ABSTRACT
Whoever coined the epigram ‘Rome was not built in a day’ – and it was probably the sixteenth-century English dramatist John Heywood – established a permanent reminder that the Roman civilization was twelve hundred years developing, flourishing, and ultimately disintegrating. This is a considerable time in the history of thinking man: almost as long as from the Dark Ages in Britain and the establishment of Islam in Arabia to the present day, and over three times longer than the period since the foundation of the first English settlement in Jamestown, Virginia. It was, too, a thoroughly impressive epoch, which had, and still commands, a profound influence on western society.
