Vegas!

 

I've never been to Vegas, the City of Lights, but Ma LSP, BW and Bo have. In fact they're there right now along with a couple of friends. Bo, my middle sister and a Byzantine classicist(?) by education was struck by the imperial grandeur of it all and sent in this photo essay. Here it is, Las Vegas June 2021:

Look, Imperial Rome, at 11 a.m.

Varus, where are my Eagles?

And what fresh hell is this? Ostia?

But note the Eagle and Orb of Imperium, held aloft in a darkening, cerulean sky.

And a homely Tuscan villa.

And Ma LSP enjoying St. Mark's Square. 

Feminae, beware the monstrous bird! Good thing it's not angry. Readers, do you see it, lurking?

But upwards, ascendite! to what? The domus aurea of the desert and the casinos of the Gods. Yes, enter at your peril.

Quod scis et divum Augustum et Tiberium Caesarem ad deos isse.

Quite a thing, eh? Imagine, if you can, looking out on the Eternal City from the Palatine Hill and the wreckage of the palace of the Caesars in, say, the 7th Century AD. 

You'd see a sea of ruins, a city that's declined from over a million people to around 20,000, stricken by plague and war but nonetheless home to the great, holy, Patriarch of the West, Gregory, gens Anicii.

There's a parable here, if you care to draw it,

LSP

Running Mates?

Pundits are suggesting that Pompeius Redivivus Trump and Constantinus Novus Putin should form a Duumvirate and run jointly for the US imperial regalia. 

I'm not sure what that'd mean for Marco Rubio, who has been accused of having "rat claw hands." Probably nothing pleasant, and seeing as how this small kebab stand on the information superhighway is now focused on classical antiquity, ponder this.

Imperial Rome had at its peak a population in excess of 1 million people. This had shrunk to some 30,000, possibly less, by the 8th century A.D. Picture the view from the Palatine Hill over what had been the temporal center of the world, and imagine the sea of ruins stretching out to the Aurelian walls.

A sobering thought, for me at least, and some say a harbinger of things to come in the US. That would make Detroit a kind of model, or type, of things to come.

Maybe our next president will disprove these prophets and you never know, maybe Detroit will be great again.

Cheers,

LSP