I'm always surprised for some reason when I learn that others are more cynical than I am. Perhaps I never had any grand expectations to be dashed against experience, but it's true, I'm not really a cynic. I never looked for grandeur from Rome, or any other City of Man, and so I could enjoy the ambiguous beauty of Virgil's poetry, just to take one example. He surely thought the founding of the Imperium, after decades, even centuries, of civil war and political purges, to be a gift of tranquilitas. He also knew what was lost, and lamented that loss, and at times you can hear him wondering if it was all worth it. (Amazing how many people fail to read all of Virgil, but that's for another day.)
Then, too, we can read Tacitus and Sallust, Polybius, even from time to time Livy and Cicero, to learn just how far from the Republican Ideal Rome fell even during the Republic. They were searching for something - or rather, for Someone - and kept chasing darkness while running from the light. In this way, they were like The Greeks, who were really the Athenians, the Spartans, the Corinthians. Reread Thucydides alongside the tragedians who remain alive - notice anything? Thucydides writes the Tragedy of the Fall of Athens, and Plato finds the fallen City a Cave fit only for slaves, not citizens.
That others erected their utopias on an illusion of Rome and Greece is interesting at times, but not as beautiful, sad, or real as the Greeks and Romans themselves.
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