Rome was built in a day

It wasn’t finished in a day, of course, but Rome was built in a day.

If you’ve ever been to Rome, you’ll know what this means. It still isn’t finished.

But the roads, full of potholes, still lead to Rome. And so do our narratives.

Rome was never destined to be a caput mundi, the centre of the world, except in the minds of some of its later rulers and their panagyrics, whether poets or historians.

Rome grew like any other settlement in any other part of the world, slowly, through conquest and consolidation.

And like every other settlement, it had no strong sense of self until it became strong enough for the imperatives, anxieties and challenges of self-identity to confront it. And then, reaching a kind of maturity, Rome began to think of itself as something worth thinking about.

Rome was also not destined to be an empire. It was more likely for it to tread in the footsteps of its neighbours, the pre-Hellenistic and Hellenistic world, than to blaze a trail of its own. In many ways, it did both.

One of Rome’s most chronic anxieties had always been related to how it saw itself relative to the Greek world and the rest of the Mediterranean, especially Carthage. The status game was so fierce and the complexes ran so deep, that the only way Rome could resolve them was to conquer its neighbours and reduce competition to dominance, agon to imperium. Carthago delenda est, so that an inferiority complex may be deleted.

Rome had always been politically vulnerable as it was trying to achieve a position which had politically never been tried before. It sought to reconcile the three types of government which the city found in the catalogue of Mediterranean catalogue: Persian monarchy, Athenian democracy and Spartan oligarchy.

It’s one thing to be religiously syncretic and adopt foreign gods into your own pantheon. But it’s quite another to create a type of government integrating all other types of government.

In that respect, Rome was the most daring political experiment of the ancient world. But success was relative.

At the height of Republican government, Rome had perfected the most imperfect hybrid system. It functioned as a mixed government where the two annually-elected consuls represented the monarchical element with supreme military and executive authority, the Senate embodied the aristocratic/oligarchic component composed of former office-holders who allocated funds and decided on military interventions, and the popular assemblies constituted the democratic element responsible for elections and passing legislation.

The knock-on effect of having a mixed government was that the weaknesses of all three types outweighed, in the aggregate, the combined strengths of all three. And that political instability, civil war and bloody rivalry haunted Rome down to its grave.

The experimental solution which proposed to solve the Republican experiment in fact ended it. The Empire and its Emperors took away some of the past challenges, but transformed the state so much that Rome had to reinvent itself to survive.

In many ways, it survived, in many ways it didn’t. As a state, it certainly didn’t, despite surviving in name and form in the East - the cyclone of transformations had turned the small unfinished city in Latium into something almost completely unrecognisable.

But in many ways, it did, and Rome is still with us today, in our imagination and our common cultural grammar. Not just the unfinished - and often ungovernable - city in Lazio, but the unfinished project which started over 2,500 years ago, an unfulfillable promise built in a day.