The ‘Eternal City’: Rome’s 2775th Birthday

According to tradition, 2,776 years ago, on April 21, 753 B.C., the city of Rome was founded. Legends blend with history in Rome’s founding, of course, and the tales of Aeneas (the Trojan progenitor of the Roman people) and Romulus and Remus (Aeneas’s descendants miraculously suckled by a she-wolf and later Rome’s founders) contain elements both of fact and of fiction. But one fact is undeniable—Rome has given to the world much of the greatest civilization it has ever seen.

In modernity, there is unfortunately a tendency either to despise all ancients (especially European ancients) or to pretend that Western civilization owes almost all its greatness and glory to Greece. Both views are wildly inaccurate. Both as pagan and then as Christian, the “Eternal City” has been swaying the world’s fate for thousands of years; sometimes much to the worse, and sometimes very much to the better. Romulus, Scipio Africanus, Titus Manlius Imperiosus Torquatus, Cincinnatus, Horatius, Seneca, Cicero, the Caesars, Vergil, Horace, Suetonius, Marcus Aurelius, the Plinys, Ovid, Livy, Boethius. . .the list could go on and on. Good or evil, or a mixture of both, the great and brilliant men of Rome are still impacting the world today.

In fact, both Christians and Americans should be most particularly grateful to Rome. Rome has been the center of the Christian world since St Peter came there, and Roman rule and infrastructure facilitated evangelization. We Americans owe much of our political philosophy to the heritage of Rome. Americans, particularly the Founders, explicitly demonstrated that they thought of themselves as the New Rome.