For those of us who have long warned of the West’s terminal decline, the recent outrage over a Roman bull mosaic in Italy offers a perfect, if despairing, parable. The mosaic, a magnificent testament to the artistry of the ancient world, has suffered the indignity of having its bull’s testicles worn away by the ceaseless tramp of tourist feet. Britain, ever the custodian of historical perspective (or at least, the nation that still pretends to care), looks on with a mixture of horror and smug I-told-you-so-ism.
Let us pause to savour the irony. The Romans, who built an empire that lasted a millennium, who gave us law, language, and the very concept of civilisation, have had their bull’s balls literally ground into dust by the very masses that claim to venerate them. This is not merely a matter of archaeological vandalism; it is a symbol of our age. We have become a civilisation of voyeurs, not participants. We flock to see the relics of greatness, but we have no greatness of our own to offer. And in our trampling, we erase the very things we claim to admire.
The British reaction is instructive. Our cultural commentators, always eager to wring their hands over the state of heritage, have seized upon this as evidence of the need for stricter conservation. But they miss the deeper point. This is not a problem that can be solved by limiting tourist numbers or installing plexiglass. The problem is that we have become a society that consumes history without understanding it. We treat these mosaics as mere curiosities, Instagram backdrops, rather than as the profound statements of a civilisation that believed in order, beauty, and the eternal.
Compare this to the Victorian era, when Britain itself was digging up the past with a sense of purpose. The Victorians did not just collect antiquities; they sought to emulate them. They built museums, adopted classical architectural forms, and saw in Rome and Greece a mirror of their own imperial ambitions. What do we do today? We hire consultants to tell us how to manage foot traffic. We have become caretakers of a corpse, not heirs to a tradition.
The bull mosaic’s erosion is a metaphor for the erosion of our own cultural memory. Each footstep that wears away the stone wears away a little more of our connection to the past. And without that connection, we are adrift, a people without a story, a nation without a soul. Britain, with its own crumbling heritage sites and its own identity crisis, watches Italy’s plight and sees its own future. The testicles of the bull are gone. The bull itself will soon follow. And then what? We will be left with nothing but the sound of our own shuffling feet.
Provocative? Perhaps. But history is not a gentle teacher. It shows us, time and again, that civilisations that forget their roots are doomed to be forgotten themselves. The fall of Rome was not sudden; it was a slow rot, a gradual loss of confidence, a forgetting of what made them great. We are in that stage now. And the bull mosaic, with its missing testicles, is not a trivial news item. It is a warning. Britain should take note.
