But hegemony slips away from those who rest easy. As soon as you take something for granted, fate revokes the grant. The US drained its coffers on useless wars and bitter infighting, failing to tackle problems of sufficient ambition to lead the world, instead of merely ruling it—not unlike the progeny of a wealthy family blowing their inheritance

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Soon after the defeat of Veii, in 390 BCE a posse of marauding ‘Gauls’ sacked Rome. Exactly who these people were is now impossible to know; Roman writers were not good at distinguishing between those whom it was convenient to lump together as ‘barbarian tribes’ from the north, nor much interested in analysing their motives. But according to Livy,

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The core values of long-standing institutions are often first established by the founders and the visionaries that traditional histories foreground, for understandable reasons. But the ultimate structure of those organizations—the limits of their power, the channels through which they can express that power—are more often than not defined by edge

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