Jean-Marc Jancovici

A citizen of Rome in 117 AD, under Emperor Trajan, would've found it difficult to imagine the empire not existing. The roads, the aqueducts, the legal system, the trade networks stretching from Britain to Mesopotamia: all of it seemed to be a near-fact of nature, like gravity // the Mediterranean itself. Edward Gibbon gave us six volumes explaining how that feeling turned out to be wrong, and even he couldn't fully untangle all the causes. But the overarching theme might be this: the permanenc