Geopolitics serves first and foremost to make peace. To wage war, the will of one is enough. To end it, at least two are needed. And two is the opposite of one, not double one. To pacify means to convert together, friend and foe, to reorder chaos within uncertain limits as peace is never absolute, but always relative. War breaks every bond, it enrages us. Peace rebuilds broken relationships, it re-humanises us. Away with couple or multiple exercises, from which no one emerges as before. Everything else is a truce, at best a prelude to peace, at worst a pause before the next assault. This is a subtle distinction.
The difference between pacifism based on principle – I say “Peace” thus saving my soul – and effective pacification – kept permanently, even if armed – lies in recognising oneself as part of a whole that is aware of itself and of the impossibility of doing everything. The same postulate informs geopolitical reasoning, which dissects conflicts to investigate their uses. Starting from the discovery that peace and war are not written on the same line, at least as long as a shred of reason keeps the combatants lucid. Those who unleash war aim for the best peace they can achieve, not vice versa. Peace is won, not war. And it is measured over time, not at the end of the fighting. This is where the analyst stops. It is up to the actors to decide in which direction to turn the analysis. But when war becomes an end in itself, geopolitics dies. For us professionals, this is all the more reason not to give up on peace.
In the real world, conversion to peace is asymmetrical, always revocable, and a function of each party’s power. Not to be confused with force. Maximum power is that which is capable of integrating the enemy into its order. Minimum power is that which deludes itself into thinking it can eliminate all its rivals one by one – a suicidal temptation. By destroying its external enemies, only its internal enemies remain. Against whom the blinded colossus lashes out with all its might, with the brute energy that self-hatred can unleash.
We have confirmation of this today. The simultaneous suicidal impulse of the American empire and nation leaves us astonished at how this unwritten law of the decomposition of powers is interpreted. Trump II’s (2025–?) declaration of war on that part of America he considers anti-American (‘the enemy from within’), certifies the delirium at the summit of the self-styled New Rome. And it reminds us how much truth there is in the sine wave that describes the rise and fall of great empires: one rises with others, variously subsumed into one’s own system, and falls through self-sabotage. The frustrated drive for expansion turns into a depressive fury of its centre against its centre. If the greatest power suffers from this syndrome, there is a serious possibility that such delirium will push us towards the ultimate war.
We are living on the threshold of an epoch-making change that requires us to rethink peace and war in an unprecedented context. For the first time in history, the decision for one or the other could prove irrevocable. Do we realise this? Or do we lean towards Bartleby’s refrain: ‘We would prefer not to’? How else can we describe the incestuous relationship between weapons of mass destruction, nuclear and cybernetic, and their automatic control, removed from human hands? Is it by chance that, in view of this terrifying prospect, the study of history and public debate between different points of view are suffering, supplanted by Presentism, lacking both yesterday and tomorrow, and by circular conversations between counterparts in sealed environments, incapable of recognising each other as legitimate? And even if artificial intelligence were to give up deciding for us, would we not have trained ourselves so much for the fate of being governed by it that we would give up our freedom anyway?
Perhaps distracted by our passion for our craft, at this juncture we feel compelled to connect, as far as possible, analysis and proposal. As well as diagnosis and therapy, and war and peace. Not to suggest anything to real or presumed decision-makers, but to contribute to the free investigation of each and every one of us, to the awareness that alone we cannot understand or produce anything. In order not to end up dazed by propaganda, listening to the other side – all the other sides, especially the most adverse ones – is a logical and ethical imperative. Equally imperative is recognising that our future is by no means predetermined.
With this spirit, we start again from Ancient Rome, the supreme reference point for the powers of every age, including the present. Imperium sine fine, but cum finibus: infinite in time, limited in space, where the second charisma reinforces the first. We treat that imperial matrix as an antidote to the dangerous DIY idiocy that plagues the world stage. We do it from within, literally. From the window we can see the Aurelian Walls, erected between 270 and 279 AD to defend the City against barbarian raids. We can still hear the involuntary remark of our Chinese friend, a gentle man of letters, who, at the sight of those walls gnawed by time, exclaimed: ‘But can’t you see how they’ve been reduced? Tear them down before they fall!’ We take it with a smile. Today, looking back, it seems like an omen. Not of a mural disaster, but of a much more powerful collapse: the not-only metaphorical departure from history, and therefore from reality, to which empires that continue to sacrifice to the original Augustan model are now inclined. Ipsa ruina docet: the physical persistence of a past that does not pass opens us up to the future, as if a mysterious magnetic field were reviving the social lesson that distinguishes the Roman way of being in the world. Pax Romana is still our teacher. Irreproducible, it inspires those who think about large, small, and in any case impure compromises, alternatives to warmongering tendencies.
