Russia and France, Britain’s allies, seemed on the brink of surrender or mutiny and rebellion. The German army was considered the most fearsome in history. The French and British armies were being bled white at the nightmares of the Somme and Verdun. I say only they will not come by sea.” The Duke of Wellington dispelled the remnants of the French army at Battle of Waterloo, and helped usher in a century of relative European peace.īy late 1916, Britain seemed again on the brink. Yet the defiant Admiral of the British Fleet, John Jervis, 1st Earl of St Vincent, assured the British sea lords in 1801-who were anxious about a seaborne French invasion-“I do not say, my Lords, that the French will not come. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the statism of Napoleonic France seemed the way of the future, destined to unite all of Europe against the British Navy, and to create an everlasting proto-European Union under French soft despotism. Rome endured for a millennium as it went through cycles of decline, recovery, and efflorescence.Ī millennium-old Great Britain was also considered finished on a number of occasions. The rule of law, transparent administration, and habeas corpus flourished alongside clean water, good roads, sewage removal, and the professionalism of the Roman legions. The magisterial Edward Gibbon described their century as an era when “the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous.”Īmid radically changing times, with novel internal and external enemies, Roman institutions and culture persisted. Effective rulers such as those whom Nicolò Machiavelli’s called the “Five Good Emperors”- Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antonius Pius, and Marcus Aurelius-gave the world 100 years of calm prosperity between AD 96-192. Sometimes, stabilizing figures such as Augustus sought a moral revival. Often, it was saved through the intervention of exceptional generals like Scipio Africanus.
#Make visuals great again corrupted serial
In fact, throughout the centuries of these serial crises, Rome usually found ways to bear the necessary remedies. As Livy famously put it in the introduction to his massive history of Rome, written almost 500 years before its eventual implosion, “We can bear neither our diseases nor their remedies.” Witnesses such as Livy, Tacitus, Petronius, and Suetonius all recorded that the Rome of their generation was simply too corrupt to continue. Inflation, revolts, barbarian invasions, corruption, and decadence were seen as insurmountable problems. Yet at various times throughout this period, Rome was declared finished-like during the Punic Wars (264-146 BC), the Civil Wars of the late Republic (49-31 BC), and the coups and cruelty of the 12 Caesars (49 BC-AD 96), especially during the reigns of Caligula, Nero, and Domitian.
The Roman Republic and Empire together lasted for more than 1,000 years. Bush’s “a kinder, gentler nation,” and Ronald Reagan’s “It’s morning in America again”? Or do such renaissances really occur in history? Is Donald Trump’s slogan “Make America great again” mere campaign rhetoric in the tradition of Barack Obama’s “hope and change,” George H.
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