A PEEK INTO THE PAST OF ROME

A PEEK INTO THE PAST OF ROME

Friends, Non-Romans and Readers……… I come to glorify the history of Rome, not to bury her history as dead bore social studies lessons.
I am here to talk about a glorious chapter in human history, which runs back to about three millennia BC. Yes, I am here to talk about Rome…..Rome, to which once all roads led.
Rome… that existed in the days when the traffic system was not complex and the term peak hours probably referred to the zenith of some ruler….. Where no one got lost….because whichever road you took, you ended up in Rome ( Ref: All Roads Lead to Rome)
Rome… which some of us collocate with Julius Caesar who bequeathed to the medical profession, the profitable venture called Caesarian Section!
Rome… which made us chuckle and guffaw as kids when, by Toutatis! our favourite comic heroes Asterix and Obelix rendered the powerful Roman army with their centurions, decurians, optios and Old Julius himself , ridiculous!!!!
Rome…. Which has been immortalized by Hollywood directors, with classics like Quo Vadis, Ben Hur and more recently Gladiator!
Friends, I am here to glorify ‘that’ Rome… not to dismiss her as a dead civilization!
So, we all know that Rome was not built in a day. I do not know exactly in how many days Rome was built… but, I do know exactly who built it.
Legend goes that twin boys named Romulus and Remus were taken from their mother and abandoned near river Tiber where a she-wolf found them and looked after them till they were able to take care of themselves (and giving Rudyard Kipling the thread with which he could weave the literary magic ‘The Jungle Book’). The twins were instructed by Mars, the roman god to build a city right where they had got labeled as foundlings. Romulus and Remus did build the city, but they hadn’t obviously heard about the bonding between twins…which led to them to fight with each other. Romulus won the battle and the city came to be called ‘Rome’ after him (which makes one wonder what they’d have called the city if the other twin had won the battle…..REEM???)
Well. That is legend. Today we have contingents of historians and archeologists digging up the past to prove that a civilized society existed out there. They claim to have evidence to prove that almost 3000 years back, there existed in Europe, a people who set up their own administration, ruling their own land…. vesting power on a group rather than an individual.
Yet, Rome was divided socially. With due apologies to George Orwell, “All Romans were equal, but some were more equal than the others!”….And those others were the Patricians or the nobles….the most powerful citizens of Rome.
Then came the Equestrians or the knights … the rich and the valiant who were expected to fight for Rome.
The lesser Roman mortals were the Plebians who had little say in any political matter…. and finally, there were the Slaves who had no rights whatsoever. With apologies to my ilk, even women did not enjoy any rights….
Things continued in this vein for nearly 750 years. Soon the generals who led the Roman armies on conquests became more and more powerful. By this time Rome was no ordinary city. It had expanded its borders so fast and so regularly that cartographers found it impossible to create a permanent map of the Roman empire. All national and international highways had milestones with ‘To Rome’ etched on them. I believe even by-lanes and detours led to Rome….and everyone had to hurry to reach their destination, these said roads being congested with chariots… all going to and from Rome.

Around 50 BC came a general ( christened Julius Caesar) who went about conquering the vast territory of Gaul, crossing over to Egypt and rowing across the English Chanel to occupy Britain. He did all these without realizing that two Belgians named Gosciny and Uderzo would laugh all the way to their bank having successfully made him look ridiculous thanks to Asterix and Obelix making mince meat of the his armies and legionaries.
Well, old Julius might have been a good general but he definitely was not a sound judge of men. On a fateful swearing- in ceremony day called the ides of March, his political dream to become the first citizen of Rome collapsed like a house of cards, when he was stabbed to death by his trusted friend Brutus and not so trustworthy conspiratorial senators. He fell dead uttering the oft quoted words people use when backstabbed, ‘Et tu Brute….then fall Caesar!’ Those words were conveniently borrowed by the Bard of Avon, William Shakespeare and left to be overused by generations of literary-minded victims!
I am not here to exhume a dead Caesar and investigate the crime committed on that fateful day, nor am I here to vindicate the atrocity of those senators. Rome owed her glory to powerful men like JC who had a line of caesars following the imprints he had left behind on the Roman sands of time. The glory of Rome lasted for more than a millennium. In those thousand years, Romans built roads (er…I did mention them earlier, didn’t I?), towns, aqueducts and, circuses where Roman WWF heroes called gladiators did many a ‘ripping and getting- ripped- apart’ act. What they did not know at that time was that even after three millennia, the public would rant and rave while watching Russel Crowe simulating them and walking away clutching an Oscar!
Rome at one point might have thought, “For emperors may come and emperors may go, but I go on forever”, but did not know that it would soon decline when the barbarians from the eastern and northern corners of the then Europe started migrating to Rome..
(Well, you can’t blame those barbarians…. After all, all roads led to Rome!!!)
To cut a 3000 year old story short, the Roman collapse came when in 476 AD, the Visigoths conquered this great empire…. And then there were only ruins….. archeologists….. tourists….Hollywood… and people like me. Viva Roma!