On bread and circuses

The Romans amused themselves to death while their empire collapsed. I hope we aren't doing the same.

Travel has never been easier.

No need to worry about your phone. It will cheaply sync to a local network and offer unlimited roaming. No need to worry about changing money or travelers’ checks (remember those?). Your credit card will work anywhere.

No need to worry about an unfriendly border guard. Immigration agencies have checked manifests and decided if you’re trouble while you’re still in the air. No need to worry about long connections. Nonstops cover the world. Take off from Atlanta, land in South Korea or South Africa without ever touching down.

Truly, the biggest problem with traveling these days might be its very ease. Some European cities, most notably Venice, have more visitors than residents and seem to exist mostly as full-scale replicas of themselves to fleece tourists. The effect is vaguely dystopian, a glimpse of a potential artificial intelligence/universal basic income future — streets of jobless but well-fed hordes looking to fill their days.

Or maybe I was just tired of overpriced souvenir shops.

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(You know what’s not overpriced? Unreported Truths!)

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Yes, we visited Italy for spring break last week (I was spotted along the way by an Unreported Truths reader, you are everywhere!). I hadn’t been in a long time, and I was glad to be back. It’s a beautiful country, and if there was any anti-American sentiment I missed it. Since 2022, Italy has had a conservative government.

More than anything, though, to visit Italy is to be reminded the United States is not guaranteed anything.

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(Ave Caesar, morituri te salutant!¹)

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At its peak in the second century AD, the Roman empire stretched almost 4,000 miles, from northern England to the Persian Gulf. It encompassed the entire Mediterranean Sea, from Egypt to Morocco, Spain to Turkey.² Roman legions patrolled and defended the empire’s borders, while at its heart the citizens of Rome lived in peace and wealth.

As a classical historian wrote in an 2025 article comparing the towns on the Italian coast to the Hamptons, the summer beach playground for rich New Yorkers:

One villa in Herculaneum covered at least 215,000 square feet — 10 times the size of the billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s home in today’s Southampton — and many were probably larger still. On the Bay of Naples, villas sprawled down terraced hillsides to private jetties, unashamed of their opulence. Inside, walls were frescoed, floors mosaicked and rooms filled with works by the old Greek masters.

The grandees who owned these palaces must have imagined the empire that coddled them would last forever.

They were wrong.

Rome was sacked in 410 AD. It fell permanently in 476, beginning a Dark Age of Europe that lasted longer than the empire itself. The causes of its decline were clear even at the time — misrule, political instability, and heavy military spending that eventually drained the empire’s coffers.

All along, though, the political elites kept Rome’s middle-class and poor at bay with massive gladiatorial spectacles at the Colosseum and arenas throughout the empire, sometimes stretching for months and including thousands of gladiators.

The people wanted only “bread and circuses,” the Roman writer Juvenal wrote early in the second century AD, coining a phrase that remains alive today. Juvenal’s full lines are even more telling:

The people that once used to bestow military commands, high office, legions, everything, now limits itself. It has an obsessive desire for two things only—bread and circuses.

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(Back in the day…)

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It’s only too easy to imagine an updated version of Juvenal’s line: an obsessive desire for two things only: sports betting and TikTok videos.

None of this is to say that the United States will necessarily follow Rome’s course. Over the last two centuries, America has survived civil war, nuclear weapons, and economic depressions. Whatever our problems now, we have the world’s dominant economy, culture, language, and military.

Still, our endless deficit spending, executive branch power grabs (whichever party is in power), and apparently growing taste for spectacle in public life (again, on both sides) do not augur well.

And the fact that in June the White House will host privately run mixed-martial-arts fights — the “UFC Freedom 250” — feels way too on-the-nose.

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(Freedom isn’t free! But Unreported Truths is, almost.)

Or just donate!

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All I can do, all any of us can do, is not to give into the temptation to indulge our worst instincts — and instead fight for the universal principles and rights our Constitution upholds.

I just hope that in 2000 years Chinese tourists (or, more likely, robots) are not touring the ruins of Commanders Stadium and talking about the great empire that the National Football League’s modern gladiators once entertained.

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BTW: If you have a thought for a practical way to improve our politics and culture — the smaller and more realistic the better — I’d love to hear it in the comments.

1. “Hail Caesar, we about to die salute you!” Gladiators supposedly shouted those words to the emperor, and the crowds, before their battles began.

2. In fact, the Latin word “mediterranean” means “in the middle of the earth.”