- "...greater than that of an Egyptian Pharaoh or a Roman Emperor..." I agree it's a thought-provoking comparison. It's a remarkably distorted lens, the one mo

- "...greater than that of an Egyptian Pharaoh or a Roman Emperor..." I agree it's a thought-provoking comparison. It's a remarkably distorted lens, the one modern humans apply to interpret pre-industrial civilization. Should we glamorize a patrician of ancient Rome? Their lifestyle would be a mediocre, low-prestige one, if faithfully translated into the modern world. The vaunted villas of the aristocrats were farmhouses—go look up farm prices in rural Georgia or Kansas: that is ancient aristocracy. If you owned a herd of goats, that was a measure of wealth and success; we'd interpret the same thing as poverty. A chickenwire fence isn't a signifier of blight, but a delineation of land, and a sigil of an authentic land owner—an elite. The wealth of a great empire, the trade routes of rare spices and fruits from thousands of leagues away? That's Wal-Mart. It's a provocative idea! The life of the Roman upper aristocratic class is fully accessible to probably a full majority of contemporary Americans. You could replicate practically every part of it, if you liked*. And you're right that that's no longer a benchmark for self-actualization today; we want—need?—so much more than that. *(The only large difference, and this is much more than a footnote, is the total abscence of slavery. Iron-age farms needed large numbers of slaves—something with the social impact that they'd label the farm owner, the aristocrat, as a high-status invidual. A human ranking above many others. The industrial revolutions replaced most of this with machines. You don't acquire social status by being superior to a tractor). (The part where the humans alive today aren't 99% farmers has wildly rewritten the human experience, and we're still far from adjusted to that).