syrian merchant with a Latin name could put up a memorial marker to his wife, who was a Briton, and consider both himself and his wife Roman.

Misconception 2: the nasty Romans were imperialist oppressors of all those poor little countries. Let’s knock one notion out first of all—countries. There weren’t any. In fact, the first stirrings of some sort of national identity were often given to many peoples by the Romans. “France”, for example, the Roman Gaul, was a collection of tribal groups in a constant state of internecine warfare. It was Caesar himself who (in his beautifully written discussion of his Gallic campaign) first sought for commonalities in the Gallic tribes, and it was his armies which had—ironically—impelled Gallic military alliance. Misconception 2 grows naturally out of Misconception 1—if Misconception 1 is accepted, then it becomes easier to see Roman conquest (inaccurately) as involving vast armies of ethnically Roman infantry spreading out over Europe to grind the peasantry under their sandalled feet.

Were the Romans “imperialist”? Well, they did have an empire. The Roman empire was premised on military might. Rome’s efficient military machine was not only its battering ram in extending its power; the army was also its bulwark against the threat of invasion by other empires or barbarian incursion. Military muscle (and advanced technological skill) lay at the root of Rome’s imperial power. However, the creation of the empire entailed a more complex process than mere “oppression” (though the Romans were more than capable of using overwhelming and absolutely ruthless force to crush opposition).

The evolution of the concept, “Roman”, meant that the empire (driven not by a desire to extend “rights to the masses”, but by a pragmatic need to survive) necessarily became more of a process of inclusion, in which previously conquered peoples were brought into the tent, not kept out. Moreover, the inclusion of these diverse peoples resulted in a reciprocal influence on Roman culture. If Rome exported its ideas everywhere, it also absorbed ideas from everywhere. Roman soldiers could worship a Celtic horse deity within the walls of Rome itself and feel just as “Roman” as their brother soldier sacrificing to Jupiter. Rome came to be governed by provincial senators and emperors who would have found the notion of being perceived as a member of an “oppressed people” deeply strange. Do we see Trajan and Hadrian, for example, as representatives of the oppressed Spanish peoples? Umm, no. They are rather perceived as two of Rome’s most successful and influential emperors, who shaped the very notion we have of the Roman imperial project. As “imperialism” goes, the Roman version provides us with a very equal-opportunity kind of oppressor.

Which leads us to Misconception 3: the nasty Romans were oppressive because they enslaved people. In fact, in the ancient world, everyone enslaved everyone else. Slavery was the norm, not an oddity, a consequence of the solving of “foreign policy” issues through war, and of the pressure of large pre-industrial economies. Slavery did not, however, conform to the contemporary stereotype, which is conditioned by the eighteenth-and-nineteenth-century experience of the West, in particular as represented to us by the American South, in which slavery was justified through the supposed “inferiority” of the enslaved. In contrast, the slaves of the classical world were not considered to be inherently inferior. They were generally merely defeated. Many Greek slaves, for example, were highly educated—sometimes better educated than their Roman masters—and were recognised as such. They were employed as trusted secretaries or as personal tutors. Moreover, in the Roman system, slavery did not preclude slaves later gaining their freedom, attaining citizenship, achieving wealth and establishing families that came to be politically significant (which is not to say that the experience of many slaves, particularly those working in the mines, was not a cruel one).

Some famous Romans began as slaves or were descended from freedmen. The playwright Terence (who wrote, so memorably, “I am a man. Nothing human is alien to me”), for example, was brought to Rome as a slave, given an education and then freed by a master who recognised his talent. The Augustan poet Horace was the son of a freedman who had succeeded in business and sent Horace to the Roman equivalent of an “Ivy League” university (he studied in Athens—the Oxbridge or Harvard of the day). This freedman’s son became the intimate friend of Maecenas, Augustus’s adviser, and a trusted civil servant. Despite the fact that as a young man, Horace had fought on the side of the Republic against Augustus’s armies, when he died he was one of Rome’s greatest poets, respected by the Emperor Augustus himself.

