Nam Gloriam

Officers and common solders gloried in single combat, taking heads and despoiling their enemies.--For the Glory of Rome, caption snippet, Ross Cowan

The Walking Dead reminds us how easy we actually have it in our modern cities: filtrated water, processed food increasingly depleted into mono-staples like corn, potatoes, but nonetheless plentiful, relative ease of travel where we kill ourselves off in macro-evolutionary fashion through vehicular homicide, but most progressives are astute enough not to call for bans on automobiles, only keeping an eye out for regulating Uber. Within the substructure of its serial wanderers punctuated by periodic post-apocalyptic community integration, Britannia's David Morrissey gives a decent approximation of a mendacious and intense tyrant as the governor, whose climatic moment culminated in the termination of Michael Rooker's character arc. He brings the same set of skills to Aulus Plautius under Claudian rule of the Empire, which, if we wish to quibble with Amazon, relies a little too much on the modern style of situation comedy for its interludes of domestic levity. In Ben Hur, Roman rule juxtaposed against the zealousness of faith is actually a code for the rise of the United States as it was viewed under Eisenhower: federated civilian supremacy imposing egalitarianism on all its subjects at the point of a bayonet-- the bayonet being the mightiest legion in the world. The English, being the irritable Victorians that they are, chime in with not so fast. The legionnaires could be out-maneuvered through the indigenous manipulation of the Druids. The writers take this manifest future superiority of Anglican globalism too seriously. The Roman Empire, under Augustan lineage and beyond, wasn't the first super power of its kind out of happenstance. When Morrissey bellows to his troops beset with the rainy weather of the British Isles, "We are Roman!" It is this to which civilization owns its homage, stirring the fervor in my own Roman blood, what articulated itself when I struggled with the door while none of the students came to my aid, and a naive little spastic set eyes on a Tassoni in army fatigues and heavy black boots, Sylvester Stalllone gloves on his hands, me and my doomed, precocious, invalid heart. I undoubtedly fell for the man instantly, merely to be otherwise signed and sealed and delivered when he wrapped his arms around me in the dormitory hallway. Though reconnected to me due to an overenthusiastic care giver, this same man, perhaps wisely, did not respond to my tentative thank you on Messenger, and do those wounds of my first true desire still have that much of a hold, more properly suffered in silence? If it matters that much, remove his account? You may laugh, and deride it. Intelligent the dowager may be, adept, mature for 56, may be adjudicated on the merits of whatsoever was wrong with being his friend? He was innocent of anything but living his life choice in 2002 when I tracked him down; he is innocent now, while I ride this metaphysical plane of passionate restoration, for the glory that was Rome. We are beholden to it in a fundamental diachronic tie much more so than Xi's presidency can be transliterated back to the formation of the Middle Kingdom, or the implied contract between the US and its lone true satellite in the East, modern Israel. This is why I had to reluctantly vacillate about removal of Hallel from my feed. I do not believe in the legitimacy of Resolution 181, and wrestle the Zionist imperative which authenticates Israel as a divine right.
What is glory in the modern world? How do we take its measure? Would my life had been different had love been reciprocated, truly?