Rome: Archetype of the Imperial Machine (Part 2)

Every empire is founded on human pathology. Ambition and hubris are at the core of it. But there is another ingredient that remains invisible at first: addiction. The addiction of constant expansion cements the machine’s control over conquered and conqueror alike. But like any addiction, it only makes itself known after the machine has established itself. Rome was the archetype of the imperial machine, and many grand histories have attempted to capture her essence. Unfortunately, Rome is not merely a lesson from history; the Empire is still with us.

In this article we will consider the kinship networks that were its victims. Thanks to this focus, another context for analysis has been revealed: morality. The key idea is expressed in a quote from the Bible. “By their fruits you shall know them.”

By Their Fruits You Shall Know Them

Rome was a global leviathan in 63 BCE. It was at the apex of its ambition, and the addiction was firmly in control. As a result, private warlords, like Pompey, found it necessary to keep conquering new borders just to feed the massive overhead. Perhaps the empire had started by amassing wealth, but debt had become the primal need gnawing at General Pompey. This Rome was not a peaceful civilization by any definition. It was a global, predatory, militant, bureaucratic machine. Rome was thoroughly amoral; that was her essential nature.

The Grand Warning: the Hasmoneans

In 63 BCE, the Hasmonean brothers had achieved Israel’s dream of religious freedom and national independence. It is always distressing to contemplate what happened to them; instead of celebrating, they invited the wolf into their house.

In the bloody battles of the Maccabean Revolt, the Hasmoneans had successfully thrown off the yoke of foreign tyrants and established the last sovereign Jewish kingdom in the Levant for over two thousand years. Yet, the moment they secured the throne room, they became embroiled in internal corruption, hubris, and a bitter civil war for supreme dynastic monopoly.

The Invitation

The brothers, Hyrcanus II and Aristobulus II were trapped in their own short-sighted family panic. Neither brother looked to their native, horizontal covenant baseline to find resolution. Instead, they each sent elite delegations with massive bribes of gold and silver to Pompey’s military camp in Syria. They literally begged a Roman general to step in and legally arbitrate their private family dispute.

The brothers may have managed to hold on to the dream of their people, but they completely internalized the ungodly systems of the world. Their kinship baseline was coopted.

Pompey was not just happy to oblige them. The combination of the arrogance of Roman Dominium and his own constant anxiety decided Israel’s fate in a heartbeat. He laid siege to the Temple and then walked right into the Holy of Holies. Once he was in complete control, he wired Israel’s former sovereignty directly into the imperial tax ledger.

The Human Pattern

This unforced error establishes the tragic human pattern that runs all through our history. When a kinship network panics, it enters a psychological blindness where it chooses to legitimize the very state ledger that is waiting to devour it. Of course, the case of the Hasmonean brothers was something new in this progression. When the elders of Israel begged Samuel for a king, they thought they were establishing a defense against outsiders. Whereas the Hasmoneans invited Rome to intervene in a family dispute.

Sadly, this is the exact same ancestral blindness that would later cause division in the premier clans of Clan Chattan. This drama will be explained in detail in another article. Here it will be briefly introduced.

In 1672, Duncan Macpherson of Cluny marched into a cold Lowland courtroom and used a foreign Anglo-Norman legal dagger to sue his own kin. His hubris had been manipulated by the machine for centuries of loyal service to the clan. Finally, in this one episode, he unwittingly validated the machine to claim a piece-of-paper monopoly over his clan. To be clear, this is not meant as a condemnation. It’s meant as a warning. Ultimately, the Macpherson’s remained loyal to the kinship baseline.

The Invisible Reach: The Corruption of Scandinavia

Very few places in the world were fortunate enough to remain untouched by the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. Scandinavia was well outside the machine’s physical borders, but its tribal baseline was corrupted just the same. Rome was almost methodical in the way it brought the Scandinavian people into the Empire’s orbit.

