A particularly romantic historical theory implies that the Roman empire ended 2011. I ran across this in a Yale Early Middle Ages course, where the prof tells an anecdote he read in the obituary of Sir Patrick Fermor. The idea is that, in a sense, Rome died w/ Pat's generation.

During WW2 Patrick Fermer kidnaps the german general responsible for the occupation of Crete, one Heinrich Kreipe. What struck the professor was a story that Patrick tells about the days he spent with Kreipe while marching him from Crete to British held Alexandria.

Imagine these two men, gathered around a fire, the captured General Kreipe on the left, his British captor Patrick on the left. I'll quote what follows in full below:

"Kreipe began to recite some lines from Horace's Ad Thaliarchum. The Latin syllables caught his captor's ear.
'As luck would have it, it was one of those I knew by heart.'
After the general had run out of steam, Paddy carried on to the end.
"We got on rather better after that'"

Its a surprisingly emotional moment in the lecture when the professor somberly tells a room full of millennials that that world is over. A world in which members of upper classes, from opposing empires, both spoke latin, and could recite from memory poems penned in 35 BC.

I've always found the professor's implication here very moving, this idea that in some very broad sense Rome existed for so long as its former client states spoke its language, recited its poems from memory.

Our current occupational elites will be forever scoffed at for failing to live up to that ancient and formerly perennial standard of education, for failing, through their own laziness and intellectual shortcomings, to preserve the flame of something beautiful.

In a sense Rome's legacy persevered through the black plague, the dark ages, the ravages of the great Khan... Only to be neglected by petty and small soul-ed bureaucrats in search of next quarter's profits.

May the current elites be remembered only as remarkably pitiful and shallow, and may those of the future rekindle old flames, and recite Latin to each other over campfires in faraway lands once again!