Midnight Express

Beginning with Justinian, nearly every emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire had faced all manner of problems upon taking the throne.

Constantinople was the gateway from East to West. Once it fell, the divided Western Roman Empire would have found it nearly impossible to stop the iron hooves of invading nomads. The Arabs were nomads too, and they were not nearly as easy to bully as the Roma.

The patriarchs of the Eastern Orthodox Church understood their place very clearly. They had always assisted the emperors and never placed themselves above secular authority as they did in the Western Roman Empire.

It was precisely because of this cooperative relationship that the Eastern Roman Empire had weathered plague after plague, famine, wars with heathens, and every kind of natural and man-made disaster.

Caesar was the founder of the Roman Empire, while Gaius Octavian was its creator. After his death, the Roman Senate decided to elevate him to the ranks of the "gods" and named the month of August after Augustus, which was also the origin of the word for August in Western languages.

The benefit of democracy was competition and criticism. When one party performed poorly, another could immediately expose its faults and replace it. The Girondins lost public support, and the Jacobins took power.

Its drawback was internal conflict and the struggle for power and profit. Debates turned into shouting matches, and responses to sudden emergencies became sluggish. They could argue for ages without finding a solution.

That was when the superiority of centralized rule became apparent. No one would call President Franklin D. Roosevelt an emperor, yet he solved America's Great Depression and, at a critical moment, persuaded other Americans unwilling to fight to join the anti-fascist war. What he did was almost no different from what an emperor