 Let's talk a little bit about Rome, I've been here two days, I'll tell you more about Rome or at least my experiences in Rome as the week progresses so far, I haven't been here very long so there's only so much I can tell you about my experiences this time but I think we can generalize to the city that is Rome and the history that is Rome. This is my third or fourth time in Rome, last time I was here I think was with my kids and my wife so it's been a long time, kids were relatively young and another time I was in Rome was with an Objectivist group, a conference that I was running, I think that must be 1999 with Mary Ann Suarez the Audistarian and a bunch of Objectivists, we did a conference in Milan, we did a tour guided by Mary Ann Suarez here in Rome and then in Florence so a really amazing trip, that was 1999, so I was with my kids in the 2000s and yeah I haven't been much to Rome, Rome is a big city, it's a city of four million people, I gravitate towards the more intimate, small, much more manageable Florence, Florence is a beautiful place, you can walk everywhere, you never have to take a taxi, everything is so manageable, Rome is a massive city, I mean you're taking taxis all the time and just getting from place to place and it's packed with tourists, there's a lot of people out there in the streets, the nice thing is that a lot of the places I go to, not necessarily the places the tourists are masked outside of, so let's see, let's start with just a little bit of a broad history of Rome, we're not going to get into any details but just in terms of giving everybody a sense of the city's history because I think the city's history is so indicative of western civilization, this is such a core piece of western civilization, at least up until our point. And then I want to talk about the art and I want to talk about the specific experiences here in Rome and particularly the role of the church here in Rome because I think one of the things that you cannot avoid in Rome is the church, of course the Vatican is here but I haven't been to the Vatican yet, I'm going to the Vatican on Monday, but there's churches everywhere, every corner has several, every major corner and there's something important there also once you enter the churches, there's really a lot to learn from going into these churches and observing and we'll also talk about it again in the artwork. But let me just, a quick back of the envelope, two minute history of Rome, I think maybe the most fascinating thing about the history of Rome is its population, the evolution of its population. I mean Rome in the pre-Roman Empire was a small village, it became the capital of one of the greatest empires in all of human history, certainly one of the largest empires of all of human history. At its peak in the second century AD Rome is supposed to have been somewhere between 1 to 2 million, 1 to 2 million people, the largest city by far in Europe, Africa, Mediterranean area. I'm not sure about India and China, whether there were cities that were larger but certainly in what we call the West, it was by far and certainly I think Latin America or any other civilization, Rome was the largest city of antiquity, over a million people, a bustling capital, a place from which an empire was ruled and if you look at a map of the Roman Empire at its peak, it basically covered almost all of Europe with the exception maybe of Russia and some parts of Eastern Europe. They did not rule Scandinavia but all of Central Europe and up into England didn't have Ireland and Scotland but almost everything else, the Bering Peninsula and then all of Northern Africa and most of Middle East. That is, most of the Middle East you want back then, I mean they did not have Saudi Arabia but who the hell wanted Saudi Arabia back then before Saudi Arabia had oil. Before oil was of value, Saudi Arabia always had oil, Saudi Arabia had no value. It was an amazing empire, an empire built on open trade, an empire built on religious tolerance, an empire that allowed all the different sects and all the different religions and all the different nationalities to have some expression as long as they stayed loyal to the empire, as long as they paid their taxes, as long as they listened to their local rulers who were ruled ultimately by the Roman emperor. So here we are at 200 CE, 280, between 1 to 2 million people. By the middle of the Dark Ages, so what, 4, 5, 600 years later, the population of Rome drops to 10,000 people, 10,000 people from 1 million to 2 million. I mean I think that more than anything indicates kind of the fall and the significance of the Dark Ages. Now why do people leave Rome? Because trade breaks down, because industry breaks down, because civilization breaks down. And a city, a city is a sign of civilization. A city is a hub of trade. Cities survive when individuals don't have to be subsistence farmers. They can sustain themselves through specialization and trade. And when specialization and trade are gone, because the civilizing force is gone, when specialization and trade is gone, because violence rules the world, viewed another way, when civilization is gone and anarchy rules the world, trade disintegrates, specialization goes away, and people have to leave the cities and go back to farming. They either die, many, many died of starvation or they die from wars, or they go back from where they came. And we all came at the end from either