This is why we invoke Rome here. The only true Rome, that is neither new nor ancient but eternal in itself, not for itself. Its eternity lies in Pax Romana: a legacy that the republican empire leaves to its self-proclaimed successors of all kinds and types. Let us try to describe its avant la lettre geopolitical genius. The aim is to offer the critical reader the thesis that opposes Pax Americana and Pax Romana. Stars-and-stripes anti-geopolitics versus Rome’s geopolitics: the botched hijacking of a brand. The only point of contact is marketing: both empires dress themselves up as republics to show themselves faithful to the self-portrait of their origins. The greatest contradiction is the denial of their roots exhibited by America’s liberal elites. You can adapt, transfigure and repaint everything in the myth that identifies you with yourself, except your birth certificate. The beginning of the end of the American imperial nation lies in the 1619 Project launched six years ago by the New York Times Magazine. The manifesto of the nation invented by the Founding Fathers is no longer the Declaration of Independence – the cannon shot that in 1776 heralded the advent of a Western world with dual leadership, first Anglo-British, then American, that until yesterday were close connected. It is the forced landing of the first African slaves in Virginia, slave-owning racism against Enlightenment universalism. Far from New Rome: Anti-Rome.
Our thesis is not dictated by historiographical ambitions. It is not a question of crushing the present on the past or vice versa. Instead, we need to study the lesson of Rome, which is universal and therefore applicable – and how! – in different spaces and times by subjects who are dying to consider themselves its heirs, as continuers and innovators.
We feel that it is urgent to come up with a critique of the solipsistic militarism that is sliding us towards war, a historical occurrence that has been removed from the last three generations of Italians. We are in no way ready to face the return of the repressed. The cure consists of a cold bath of reality, to open ourselves to understanding and therefore to managing such a threat. Thanks to the discovery of a resource we did not suspect we possessed: the legacy of Pax Romana.
Let us anticipate the conclusion: to save peace, that is, ourselves, it is better to learn from the original rather than to cook it again, this time in American sauce. Moreover, if New Rome were to associate itself with such a revision, it would gain a great deal. And we along with it. This serves as a caveat against the neurosis that leads the Italian elite to conceive of home-grown donkey kicks against the weary American lion, given up for dead, in order to quickly hook up with the presumed incoming hegemon, Red China. Our history warns us that one can die from premature “cunning”.
With a reckless leap backwards, we explore Pax Romana in its applications, which are both older and more advanced than is commonly believed. A note for our American friends, whom we know to be fond of gladiatorial art, so much so that they mistake it for the essence of Roman culture: the difference between us and you – friendship allows intimacy – is the one that at the time distinguished the retiarius from the secutor. Let us quickly retrace the first principles of the geopolitics of peace. With a clear purpose: to understand in order to act. Understanding in order to understand, today means not understanding anything at all.
The awareness that one cannot decide the fate of others, let alone one’s own, is the premise of any geopolitics that does not want to be science. It is a premise based on the comparison of the interests of the parties in conflict, each starting from their own point of view in contexts moved by the unceasing wind of history: masses of air that blow inconsistently in the most varied directions and at different times, never the same. Thus, stirring up the competing subjects, they outline clashes, intertwinings, overlaps, pretence and counter-pretence. And temporary collusions, that they will call peace.
In elegant geopolitical form, it is a rhapsody of contrasting maps that describe the trajectories of the games in question on multiple scales. They are infinite geograms, rebelling against any attempt to pin them down to a pattern or, worse, to hinge them on Cartesian axes. They are peculiar historical atlases, a publishing genre in danger of extinction. Incidentally, a sign of the times.
The exercise of geopolitics, by its very nature, forces us to think about ourselves in relation to others. Not out of altruism, but on the basis of the self-preservation principle, to which individuals and communities do not spontaneously tend. This exercise is intended to be therapeutic, if only because it warns us that we are not alone in the world. It is a recommended cure for delusions of omnipotence.
