Roma Eterna by Robert Silverberg

Author:Robert Silverberg
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2003-09-28T16:00:00+00:00

We dressed and had a breakfast of wine and cheese and figs, and I called for horses and took him on a tour of the estate. I showed him the olive groves, the fields of wheat, the mill and its stream, the fig trees laden with fruit. The day was warm and beautiful; the birds sang, the sky was clear.

Later, as we took our midday meal on the patio overlooking the garden, he said, “This is a marvelous place. I hope that when I’m old I can retire to a country estate like this.”

“Surely there must be one in your family,” I said.

“Several. But not, I think, as peaceful as this. We Romans have forgotten how to live peacefully.”

“Whereas we, since we are a declining race, can allow ourselves the luxury of a little tranquility?”

He looked at me strangely. “You see yourselves as a declining race?”

“Don’t be disingenuous, Quintus Pompeius. There’s no need to flatter me now. Of course we are.”

“Because you’re no longer an imperial power?”

“Of course. Once ambassadors from places like Nova Roma and Baghdad and Memphis and Khitai came to us. Not here to Venetia, I mean, but to Constantinopolis. Now the ambassadors go only to Roma; what the Greek cities get is tourists. And Roman proconsuls.”

“How strange your view of the world is, Eudoxia.”

“What do you mean?”

“You equate the loss of the Imperium with being in decline.”

“Wouldn’t you?”

“If it happened to Roma, yes. But Byzantium isn’t Roma.” He was staring at me very seriously now. “The Eastern Empire was a folly, a distraction, a great mistake that somehow endured a thousand years. It should never have been. The burden of ruling the world was given to Roma: we accept it as our duty. There was never any need for an Eastern Empire in the first place.”

“It was all some terrible error of Constantinus’s, you say?”

“Exactly. It was a bad time for Roma, then. Even empires have their fluctuations; even ours. We had overextended ourselves, and everything was shaking. Constantinus had political problems at home, and too many troublesome sons. He thought the Empire was unwieldy and impossible to hold together, so he built the eastern capital and let the two halves drift apart. The system worked for a while—no, I admit it, for hundreds of years—but as the East lost sight of the fact that its political system had been set up by Romans and began to remember that it was really Greek, its doom became inevitable. A Greek Imperium is an anomaly that can’t sustain itself in the modern world. It couldn’t even sustain itself very long in the ancient world. The phrase is a contradiction in terms, a Greek Imperium. Agamemnon had no Imperium: he was only a tribal chief, who could barely make his power felt ten miles from Mycenae. And how long did the Athenian Empire last? How long did Alexander’s kingdom hold together, once Alexander had died? No, no, no, Eudoxia, the Greeks are a marvelous people, the whole world is

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