small farming communities or hunter-gatherers. So they go back to small farming communities, they go back to the small villages, they go back to cultivating the land, and they go back to barely surviving. Rome, at its peak, not only had one to two million people, it had running water, it had an unbelievable system of aqueducts that moved water throughout the empire. But in addition to aqueducts, they had pipes. They had pipes that brought water into people's homes or into public wash facilities. You could see that if you go to Pompeii, you can see those pipes. They literally had faucets. I mean, pipes that ran water with faucets, I don't think that existed again until the 19th century. All of that disappeared. It literally disappeared once the Roman Empire collapsed. The pipes disappeared, the aqueducts were destroyed, people didn't know how to use them, people didn't know what to do with them. The faucets disappeared. You can imagine just the deterioration and hygiene that resulted in that. I mean, there is a reason in spite of the many, many people trying to rewrite history. The Dark Ages were dark. They were dark because in comparison to what had come before the Roman Empire, and in comparison to what came afterwards from the Renaissance on, they were dark. They were dark in terms of quality of life. They were dark in terms of hygiene, in terms of the way people lived and in terms of the ability of people to specialize. They were dark in terms of the amount and quality of trade. They were dark in terms of the intellectual activity, the scientific activity. They were dark politically in terms of the way people were ruled and governed. I'm going in and out of focus. What happens? I need to figure this out better. It was at dark ages. Smelly, yes, definitely smelly, dark and smelly, Jennifer says and she's absolutely right. Now, beyond that, you know, all real specialization trade makes it possible for wealth to be created. And wealth was created not on the scale of the 19th century or the 20th century, but on the scale of human existence up until that point, the Roman Empire created a lot of wealth. That wealth made it possible for some people to specialize in, you know, being artists, in education, in all kinds of fields that were not entailed in the direct production of the things that were necessary for you to survive, you know, on the spot. So what you had was, again, a descent into people being subsistence farmers, the disappearance of the disappearance of artists and the disappearance of artists from the world, the number of artisans, the number of artists and the number of intellectuals, the number of writers and poets and authors disappears. And of course, you have much more authoritarian governance and therefore you have a lot less political dissents and with less political dissent, again, you also have fewer, you know, fewer people engaged in the kind of activities that lead to political dissent. Let's put on a light here maybe that'll make a bit of a difference. Let's put it on this side. Hopefully that makes a difference. All right, so, you know, in Rome, you really see this. In Rome, you see the Roman Empire. I mean, you see the grandeur of it. We walked by, we didn't go into the Coliseum this time because I've been in the Coliseum before, but you walk by the Coliseum. I mean, what a spectacular building, the size of it, the magnitude of it. And you think that this is something that was built 2000 years ago and that's just stunning. The reality is that nobody could build anything close to that, at least in the West, until well into the Renaissance. You go to the Pantheon and the Pantheon has a dome on it that nobody knew how to recreate. Nobody knew how to recreate. Until in the Renaissance, they finally figured it out with a duomo in Florence. But they had no idea how the Romans built the Pantheon. They had no idea how the Coliseum were built. If you go to, you know, some of the ancient ruins, which you see as multi-story buildings. There were no multi-story buildings in Europe until well into the Renaissance and later on. So, in every dimension, you see this amazing civilization. They had a lot of corruption and a lot of problems in it. But in terms of technology, in terms of wealth, in terms of specialization, in terms of trade, wow. And in terms of construction, wow. I mean, they're just now figuring out the secrets for the cement and the concrete that the Romans built because it is so long-lasting. And they finally figured out the combination that the Romans used in order to get that cement to work. But again, no multi-story buildings, no pipe snow, aqueduct snow, all of that goes away. It just disappears. And it's hard to believe that once you reach a certain point of civilization, it can indeed just disappear. But this city is a testament to it. Any way you dig in this city, you know, they build a new building or something like that, anytime they dig, they find Roman ruins because the fact is that the Roman city was massive, was huge. What we see today is basically a modern Rome built on top of the ruins of ancient Roman and only some places where either the ruins were so large or they've excavated, do we see the actual ancient Rome? Thank you for listening or watching The Iran Book Show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening, you get value from watching, show your appreciation. 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