Good catchy tile: SPQA, as I was about to flag the spelling error. What the post doesn’t mention is the demographic bomb which both the Romans and our civilisation is facing. Romans used some of the barbarians to man their armies, while ignoring the hordes pressing against their borders – until they were overrun, eventually. Western societies are getting old and the population is shrinking, while in the Middle East and Africa populations have been exploding, for decades. The Syrian conflict acted as the detonator, but the underlying cause of the flow of refugees is the demographic bomb: too few, soft and rich on one side, too many, poor and desperate to get to the safety and wealth of our society on the other. We are experiencing on our skins the Chinese curse: may you live in interesting times.
Source: SPQA
Mary Beard’s history of ancient Rome, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (Senatus PopulusQue Romanus), offers disturbing lessons for 21st century America. Efforts to draw direct parallels can be too forced. But as countless commentators since Santayana have pointed out, failure to learn from history quite often guarantees repeat of its mistakes.