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. 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 state on earth could not achieve what Rome's citizens demand of it.
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Cataline, that bucco whose hair could serve as its own battle helmet, was just bait to measure how many fish would bite at a dictator. That tramas putidas had neither the money nor legions nor brains to organize his own rebellion, and even were that sterculinum publicum to be dictator, there was clearly a puppetmaster to whose questions he provided every answer. The feeling of many here is that it's King Pharnaces of Pontus, eager to avenge the Parthian defeat and willing to infiltrate Rome from the inside. As implausible as it seemed prima facie, evidence is overwhelming of at least some Parthians colluding with Cataline. But my feeling is that even if Cataline had Parthian handlers, there had to be collusion within Rome's most powerful interests as well. Was it people from Crassus's camp, did it come from Pompey's, was it Caesar's? Was it all three? Or was it a different puppetmaster abroad? Perhaps it was King Antipater but that's too tempting a leap: everyone loves to blame Judeans for things they don't do.
But even were there no conspirator behind Cataline, even if such a vacca ac nebulo orchestrated such a breathtaking conspiracy of his own accord, all these potens are looking oh so closely at the example of the Cataline Conspiracy, testing its data, formulating precisely where it went wrong and documenting every way it went right. Rome claims to be a republic but even now it's basically run by three or four families and everybody else is just a bureaucrat under their patronage. Had the Roman Republic hope of survival before Cataline, there is no hope now. Were I to die a natural death, I would live to see Rome a perpetual dictatorship. And doubtless the Holy One BBH views it as my duty to steer Rome to choose the least bloody option. God forbid Hashem do this by making me something more powerful than a Roman J...
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....ust as the world once was divided between Rehovam and Yerovam, or Menelaus and Paris, (or Cain and Abel), the world is now divided between Optimates and Populares. All it takes to destroy a civilization is dwell within it at an indisputable apogee of its progress and watch helplessly as the societal organism vivisects itself into two political parties with a neatness as miraculous as an ocean pebble.
How?
Because the more accustomed they grow to their powers, the more dim grow any memories of life without such amenities. So great are this great society's newbegotten powers that its citizens have no idea to use them, nor is there precedent for their use, so the society neatly divides into two parties:
The party of more, and the party of less.
The party of more wants to use their powers to effect enormous change that includes everyone, the party of less wants to use these powers to exclude everyone from any change at all. The more the two parties interact with one another, the more they push each other into ever more extreme versions of themselves that cannot abide the idea that their vision of what life is is partial.
The arguments for how to use these powers will eventually have equal means to move their powers until no agreement is possible and there is absolute gridlock in this of all places where dynamism is taken for granted, and the Holy One BBH merges these volatile elements like we are his own personal chemistry set. Inevitably, some event happens that sets these dynamic elements in motion again, and it sets off an explosion that causes generations of violent chaos, chaos that only is overcome by the imposition of tyranny still more v...
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....hat are these new powers?
It's different in every society, but in the case of this particular grandiloquent metropolis, it's their engineering - their capacity to build: housing, plumbing, weapons, tools roads, roads; roads: roads so strong, so durable, so distant, that they have paved an entire world, and what once was a world full of small spheres has become a one large globe around which men like me can wander for an eternity.
Rome roads brought her wealth beyond what any city ever procured, but since Rome has more work than elsewhere, so there are more workers, more mouths, more noise, more crime, more garbage, more fire. The more is built, the more buildings fall.
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Caesar, who started his life just as another rich debauched, then sowed his wild oats as
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