In 216 BC, Rome lost 10% of its adult male population, and 80% of its Republican military population, under the might of the Carthaginian general Hannibal at Cannae in 216 BC. Yet in 197 BC, barely 20 years later, Rome won a decisive victory at Cynoscephalae, Greece, over the once-mighty Macedonians. From here, Macedon became a client state to the Romans, and meanwhile Carthage was reduced to almost nothing in power. Rome was then the supreme power in the Mediterranean, and would go on to remain so until the Dark Ages and the brutal rise of Islam. Nearly One
Thousand Years Later.

I cannot begin to stress just how powerful Rome really was. It’s perhaps a little hard to fathom since the days of colonialism, gunpowder and electronics have made ancient empires seem as nothing, but Rome really was everything. And it still is everything to the West:

• French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish all stem directly from Latin, and these languages are spoken today by around 985 Million people as a primary language worldwide, 67 Million more than native Mandarin. If you were to include English to this list, with a population of 400 Million people worldwide understanding it as a primary language, Latin’s descendant languages would account for nearly 1.4 Billion people today, and that’s not including the countless million more that can at least understand those languages.

• Christianity, the religion that Rome came to adopt primarily in the fourth century AD, is by far the most followed religion today, with nearly 2.5 Billion people (30% of the entire world) following one form of Christianity.

• If The Empire were to suddenly reunite today, it would completely encompass England, Wales, Portugal, Spain, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Italy + The Vatican, San Marino, Malta, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Serbia + Kosovo, Macedonia, Albania, Greece, Bulgaria, Turkey, Cyprus, Armenia, Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Palestine. It would also nearly encompass all of Romania, Azerbaijan, Iraq, Kuwait, Egypt and Tunisia, and would reach parts of Scotland, Germany, The Netherlands, The Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Moldova, The Ukraine, Russia, Georgia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Algeria and Morocco. All of these countries have since had nearly 2,000 years of proud history to boast of, and a vast amount of them owe their existence to The Paragon of Western Civilization itself.

• If you were to make a journey from Scotland to Kuwait today, you would need to know dozens of languages, have several different passports, and even more visas and currencies at hand, yet under Rome, all you needed was ONE language (+ maybe Greek) and ONE currency, and you would have been protected by ONE legal system.

• Europe’s ways of law, art, architecture and warfare have all been influenced by Rome. The city itself had more and purer drinking water than a citizen of 20th century Chicago + Paris did, and there are roads built by the Romans that are still in some use today, including a bridge in Rome that was built in 63 BC – it still carries traffic with ease.

• Rome was also the first city in world history to reach a population of one million people.

THE most astonishing thing is, that for all the government-funded straight, paved roads, aqueducts, homes, colonies, arenas, forums, temples and other genuinely amazing pieces of architecture and infrastructure that Rome built and that has lasted to even today, the average Roman citizen (during the Pax Romana / Roman Peace) was taxed at only 0.01-0.03%, and only had to work 2 days a YEAR to pay their taxes. (It’s easy to overlook this fact by stating that Rome had slaves, but it’s also easy to forget that pretty much everyone else did at the time, and so do we – there’s just no human rights being violated when we use them, and we tend to call them ‘robotics’.)

I would easily consider all of this to be, by far, the greatest achievement in the history of civilization, and I’m including splitting the atom and putting man on the moon when I say that. The 300-ish year period of wealth, prosperity and peace of the Pax Romana once led a historian to claim that if a person were to pick the one period of the human race where mankind was happiest, he would – without hesitation – choose the 2nd century AD in Rome, and I cannot say that I disagree.

It is also said that when Rome came into contact with China, a nation known for viewing the world as either Chinese or Not-Chinese, (basically viewing themselves as the world’s superiors) the Chinese started referring to Rome as “Other China”. Understanding that the Himalayas, the Mauryan Indians and the Parthian/Sassanid Persians separated these two ancient empires, and knowing just how limited their contact with one another really was, tells you not only how far-reaching Rome could be but also how powerful even the most distant of nations knew Rome was.

Now this piece of music isn’t actually the anthem of Rome – Rome never had an official national anthem to our knowledge, and it’s generally considered that national anthems weren’t a thing until around the 16th century AD. This particular piece of music is an altered repetition of ‘Triarii’, or ‘The Final Legion’, from Dvorák’s Requiem, written in 1890, but it could not be more perfect a piece to represent Rome; Its instruments have an imperial and Roman feel to it and it doesn’t mess about from the start – it starts loud and glorious and it never ceases to be so throughout.
Knowing exactly what Rome was, and is, and hearing something so glorious honestly made me cry, something no other piece of music had genuinely made me do before or since.

An empire so boundless, so powerful, so wealthy, so influential and so immortal could seemingly never fall. But it did. An empire that falls to invasion can rise again, but one that crumbles from within is history forever. The invasions of the Great Migrators of Europe – the Goths, Vandals and the Huns in particular – obviously were the key catalyst to finishing off the Western Empire by the late 5th century AD, but Rome’s internal political weaknesses started it, and the modern parallels are frighteningly familiar – its eventual granting of citizenship to anyone at will for the sake of more taxpayers, the de-funding and removal of patriotism and traditions from the army, the severe devaluing of the currency by nearly 1,000 times its original value from c.200 – 300 AD, an increase in unnecessary taxes and a loss of economic freedoms, the growth of the welfare state…

So ancient an empire yet such a familiar cause of downfall to us, it is more important now than ever to ignore the people that claim ‘no-one learns from history’. Understanding the proud history your ancestors built and defended so valiantly is so vital. Few really understand what happened to the empire and why it fell, because if we did all know, the size of the state today would have to be shrunk enormously. Teaching about how to shrink the size of the state in public schools/colleges/universities would of course be a conflict of interests for today’s elite; the government is the main source of these education centre’s wealth, so knowing of the truth won’t come from those feeding off the state’s power – a parasite wouldn’t want to teach you how to remove itself from you.

Our history today consists mostly of whining about ourselves – the terms “racist, imperialist, sexist, genocidal” in reference to Europe’s history has bred generations of self-loathing peoples without a common cause for national prosperity. That is all simply an unforgivable attack on the virtues of future generations. Our truth is much different: the values of Socratic philosophy, logic, reason, science, the free market, medicine, capitalism, separation of church and state, innocent until proven guilty… all were propagated primarily by the west.

If you are of the West, you are likely a child of Rome, and of the great nations born from it since. Your ancestors built, defended and gave unto you the greatest values and civilizations in history, and now it’s your turn to defend these, so that your children may do the same. You are the children of heroes, and only heroes earn their freedom.

This isn’t just the anthem of an empire, this is the anthem of civilization itself. Boom it out loud proudly and defiantly, and bow down to no-one.

ROMA INVICTA <3