As with the concept of Roman citizenship, there was fluidity in the practice of slavery in the Roman world. Slavery did not represent a specifically Roman form of “moral decadence” in their society. 

The question of Rome’s “moral decadence” leads neatly to Misconception 4: those nasty, nasty Romans got their justified comeuppance in the “Fall of Rome”, which occurred because of its inherent decadence and corruption, its slave girls and banquets, and its horrid emperors such as Nero and Caligula who persecuted Deborah Kerr and all those other poor little Christians. There’s a grain of truth here. Some Roman emperors were downright certifiable—Caligula would have kept a faculty of consultant psychiatrists in business—and persecuting Christians did occupy many a cheery afternoon’s entertainment in the reign of quite a few Roman emperors. The fact of the matter is, however, that our perception of Rome’s “decadence” has been coloured to a great extent by Roman self-criticism (an awful lot of ink was spent by Romans on exhorting their fellow citizens to adhere to the moral virtue of earlier generations). Our understanding of the Romans has equally been influenced by the writings of the Christian Fathers, who saw in the Roman ideology a competing worldview which had to be negated. Our perception of Rome therefore reflects the moral judgment of those with a vested interest in its negative portrayal. The Roman state was neither inherently corrupt, nor did the periods of genuine high moral decadence inevitably lead to “The Fall of Rome”.

In the first instance, the conquest and expansion seen as being so quintessential of the Roman state began in the time of the Republic, when Rome had no emperors, and when the concept of Roman “virtue” was first formulated as the pretty abstemious and disciplined affair it became. Second, the periods we associate with the height of Roman decadence—such as the reigns of Nero and Caligula—were neither periods of particularly great disorder (despite the undoubted damage they caused, the empire chugged along), nor were they followed by anarchy and collapse. The empire did not fall as a result of their nuttiness, mismanagement or moral decadence.

The empire survived for hundreds of years. Sometimes it flourished, sometimes it suffered. There could be drought, plague and war (all at once, on occasion); or there could be peace, prosperity and growth. The empire sometimes had good emperors in bad times and bad emperors in good times. Whatever the flaws of the imperial system of governance (and it could be a hit-and-miss affair), however, it was generally able to survive even the bad emperors. In fact, not long after the melodrama of the Julio-Claudians, the Roman empire produced the period known as the “Age of the Good Emperors”, in which the empire—far from falling—reached to its farthest extent, and produced a wealth of what we regard as Rome’s cultural treasures, during a period of excellent administration. Trajan, for example, was a Kevin Rudd kind of guy, a micro-manager with a prodigious work ethic and an amazing attention to detail. Pliny and Trajan’s correspondence is a model of imperial oversight, right down to organising water supplies, public amenities and fire brigades! The period also produced one of the great “philosopher kings” of history, Marcus Aurelius, whose Meditations, full of insight and wisdom that translate across time, were written in his tent on military campaign. 

Rome, however, did fall. It didn’t happen overnight—there were 400 years between the spectacular hyperbole of Nero’s reign and the collapse of the empire in the West. There was no cataclysmic event. It was more “whimper, not bang” history. In the East, the empire, in its Byzantine form, survived for another thousand years. In the West, however, the great Roman empire withered away into the barbarian kingdoms of the Dark Ages, in which (despite what current research recognises as survivals and points of continuity) knowledge and skills were lost, cities and their necessary process of civilisation were stunted and diminished, and governance degenerated into a form of aristocratic banditry out of which administration, the law and social order had to be carved once again. It is at this point that we need to look for those lessons from Roman history.

The Fall of Rome in the West involved a complex knot of factors, a nexus of interacting variables that led to the disintegration of the unified Roman empire into the Eastern Roman empire on one side and a succession of barbarian kingdoms in the West on the other. These factors include internal pressures such as changes in the rural economy, problems in exacting taxation or constituting the army, friction over religion (in its various permutations), bloody faction-fighting, and blinkered Roman expectations of the empire’s imperviousness to change; as well as external pressures such as climate change and population movements in the region. It is an interesting exercise for those espousing “Western liberal values” to consider two of these factors in particular: population movements and cultural expectations.