There is method in decline. The hegemon that knows it is mortal accompanies its own return to the folds of humanity, recognising itself as distinct because it is not alone. It relies on those who will become its travelling companions once it has gone down in class. It renounces the (in)glorious temptation of the last battle. Ars declinandi is ars coniugandi.
The power of every empire is directly proportional to its ability to organise its peace. It is an unattainable but binding ideal, verifiable a contrario. The fever of hyper-power is measured in its wars’ frequency, intensity and crisis, in the violations of its peace. This is a test in which the distance between the One and Only Rome and the New Rome appears dazzling. The zenith of the Roman Empire’s parable was the Pax Augustea, extendable to the first two centuries of the creature invented by its genius founder, Octavian Augustus under a thinly-veiled republican guise. It was a time during which there was certainly no shortage of wars to maintain hegemony, aimed at consolidating the forma imperii. The collapse of what we consider to be the Fourth Rome (between us and Washington, Constantinople and Moscow) coincides with its apparent zenith, at the height of the impossible yet celebrated unipolar moment. A moment of madness, when the empire mirrors itself in the world it would like to remake in its own image and likeness. Being a totalitarian delusion, it accelerates the empire’s steep decline.
The warlike fury unleashed by the superpower in response to 9/11 was striking, just six months after one of its aspiring Virgils, Charles Krauthammer, had venerated it as the ‘dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since Rome’. The “war on terror” was another name for suicidal war. While Bush Jr. threw himself into a crusade that disintegrated the American way of life in order to save it, on the opposite side, Mullah Omar, leader of the Taliban, compared himself to Ulysses and to Polyphemus, ‘a giant blinded by an enemy he cannot name’. It took a mortal enemy of the West who read Homer to remind the champion of the West of the relevance of the Classics. They are today plundered, not only in America, by a devastating use of quotations in a festival of context-free quotations, parallel to the academic liquidation of the Classics as white, male-dominated and racist. It’s Wokism, to which Trumpism responds with equal and opposite censorship. The war to save the American way of life among those who presume to embody it contributes to its demise: seven out of ten Americans renounce the American Dream, or rather their own religion. Meanwhile, Trump reveals himself to be a confused follower of the Polyphemus-Bush Jr. faction, launching air and sea raids from the world’s largest aircraft carrier against the small boats of Venezuelan drug traffickers in his convinction that he is overthrowing Maduro’s regime while changing his own.
Healthy scepticism towards essentialism, which would postulate America’s nature as devoted to violence, gives way to statistics that show the United States invading almost half of the other states and militarily engaged with each of them except Andorra, Bhutan, and Liechtenstein. This is worth remembering in order to grasp the distance between Pax Americana and Pax Romana. For example, we would not bet that in a few centuries’ time the American Empire will arouse the poignant nostalgia for all things Roman that pervaded the entire Middle Ages and coloured the Renaissance, an age marked by its devotion to Ancient Rome.
It is worth reflecting on the lessons of Rome, starting with two observations made by the English historian and writer Adrian Goldsworthy, an expert on the peace of Rome. First: ‘When the empire finally collapsed in the western Mediterranean there was no trace of independence movements in any of the provinces, a stark contrast to the crumbling of the twentieth century’s imperial powers after 1945. As the system decayed around them, the people in the provinces still wanted to remain Roman. A world without Rome was very hard to imagine and does not seem to have held much appeal’. Second: ‘There can be no doubt about the enduring power of Rome (that meant) large parts of the empire experienced no major military activity, let alone open warfare for long periods of time. It is important to remember just how rare this has been in recorded history, most of all in the areas controlled by Rome. At no other period since then has Western Europe, North Africa or the Near East experienced a single century without major conflict.’
Echoing the classic of classics, Edward Gibbon’s six volumes on the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, published between 1776 and 1789, between the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen: ‘If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian and the accession of Commodus (96-180 AD – ed.). The vast extent of the Roman Empire was governed by absolute power, guided by virtue and wisdom’. Let us resume from here, but allow us to object to the rationale of Roman virtus et sapientia. If it was (relatively) virtuous and wise, it was precisely because it was not based on absolute power. On the contrary, its power was, in its own way, absolutely relative because it was relational in spirit, rules, and strategy. There you have the clear mystery of Rome. Let us have a look at it.