🪙 1. The Weaponization of Luxury Trade

Rome did not need to conquer a people to destabilize them; they used their merchant ledger. Roman traders traveled deep into Scandinavia to extract raw northern wealth—specifically amber, furs, and blond hair (highly prized by the elite in Italy).

• The Currency Trap: In exchange, the Romans pumped massive amounts of silver coins (denarii), glass beads, and Roman wine into the north.
• The Structural Split: This injection of luxury goods completely corrupted the traditional, horizontal tribal baseline. Suddenly, a few local chieftains became hyper-wealthy by monopolizing Roman trade. They used Roman silver to hire permanent private warrior retinues, breaking away from the traditional kinship assemblies and establishing the first top-down, hereditary aristocratic hierarchies in Scandinavia.

⚔️ 2. The Mercenary Software Export

The Roman army was constantly starving for manpower, so they routinely recruited elite Scandinavian and Germanic warriors into their auxiliary legions.

• These young men spent decades serving inside the Roman military machine. They learned its vertical chain of command, its engineering tactics, and its cold, mechanical approach to warfare.
• When these veterans finally returned home to Scandinavia, they brought that imperial software with them. They stopped acting like traditional tribal elders and began acting like mini-Emperors. They built fortified hill forts, centralized local weapons manufacturing, and used Roman-style martial discipline to dominate neighboring clans.

🪓 3. The Runes: Copying the Ledger

• The Contagion: The very script of the Vikings—the Elder Futhark Runes—developed in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE as a direct result of contact with the Roman Empire. Scandinavian elites saw how the Romans used written Latin characters to issue laws, count taxes, and project power across vast distances. The northern tribes customized these alphabetic concepts to carve their own runes into stone and wood. It was an indigenous adaptation, but the initial spark was inspired by watching the power of the empire’s written ledger.
• The Altered Baseline: Rome’s silver and military software corrupted Scandinavia’s horizontal tribal baseline long before the empire fell. It structurally primed the northern tribes to become the hyper-militarized pressure cooker that would eventually explode across the sea.

The Global Crouch: The 536 CE Detonation

When the Empire fell, the Scandinavian chiefs still had not turned into raiders. It was the 536 CE volcanic winter that finished off any kin-centered reserve that remained. In that year, a series of massive volcanic eruptions blanketed the Northern Hemisphere in a thick, atmospheric ash cloud. This triggered what scientists call the Late Antique Little Ice Age. The sun’s rays grew weak and blue, summer temperatures plummeted up to 4°C, and parts of the world experienced a decade of continuous, jumbled winters without heat.

The Combined Effects of Planetary and Political Disaster

The Empire’s fall and the effects of the volcanic winter together shattered the highly centralized trade grid and forced the entire world into a feudal crouch. The effects were apocalyptic for the world, but they were especially harsh for Scandinavia.

• The sudden drop in temperature caused massive, systemic crop failures and famine. Archaeological records reveal that up to 50% of the population in Sweden and Norway perished or abandoned their settlements in the 6th century. This real-world climate horror directly birthed the Norse mythological memory of Fimbulwinter—the three continuous years of winter that precedes Ragnarök (the end of civilization).
• The shattered Scandinavian tribes spent the next two centuries reorganizing. They divided their fields into tiny production units, turned away from fragile crops toward frost-resistant rye, and began hyper-militarizing their society. In this way, they hoped to compete for the drastically diminished local resources.
• By the time the weather normalized and the population began to rebound in the late 700s, Scandinavia was an overcrowded, hyper-militarized pressure cooker. Primogeniture rules meant younger sons had zero inheritance, and there was a brutal domestic scarcity of farmable land.
• They built the perfect maritime escape weapon—the shallow-draft longship—and burst out into the North Sea, desperate for wealth and space.

The Pictish Golden Age

The Picts did not feel the post-Roman vacuum as a loss because they had never been enclosed by Rome in the first place. For them, the 5th and 6th centuries were not a “Dark Age” of collapse, but a glorious, un-enclosed Golden Age of independent crystallization.