Let’s look firstly at population movements. The commonly held stereotype of the Fall of Rome is that of a corrupt system being overwhelmed by the invading hordes of barbarian armies. Well, not exactly. There were no massed armies. There was no “invasion”. The “Barbarians at the Gate” had in fact been initially invited inside by Roman rulers. Possibly as a result of climate change in regions far from Rome, Germanic peoples, squeezed off their lands by the Huns—the very, very scary Huns—were on the move. They arrived at the boundaries of the Roman empire desperate and starving. The Romans, with their own internal problems with faction-fighting and maintaining their army, saw this as an opportunity and opened their borders to these new communities. After all, the Romans had always possessed the ability to absorb and integrate other cultures, cultures which over time had enriched the strength and viability of the empire.

However, this particular inclusion was different. For a start, when Rome absorbed Gaul or Spain into the empire, a gradual process from initial defeat of the subject lands to full inclusion occurred in which Romanisation took place at every level, from the building of public amenities like aqueducts to the use of Roman law and social practice. Literacy, for example, was usually the inevitable result of areas being incorporated into the empire and their people acquiring Roman citizenship, and areas which previously had no written literature came to produce thinkers whose work was regarded as among the greatest products of their age. Virgil was himself the product of ethnic diversity. His poetry embodied all that is noble in the Roman ideal. Yet Virgil most likely was not born a Roman citizen. He came from the region known as Gaul-this-side-of-the-Alps, and was probably a descendant of the Celts. The process of Romanisation started within the subject lands themselves, growing outwards from the native-born elites who had allied themselves with the Romans. Intermarriage was accepted and commonplace, and Romanisation could therefore be pretty much a family affair. When the provincial Romans came to exercise political power in the Roman state, they were well and truly a part of the system, sharing bonds of education, values and family loyalties.

In the case of the new Goth peoples, these communities were absorbed lock, stock and barrel (the warlike imagery is apropos). The Goths, and the other Germanic peoples who followed them, had very different customs from those of Rome. Friction with the Roman system was guaranteed from the start. Moreover, interactions with Rome were initially mediated by venal officials who served to generate even more conflict. The process of gradual integration was therefore short-circuited, and the development of attachment to Roman values was slowed and blunted. The irony is, of course, that subsequent to the fall of the empire, the barbarian kingdoms eventually came to esteem the very society whose end they hastened. They sought to speak Latin, adopted many Roman practices and valued the works of Roman civilisation.

In a parallel universe, there is perhaps an alternate timeline in which gradual absorption did take place, and the Germanic peoples became part of a Roman system that was able to maintain itself against the various internal and external pressures it faced. In our timeline, however, a weakened Rome fell. Roman emperors sought to retard the process by “buying off” the newcomers with parcels of land on which they could settle. All this did was not only bring the antagonistic newcomers further and further within the borders of the Roman state, but also acted to diminish Rome’s ability to levy necessary taxes and maintain a viable defensive army.

The relevance to our times of this period of flux in the Roman empire is clear enough. Population movements are likely to be one of the most significant and difficult issues facing the twenty-first century. Unlike the nineteenth century, in which mass migrations of people—the Irish Diaspora, for example—were able to move into regions of large land mass which (whatever one’s attitude to European colonisation) had relatively limited population (such as the Americas and Australasia), the people movements of our own time will move groups into regions with substantial existent populations. Like the Romans, Western countries are faced with quickly integrating large groups of people with backgrounds, values and customs very different from their own. Like the Romans again, the countries of the West have encouraged migration to serve their own ends. In a Europe with a declining birth rate, for example, migration has a necessary role to play in supporting the economic system. However, like the Romans, Europe now faces seemingly intractable problems in absorbing an influx of migrants, whether legal or illegal, on a scale that makes it difficult to both help newcomers adapt to the culture of their new country, and allow the host country to adapt to them.

