The prestige of antiquity

For someone born in the XXth century, it is difficult to understand the immense prestige and influence of the antique world until the XIXth century. Only then, and only to a certain extent, did Europe achieve a level of sophistication and urbanization comparable to the Roman world. In its heyday, Rome had at least one million inhabitants. London, then the biggest city in the world, only achieved this population in the early 1800's. Latin and to a lesser extent Greek were the mainstays of a proper education: the classics were, by definition, the writers of antiquity. A visit to the ruins of Pompey, a provincial backwater home to only about 20 000 people when it was hit by the eruption of the Vesuvius in 72 AD makes this clear. The wealth of paintings, mosaics, and sculptures unearthed in that city, now preserved at the Naples archeological museum, makes one wonder about the incredible splendor which made Rome, for so many centuries, the capital of the world.