How the daily post conquered Rome

In his historical fiction, Man at Arms, Stephen Pressfield says the greatest innovation the Roman Empire brought to the nations it conquered was not aqueducts or architecture but instead:

"Mail. The daily post."

Pressfield describes how the mail system gave the Romans administrative power over the people of the lands they conquered:

"The [Roman] conquerors believed their highways and waterways and the trade and postal communications that sped along them would bind their subject peoples in such shackles of order and dependence upon their overlords as would render them submissive, compliant and incapable of rebellion. Yet, as with any world-altering innovation, consequences unintended and unforeseen soon ascended to the fore.”

While infrastructure gave the Romans great power, it also gave the common people the “practicability of the empire-wide transmission of new and seditious ideas” which “would be the gravest threat to imperial hegemony."

Man at Arms describes how Rome fell not by well-armed armies, but rather "from the pen of a single man — Saul of Tarsus, who became Paul the Apostle."

Today, we aren't reliant on hand-written scrolls taking weeks to travel over roads and waterways.

No, today we have email.

These short, plain-text messages we send back and forth all day long have become so common that we don't realize how powerful a technology we have at our disposal to counter lies and spread truth.

But only if we use it.

That's why I send you daily emails sharing stories, thoughts and inspiration to help break those "shackles of [new world] order and dependence.”

There is no need to be, as Pressfield says, "submissive, compliant and incapable of rebellion”… unless we choose to be.

Email may not be all that high-tech, but it's efficient, fast and low-cost. And it contains the greatest threat to those who rule by deceit: Words.

So let me invite you to be brave, independent and rebellious by subscribing to my Blazing Pine Cone Posts at https://blazingpinecone.com/subscribe.

John C. A. Manley is the author of Much Ado About Corona: A Dystopian Love Story, the forthcoming All The Humans Are Sleeping and other works of speculative fiction. Get free samples of his stories by becoming a Blazing Pine Cone email subscriber at: https://blazingpinecone.com/subscribe/