Another of the factors which inhibited the Roman empire’s ability to adapt was not the “moral corruption” so often ascribed to it (in fact, by the time of the actual Fall of Rome in the West, the empire was Christian, and at least part of their ostensible reasoning in absorbing the Germanic peoples was “Christian charity”), but the sclerotic complacency of a society accustomed to success. In the minds of its citizens, Rome was the Eternal City, and the concept of the Fall of the Empire seemed inconceivable. The empire had lasted as long as our own Modern era (taking this from around the Renaissance onwards), and the Republic was constituted centuries before that. The notion that sheep would one day graze amidst the ruins of the Forum was as impossible for the Romans to imagine as a modern European contemplating herding cattle one day on the Champs-Élysées. The Romans were blinded by the sense of their own superiority (even the Germanic peoples themselves saw Rome and its culture as superior to their own; they just wanted part of the action, not realising that the golden eggs depended on the goose). The Roman emperors destroyed the empire by inches, ceding territory incrementally to the Germanic tribes, who established their own fiefdoms in competition with each other and the Roman state. The empire was hollowed out from within, and when Rome fell, the last emperor in the West had become as historically insignificant as King Zog. 

So, if we are going to draw an analogy between the Western world as we understand it today and Rome, what lessons can we learn? On the plus side, in relation to population movements, we can learn from the Romans’ previous capacity to integrate diverse peoples within the empire. The Romans were a pragmatic people. They quickly came to recognise that their problems with diminishing replacement population on the Italian landmass, and their need to maintain order in the provinces, could be answered by progressively extending citizenship to the provincials. Citizenship not only replenished the depleted population stocks, filled the ranks of the army and maintained government revenue through taxation, it provided people in the provinces with more of an investment in Rome’s imperial project. In most regions of the empire, after the initial process of military defeat and occupation, the Roman legions were a locally drawn, not foreign force.

In the “good times”, the Roman state provided stability and gave its citizens legal and political rights that many of them had not had under their previous indigenous systems (the slave about to be offered up as a human sacrifice by another Gallic tribe may, for example, have considered the Romans’ prohibition of the practice an attractive prospect). Without seeking to gloss over the undoubted brutalities of Roman rule (the exercise of power anywhere in the ancient world was rarely nice), “business as usual” in the Roman empire at its height could be very good indeed.

There were specific factors that helped the Romans successfully integrate new populations. The new peoples had homelands over which the Romans had established control; and the Romans had time. Pacification and Romanisation could take generations, and the Romans were able to operate on a timetable which allowed for persistence and patience. However, four key practices of the Romans that helped them effectively integrate peoples in the “good times” of effective governance are worth considering by modern observers.

They imposed the law and demanded observance of social and cultural norms. Tolerance exists as a concomitant of a society confident in asserting its own expectations. Roman law established one code for all. Citizenship rights therefore held as much in Londinium as they did in Rome itself. The Romans imposed standardisation across the empire, from uniform weights and measures to civic structure. Latin was the language of the empire and core Roman mores were enforced. The Gallic propensity for wearing a girdle of one’s enemies’ severed heads, for example, was quickly rendered unfashionable.

They adapted to new cultures. The Romans were interested in other cultures, and prepared to absorb not just people, but also new ideas and practices from the provinces.

The Roman system gave new citizens concrete benefits. The Romans provided opportunities for education, economic development, political participation and social mobility. At its worst, Rome was a shark pond in which getting ahead could be a vicious affair. At its best, however, Rome was a meritocracy in which talent was recognised, and in which a man could go from slave to wealthy entrepreneur, or from provincial citizen to emperor.

They delivered those benefits locally. The Romans did not want to keep the provinces in a permanent state of subjection. They were pragmatists, and such control required too great an expenditure of manpower and treasure over long periods. They would if they had to (Judaea was a case in point), but it was rarely worth the effort. It was more profitable to facilitate the growth of a stable, productive, economically viable and politically-involved region contributing to the overall cultural richness and prosperity of the empire. 

