Section Three:

"Woe to the age that understands Tacitus."

--Proverb of German Historians

2206 A.D.
Rome, 79 A.D.: Titus succeeds his father Vespasian.

2208 A.D.
Rome: 81 A.D.: Titus is succeeded by his cruel and paranoid son, Domitian.

2213 A.D.
China, 87 B.C.: Death of the Emperor Wu-ti.

2219 A.D.
China, 81 B.C.: The government debates the privatization of the salt, iron and spirits monopolies. Government control of the economy begins to loosen.

2221 A.D.
Islam, 1595 A.D.: The Turks defeat the Holy Roman army in northern Austria.

2223 A.D.
Rome, 96 A.D.: The competent emperor Nerva restores order.

2225 A.D.
Rome, 98 A.D.: The emperor Trajan ascends the throne. The empire achieves its greatest extent during his reign. Vast, underfunded building projects are begun throughout the empire.

2229 A.D.
Islam, 1603 A.D.: Ahmad I becomes Sultan.

2230 A.D. Islam, 1604 A.D.: The Persians take Tabriz from the Turks.

2239 A.D.
Islam, 1613 A.D.: The Turks invade Hungary.

2242 A.D.:
Egypt, 1305 B.C.: Ramses I establishes the Nineteenth Dynasty.

Egypt, 1305 B.C.: The bases of economic power shift to new regions. Theology takes an ecumenical twist, but within established traditions.

2244 A.D.:
Rome, 117 A.D.: The historian Tacitus writes an influential history of the imperial age.

Rome, 117 A.D.; The reign of the Emperor Hadrian is taken up with reducing Trajan's conquests to manageable proportions.

Egypt, 1303 B.C.: The empire reexpands under Seti I.

Of course, human nature being what it is, there is still no end of people who are treated unjustly or who are oppressed, or who simply hate their lives. Societies that had always rested on slavery continue to do so in this period. Empires whose idea of international relations consists of exacting tribute under threat of punitive raids carry on in the same fashion. The best that a civilization can do is not necessarily very good. Whatever its ideals may be, however, this is the period in which the civilization comes closest to achieving them. It is therefore also the period in which the idea of fundamental social change finally dies out, at least as a serious secular possibility. The patricians and the people, or those who spoke for them, had fought for centuries about who would rule. The question now lapses, even in theoretical terms, for lack of interest.

Happiness is not to be confused with simple debility. For the last time, this period sees an imperial government capable of serious initiatives and a civil economic sector with the resources to support them. Indeed, the civil economy may show signs of renewed vigor and independence in this epoch, striking out in new directions on its own with only limited government supervision. The circumstances with which each civilization has to deal varies from case to case, of course. Nevertheless, all seem to achieve pretty much what they intend to. Egypt, for instance, had briefly withdrawn from Asia while concentrating, successfully, on fostering development and discipline at home. Rome, on the other hand, made large if transitory conquests to the east. Western civilization began a massive if ill-considered terraforming project on Mars, briefly succeeding in turning large sections of the northern hemisphere into a shallow sea. Everywhere there is ambition and success, but ambition within limits. Civilization knows the kind of thing it can do and what is beyond its reach. It busies itself, usually, with the former.

Despite this largely happy picture, the vitality of imperial society operates only at certain levels. Public enterprise in this epoch tends to take the form of gigantic canals, huge buildings and triumphal arches. The free enterprise section of the economy is able to grow only in the shadow of great, capital intensive initiatives, like the worldwide railroad building craze of the later nineteenth century. The enterprises which flourish in this period, however, are hardly models of entrepreneurial daring. They are, rather, often in the nature of utilities, made possible by the grant of official monopolies, of public land and licenses. Still, they are built in part with private money, and so have a modicum of private control in which the central government can as yet see no danger.

Cities, fussed over by paternalistic public authorities and businessmen anxious to stay in their good graces, approach a state of perfection. Transportation becomes as fast and safe as it will ever get, sanitary and health services proliferate to the extent of available knowledge. The police are everywhere effective through efficiency rather than brutality. Much of the economic activity of the period, both private and state-supported, is directed toward making public spaces beautiful and providing mass public entertainment. The latter was particularly the case in Western civilization, where the availability of electronic and neurally-induced illusion created an insatiable hunger for unmeditated experience.

The difference between this and previous ages of economic expansion, however, is that little of this activity really affects the way most people live. This is not an age of great increases in private consumption, or of new goods and services available to the typical household. Technological innovation as it applies to everyday life, in fact, comes to a halt, the first of many areas of mechanical ingenuity to follow. It is as if the wonders which civilizations produce during this period, the tunnels under the seas and the amphitheaters and great buildings, were happening on a level of reality different from that of ordinary life. The continuous change and excitement which were regarded as normal during the modern era continue, in a somewhat stereotyped fashion, on the public surface of the life of this period. Down below, where natural mankind lives, the stasis of everyday life which is native to the species already begins to return.

This is an age of perfect rather than daring art. The goal of the serious plastic and visual arts everywhere is the codification and mastery of historical styles. Syncretism and experiment are always possible, but command no durable respect. In an age of congealing standards, this is the time in which artists of all descriptions try to get it right, rather than to challenge or offend their audiences. Their audiences have access to the results of every possible experiment. It is no longer possible to challenge them.

Literature achieves final definition. For every imperial language (and some civilizations have more than one), the results of all the experiments of prior ages are long since in. It is only now, perhaps, that each language can become precisely itself, to do what only it can do and, for once, to do it without flaw. From the muscular, gnomic Latin of Tacitus' Annals to the sprung-rhyme lucidity of Those Who Err, greatest of English-language novels, the products of this period achieve a level of integrity which few in the time to come ever succeed in imitating.

This is the age when science dies. Even though the great final conclusions about the physical universe characteristic of each civilization had been reached two or three generations ago, this is the period in which they achieve their classical expression, the form in which they will be remembered forever after. Scientists, or natural philosophers, come to think of themselves in a way different from that of their predecessors. Their new role is not to discover new truths, or even necessarily to gather new information, but to teach and to apply the intellectual skills bequeathed by the past. Far from being rigid, however, they work always with an eye to synthesis. Because science is finished, they are more willing to consider those aspects of experience which cannot be captured by it. Their accounts of the world come more and more to resemble ontologies, theories of the whole of being which cover art and ethics and the supernatural.

This development is not simply a declination from old standards of rigor. Indeed, in a way it is a time of uniquely rigorous empiricism. What cannot be explained or reduced to something familiar is no longer simply explained away, as was the custom in prior ages. Rather, it is assigned a place in a hierarchy of knowledge. Even when some matter is held to be unknowable, it is still assigned a place on the new map of universal philosophy.

These maps, no matter which civilization composes them, call to a certain kind of fine mind in every other civilization which knows about them. The later Stoics and some types of Confucianism are examples, as are the mysticisms of Egypt and Islam, which became increasingly portable in this period. Schools and the writers of curricula love these systems. They are luminously clear, meticulously thorough, and beautifully expressed. They are also extremely artificial. The only comfort they offer is that of codifying a world in which there are no surprises. Like irony and the sort of sensibility which loves decay, they depend for their plausibility on the bland good fortune of their adherents. They fit ill with the experience of people whose life involves a great deal of wonder or misery, and many people's lives involve both. In later phases of civilization, the proportion of such people will increase.