records his life's work in what his posterity would preserve as the Tao Te Ching, describing the everyday opposites manifest of a primordial aether at the root of the immutable yet ineffable Way (Tao) of nature.
promulgates a system of morality, statecraft and day-to-day rules of conduct in an attempt to discourage corruption, bring about peace and stabilize the affairs of state. Although proceeding ostensibly from similar motives, Kung's writings cast his older contemporary Lao Tzu's teachings in sharp contrast as Lao's later proponent Chuang Tzu would not hesitate to illustrate. Particularly in later application, they would foster a blind reverence for the social hierarchy that would corrupt their ostensive goals and be echoed in the writings of Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli in the context of the Italian Renaissance.
propounds the Unity of Opposites and the ultimate accordance of all things with the Logos, a primordial aether that he likened to an an ever-burning and all-consuming cosmic fire.
thrives for 450 years under a senatorial administration modeled after Athenian democracy.
becomes what the Encyclopædia Britannica would call the first genuine scientist in history during and after some 20 years at Plato's Academy. In the first known systematic study of logic, Aristotle codified logical arguments as syllogisms that helped later scientists and philosophers formalize their reasoning and that would find abundant use later still in the design of integrated circuits - the logic circuits at the core of modern computer technology.
embellishes Lao Tzu's teachings in prodigious allegory, metaphor and epic poetry.
studies under the personal tutelage of none other than Aristotle at the behest of his doting "tiger dad" King Philip II of Macedon. During his eastern campaign of 334-323 BCE, Alexander infuses the Eastern Mediterranean and Persia with Hellenistic culture and Athenian philosophy along with all of those new things started by his famous tutor including empirical science and formal logic.
studies under the Cynic philosopher Crates of Thebes and subsequently introduces a new philosophy on the Stoa Poikile (Painted Porch) of the Agora in Athens. Known initially as the Zenonians, his students and proponents would later by this incidental architectural association become known as the Stoics. As distinctively in its Heraclitan roots as in its emphasis on behavior as the only meaningful result of philosophy, Stoicism is tantamount to Taoism and would later soar in popularity during the height of Roman civilization.
Its founder and its early Greek and Roman proponents carry the torch of Stoicism through the formative years of the Roman Republic. Only fragments of these writings would survive to the modern era.
seeds the Roman Imperial notion of divinity by virtue of imputed lineage. Calling himself Gaius Julius Caesar after his famous adoptive father, Augustus leverages this status to legitimize his rule - a rule he tactfully denies, on the other hand, to have seized in the first place. Just think of me as Princeps Civitatis, he encourages his minions after defeating Mark Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium (BCE 31), having long since appended Divi Filius (Son of the Divine) to his cognomen in the wake of his namesake's assassination and deification - First Citizen of a polity that by then had become a but republic in name only.
alternately suffers and thrives through civil wars, coups and emperors good and bad.
A maverick Rabbi gains a huge following in the Roman province of Judea. Yehoshua's practical instructions show a strong Stoic influence and parallel those of Taoism.
promulgates a Hellenized behavioral focus on Yehoshua's teachings to Jewish Christians.
promulgates a Romanized theological focus on Yehoshua's teachings throughout the empire.
A series of Greek and Roman proponents carry the torch of Stoic philosophy to its zenith at the height of Roman civilization, culminating in the person of Emperor Marcus Aurelius.
Stoicism reaches its height of popularity under Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Pius and Aurelius. Per Edward Gibbon (from a Roman perspective), “…the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous…” At least two of these emperors themselves - Hadrian and Aurelius - are Stoic philosophers.
Born to the purple and with his wise and prudent father Marcus Aurelius finally out of the way in 180, Lucius Aurelius Commodus Antoninus finds his lifelong dream of gladiatorial glory at long last unchained. With the Colosseum and the accumulated wealth of Western civilization at his disposal, Commodus gives the people what they want - or at least thought they wanted. Basking in the stolen glory of rigged matches, tilted wild animal hunts and wanton barbarism, Commodus drains the Imperial coffers dry, accumulating in exchange the running title Lucius Aelius Aurelius Commodus Augustus Herculeus Romanus Exsuperatorius Amazonius Invictus Felix Pius in celebration of his innumerable - if not genuine - gladiatorial victories. Before they find a way to kill him, Commodus makes a last desperate dash for cover in his lifelong flight from accountability. Reinforcing the Roman Imperial notion of divinity by virtue of imputed lineage seeded by Augustus, Commodus declares himself the reincarnation of Hercules - in Roman mythology, the son of Jupiter. Iuppiter Optimus Maximus being the supreme sovereign of the Roman Pantheon, Commodus in Roman terms, with nowhere else to run, has finally cast himself as the son of God.
Swept into power by his Danube legions in Sirmium (Serbia) during the Crisis of the Third Century, Lucius Domitius Aurelianus effectively ends it through a series of conquests during his reign from 270 to 275 that subdues the Germanic Alamanni, Goths and Vandals to the North and recaptures the breakaway Palmyrene and Gallic empires to the East and West respectively. Dubbed Restitutor Orbis by Senatorial decree for these accomplishments, Aurelian refocuses Roman religion on the Sun god Sol Invictus under the credo one god, one empire to further consolidate the Roman Empire thus restored. During his meteoric posthumous rise in popularity about this time, Yehoshua Nadzoraios is identified with Rome’s newfound monotheism in the name of Sol Invictus. Aurelian adds the Syrian Mithraic Winter Solstice festival Deus Sol Invictus to the Roman calendar in 274.
simmers with unrest as Paulos' Romanized brand of Christianity displaces the Pantheon and back-fills the meaning of Roman traditions and holidays.