Ancient Rome had a secret name, guarded by Angerona, the arcane Goddess of Silence, depicted with her right index finger raised to her mouth as if to seal it. The name had religious significance for the Romans, with apotropaic undertones, so much so that, for fear of assigning the wrong gender to a deity, they would resort to the formula sive deus sive dea – ‘whether god or goddess’. Revealing Rome’s other name would have brought misfortune, even the destruction of the City. If known to a rival, the secret would have given him the inspiration for evocatio, a ritual in which Roman leaders, on the eve of battle, invited the patron gods of the enemy city to move to Rome, where they would dedicate a temple to their worship. The pious Roman warrior, capable of many ferocious deeds, would not have forgiven himself for renouncing the consent of other gods to be promoted in the Empire. We can imagine the care taken by the priests to conceal the secret name that the enemy – a potential ally – could have evoked with malicious intent. It would have constituted a magical combination that would have allowed the enemy to cross the supreme pomerium.
According to Giovanni Lido, a scholar of the Justinian era of Byzantium, Rome’s initiatory name is Amor. The great Gregorovius adds an esoteric aura: ‘The connection between Roma and Amor is ancient and mystical’. Whether it is or is not a palindrome, for the Romans the preservation of the secret name was a guarantee of the City’s eternity. The evocation of the patron god of the city to be annexed illuminates the religious spirit – relational in the strict sense – of the bond between the City and the World. It was a metaphor for the relationship between the centre of the Empire and the peripheries admitted to its hegemony: a horizontal whole between earthly cities, and a vertical one in divine synchrony, a halo of perpetuity. A connection that can even be traced in Rome’s move from the Tiber to the Bosphorus: a double body of the same essence. In the poisonous verse of a 9th-century Byzantine patriot, another palindrome: ‘Roma tibi subito motibus ibit Amor’ (‘Rome, Love will soon vanish from your limbs’). What other affection could then induce the perception of Romulus’ debased creature in the eyes of a Constantinopolitan Roman?
Against this backdrop, it is worth reading certain recent historiography that challenges the axiom of militarism as the essence of Roman imperialism. Not to deny the power of legionary arms, but to frame it within the thesis of the Great Negotiation, the name archaeologist Nicola Terrenato has used for his learned revisionist exercise. Applied to the Romanisation of Italy, the platform of the Empire, this radical reinterpretation focuses on Rome’s expansion in the peninsula between the end of the fifth and the beginning of the third century BC, which was the result of negotiations with and between Italian elites rather than legionary glories. In this context, the author accelerates the very incomplete emancipation of Roman history from later projections that reinterpret it using modern categories, as if that imperialism pulsated in a single direction from the centre to the peripheries, in the style of Prussia, France or “Europe”. Here we are neither in Berlin nor Paris, let alone Brussels. How can we be surprised if the icon of Rome, delivered to the Bosphorus and then stolen by Moscow, inspired European colonialism with its ubiquitous allure, not to mention English and American colonialism? Nor can the Eternal City be reduced to a precursor of any nation state, a category of the modern and contemporary world. Why designate the res publica as a state, with such a dizzying leap in context? Instrumental analogies reduce history to the recitation of sterile formulas.
But what interests us here is the method. The lesson in strategic style that transcends presumed fixed times and spaces. Romanising Italy did not mean swallowing up local communities, destroying their pre-existing powers in order to exercise dictatorship, but rather integrating indigenous aristocracies into its own Mediterranean circuit – today we would call it “global”. Ethnic background did not matter. Then, as always, Rome’s eye was perfectly colour-blind, insensitive to skin colour. Nor did the Roman mind elaborate civilising missions. As for the autonomy of local communities, it was left, within limits, to the respective families and land-owning aristocracies. It was guaranteed by bilateral treaties that remained in force for centuries, with the gradual granting of Roman citizenship to the whole of Italy, then to the transalpine and overseas cives. These were agreements between formally equal parties, whether the counterpart was Carthage or Camerino.
Terrenato invokes the concept of Trust (with a capital T), personified in the goddess Fides. Hence the deditio in fidem, a ritual whereby the community surrendered to Rome without becoming its slave. Indeed, it obliged Rome. In the words of Terrenato, ‘Those who surrendered seemed to place themselves at the mercy of the Romans; but the latter, precisely because of the declaration of blind trust implicit in the act, ended up being bound in their initiatives. This did not create the abject subordination of one community to another, but a paternalistic bond, governed by traditional values’.
