As you might remember were camping on the North Shore of Lake Superior for Independence Day. As we weaved our way up and down the jagged coast on Highway 61 we stopped in lots of little gift shops along the way.
One such shop sold mostly agates and other semi precious stones but tucked away in a little display case in the back of the store I found row upon row of ancient Roman coins of all varieties and sizes. Some of these coins featured some gruesome gladiatorial scenes, lots of spears and swords slicing through people and animals. Those ancient Romans were a gruesome lot.
One of these coins caught my eye, in part, because it seemed like the least gruesome of the bunch. As I learned more about it I discovered it held quite a few secrets. The coin was a bronze Antoninianus from 254-268 AD featuring Salonina, the wife of Emperor Gallienus. As you can barely make out Venus is on the reverse side of the coin holding an apple and scepter with a cupid below, I was instantly intrigued so it was worth the thirty dollar price tag to me, even though I probably paid too much.
As it often does, my nerdy brain forced me to take a deep dive down the research rabbit hole and I was shocked at what I discovered. I couldn't ignore the similarities between the Roman era in which this antoninianus was minted and the current phase of our American empire.
During the time period of 254-268 AD the Roman Empire was descending into financial chaos. Although it would be a couple more centuries before Rome fully collapsed (476 AD), the cracks in the far reaching and seemingly invincible empire were beginning to undeniably appear.
You see, the Roman government needed to pay the legions of soldiers that kept the empire afloat and ever-expanding but they were beginning to realize they didn’t have enough precious metals to mint enough coins for all those paydays. Their answer? Use more bronze, less precious metals, and mint away to their hearts’ content. Although in the years to follow the empire would revive itself somewhat, the revival was short-lived, something akin to a dead cat bounce.
The following picture illustrates the declining precious metal content (and craftsmanship) of the Roman currency over four decades. This practice kept the wheels of the mighty empire turning but eventually led to serious hyperinflation.
This ancient Roman conundrum sounds very similar to the Federal Reserve’s current day addiction to excessive money printing. This link, for example will bring you to some very damning data about America’s current and future debt projections. If the US doesn't find a way to turn this around it will lead to very perilous places.
(This graph illustrates just the interest payments on American debt.)
The secret this little coin carried across all those centuries felt like a very important message in a bottle and that message caused my imagination to kick into overdrive.
In my mind’s eye I envisioned some wise, ancient Roman walking across the cobblestones to the local baker clutching this coin in their hand and feeling overwhelmed as they are needing to work more hours to buy the same loaf of bread.
This person would have probably had the same festering anger that many of us share now when we go to the grocery store and are paying two to three times more for the same amount of food as we did just a few years ago.
That Roman citizen would have also been frustrated at their leadership's lack of understanding and/or concern about their day-to-day struggles. They probably even walked around with underlying feeling of dread in the pit of their stomach that something wasn’t quite right. Maybe they were even astute enough to realize the true depth of the trouble the empire was in and experienced a swell of sadness about the fate of their grandchildren's future.
History is eager to reveal to us that even the mighty aren’t immune to greed, corruption, and eventual collapse from within. Lessons unlearned are always repeated. History is there for us to learn from, it can be a kind of shortcut. If we can learn from other people’s mistakes we don’t have to suffer as much ourselves, it’s far less painful and destructive in the end. This is the main reason why I despise cancel culture so profoundly.
Although it's popular for people to draw parallels between Rome and America, these two empires have less in common than most people think. There’s still lots of valuable lessons to be gleaned from studying history.
As I write this blog I have an underlying feeling in the pit of my stomach that something isn’t quite right and worry about the fate of future generations of Americans. Even so, I haven't completely given up hope, miracles happen every day.
If we’re lucky we might have a few decades to turn things around and maybe it'll be a true American renaissance this time and not just a dead cat bounce. The answers to saving ourselves from a collapse within are already here but they're being ignored by our greedy and corrupted elected officials. We need only tune into the news for a constant reminder of that.
If America goes in the other direction, 1800 years from now some curious citizen of our Earth’s next mighty empire might be holding a time-worn American coin in their hands, having some of these very same thoughts as we are today. If so, let's hope they finally learn from our mistakes.
All for now. Trust your instincts, invest in you, live boldly, and take chances.
~Eric Vance Walton~
Poetry should move us, it should change us, it should glitch our brains, shift our moods to another frequency. Poetry should evoke feelings of melancholy, whimsy, it should remind us what it feels like to be in love, or cause us to think about something in a completely different way. I view poetry, and all art really, as a temporary and fragile bridge between our world and a more pure and refined one. This is a world we could bring into creation if enough of us believed in it. This book is ephemera, destined to end up forgotten, lingering on some dusty shelf or tucked away in a dark attic. Yet the words, they will live on in memory. I hope these words become a part of you, bubble up into your memory when you least expect them to and make you feel a little more alive.
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