An empire that turned its back on the outside.

In page 12, Cahill shares a thought about the natural inward-looking approach of the Romans that should serve as a caution to us in the present too:

For all the splendor of Roman standard, the power of Roman boot, and the extent of Roman road, the entire empire hugs the Mediterranean like a child's village of sand, waiting to be swept into the sea. From fruitful Gaul and Britain in the north to the fertile Nile Valley in the south, from the ricky Iberian shore in the west to the parched coasts of Asia Minor, all provinces of the empire turn toward the great sea, toward Medi-Terra-nea —the Sea of Middle Earth. And as they turn to the center of their world, they turn back on all that lies behind them, beyond the Roman wall. They turn their back on the barbarians.

(Cahill: p. 12)

Great empires and large countries always tend to ignore what lies beyond their borders, considering it worthless or, at least, of less value, inferior to their own clearly superior ways and manners. This is a permanent danger in History, something that afflicted Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries and it may afflict the United States now. We should be careful here though. This is not a Western defect only, as many multiculturalists would have it nowadays. The old Chinese Empire also viewed itself as the center of the world, to the point that it referred to itself as the Empire of the Middle, and something similar can be said of the Japanese. Quite to the contrary, this is a very human fault, something intrinsic to human nature and not to this or that particular nationality or culture.