Something I was reading the other day was talking about changes in modern US society from days of old like things you cant do now that you could back then and vice versa (it was a numbered slide show)and the comments were “when we stopped or weren’t allowed to do 1,5, and 7 and we let 6 and 8 happen we started on the road to hell and ruined the nation”
Did the average roman, geek, or Egyptian hear " they banned carts from the forum and leftus rightis middleus is emperor? and think/say sell the house the towns going to the underworld and the empires screwed " on a regular basis ?"
I am sure the Romans had their contingent of people saying “What?! The capital of the Roman Empire is being moved from Rome to Byzantium? We’re screwed now!” As it turned out, they were kinda right.
In all things I yearn for the past. Modern fashions seem to keep on growing more and more debased. I find that even among the splendid pieces of furniture built by our master cabinetmakers, those in the old forms are the most pleasing.
And as for writing letters, surviving scraps from the past reveal how superb the phrasing used to be. The ordinary spoken language has also steadily coarsened. People used to say “raise the carriage shafts” or “trim the lamp wick,” but people today say “raise it” or “trim it.” When they should say, “Let the men of the palace staff stand forth!” they say, “Torches! Let’s have some light!” Instead of calling the place where the lectures on the Sutra of the Golden Light are delivered before the emperor "the Hall of the Imperial Lecture," they shorten it to “the Lecture Hall,” a deplorable corruption, an old gentleman complained
This is a nitpick, but the capital of the Roman Empire was never moved from Rome to Byzantium. What happened was that the empire was split into an eastern and a western part, with the east run from Byzantium and the west from Rome. This was originally meant as an administrative measure that was not supposed to end the existence of the notion of the empire as a whole; but subsequently, the distinction between east and west became more entrenched, and when the western part of the empire went down in 476, the east was all that remained.
What did happen was that the government of the western part of the empire was moved away from Rome, first to Milan, then to Ravenna.
Livy (59 BC – 17 AD) wrote a history of Rome. In the prologue, he asked the reader to pay special attention to the moral decline of society up to that point:
The subjects to which I would ask each of my readers to devote his earnest attention are these-the life and morals of the community; the men and the qualities by which through domestic policy and foreign war dominion was won and extended. Then as the standard of morality gradually lowers, let him follow the decay of the national character, observing how at first it slowly sinks, then slips downward more and more rapidly, and finally begins to plunge into headlong ruin, until he reaches these days, in which we can bear neither our diseases nor their remedies.
Also, this recent Nature article makes the argument that people have always believed that society is declining, and that “the perception of moral decline is pervasive, perdurable, unfounded and easily produced.”
Absolutely. Every. Single. One. Complaining about how things aren’t as good as they used to be and everything going to pot, is a universal human trait.
The end of the Roman Republic is one of the more memorable times when that was the case. Of course it’s also one of the relatively rare times where the doomsayers were entirely correct. People weren’t respecting the traditions that stopped the Republic from collapsing into dictatorship, wealth was being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the large slave run estates were replacing the small farms run by ordinary Romans, etc.
The catch was the people saying everything must stay the same as it was in our fathers time, when everything was awesome, and we will beat you to death if you try and reform anything just made sure the whole system was gonna collapse.