If these are the lessons of Rome’s periods of success in handling ethnic diversity, we can also learn from its failure. The settling of the Germanic tribes in their own separate areas, while meeting their immediate needs for farming land and food, created resistant cultural centres that probably slowed acceptance of Roman values and created hubs from whence raids against the empire could be raised. Rather than establishing what became de facto kingdoms for the Germanic tribes, the Romans should have distributed the new peoples throughout the empire in smaller groups. This would have reduced inter-tribal hostility and facilitated their adaptation to the Roman system. After the chaos of the third century, however, Rome had forgotten its own lessons. The Roman empire descended into a series of despotisms. Citizenship rights in the late empire were reduced to a shadow of what they once were. Harried on all sides, the Roman system in the West therefore wheezed on into the oblivion that awaited it.

In the case of modern population movements, creating analogous migrant “islands” is equally a poorly conceived idea. Suburbs of Paris, for example, have essentially become ghettoes for their largely North African Muslim inhabitants, providing only substandard living conditions, poor education, and astronomical rates of unemployment in crime-ridden areas largely unpoliced by the state. This is a recipe for disaster, ensuring deprivation on the part of new citizens, and huge potential for disorder on the part of the larger society. These ghettoes have seen outbreaks of serious rioting between North African youths and police, and between different immigrant groups. Europe, which like Rome has been seeking to counterbalance its declining birth rate with immigration, confronts great difficulties in integrating its new citizens. The EU has taken in large numbers of low-skilled immigrants (as noted by Newsweek recently, 85 per cent of the movement of low-skilled migrants to the developed world is to the EU; by contrast it receives only 5 per cent of the world’s highly skilled migrants—a whopping 55 per cent of highly educated migrants to the developed world end up in the USA). The EU has generally provided them with little access to quality education, and has offered welfare benefits rather than opportunities for genuine advancement. As explosive social cocktails go, this is an absolute cracker. Moreover, democracies are ill-placed to deal with the consequences of their poor planning. The ugly reality of xenophobia and racism lies all too close to the surface, for example, in Italian or French calls to deport the Roma. The forced deportation of illegal (and even legal) immigrants is being seriously canvassed. The freedoms of liberal democracy would wither under these conditions.

Undemocratic systems have less compunction in dealing with migration. The Chinese, for example, routinely send desperate North Koreans back across the border. The Iranians have deported hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees over recent years, with little international comment. These are not examples to follow. Yet the world faces seemingly insurmountable problems in handling future population movements.

Large-scale migrations have always been a factor in human settlement. In the past, migrations were constrained by distance, by the smaller overall world population, and by the exigencies of migration itself. The “tyranny of distance” is largely overcome in our global world. Planes can take us halfway around the world in less than a day. We are currently adding a billion people to the planet approximately every twelve years, mostly in the regions least able to support them. Even without climate change, mass migration at unprecedented levels is likely. With it, even if only the minimalist prognostications of climate sceptics are borne out, the dimensions of the problem would be staggering.

Large-scale population movements are generally driven by desperate need. The Germanic tribes, for example, are thought to have been pushed into Roman territory by movement outward by the Huns. The needs of modern-day migrants can be just as desperate. The long-term solution entails radical improvement in local economic and political conditions for people in those nations feeding global migration (delivering, as did the Romans, the benefits of modernisation regionally), and forward planning at a global level to slow population growth to sustainable levels. The West must also manage its inclusion of immigrant peoples more effectively. Like Rome, Western nations can both offer opportunities to their new peoples and reinvigorate their own host societies. Western democracies should not, however, ignore the potential that major population movements pose in this century to the democratic principles on which their states are based. Whether freedoms are taken away or whether governments ignore and undermine them (treating the Roma as a “special case” may be expedient for EU countries, but what precedent does that set with regard to the respective rights of the individual and the state?), freedoms could be lost. 