This method also suited Rome, for if it behaved too harshly, it would invite resistance. In fact, most of the Italic communities allied themselves with Rome without going to war. Partners tend to remain loyal even when the fate of the hegemon is threatened. This is evidenced by the loyalty of almost all the Italic communities in the face of Hannibal’s overwhelming advance. They were aware that even if Carthage were victorious with its weapons, it could not offer the Italics anything better than the Roman koiné, designed by the network of commercial and military routes, the true glory of the empire.
For the Romans, the important thing was to win peace, not war. They fought fiercely when necessary, but within a strategy that was methodical and with the least possible waste of men and resources. A good example of this conservative spirit was the taste for rituals applied to the battlefield, such as duels between community leaders or army champions. This is confirmed, conversely, by the premonition of the consul Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica Corculum, who believed that by destroying Carthage, Rome would destroy itself. This view was shared by the conqueror of Rome’s great Mediterranean rival, Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus, who, upon his victory, took Polybius’ right hand and confessed: ‘Polybius, yes, this is good, but I do not know why I have a fear and a premonition that someone else will give our homeland the same news’ (which is now given for Carthage – ed.).
It is also striking how Roman historians, led by Titus Livius, narrate events and military campaigns, often referring to the point of view of the adversary, to the point of putting themselves in his shoes, as Caesar did in Gaul.
The high degree of formalisation of civil and religious power is the hallmark of Rome. The power of abstraction that presides over the formation of law strengthens and legitimises the sense of community. It wears down those who do not have it. The Empire evolves into an attractor rather than a conqueror of peoples. One wonders whether it was Rome that conquered Italy or Italy that overwhelmed Rome. Francis Bacon (1561-1626), philosopher and Lord Chancellor at the Court of James I Stuart, stated that ‘it was not the Romans that spread upon the world, but it was the world that spread upon the Romans’.
While we appreciate the provocation, we leave to the specialists any critique of Terrenato. No one better than them can grasp the possible excess of consistency in his thesis. Also because of the distance in time, which, despite the campaigns of archaeologists, the meticulousness of epigraphists and the insights of those who reread ancient sources to discover ever new ones, does not allow us to determine “what really happened” a couple of millennia ago on the banks of the Tiber.
The thesis of the Great Negotiation focuses on the Romanisation of the Peninsula, first in the Tyrrhenian context and then more broadly in the Mediterranean, in bitter conflict with the peoples of the Po Valley and the Alps, extending until the Second Punic War (218-202 BC). These events led to the dawn of the Christian era in the Augustan architecture of the regions of Italy, which was so robust that it is still reflected in our state structure today. It was with and for Augustus that the republican Empire perfected and consolidated the results of its peninsular conquests. Legal historian Luigi Capogrossi Colognesi highlights the continuity and ruptures inscribed in the very expansion of the Empire, which invited some provincial leaders and governors to pursue their highest ambitions or local secessionism. In his original synthesis of the paths followed by Roman law, which would inspire the legal culture and institutions of Western Europe, the author describes the political and geopolitical oxymoron invented by Caesar’s adopted son as the Great Compromise. Octavian flaunted his loyalty to republican traditions while concentrating all power in his own hands. He had the Senate proclaim him Augustus as well as princeps endowed with supreme auctoritas, the moral, political and legal, therefore religious authority in the broadest sense of the term. A new balance of government emerged, preserving the social structure of the City and the aristocratic tone of power embodied by the Senate, while curbing the ambitions of the military and restless provincial elites, fomenters of anarchy. The prince asserted himself as the sole arbiter empowered to reconcile the interests of the Roman-Italic centre with the claims of the provinces.
It was a masterpiece: how to found an Empire as restorer of the Republic. In the memorable Res Gestae, a monument to himself that spread to the most distant provinces, his geopolitical vision stands out. Augustus extended the empire like no one before or after him: more than 1.5 million square kilometres, from Germany to Elba (avenging Teutoburg) and Illyria, from northern Iberia to Galatia, Judea, Africa Nova and above all Egypt. At the same time, he was concerned with stabilising the borders exposed to the risks of overextension. He took care of the welfare of the provinces against the predatory ambitions of nobles, soldiers, and adventurers. He applied the integration processes experimented with in the Romanisation of Italy, especially local autonomy, to the peripheries in new forms and with new rules.
