Perspective does something strange to our understanding of time as much as space.
Ancient Rome. Think of that time, those glory days of pillars and togas and crucifixions and whatnot. Less than 200 years.
Same thing with Greece. The really glorious days of democracy and city-states and all that... about 200 years.
Alexander the Great was dead at 32, so the Macedonian empire petered out pretty quickly.
The Turks had a few generations. As did the Arabs.
I'm sure you see where I'm going with this?
But you're wrong.
I was going to tell you something funny. About a guy called Polybius.
And it's not just his name, which is also funny.
Polybius spent a lot of time lamenting the fact that the sun was setting on his home of Greece while Rome was on this incredibile ascendency.
From his perspective, Rome had finally managed to break the cycle of anacyclosis... the cycle by which social structures form, turn dark, are replaced by something a little better, turn dark, are replaced... etc until the cycle starts anew.
A bunch of nitwits find themselves a king, a good one.
The good king has a shitty descendent who becomes a tyrant.
The people cut the tyrant's head off and form an aristocracy.
The aristocrats turn into greedy oligarchs.
The people build guillotines for the oligarchs and form a democracy.
The heads of the democracy turn into psychotic demogogues who burn the world to the ground where a bunch of nitwits try to figure out what to do next.
Second verse same as the first for about 50K years.
It was, he said, the curse of all empires to run this course. But the Romans, you see, the Romans had figured out how to divvy powers up and break this awful cycle. Which is why Rome was so great!
His arguments were so persuasive that the founding fathers of the United States considered his philosophies required reading.
He argued this from the position of a person at the height of the Roman republic. Before the empire.
SPOILERS AHEAD:
Rome fell.
Both of those things ran their course inside of about 200 years each. They both fell. The thing he thought was infallible fell. To the same cycle he invented to explain what it would never fall to.
But, still, that's not the funny part.
1800 years later some slaveowners in wigs said, "This dude knew how to design a government that will never fall! Even though all the governments he lived under and venerated all fell!" And they designed a government that they thought would never fall.
But, still, that's not the funny part.
I wonder whether there's a perception that because things happened thousands of years ago they happened FOR thousands of years. Because events have been repeated and remembered for that long they have an actual lifespan measured that way.
A wise man once said, "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."
The funny part is that we're all missing it.
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