A censor wasn’t someone who went around cancelling people or closing down newspapers; a censor was someone who, every few years, would go around, working out how much money each individual citizen had, and also his moral worth. For a culture based on the virtues of manliness, of simplicity, of dignity, what was to become of it when dangerous habits – of luxury, comfort and, heavens forbid, cookery – were imported along with the hordes of weirdoes and degenerates from the barbarous provinces? The bestselling historian, author and co-host of The Rest Is History podcast turns his attention to Rome’s golden age in the third of his superb books on the Roman empire.

By the way, small band hunter gatherer society are not notably charitable to their enemies (neighbouring bands) and they almost always do have enemies! Pax opens with the funeral of Poppaea, the pregnant wife whom Nero allegedly kicked to death, and the instalment in his bed of a Poppaea replacement in the form of Sporus (“Spunk”), a boy deprived of his genitals and made up to resemble the late empress. Or rather to consider the barbarians the good guys and to gain virtue for our wretched white selves by lowering the drawbridge to them.And it reflects a moral anxiety on the part of the Romans that has been characteristic of them, really, from the time that they start conquering massively wealthy cities in the East — the cities in Asia Minor or Syria or, most of all, Egypt. The conflict lasted for almost 30 years and Khusro refused to negotiate even from positions of great strength.

His contention is actually quite pernicious – the implication being that the Christian worldview was manufactured (he claims, at least, for the better of mankind) then it surely can be replaced by something else, even better. This was a time-honoured role in Rome that encompassed not only morals (though he did bury alive a Vestal Virgin convicted of adultery) but also enhancement of the physical city (‘a lunatic desire to build’, as one author described it), and increasing the silver content of the coinage. The Chinese Empire will disintegrate, be reconstituted, disintegrate, be reconstituted, and yet, in a sense, always remain China. Of course, just as the conquered peoples bore some consequences of the Pax Romana, the Roman system, and the city itself, bore others.The first is from the Roman senator and author Pliny the Elder: ‘Truly, it is as though the Romans and the boundless majesty of their peace have been bestowed by the gods upon humanity to serve them as a second sun. He says that the natives mistook these things as the marks of civilisation, when they were actually marks of their servitude. Really worthwhile article with some intriguing insights Interesting comment comparing our current cultural disintegration with the reformation period rather than the decline and fall of Rome.