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I think it’s always very hard to learn lessons from Rome, direct lessons. I don’t think
that certainly there’s much where we can say oh look, the Romans did that and we should
do it too. There are I have to say quite a lot of things that the Romans did extremely
badly. I wouldn’t fancy being a woman in the Roman Empire. I certainly wouldn’t have
fancied being a slave. So we can see them as offering a rather anti-model of how you
should treat women and the conquered. And I think that Rome makes us think differently
about some of the problems that we have and which they faced too. One of those most obviously
and particularly relevant at the beginning of the 21st century is ideas of migration
and citizenship. Currently refugees, asylum seekers, economic migrants – one of the
biggest crises that certainly the continent of Europe but also the world more widely faces.
I think for me very instructive to look back to Rome and to see in Rome a world where there
was no such thing as an illegal migrant. That would have been absolutely incomprehensible
to a Roman where there was free movement of people. Where people were granted citizenship
by the Romans very freely. There was no such thing as a citizenship test. You didn’t
have to salute the flag. You didn’t have to sing the national anthem. You didn’t
have to pay a fee. Rome was an incorporating society. And indeed when Rome thought about
its very origin, you know, who founded Rome. And they told elaborate fantastic mythical
stories like the story of Romulus and Remus. And who founded Rome after being discovered
and suckled by the wolf on the banks of the Tiber. Or a different story but equally popular
how the Roman race was founded by Aeneus who had been a Trojan hero in the great war between
the Greeks and the Trojans at Troy. Aeneus had fled from Troy to find a new city in Italy
when his own had been defeated. If you look at those kind of stories you discover that
Romans are imagining their origins in terms of being a home for refugees like Aeneus.
And very interestingly when Romulus actually found the city that was on the site of Rome
itself and he looks around and he thinks help, I haven’t got any citizens. You know except
for a couple of lads and nothing much more.
What does he do? He puts up a notice and sends message around saying Rome is a place of asylum.
Any runaway, any criminal, any asylum seeker could come to Rome and be a Roman citizen.
Now it’s extraordinary and perhaps rather more like some American founding myths that
saw British founding myths. It’s quite extraordinary to see for me a culture which traces its origin
back to migrants and refugees and asylum seekers. Now I think it’s very important to say we
can’t just take that as a model of what to do ourselves. It would be slightly crazy
to say oh, because Rome was an open city and welcomed asylum seekers so should we. We’re
living in a different world.
But I think what’s important is simply the realization that there is another culture,
back there, that had a very, very different view from the view that we now tend to hold.
And it helps you put that view, your own view, in perspective. It helps you to see that view
from the outside. The Romans would look at us and they’d look at what’s happening
on the beaches of Europe and the Mediterranean Sea, you know, their world. And they would
be amazed and horrified just as we are horrified about some of the things that they did.