A Stern Warning to All Visitors to Rome's Party Poetry/Writing Contest Entry Friends, Romans, Countrymen, Barbarians, lend me your ears; I come not to praise Rome, but to denigrate her. Her seedy side; the corruptness; her lousy fire safety record; the degradation; the vileness: it is all worthy of ridicule. Let me begin this dour tale with the basest of topics, public hygiene. Who in this miserable city has been brave enough to lurk into the depths of the public toilets? I, for one, congratulate you on your survival. There is no sense of privacy, no way of pretending that that noise was someone else. As stated by a certain Australian movie recently, "there's a smell in there that is gonna outlast religion". (Kenny, 2006) OK, so I know that things went downhill from then; the medieval English simply tipped theirs out the window, and if you happened to be in the way… And granted, Rome had a sewage system better than anything of its day, and its baths were second-to-none (how many of you Germanic barbarians have even heard the term ‘bath’?). OK, so maybe hygiene wasn’t the best topic to begin with. So, moving right along to its fire and building safety record; be afraid if you are going to sleep in this grim city during its birthday celebrations. You are likely to be burnt to a crisp in your sleep (that is if the building doesn’t fall down around you first). The poor majority of Rome’s populace live in faltering insulae, with patches on patches over the cracks in the walls. They "live in perpetual dread of fires and falling houses." (Juvenal, Satire 3) OK, so we have the Vigiles specifically to keep watch for fires, effectively becoming the first official professional fire-fighting brigade consisting of approximately 7,000 paid firefighters. The best you visiting barbarians have managed are you Egyptian bunch inventing hand-operated wooden pumps. As for you Celtic lot, with your highly flammable wattle-and-daub and thatch houses, in which you light your fires inside, well, that's just asking for trouble. So granted, for its time, the fire safety record isn’t really that bad, compared to elsewhere at the time. Ahem, lets move on to grander things; politics. A certain American actor has defined politician thus: "Politics: 'Poli', a Latin word meaning 'many'; and 'tics', meaning 'bloodsucking creatures'" (Robin Williams). Rome is full of them. Take a look at the Emperors, for goodness sake. Tiberius' habits we'd best not go into, Caligula elected his horse into the Senate and married his sister, and Nero merely sang with his lyre as he watched half the city burn down! And these are the people we trusted to lead Rome into a bright future? Well, I guess it was bright when Nero was around... But I suppose, when you look around a bit, it isn't really that unusual. You barbarians from the Orient must surely remember Emperor Qinshihuang, who sacrificed 700,000 forced labourers to build his own city-sized tomb. And as for the Egyptians: Seqenenre Tao II married his sister, their grandson Amenhotep I married his sister, their grandson Thutmose II married his half-sister... need I continue? So, I guess, yet again, maybe this isn't the best topic to show to you all just how vile Rome is compared to its contemporaries. Let's move onto something that is close to everybody's heart – crime. You party-goers do not want to be out in the streets at night, trust me. This must make Rome worse than anywhere you smelly lot of visiting barbarians are from. Uh.... um.... well actually... Now, I know you Spartans are actively encouraged from birth to thieve, loot and plunder, and if you are caught then you are punished for being caught, not for actually trying to steal stuff. We're going to make sure our Vigiles and the Praetorian Guard are keeping a firm eye on you whilst you are here. We'll have none of those shenanigans. We have these things called 'Laws', and if you break them, you go to this thing called 'Prison'. I know these concepts are strange to you, but you'll just have to behave yourselves or suffer the consequences. Goodness knows what would happen if we left you lot unsupervised in our city of outstanding hygiene, with professionals keeping an eye on our safety, our politicians who are no worse than most, our wonders in architecture, engineering and entertainment, our decent roads and our phenomenal army. I guess Rome's a pretty good place to live after all!