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Thursday, April 17, 2014

This Is How Free Americans Really Are

Among all the great stories and conversations passed down from the ages, probably my favorite is one from the ancient historian Lucius Cassius Dio about Roman emperor Caracalla.

Caracalla ruled in the second century AD, and he was notorious for bankrupting the Roman treasury and waging costly, unnecessary wars.

Dio tells us that Caracalla made “one excuse after another and one war after another; but he made it his business to strip, despoil, and grind down all the rest of mankind.”

Under Caracalla, Rome was broke. And Dio recounts a story between the emperor and his mother Julia:

Julia to the emperor: “There is no longer any source of revenue, either just or unjust, left to us.”

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