Great Negotiation and Great Compromise were the pillars of Rome’s eternity, in relative continuity. The first imperial construction, limited to the Peninsula, was a condition of August’s version, which raised Roman hegemony to unsurpassed heights. With Augustus, Rome equipped itself with a setting that would crystallise the model of the Roman Empire, still current today, from high versions to digital kitsch.
The reader will have guessed what is meant here by the lesson of empire imparted by Rome to the world: network strategy. It meant weaving around the City a confederation of cities that was both polycentric and concentric – a logical contradiction but a stroke of geopolitical genius – with the maximum possible openness without compromising the hegemon’s authority. Nor did it fall into the temptation of what we would today call a territorial state, capable of disrupting the institutions and traditions dear to the Roman people. In short: attraction rather than coercion. In imitation of the retiarius, who in gladiatorial games, armed with a dagger and trident, protected by light armour, used a fishing net to evade the blows of the secutor who pursued him, brandishing heavy weapons. The retiarius danced around him until he ensnared him and forced him to reveal himself. A somewhat successful strategy: Quintilian passed down the saying contra retiarium ferula, which means ‘to accomplish a useless feat’.
This is a very topical lesson. Precisely what, to stay with the metaphor, distinguishes the a-strategic and anti-geopolitical campaigns of New Rome, never won, above all never ended. New Rome keeps bleeding from wounds that are always open. A rodeo in which America consumes the auctoritas from which fides derives, the religion of an empire founded on the coexistence of different peoples, on integration, in a pluralistic way, not on assimilation, a forced reductio ad unum. From Bush Junior to Trump II, the system we Italians enjoyed as a peaceful province quickly lost its legitimacy and then its power. We will see how much its enormous reserve of hard power – the soft strand seems close to extinction, especially among Americans themselves – can prolong the decline of the nation as a compromised empire. Seen from Rome, Italy, the tilting of the American battleship is a very bad omen.
The name Rome continues to echo between the banks of the Potomac. It’s more regret than inspiration. How can one not feel the influence of Rome’s legacy in those who are so fascinated by it that they cannot shake off its mark? Rome may well be the matrix of every empire, but no other will truly resemble it. Yet the specific will remain universal, until America abdicates any residual ambition to offer itself as a paradigm to the world.
The One and Only Rome keeps radiating its rays. It is radioactive material decaying into unstable atomic nuclei to which we certainly cannot apply negative exponential equations or other mathematical abracadabra, as these are unsuitable for expressing the human factor in history. Its example invites us to exalt honour, passion, love – the driving forces of power – as Andrew Marshall (1921-2019), alias Yoda, the most Roman of American geopoliticians, stubbornly asserted, often unheeded. Perched in the spartan Office of Net Assessment, he claimed to go against the grain of Pentagon strategists by inviting them to study historical contexts, combining different fields of knowledge and disciplines, and measuring their own power in relation to that of the enemy. Power does not exist on its own. Yoda was a frequent explorer of the City. Until a few years ago, you could meet him among the ruins of the Forum or looking out of the window of a historic hotel opposite the Pantheon. We wonder how he would have reacted to Trump’s contortions, keen to diagnose the unsustainable course of globalist America as suicidal, yet unable to pursue an alternative consistent with the diagnosis. The shift in emphasis from warmongering to negotiation is clear, even if the results will only be measured over the long term, which the United States does not seem to have at its disposal. Who knows, between rounds of golf, perhaps remembering Cincinnatus in the interlude between his (so far) two reigns, Trump may have leafed through the pages of Terrenato, published in English in 2019.
We are grateful to the theorist of the Great Negotiation also for the involuntary glimpses he offers into the present, and therefore into the future, of those of us Italians who today are reliving the decline of New Rome in a completely different context, albeit from a hole in the net. Because yes, every empire is an empire in its own way, but all of them, including the American Empire that has welcomed us into its broad bosom, refer back to Rome as a unit of measurement. Rome was an example of intelligent management of heterogeneous communities in large spaces governed by the power differential of a recognised hegemon. Finally: we are in Rome. From here we observe the world. And it is through the myth of Rome that the world observes us, while we wonder where we are ending up, aware that we can only come up with approximations. Never mind! We are grateful for the privilege, hic manebimus optime.
Yes. But to do what with it?
Translated by Dr Mark A. Sammut Sassi
