The Romans, we are told, were by nature a peculiarly warlike race.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
We were all Romans once, I guess.
The Romans thought of themselves as the chosen people, yet they built the greatest army on Earth by recruiting warriors from any background.
Ancient Rome was a violent place.
From Syria even to Rome I fight with wild beasts, by land and sea, by night and by day, being bound amidst ten leopards, even a company of soldiers, who only grow worse when they are kindly treated.
I'm Greek, and we're conspiratorial by nature.
War had always seemed to me to be a purely human behavior. Accounts of warlike behavior date back to the very first written records of human history; it seemed to be an almost universal characteristic of human groups.
The Roman Empire was very, very much like us. They lost their moral core, their sense of values in terms of who they were. And after all of those things converged together, they just went right down the tubes very quickly.
The havoc wrought by war, which one compares with the havoc wrought by nature, is not an unavoidable fate before which man stands helpless. The natural forces that are the cause of war are human passions, which it lies in our power to change. What are culture and civilization if not the taming of blind forces within us as well as in nature?
Whether one believes in evolution, intelligent design, or Divine Creation, one thing is certain. Since the beginning of history, human beings have been at war with each other, under the pretext of religion, ideology, ethnicity and other reasons. And no civilization has ever willingly given up its most powerful weapons.
We are fascinated with our own history, and we are fascinated with the Romans because they were millennia ago, and yet they still capture our imagination because they were actually so similar to us. They were very civilized. They had a very similar political system.