What have the Americans ever done for us?
For its 250th birthday, it is worth remembering some of the greatest contributions that the US has made to humankind
In Monty Python’s classic comedy Life of Brian, one of the many bickering revolutionary groups, the Campaign for a Free Galilee – or was it the People’s Front of Judea? – was plotting revenge against the Romans.
One of them broke into a song: The Romans are all b*******,/they have bled us ’till we’re white,/they’ve taken everything we’ve got/as if it was their right,/and we’ve got nothing in return/though they make so much fuss./ What have the Romans ever done for us?
For all their brutalities, the Romans did contribute substantially to human progress. Among those contributions, the rebels reluctantly acknowledged, were aqueducts, public hygiene, wines and fermentation, public baths and toilets, roads and canals, cheese, medicine, irrigation, Roman law and classical education.
I was going to add crucifixion, the method by which the titular Brian was executed. But according to archaeologists, that honour goes to the Assyrians. The Romans merely refined it in the form of a cross, thus helping to give birth to one of the world’s great religions, and the West itself.
According to a survey a few years ago, American men apparently spend a lot of time thinking about the Roman empire. Yes, mostly men, not women. Before Elon Musk briefly became Donald Trump’s cost-cutting tsar, thus contributing to America’s decline in governance standards at home and abroad, he also fretted about Rome.
“Anyone feeling late stage empire vibes?” he tweeted in 2023. “Watching the Roman Empire collapse again but with Wi-fi and memes this time.”