Golden Ages Don't Last

BUT THEY CAN TEACH US A LOT ABOUT WHAT MAKES CIVILIZATIONS RISE AND FALL.

- JOHAN NORBERG

THE FEELING WILL be familiar to many who have visited the great cities of history: I had come to Athens for the first time and made a pilgrimage to its democratic assembly, Plato's Academy, and Aristotle's Lyceum.

And it left me with a sense of profound sadness. Here were the scenes of some of the most extraordinary moments in human history, and all that was left was rubble, garbage, and dog waste. Instead of bustling creativity, there was silence, interrupted only by the odd intoxicated passerby.

To be sure, I also experienced spectacular beauty in Athens, such as the grand monuments on the Acropolis. But even that was a museum to bygone glory. This used to be the place around which the world revolved, and now it's a collection of patched-together columns, stone blocks and shards with plaques telling us that it used to be impressive.

This must be what Percy Shelley, a great admirer of ancient Greece, reflected upon when he wrote about the crumbled monument to Ozymandias, king of kings: “'Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!' / Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

This encounter with the transience of great civilizations set my mind racing. What made it possible for them to rise so spectacularly, and why did they decline so thoroughly? It forced me to consider whether travelers will one day visit our proud landmarks and plazas and think about how our civilization lost its way and became so sluggish and stationary.

THIS IS A precarious time to write about history's golden ages. Ours is an era of authoritarian and populist revival, with savage dictators trying to extinguish neighboring democracies, when the fear of inevitable decline seems more prevalent than belief in progress.