The attack on Ostia was Rome's 9/11
One of the nice aspects of being a historian is that the past provides a whole range of parallels which illumine and help us understand the present. It has become almost a cliche to state that Islamic Terrorism is the biggest scourge of this era, in much the same way medieval Europeans looked upon the Mongols. Surprisingly the language used to describe the phenomenon of Jehadi liberation idelogy evokes the same kind of apoclyptic exuberance which was once used to describe such horrors as the palague and the mongol hordes. How many can realise that the child's verse, ringa ringa roses pocket full of poises, is actually a description of the symptoms of the palgue. My point is simple: with time the nation states which lie at the very root of all the problems in the world today will disappear and in its palce will come about a new, and hopefully more humane ways by which human society be organised.
In the year 68 BC when the Roman Empire in the dramatic words of its historian Edward Gibbon covered the fairest and the most civilied parts of mankind, an event of unspeakable horror ocurred in Rome and hence my parallel with 9/11. Rome the world's greatest hyperpower at that point in time was dealt a devastating blow from which it appears the Empire never quite recovered. Pirates from the Phonecian territories on the coast of the Meditteranean attaked the port of Ostia in which was anchored the entire war fleet of the Roaman military. The pirates set the fleet on fire destroed the entire fleet and its harbor and kidnapped a few prominent Roman politicians. This event seared the consciousness of the Roamns in much the same way the events of 9/11 did.For the first time Roman homeland was attacked. Forget the fact that the Roamns like the Americns now have been attacking and killing all over the world, but they were just not prepared for the attack on their own home territory.
The rersult of this attack was an early Roaman version of the "War on Terror", documented ably by Plutarch in his Parallel Lives.Pompey was put in charge of making another fleet and he built a fleet of 500 war ships, an army of 120,000 men and 5,000 cavalry.Pompey, unlike Bush and the Bushmen, was highly successful in his self declared "war on Terror". It appears that the Roman politicians had used the Osxtia incident to whip up the passions of the Roman people. And the first step toward the civil war that ulitmately brought about thed end of constitutional rule in Rome was taken. The response to the Ostia incident like the military adventurism of Bush, Rumsfeldt, and other Bushmen resulted in the complete erosion of the rule of law.
Come November when USA votes for the mid term Congressional election, let us hope better sense will prevail.