When the Roman legions evacuated southern Britain in 410 CE, the Lowlands and the south fell into an absolute structural panic. Those societies had become addicted to the vertical infrastructure, the coin-based markets, and the military protection of the Roman ledger. When that grid vanished, their society fractured. However, Pictish society did not fracture; the Picts felt an absolute release of pressure because their greatest external threats had collapsed. In this period, the Pictish horizontal kinship baseline operated at its peak.

Recent cutting-edge archaeology (like the discoveries at Tap o’ Noth and Fortriu) show that in the 5th and 6th centuries, the Picts built massive, highly organized hillfort settlements containing hundreds of homes. These settlements were supported by advanced agrarian farming and sophisticated, decentralized regional alliances. It was during these years that the Picts carved their magnificent, iconic Class I and Class II Symbol Stones into the landscape.

Whenever outside forces tried to bring a new vertical ledger into the north, the unified Pictish kinship vanguard utterly crushed them. When the Anglo-Saxon Kings of Northumbria marched north with their heavy armies—the Picts crushed them at the Battle of Dun Nechtain (685 CE) and permanently secured their borders against enclosure.

Innocent Bystanders in the Apocalypse

But in 839 AD, a massive Viking fleet sailed into the Northern Heartland of Fortriu and annihilated the Pictish royal family. This disaster opened the way for a warlord from Dál Riata, Kenneth MacAlpin, to invade Pictish lands and seize control.

Dál Riata had a long, adversarial history with the Picts. This Irish colony had been trying to subvert the northern indigenous baseline for over two centuries. In response, Onuist, the Pictish king, had marched his elite northern armies west a hundred years earlier, laid siege to the Gaelic capital of Dunadd He burned their strongholds, and put the royal princes in chains. It was a counter-offensive to protect his people from a predatory, foreign nuisance, but it demonstrates how the Picts maintained their independence for so many centuries.

It’s true that the Vikings had also pressured Dál Riata leading up to MacAlpin’s invasion, but the motive of breaking free from the Viking threat was in addition to the foundational nature and purpose of the colony of Dál Riata.

St. Andrews: From Pictish Sanctuary to State

Mainstream history books claim St. Andrews was founded by a miraculous arrival of the relics of St. Andrew from Greece. This was a myth invented centuries later to overwrite the local, indigenous reality. King Onuist had established this great monastery. Its original name was Cennrígmonaid (Kilrymont).

The entire organic organization of Pictish culture was centered around such monasteries. They were horizontal sanctuaries of hospitality, kinship registries, and regional security. And they operated independently; they were not part of the top-down corporate hierarchy of Rome. However, MacAlpin soon overwrote this old, decentralized Pictish world by replacing it with the rigid Céli Dé registries. Changes in the succession of kings were more gradual.

MacAlpin’s direct male line of succession eventually fractured, but his eventual impact on the future kings of Scotland resulted in the transition to a rigid dynastic monopoly. For nearly two centuries, the dynasty managed succession through the horizontal Gaelic law of Tanistry. This was a system in which the royal kindred selected the strongest adult cousin to prevent immediate structural collapse. However, the pull toward centralization was irresistible.

By 1034 CE, Malcolm II systematically assassinated his own male-line cousins. This forced the crown into a singular, narrow dynastic loop. It also paved the track for his anglicized grandsons to permanently replace horizontal Celtic assemblies. Future kings would adhere to top-down, document-obsessed Anglo-Norman law.

The Ghost of Rome and the Return of Dominium

Centuries after the Western Roman Empire collapsed, its cold, legal definitions of Dominium were dragged out of the Church archives by ambitious medieval kings like David I. In this way, they were able to declare the unwritten, oral kinship baseline of the Celtic world (dùthchas) legally invisible.

