Word: rome
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Observing the self-congratulatory excesses of Bicentennial America, some pop historians have found the empire's obituary a bit premature. Edward Gibbon's celebrated attribution of Rome's fall to "the triumph of barbarism and religion" has been supplanted by a more trenchant aphorism. "The decline of Rome," wrote Gibbon, "was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness...
...parallel decline of the modern West. Oswald Spengler believed that the historical cycle-both Roman and industrial-ends in megalopolis, where man coheres "unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter of fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful ..." Arnold Toynbee, in his monumental A Study of History, charted Rome and America through similar cycles of triumph, disintegration and collapse; like the empire of Augustus and Tiberius, imperial America could end in "a schism in the soul...
Other lesser observers have made blatant comparisons. In 1968 The New Republic editorially linked the assassinations of Gaius and Tiberius Gracchus, two reforming fraternal politicians of Rome who lived more than a century before Christ, with the murders of John and Robert Kennedy. At a background briefing for press executives a year before Watergate, Richard Nixon spoke of the "great civilizations of the past, subject to the decadence that eventually destroys the civilization." Nixon went on to speculate that "the U.S. is now reaching that period." Although he agrees with Nixon on hardly any other subject, Novelist Gore Vidal...
These tocsins resound in French Journalist Amaury de Riencourt's recent The American Empire, which envisions an Americanization of the world comparable to what Rome achieved when the Mediterranean bordered the known universe. Leaders of government and multinational business are the coming Caesars. U.S. foreign policy, however well intentioned, is an imperial thrust at Europe, Asia and Africa. "Roman citizenship," De Riencourt explains, "was eventually granted to all men dwelling within the borders of the empire. Today, as the unacknowledged American empire strives to find its shape and its limits, the same ecumenical dream is beginning to haunt...
...even then there were endangered species: the hippopotamus was made extinct in Nubia, the lion in Mesopotamia, the elephant in North Africa. Sport was the adult's amusement and the child's obsession. Rather like a querulous Harvard professor, Tacitus complained that few students of 1st century Rome "are to be found who talk of any other subjects in their homes, and whenever we enter a classroom, what else is the conversation of the youths?" Ancient witnesses to Rome's concern about modes of dress have a distinctly modern ring. "I cannot keep track of fashion," Ovid...