Is America The New Rome…??

…Fated to fail

From the start, Rome was destined to absolute monumental failure.  It started out small like every other empire but there came a point where Rome became too big… I mean it was enormous. I’m guessing that they ignorantly did not realize that they weren’t going to be responsible enough of their empire for it to continue thriving as it had been during the Pax Romana (a time period of about 200 years where Rome was at its best.)

Too much and too fast…

Because of this, the Roman government was weakening continuously while the population of the Roman Empire was growing rapidly and becoming tremendously immense.  All of this meant that the government could not control the rapidly growing empire…at all. The Romans thought that they would always be the best, but just like the Chinese dynasties, their greatness was fated to end. Someone once said, “All good things must come to an end.” The people of the Roman Empire were probably way too confident in their government, but who could blame them; they were the biggest empire at the time.  Although they tried their best, laziness probably got to the Romans; even as they saw their empire coming to an end and becoming corrupt, they couldn’t have cared less.

 

… Don’t bite off more than you can chew

Why did Rome grow so amazingly big in the first place? The Roman Empire grew simply because they were remarkably greedy. The Romans had a good sized empire already, but that just wasn’t enough for them. Their goal was to grow, grow and grow.  I wonder what they were thinking to do when it got extremely large. Did they even have a better form of government for when the empire got way too big for the government system at that time? Regardless, they took over a lot of places including today’s Britain, France, Germany, Egypt, Spain, Austria, Switzerland, and many more. Not only were they growing with greed, but they were also making citizens upset. There was no way possible they could’ve controlled that many angry and disappointed people while keeping their empire thriving and large.   Greed is a good thing to a certain point: think about it, if they hadn’t been greedy, their empire wouldn’t have expanded and become extremely successful and powerful. Having a huge empire increased their power over trade and it also made other empires afraid of them, which, in a certain way was a good thing. If other empires or countries were scared of being taken over by them, they would cooperate with anything the Romans asked of them. But…. in the end, their greed did not benefit them: they became too greedy and had too much power, so much that they couldn’t handle the responsibilities that came with all of that power.  With great power comes responsibility; they obviously did NOT take this concept into consideration when taking over so many places. Hopefully other countries can learn from their mistakes and from their successes.

 

…….Is America becoming Rome??

How is modern America and the Ancient Roman Empire related ?

Some similarities would include that America is a representative democracy(which is a form of a republic) the same way the Roman Empire was also a republic. Also, the Ancient Roman Empire was very powerful around the world, just like America.  Not only were they both powerful, but they were also very large. In the same way the Roman Empire fell because it was too large to function, America could also eventually do the same thing, because America is absolutely huge.  Obviously, America’s government is stronger than Rome’s was, but that could change at any given moment.  Either way,  I personally think that America is not looking to expand further in the near future, so if it were so fall because of its size,  it would happen in years to come; that type of failing won’t happen in the blink of an eye.  

How is modern America and the Ancient Roman Empire different ?

The difference between the amount of rights that Americans have and the amount of rights that people in the Roman Empire had is enormous. This a very good thing for Americans because we get huge amount of freedom and not too much where its like we’re living in an anarchy, but enough that prevents Civil Wars.  Rome made the mistake of not giving rights to certain people, which caused Civil Wars. Because the government already couldn’t control the fast growing population, these wars were definitely not helpful. Moving on to another difference is slavery…….In the Roman empire, slaves were taking a large amount of jobs, but in America one of our main goals is to create more jobs ,which improves and helps the economy. Although we did at one point have slaves, America has learned that the smarter thing to do is have people feel happy in their country.  

By: Nina Yalung, Kendall President, and Michelle Andrade

Links:https://www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-s-nye/america-like-rome_b_7147216.html

https://www.moneycrashers.com/united-states-america-roman-empire/

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