So what about continuous wars?
The Roman Empire, ancient Egypt, and Western Europe all made their greatest advances during long, long, long periods of continual warfare and endless campaigns.
I'm not sure you'd want to be imitating the culture of the Roman Empire. Or ancient Egypt. Or, to that end, Western Europe.
Why not?
And are you going on the actual history, or the comic-book Hollywood popular culture versions that are completely inaccurate?
Did you mean the Roman Empire that had six-story apartment buildings, fast food restaurants with health inspections, widespread organized trade, incredible engineering feats like the still-operating aqueducts and the ability to have settlements quickly equal most of the comforts of a modern suburb with the exception of electricity? The Rome that had professional surgeons with excellent steel instruments who sterilized them in boiling water before surgery, that even did eye cataract operations successfully? The Rome where carpenters used claw and ball hammers, band saws, hacksaws, coping saws, cold chisels and planes pretty much identical to modern ones? Where they made a waterproof concrete we're still trying to figure out? Would that be the Rome of Cicero's oratories before the Senate that make our politicians look like inbred monkeys?
Did you mean the Egypt that was so well organized that it had scheduled water taxis for workers, police department precincts with formalized homicide investigations, and some of history's most skillful mathematicians, astronomers and architects? Where people were often quite healthy, and anyone who could learn to read and write could become a scribe, which was an extremely high-paying position that would probably get them their own nice multi-level villa?
Did you mean the Western Europe of the Renaissance?
As, then, this is the case, O Catiline, continue as you have begun. Leave the city at last: the gates are open; depart. That Manlian camp of yours has been waiting too long for you as its general. And lead forth with you all your friends, or at least as many as you can; purge the city of your presence; you will deliver me from a great fear, when there is a wall between me and you. Among us you can dwell no longerI will not bear it, I will not permit it, I will not tolerate it. Great thanks are due to the immortal gods, and to this very Jupiter Stator, in whose temple we are, the most ancient protector of this city, that we have already so often escaped so foul, so horrible, and so deadly an enemy to the republic. But the safety of the commonwealth must not be too often allowed to be risked on one man. As long as you, O Catiline, plotted against me while I was the consul elect, I defended myself not with a public guard, but by my own private diligence. When, in the next consular comitia, you wished to slay me when I was actually consul, and your competitors also, in the Campus Martius, I checked your nefarious attempt by the assistance and resources of my own friends, without exciting any disturbance publicly. In short, as often as you attacked me, I by myself opposed you, and that, too, though I saw that my ruin was connected with great disaster to the republic. But now you are openly attacking the entire republic.
Can you imagine any politician today speaking so eloquently, without a prepared speech, in front of our legislators as Cicero delivered that to the Senate? I would love to have been able to sit there and listen to that.
We've lost a lot since then.
