prompt: twilight, title: arrivederci roma in misc. flash fiction

The cliché is “Rome wasn’t built in a day” but what that chestnut neglects to say is that Rome didn’t fall in just one day, either. At its height, it’d become so vast and all-encompassing that those at the core might not have even known or cared when the Germanic tribes carved back their homeland. Rome’s decline as slow as the tides that lap at Mediterranean shores, wearing away coastline over ages, over lifetimes as human beings measure. It was never one emperor’s deposition, one military’s failure, it washed away as Arctic glaciers melt away today, bridge by crumbling bridge, trade route by trade route abandoned over lack of security, like the frog of metaphor in a saucer slowly heating, never noticing a change in its climate until completely cooked alive. That’s how all of the empires will fall, really.

The twilight of an empire is messy liminal, indistinct, hazy as it frays apart back into the earth from whence it came. Something that big, encompassing the western world as they’d known it, isn’t too big to fail, of course, nothing’s too big to fail, entropy will have it out for the sun and the moon and the stars just the same as empires, just the same for you or me or anyone, but the inertia of that kind of scale means it can’t go all at once. Too big to fail in a day, at least, to say.

Even the residue of power and prestige, the mythology of former greatness, could keep a few generations of emperors in opulence in a capital, in denial of the collapse at the edges that they didn’t really care to think upon anyway. The Byzantine East called itself the Roman Empire for centuries long after Rome itself was no longer under their control. The rump state of that entity had some little tinpot saber-rattler or another calling himself The Emperor of Rome, up until the 1480s, long past what we would think of antiquity, a mere decade away from Cristobal Colon’s departure west to kick off a new empire with guns and germs and God for gold starting empire’s bloody cycle off again. The Germans called their empire Holy Rome, despite no lineage with the old, just for the title into the 1800s, right alongside baby America. Empires to empires, Athens to Rome to London to Washington, rising and falling all the while in perpetual denial that they too shall pass, passing even as they proclaim renewed glory. Time after time, same old story.

But let it be known, more than once a Caesar sat upon a throne and thought “I rule the world” when actually, the provinces rebelled generations ago, all the glories and largess he seemed to possess was nothing more than momentum from the distant past. Rome fell long ago, emperors too detached from reality to see the truth of history, that everything ends eventually, even if it takes some time to fall, be it riot barricade or Berlin wall.