In ancient Rome, you could murder, torture, rape, steal, and even flog your wife
In ancient Rome, you could murder, torture, rape, steal, and even flog your wife - And if your slave ran away, you just cut off his foot, it was a Roman bloodbath! Edward Gibbon said in 1787 of the subject of his monumental opus, The History Of The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire: ‘It is the most overwhelming phenomenon in recorded history — the disintegration not of a nation, but of an old . . . and apparently indestructible civilisation.’ Things are collapsing all over again in modern Europe, of course, and, in his revisionist chronicle of Ancient Rome, Jerry Toner is not slow to point out the parallels. ‘The first pan-European super-state had been created,’ we are told of the Caesars’ domain, which was woven together by a vast bureaucratic ‘central civil service’ — like the one in Brussels, but with togas. The philosophy of the average Roman, likewise, chimes with that of any pushy, upwardly mobile Westerner today. As ‘everyone was constantly jockeying for position’...