“‘The two greatest problems in history,’ says a brilliant scholar of our time, are ‘how to account for the rise of Rome, and how to account for her fall.’ We may come nearer to understanding them if we remember that the fall of Rome, like her rise, had not one cause but many, and was not an event but a process spread over 300 years. Some nations have not lasted as long as Rome fell. A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within. The essential causes of Rome’s decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars. Christian writers were keenly appreciative of this decay.”

Will Durant Caesar and Christ

In my latest National Post column I condemn Canadians’ support for compulsory youth service to give us free money not defend freedom.

“The truth is that the Imperial movement going on around us has few of the marks of patriotism. Above all, it lacks one essential quality, and closely connected with the sense of sudden antiquity of which I have spoken, a quality which it is very difficult, perhaps, accurately to define. Perhaps the best phrase for it would be an exultant melancholy. These old war ballads do not dwell upon victory to anything like the extent to which they dwell upon defeat, disaster, the darkness which alone leaves visible the single star of fidelity. The hero of all these songs is not the triumphant hero in the car; their hero is the last man by the flag. The only strong nation and the only strong empire is the nation or the empire that has before it continually this vision of its own final disaster and its own final defiance. There is no success for anything which we do not love more than success. There lies in patriotism, as in every form of love, a great peril, a peril of self-committal, which, while it scares the prudent, fascinates the brave. But this spirit of noble peril and melancholy, which runs from end to end of the patriotic poetry of the world, is just the note which is lacking in current Imperial patriotism…”

G.K. Chesterton in “Patriotic Poetry” in Daily News Nov. 29, 1901, reprinted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #1 (September-October 2024)

“no Roman citizen, as every reader of the Acts of the Apostles knows, could be scourged, tortured, or put to death over his appeal to the emperor.”

Will Durant Caesar and Christ [and everyone knew it then, Christian or not, whereas nowadays I wouldn’t count on most state-educated people to understand any part of that sentence]

“Of his eighteen years as emperor Septimius gave twelve to war. He destroyed his rivals in a swift and savage campaigns; he razed Byzantium after four years’ siege, thereby lowering the barrier to the spreading Goths; he invaded Parthia, took Ctesiphon, annexed Mesopotamia, and hastened the fall of the Arsacid kings. In his old age, suffering from gout but fretful lest his army deteriorate through five years of peace, he led an expedition into Caledonia. After expensive victories against the Scots he withdrew into Britain, and retired to York to die (211). ‘I have been everything,’ he said, ‘and it is worth nothing.’”

Will Durant Caesar and Christ

“Moral decay contributed to the dissolution [of the Roman Empire]. The virile character that had been formed by arduous simplicities and a supporting faith relaxed in the sunshine of wealth and the freedom of unbelief; men had now, in the middle and upper classes, the means to yield to temptation, and only expediency to restrain them. Urban congestion multiplied contacts and frustrated surveillance; immigration brought together a hundred cultures whose differences rub themselves out into indifference. Moral and esthetic standards were lowered by the magnetism of the mass; and sex ran riot in freedom while political liberty decayed. The greatest of historians held that Christianity was the chief cause of Rome’s fall.”

Will Durant Caesar and Christ [the greatest of historians is of course Edward Gibbon - but it is not immediately obvious that Christianity caused any of the things Durant just listed including unbelief or sex running riot]

Because of the infamous crowded, dirty, rowdy streets of Rome, and tendency of cheap shoddy apartment “insulae” buildings to collapse, and people throwing solid or liquid objects out upper-storey windows “All in all, he [Juvenal] thought, only a fool would go out to dinner without making his will.”

Will Durant Caesar and Christ

On Miracle Channel TV recently I spoke about our government’s pigheaded persistence in forcing EVs on us with Paul Arthur.