This is Friends of History Debating Society. I am Gaius. Dramanicus is here. We have our cups of wine.

There's a thaw over Lundinium. That doesn't mean that it's easy walking out there. There's ice everywhere.

It does mean that there'll be theater later, and that's exciting on a Sunday night.

The centurions and the families have gone home over the crunching

ice, and we're here to remind ourselves that as Romans, we carry around in us the approval

needed for the Imperial Project. We sign on to it as Romans. We sign on to it as Equist class.

The Senate runs the Imperial Project.

The Emperor is the Imperial Project.

It's a success, even with what you'd have to say,

uneven successors to Augustus, our God Augustus.

However, it is not clear to Germanicus and myself that our audience in the 21st century

is familiar with the Imperial Project. Why we believe it works, why we have, oh, about one and a half

thousand years of history to demonstrate that it works, why it is that

it puzzles modern America when they learn that the males of America think about Rome every

day, a lot. Why is that? Is it built into the DNA? Or is it something to do with the institutions

that America lives with?

Britain inherited the institutions. We inherited, the Americans inherited it from Britain.

They are the emperor, sometimes called the king, the apparatus around the emperor, the military

or the national security set, and then the people, the Senate

and the people of Rome, are part of the emperor project, but it's special, and we need to

define it. Germanicus, a very good evening to you. I begin with evidence of the imperial

project underway in modern America.

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