Constantine I and Licinius need a way to restore the dignity of Imperial authority and consolidate their power over the legions. Catching the rising wave of Christianity amongst the legionnaires and taking inspiration from the final throes of Commodus' ill-conceived and catastrophic reign together with Aurelian's more recent success conflating religion with empire and manifest destiny, they convert the Roman Empire itself to Christianity.
falls into a thousand years of decline and stagnation under sectarian monastic administration. Throughout the Empire, countless municipal aqueducts feeding clean water into cities and towns for use in public baths, latrines, fountains and private households are systematically dismantled and their materials repurposed for the construction of churches and monasteries.
Justinian I orders the closure of all philosophy schools, declaring them at odds with Christianity.
flourishes for a thousand years under the secular Athenian administration of Constantinople.
sweeps through Europe, killing between 75 million and 200 million people. Contributing factors are presently understood to have included an ignorance of hygiene. Though evidence may be lacking to support a Roman understanding of hygiene, evidence of their extensive networks of municipal aqueducts (by now mostly dismantled in Europe) is not. Would luxury alone have justified such public expense?
writes prodigiously on the subtle nuances of social engineering, opportunism and power politics, promoting the Roman Imperial idea of political power as a self-justifying goal. Machiavelli's blind reverence for the social hierarchy parallels that ultimately promoted by his Chinese counterpart Kǒng Fūzǐ as distinctively as it contrasts the reverence that Lao Tzu, the Stoics, Yehoshua and their proponents hold for an immutable natural or heavenly order.
thrashes and wrangles under Papal rule and petty kingdoms, as though inspired to test the social and political theories of Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli.
Spurred by René Descartes' Discours de la Méthode and running through to the onset of the Napoleonic Wars, this period witnessed a resurgence of commitment to rational thought as the definitive basis for legitimacy and authority.
writes The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in six volumes from 1776 to 1788, and is hailed as the first modern historian of ancient Rome. True to the Age of Reason in which he lived, Gibbon relied heavily on primary sources and objective analysis to trace the reasons for the decline and fall, citing Christian pacifism and the outsourcing of the Roman legions, the civic apathy brought about by a widespread abandonment to the expectation of Christian salvation and adventism and thirdly the thousand years of stagnation brought about by the church-centric Dark Ages.
shakes British rule from North America, ushering in a new era of self-government that spreads quickly to Europe. Not least among his peers as an avid student of Roman history, Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) notes that "In designing the constitution of these United States of America, we have at various times sought precedent in the history of that ancient republic and endeavored to draw lessons both from its leading ideas and from the tumult and factions which finally brought it low" and opines moreover "That the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavouring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time." This thinking leads Jefferson later in life to secretly abstract for his own use the practical underpinnings of Christian philosophy from the New Testament into The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, a work that would later become known as the Jefferson Bible.
breaks the vicious cycle of wealth inequality that had ossified Europe under an iron-fisted web of feudal monarchies during the monastic Dark Ages. Though it would devour many of its own children in the frenzied paranoia brought about by the internal upheaval and the concurrent threat of invasion, it would also roll out the red carpet for the Napoleonic era that would draw the borders and set the stage for the emergence of Modern Europe.
Though controversial as a self-styled modern protégé of Julius Caesar and reviled by some as a tyrant, Napoléon Bonaparte (Corsican by birth) is celebrated by others as a defender of the liberté, égalité, fraternité established by the French Revolution and effectively beats back the Machiavellian snakepit of petty kingdoms that had infested Europe under Papal rule. Not least among the enduring legacies of Napoleon's adventures would be the modern rediscovery during the French occupation of Egypt of the Rosetta Stone, from whose concurrent Ancient Egyptian, Demotic and Ancient Greek inscriptions the French philologist Jean-François Champollion deciphered the hieroglyphic language of the pyramid builders.
embarks on the road to recovery through a series of international Congresses, leading through the Berlin Congress of 1878 to the Concert of Europe.
through the Bohemian Revolution to the brink of global conflict.
The War to End All Wars heralds a new age of global conflict. More than 15 million people are killed in a dirty era of trench warfare. Draconian capital punishment originating in ancient Roman tradition is routinely applied, though less judiciously than had any Roman legatus with the possbile exception of Marcus Lucinius Crassus. Primitive, rickety aircraft can be harder to keep flying than to shoot down and the machine gun has been refined for use both above and below. Nations the world over voraciously pursue the first real opportunity to put this brave new weapon to the test.
comes to a head as Edwin Hubble returns from the war to find evidence that the universe is expanding. While Hubble himself is loath to believe it, Albert Einstein palm-heels his forehead for having fudged this result out of his original equations for the General Theory of Relativity, which imply that the universe must be either expanding or contracting (but not neither). Einstein's equations and Hubble's discovery echo Edward Gibbon's observation about the Roman Empire that "All that is human must retrograde if it do not advance," exploding forever the myth of the steady state.
sweeps the world into poverty and economic stagnation for the entire decade of the 1930s. Runaway isolationism and a lack of government experience in the application of Keynesian economic theory would later be cited as root causes. Governments were sheltering the home economy and attempting to balance the national budget when they should have been promoting international trade and aggressively spending at a deficit to soften the economic downturn by bridging the peak of risk in capital expenditures.
in which the Allied Forces beat back what is presumed to have been the last great resurgence in overt imperialism. More than 70 million people are killed - mostly civilians - making it the deadliest conflict in human history.
A floating codename finds favorable weather, triggering the greatest amphibious military operation of all time. It is the reverse of Julius Caesar's exploratory cross-channel conquest of Britain in 55-54 BCE but against a highly technical and far more deadly, efficient and determined enemy than any soldier in history had ever confronted, fully informed by the lessons of 3,400 years of military history.
