Scanned from FAR HORIZONS (edited by Robert Silverberg) [story 05]

ROMA ETERNA
Robert Silverberg
"To the Promised Land" (1989)
'Tales from the Venia Woods" (1989) 
"An Outpost of the Empire" (1991)
"Via Roma" (1994) 
"Waiting for the End" (1998)

The Roma Eterna stories are based on an alternate-history scenario in which the ancient Hebrews remained in Egypt instead of being led forth by Moses as recorded in the Book of Exodus. Since the Jews thus never settled in Palestine, the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth did not exist, Christianity failed to develop, and Rome remained pagan. The history of Rome in this alternate world is generally identical to that of our Rome as it unfolded through the fourth century a.d.-the foundation of the Empire under Augustus, its great expansion under Trajan, Hadrian, and Marcus Aurelius, its difficulties during the time of the third-century military dictatorships, and the division of the Empire by Constantine the Great into eastern and west-em domains.
But after Constantine, who in our universe had been responsible for making Christianity the official Roman state religion, things begin to diverge. The Empire, instead of being riven by the quarrels that divided Constantine's heirs in our time line, and weakened politically by the changed social attitudes introduced by Christianity, thrives and expands in the fifth century and succeeds in renewing itself constantly during the period we call the Dark Ages, fending off the invasions of the barbarians and sustaining itself as a thriving Worldwide empire stretching from Britain to the borders of India and China. The Empire has no serious rivals in the world, although at times there is strife between its eastern and western halves, and the Aztec and Inca empires of the New World remain independent and powerful despite an ill-fated Roman attempt to conquer them and establish a Nova Roma across the sea.
The time line of the Roma Eterna stories starts in 753 b.c., the traditional date of the founding of the city; thus our year a.d. 1999 is 2752 a.u.c. by Roman reckoning. Of the stories written so far, the earliest along this chronology is "Waiting for the End," set in 1951 a.u.c. (a.d. 1198), which shows the western half of the empire, during a period of decadence, being invaded and conquered by the army of the Greek-speaking Eastern Empire.
In "An Outpost of the Empire," which takes place 250 years later in 2206 a.u.c. (a.d. 1453), the Western Empire has not only regained its independence but, under the vigorous leadership of Emperor Flavius Romulus, has defeated the Eastern Empire and incorporated it into a reunited Imperial state that includes both halves of the empire that Constantine had split eleven hundred years before.
In the Imperial years 2250-2550, which parallel our sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, the Empire undergoes a renaissance that is given its first impetus by the great emperor Trajan VII, who undertook worldwide voyages and the development of trade with Asia. The resurgence of economic growth through the opening of new trade routes leads eventually to an industrial revolution, the breakdown of the Imperial heartland into regions that speak dialects approaching separate languages (Gallian, Hispa-nian, Britannian, "Roman" [Italian), etc.), and, ultimately, the gradual collapse of the central authority of the Empire during a second period of prosperous decadence. An attempt at reunification of the virtually independent European provinces launched in 2563 a.u.c. (a.d. 1810) by the Napoleonic figure of Count Valerian Apollinaris is successful, and for a time the Empire, with Apollinaris ruling sternly as the power behind the throne, seems rejuvenated.
But the assassination of Apollinaris dooms the Imperial system: after eighteen centuries of Caesars, there is an intense public yearning to sweep away the lazy and luxury-loving aristocracy and return to the ancient republican governmental form that Augustus abolished. The next of the presently existing stories, "Via Roma," depicts the overthrow of the last Emperor in 2603 a.u.c. (a.d. 1850), the murder of most members of the royal family, and the establishment of the Second Republic under the aegis of the authoritarian and conservative Gaius Junius Scaevola, who takes the title of First Consul for Life.
The following story, "Tales of the Venia Woods," which takes place about fifty years after the fall of the Caesars, provides a glimpse of the last surviving member of the old Imperial house, an old man living as a quiet recluse in the forest outside the city we know as Vienna. Then the series jumps to 2723 a.u.c. (a.d. 1970), and the story, "To the Promised Land," in which Moshe, a charismatic Egyptian Jew, attempts to build a spacegoing vessel to take his people to another world. The attempt to launch the spaceship is disastrous and Moshe is killed, but as the story ends we see the first stages in the development of a new messianic religion in the Middle East, with Moshe being looked upon as the Son of God.
The present story, set in 2503 a.u.c. (a.d. 1750), fills in a gap in the series by depicting the Empire late in the Second Decadence, when the Emperor Demetrius II is about to come to the throne, and one historian looks back to the Renaissance inaugurated by Trajan VII a quarter of a millennium earlier as a golden age.
-Robert Silverberg