I'm John Batchler. Ed Watts is here. Professor Ed Watts. The book is the Romans, and we've been through 2,000 years of mayhem and order.

And Rome is order, but it's fled, it's gone. The Crusaders, marauders better understood, destroy the magic of Rome.

The end.

However, what have we learned?

How did they get through 2,000 years?

No one else has approached that number.

We're in the United States at 250.

Imagine another 1,750 years of this kind of shock value on television. So,

Professor, lessons learned from the Roman Empire. How did they do it? I think the biggest

lesson that we can take away from Rome is there is a sense from the very earliest moments that

the state was created, that it must evolve.

You know, that its institutions, its populations, its practices, even its religious ideas,

its philosophies, everything must evolve.

But it must evolve in a way that remains connected to what came before.

And so there is a real sort of interest in Rome in managing this tension between being

overly tied to tradition and overly willing to discard those traditions.

And what Romans really succeed in doing is creating structures and institutions that manage

this transformation.

The transformation is something that is, it's governed, right?

Rome is always moving forward, but Rome does a very good job of making sure that most of the

time this forward movement is something that's controlled.

And so I think this is the big long-term lesson that we can take away. And the 21st century is a moment of really intense transformation. And these questions that the Romans had answers to, these questions about how do you become something new while also remaining true to what you have inherited? this is something that we are very much encountering

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