I want to return to one experience of my recent France trip that I mentioned in last week’s post. As I said, I had been unaware until just recently of the extent of ancient Roman colonization in southern France. Basically, all the physical aspects of Roman civilization can be found there. In addition to the enormous Pont du Gard aqueduct bridge we visited, there are coliseums, theaters, triumphal arches, temples, and public baths scattered across the region, modeled on ones in Rome. The remains of a Mediterranean coastal highway can be seen which stretched from Italy to Spain.

Just a few days ago, I came across an X post about the Roman engineering which made their extensive network of aqueducts possible. Amazingly, some are still in use! One feeds the iconic Trevi Fountain in Rome. The post featured a short video of such an aqueduct to illustrate its crystal-clear water. The poster writes:

That water clarity is an engineering decision, and the math behind it is wilder than the video. Roman aqueducts ran on gravity alone. No pumps, no pressure systems. Engineers carved channels with a gradient so shallow it borders on absurd. The Pont du Gard in southern France drops 2.5 centimeters over 275 meters. That’s roughly the thickness of a coin over the length of three football fields. [Note: commenters said it’s actually an inch over that distance, but still amazing.] They surveyed that accuracy with plumb lines and wooden leveling instruments. The clarity you’re seeing is a direct product of flow velocity. Too steep and the water erodes the channel walls, picks up sediment, turns brown. Too flat and it stagnates. Roman engineers targeted a slope of about 20 centimeters per kilometer, which kept the water moving fast enough to stay fresh but slow enough to stay clear. Before the water reached the city, it passed through multi-chamber settling tanks where velocity dropped near zero. Suspended particles sank. Clean water flowed out the top into the next chamber. Repeat three or four times.

Pont du Gard was part of a 30-mile aqueduct carrying water to the Roman city which is now Nimes, in Provence. It was probably completed in the middle of the 1^st century, or about the time of Paul. It’s estimated to have provided 11 million gallons of water a day. In the 4^th century, however, things began to go wrong as debris, plant roots, and mineral deposits reduced its flow (most of the aqueduct was underground, as was typical). This was the result of a breakdown in regular maintenance due to the increasing number of barbarian invasions in the region. In short, it was the beginning of the end of the Roman empire.

One comment on the X post linked to a clip from the first episode of the BBC’s landmark series Civilization. The host, the renowned art historian Kenneth Clark, is sitting on the river’s edge across from Pont du Gard and wonders how the empire which built such a structure could collapse a few centuries later.

What happened? Well, it took Gibbon nine volumes to describe the decline and fall of the Roman Empire and I shall not embark on that. But thinking about this almost incredible episode does tell one something about the nature of civilization. It shows that however complex and solid it seems, it is actually quite fragile; it can be destroyed.

What are its enemies? First of all, fear. Fear of war, fear of invasion, fear of plague, fears that make it simply not worthwhile constructing things or planting trees or even planting next year’s crops…. And then boredom, the feeling of hopelessness which can overtake people with a high degree of material prosperity…. Of course, civilization requires a modicum of material prosperity, enough to provide a little leisure. But far more, it requires confidence. Confidence in the society in which one lives, belief in its philosophy, belief in its laws, confidence in one’s own mental powers. The way the stones of that bridge are laid is not only a triumph of technical skill, but it shows a vigorous belief in discipline and law, energy, vitality.

All the great civilizations or civilizing epochs have had a weight of energy behind them. People sometimes think the civilization consists in fine sensibilities and good conversation and all that. Well, these can be among the agreeable results of civilization but they are not what makes a civilization. And the society can have these amenities and yet be dead and rigid. So, if one asks why the civilization of Greece and Rome collapsed, the real answer is that it was exhausted.

In the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries, Europeans became fascinated with ancient Egypt. In 1818, the poet Shelley wrote a poem about a statue of the pharaoh Ramesses II that would soon be coming to Great Britain. It was called Ozymandias, the Greek world for Ramesses, and imagines a contemporary person viewing the statue laying in the sand. It is considered Shelly’s most well-known poem.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Shelley wrote in the midst of growing cynicism about and criticism of Europe’s monarchies, especially in the wake of the American and French revolutions. Exploration and the new field of archaeology were uncovering the ruins of history’s great ancient empires, like that of Ramesses in Egypt. The quotation Percy uses shows how the passage of time exposes the foolishness of rulers’ grandiosity and how neither their power nor any human accomplishment lasts forever.

In the news analysis and commentary I read these days, it has become common to talk about the decline or end of the American Empire. And these are not political messages about what needs to be done to stop it. Rather, they are more like weather forecasts: here’s what’s coming, so get ready.

A teaching common to all the world’s spiritual traditions is to warn against the dangers and foolishness of placing our security in the “things of this world.” In a famous scene from the gospels, during the week of his passion, Jesus walks in the Jerusalem temple with his disciples. The temple was an enormous complex and considered one of the wonders of the ancient world. It was the anchor of ancient Judaism.

As he came out of the temple, one of his disciples said to him, “Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!” Then Jesus asked him, “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.” (Mark 13)

And indeed, seventy years later Roman legions did destroy the temple, leaving only one relatively small wall standing which survives to this day.

The rest of the chapter is Jesus’ grim but metaphorical description of the chaos and suffering to come. At the end, he gives his disciples a puzzling direction: “And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake.” Here, too, Jesus speaks a universal spiritual truth. Our greatest danger is a blindness or at least a distorted vision of life and the world around us. It is the Spirit that awakens us and opens our eyes to the truth, truth we often would rather not recognize.

As was true of the Romans and the resident of all the great civilizations, it is true for us: we are easily dazzled by our society’s accomplishments and think they represent our collective importance and might. But they also hide the more subtle and essential realities of truth, values and justice—or their absence. We can have, as Kenneth Clark says, many wonderful social “amenities,” and yet be “dead and rigid” with “exhaustion” right around the corner. Then our individual challenge is to be “awake” to the faith, hope and love which always transcends empire’s rise and fall and upon which life depends.

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