A Cain Fragment - First Quarter

My Dearest Abel, 

It is your brother again, now named Flavius Iacobus, reporting to you live from Rome, the latest in a long series of eternal capitals. Unlike all those others, this one seems to stay put no matter how many times it deserves to be burned like Jerusalem. 

By this lifetime, I'm just the latest in a long series of Jews born to Rome. First I was just Flavia-bat-Yehuda, born in Central Italy to Israelite immigrants who fled the Assyria's destruction of Israel's Northern Kingdom. I was handmaiden to a Sabine women who witnessed the famed rape then shared their fate; only to became house chambermaid then mistress of Romulus himself, until he decided my best decorative use would be on a pyre of human sacrifice. After two-hundred years I returned as Flavius Avramus: a contract lawyer who settled a long dispute between Plebians and Patricians by writing them a simple constitution. The Roman decemvirate told me it was so good Rome was going to adapt it as their national constitution. Then they buried me alive.  Three hundred years later I returned to Rome as Flavius Isakus, a mathematician whom Scipio Africanus employed as a tactical advisor in the Second Punic War. Scipio had me crucified after the Battle of Cannae. There were 70,000 Roman casualties that day, all because Scipio thought I told him to attack the right bank but I said to attack FROM the right bank. Now I'm Flavius Iacobus - a Roman banker born Yaakov de Sabatus, adopted into the Flavians for having repeatedly paid off the orgy debts of six separate heirs. You'd think nobody is horny enough to spend that kind of money on sex, but Romans spend so much on sex these days that they decided they need a banker in the family just to keep having it. 

This is what happens when a country gets too much power. Rome is no longer a city or even an empire, Rome is the world, and from here to aeternam, the world will build on the roads Rome paves. For the first half of this particular life, the defeat of Parthian Empire was the goal to which Rome strove, and from the moment of victory over King Mithridates, Rome's decline began.

You'd think decline would make a country less powerful, but no, they're too magnum to fail. Every time Rome fercocks something, they just get more powerful.  No country is meant to be like this. Romans are such great builders, but no engineering feat can govern an empire of 60 million people. And no building can make livable this capital of a million inhabitants. The more Rome accomplishes, the more accomplishment Romans demand of it, and even the greatest most resourceful state on earth could not achieve what Rome's citizens demand of itself. 

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