While an empire is birthed by the arrogant ambition of individual warlords, it very quickly crosses a threshold where it becomes a self-perpetuating, automated resource-extraction machine. At that point, it doesn’t expand because it wants to; it expands because it has to. It’s the only way it can keep from collapsing under the weight of its own internal debt, population pressures, and resource depletion.

Primary Motivations for the Imperial Pattern

If we look closely at Rome in 63 BCE and the Viking explosion after 536 CE, we see two entirely different primary motivations, but they both resulted in the exact same imperial pattern:

🏛️ 1. The Roman Machine

Driven by Debt and Bureaucratic Overhead. For Rome, expansion was driven by a vicious, structural feedback loop.

• The Problem: To maintain their massive standing armies, pay off the urban populations, and fund the escalating political battles of private warlords like Pompey, the state required an astronomical influx of wealth.
• The Dynamic: If the empire stopped expanding, it ran out of new wealth to pump into its system. It would face immediate economic stagnation, military mutinies, and domestic collapse. Therefore, extinction or expansion became the machine’s primary directive. It was an insatiable beast that had to keep devouring new borders—like Judea—just to generate the tax revenue needed to pay for the conquests of the previous generation.

🌊 2. The Viking Crisis: Driven by Ecological Compression and Survival

On the flip side, when you look at Scandinavia after the 536 CE volcanic winter, the primary motivation wasn’t luxury-loving hubris or imperial debt. It was pure, raw survival against nature.

• The Problem: The sudden, catastrophic drop in planetary temperatures wiped out half their population and left them with a severe domestic scarcity of farmable land.
• The Dynamic: As the population rebounded centuries later, the younger generations found themselves locked in a hyper-militarized pressure cooker with zero inheritance or dirt to stand on. They built the longships and launched their maritime land-grabs out of a desperate, primal need for security, food, and space.

📐 The Universal Attribute: Total Centralization

So, the spark can be different—Rome was driven by financial overhead and debt, while the Norsemen were driven by ecological compression and survival. But they both share the exact same foremost attribute: they solve their internal crises by centralizing power and violently exporting their trauma outward to enclose someone else’s home.

Whether it is an ambitious Roman general walking his boots into the Holy of Holies, or a desperate Norse longboat crew decapitating the native Pictish elite in 839 AD, the result for the indigenous kinship baseline is identical. Their unwritten, horizontal sanctuary is crushed and forced into a top-down extraction ledger.

Today, we are not even capable of mourning this loss. This article is an attempt to remind us of what has been lost.

Alternatives to the Machine

If we are going to analyze the mistakes of ancient people whe were dealing with the machine as unforced errors, alternatives must be available. Alternatives do exist, but a full accounting will require a separate article. This is what we know so far:

• Israel’s covenant enforced order through personal, local accountability to a shared spiritual baseline. If your neighbor was oppressed, the community stepped in. A state police force did not order this. They stepped in because the unwritten covenant demanded it. The society was based on relational intimacy, not corporate compliance. 
  • • Under this radical alternative law, all land boundaries were wiped clean every fifty years.
    • Even if a family fell into poverty and was forced to lease or mortgage their ancestral plot to a wealthy neighbor, the debt was automatically canceled and the dirt must return to the original family network.
    • It made permanent corporate real-estate monopolies completely impossible. The machine couldn’t own the valleys permanently.
    • The ancient Hebrew baseline had a built-in, systemic software weapon designed specifically to stop the land-hungry intruders. The “Gordons” and “Davids (King David I)” of the ancient world could not enclose the landscape. (We will also discuss these examples later.)  This ‘software’ was the Jubilee Year (Leviticus 25).
    • The alternative to a king was a network of local, independent sanctuaries and tribal assemblies where authority was temporary. Kings were merit-based, and defensive—exactly like the Gaelic Tosach, or the Judges of Israel. When a threat arose, leaders stepped up out of allegiance to the family network. When the threat disappeared, they went right back to the dirt and the plow. There was no permanent political palace to hide behind.