“Far more renowned than Strabo in his time was Dio Chrysostom – Dio of the Golden Mouth (A.D. 40-120)... Dio left behind him eighty orations. For us today they contain more wind than meat; they suffer from empty amplification, deceptive analogies, and rhetorical tricks; they stretch half an idea to half a hundred pages... ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said the honest Trajan, ‘but I love you as myself.’... Probably what drew people to him was not his fine Attic Greek, but the courage of his denunciations. Almost alone in pagan antiquity he condemned prostitution; and few writers of his time so openly attacked the institution of slavery. (He was a bit vexed, however, when he found that his slaves had run away.)”

Will Durant Caesar and Christ

In my latest Epoch Times column I say the fatal flaw in the Carney cabinet’s lavish austerity program is their conviction that almost any government spending, however trivial and absurd or massive and wrongheaded, pays big dividends so we can’t afford not to.

In my latest Epoch Times column I say our homes used to be our castles and still should be.

In my latest Loonie Politics column I say the reason Mark Carney can’t pull us back from the left-wing idiocies of Justin Trudeau is that he holds substantially the same views and doesn’t even know it.

In my latest Epoch Times column I say from coast to coast Canada is turning away from trusting the people and abandoning self-government for meddlesome ineffective presumption.

“‘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.

“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]