What we cannot afford is the kind of complacency which did, in the end, contribute to the Fall of Rome in the West. The last Roman emperors in the West were blinded by their belief in the permanence of Rome; but it could not survive the final dismantling of its regional control on top of the gradual weakening of military and societal cohesion that had occurred in the period. The “idea” of Rome was enormously powerful (the strength of which is apparent in the continuing fascination it holds) and did influence the barbarian kingdoms that rose in its wake, but the idea was not strong enough to withstand the brute geopolitical realities of the time. Educated individuals in what came to be called the “Dark Ages” read their Virgil and Horace, Caesar and Cicero, but the engine that drove the Roman “idea” ground to a halt, and with it was lost the process of civilisation and technological advancement represented by Rome. It was not just a matter of forgetting how to build great domed buildings or how to maintain adequate sanitation. The notion of the free citizen whose rights were guaranteed under law by the state was supplanted by that of subject and feudal lord. Something important was lost, and it was lost for a very long time.

The Romans had a natural talent for self-criticism. Fulminating against the falling away from moral values was a favourite activity for the Roman intellectual; and in this, Western nations today can be very Roman. However, in the worthy endeavour to keep our governments and societies true to the principles that sustain them, there may be a tendency, like the Romans, to take for granted the survival of the political system that generates them. There is, as I said earlier, a lazy anti-Americanism in a great deal of contemporary social commentary. In fact, as “imperial” powers go, the Americans are a singularly hopeless lot by Roman standards. The fact that despite being a dominating actor on the world’s economic and political stage, the USA is still out there valiantly trying to set up democracies, rather than establish a unified empire, would have mystified the Romans. They would have considered the Americans naive, idealistic and self-absorbed—and the Americans probably are naive, idealistic and self-absorbed. They are not, however, the “Evil Empire”, and the misuse of the “Roman analogy” is wrong in both senses. Without diminishing the problems of the passionate but flawed society that is America, a facile association of the USA with either “Roman moral decadence” or the “Fall of Rome” represents a misreading of both modern and Roman history.

In making this analogy, modern commentators elide over history, but they also seek to de-legitimise the ideal of Western liberal democracy. The concept of human rights, for example, has never been “universal”. It is the product of the specific cultural and historical conditions that produced our modern Western world (conditions which include the legacy of the Greeks and Romans). Throughout history there have rarely been civilisations that offered even basic citizenship rights to their own peoples, let alone extended the notion of rights to all humankind, as does the modern world. As kinship patterns go, the brotherhood of man has been a very dysfunctional family indeed. The American Declaration of Independence states grandly: “We hold these truths to be self-evident …” Yet even a cursory scanning of human history reveals the distinct lack of any “self-evidence” of the notion of individual rights underpinning the American Constitution, or of human rights enshrined in the UN Charter. In the earliest written creation story to come down to us (from the Sumerians), human beings were created as a slave labour force to dig irrigation channels for the gods. In this worldview, servitude was the original condition of humankind, and there have been a host of civilisations throughout history who would have concurred. If we value the concepts of human rights, liberty and modern democracy, then we need to cherish the culture that produced them—our own.

One of the ways we can do so is to counter the misperceptions inherent in “the Roman analogy”. Rome was not a particularly vicious or corrupt state by ancient world standards. It did not fall because of any inherent moral turpitude. There are not innumerable much “nicer” empires throughout human history against which Rome’s particular malevolence can be measured. In fact, Rome was remarkably effective for centuries as a force for efficient governance and provision of social “goods” to a citizenry which was far more inclusive than at any time other than our own. Moreover, the ideals of the Roman Republic (which the empire had continued to value) were to flicker like a small candle throughout the Dark Ages and beyond, inspiring great minds across the centuries that separate us. To this day, the “idea” of Rome remains a powerful thing.

If Roman analogies are to be used, then they should be accurate ones. Rather than use Rome as a convenient whipping boy for castigation of the West, we should really look at the problems of history—including the pattern of events which led to the Fall of Rome—as a means to understanding the inevitable pressures of human settlement and civilisation. The twenty-first century is shaping up as one of the most challenging faced by humankind on this increasingly crowded planet. What can we learn from the Romans in dealing with it? Plenty.

Rob Nugent contributed “The Decline of Reading in an Age of Ignorance” in the January-February issue.