When pretense is no longer possible

On August 24, 410 AD, the city of Rome fell to invaders for the first time in 800 years.  This event shocked the world, and precipitated Augustine's writing of The City of God.  In defending the Christian faith from those who blamed it for Rome's decline, Augustine took a look at Rome's history, from simple republic to expansive empire.  At one point, he recalls how leading Romans of an earlier era had wrestled with the changes in the character of their nation:

...Scipio reverts to the original thread of discourse, and repeats with commendation his own brief definition of a republic, that it is the weal of the people.  “The people” he defines as being not every assemblage or mob, but an assemblage associated by a common acknowledgment of law, and by a community of interests.  Then he shows the use of definition in debate; and from these definitions of his own he gathers that a republic, or “weal of the people,” then exists only when it is well and justly governed, whether by a monarch, or an aristocracy, or by the whole people.  But when the monarch is unjust, or, as the Greeks say, a tyrant; or the aristocrats are unjust, and form a faction; or the people themselves are unjust, and become, as Scipio for want of a better name calls them, themselves the tyrant, then the republic is not only blemished (as had been proved the day before), but by legitimate deduction from those definitions, it altogether ceases to be.  For it could not be the people’s weal when a tyrant factiously lorded it over the state; neither would the people be any longer a people if it were unjust, since it would no longer answer the definition of a people—“an assemblage associated by a common acknowledgment of law, and by a community of interests.”

When, therefore, the Roman republic was such as Sallust described it, it was not “utterly wicked and profligate,” as he says, but had altogether ceased to exist, if we are to admit the reasoning of that debate maintained on the subject of the republic by its best representatives.  Tully himself, too, speaking not in the person of Scipio or any one else, but uttering his own sentiments, uses the following language in the beginning of the fifth book, after quoting a line from the poet Ennius, in which he said, “Rome’s severe morality and her citizens are her safeguard.”  “This verse,” says Cicero, “seems to me to have all the sententious truthfulness of an oracle.  For neither would the citizens have availed without the morality of the community, nor would the morality of the commons without outstanding men have availed either to establish or so long to maintain in vigor so grand a republic with so wide and just an empire.  Accordingly, before our day, the hereditary usages formed our foremost men, and they on their part retained the usages and institutions of their fathers.  But our age, receiving the republic as a chef-d’oeuvre of another age which has already begun to grow old, has not merely neglected to restore the colors of the original, but has not even been at the pains to preserve so much as the general outline and most outstanding features.  For what survives of that primitive morality which the poet called Rome’s safeguard?  It is so obsolete and forgotten, that, far from practising it, one does not even know it.  And of the citizens what shall I say?  Morality has perished through poverty of great men; a poverty for which we must not only assign a reason, but for the guilt of which we must answer as criminals charged with a capital crime.  For it is through our vices, and not by any mishap, that we retain only the name of a republic, and have long since lost the reality.”

Words that echo today.  The sack of Rome merely ripped away the veneer of the 'eternal city,' showing just how far it has already fallen.  One wonders when a modern 'Visigoth' will do the same to the decrepit machinery of empire now operating under the name of the United States.