Status Updates From Hadrian

The sea journey was shorter from Carthage than from other ports on the coast, and so it was from there that the thousands of creatures were exported to be terrified and butchered in the Roman arenas. Every age has a "blind defect"-some taint that is quite incongruous with its prevailing moral standards. In eighteenth-century England, it was slavery, in the twentieth, belief in bombs. Hadrian's age had a great many,

"It is a wonderful picture, which even at this distance of time excites a glow of admiration, a nostalgic wish that our own epoch, too, might witness such felicity, such brotherhood, that men might travel, safe and unmolested by thieves or frontiers, from Newcastle to Baghdad, and from Khartoum to Odessa. But then, behind the pleasant vision comes always the haunting question, 'Was it worth it?'