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Comment by marginalia_nu | Hacker News Reader

It's struck me, reading roman authors, that they were considerably more obsessed with building a legacy than we are. Not just getting powerful or famous in life, but entering the history books, to become big name like Scipio Africanus.

May be that it comes with living in an "eternal" city that's been the same as long as anyone can remember, with generations coming and going and most human activity washed away like sand castles on the shores of oblivion. Making some form of lasting mark seems almost urgent when you look at it from that perspective.

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Hard to know if their culture was different, it could easily be a case of survival bias. Those obsessed with creating a legacy for themselves were more likely to create a legacy that lasted.

Think about all your contemporaries, unless they're incredibly famous their story will be lost in time.

A lot of this is second hand accounts, i.e. people talking about other peoples' feverish quests for leaving a legacy, not always in positive terms.

I read on here - and I hope someone can find the link because I just spent 20 minutes looking for it and now I can't find it - an economist or similar academic grousing about a rail bridge in the UK that had been upgraded for the first time in an [arbitrarily long amount of time] to support heavier trains. The complaint was that, surely, a bridge should not last that long without needing an upgrade; you should build a cheaper bridge and replace it, because whatever gains you can make from investing the difference will outpace the replacement cost.

I guess the point is that building a legacy of infrastructure is, generally, not economical and therefore should be foregone in favor of building a legacy of financial holdings.

Rome wasn’t very old by the standards of 1 AD. Elsewhere in Greece, Egypt and Middle East, cities had been inhabited for several millennia.

But Rome’s founding just 750 years earlier was mythological because the place was too remote to even have written history until much later. Virgil had to invent a Trojan connection to elevate the national epic.

Being obsessed with building a legacy is not so uncommon. Machiavelli comes into my mind, for whom future fame is one of the most important motivations for rulers. Or think of Pericles, who states in his famous Funeral Oration: "there are mighty monuments of our power which will make us the wonder of this and of succeeding ages".[1]

[1] http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/education/thucydides.html

Renaissance writers like Machiavelli were very influenced by the romans, to the point where some were even into Roman LARPing: Wearing togas, refusing to speak vernacular, etc.

As are the US Americans of today having a Senat, a Capitol, ...

When I was in Rome, I was struck by how many wealthy people had created monuments to themselves. There were statues of people, everywhere.

It was their version of instagram. You got to be famous if you had a statue. Upon which you could gain status.

Or that’s my guess anyways

Still i think they would be surprised at how much of their civilization has survived in ours 2k years later.

"the Romans empire never ended, we just call it the Catholic Church now"

(Obviously a joke, but not that silly as it looks at first sight)

Maybe there's survivorship bias in that sample. Are ancient authors we still read more likely to be obsessed with legacy-building than the ones we've forgotten?

Capitalism has no legacy. After all, time preference can't be negative. Implying that destroying the earth is a perfectly viable idea because the discounted future value of earth is $0 to many people after their death.

A time preference of 0 is equivalent to never consuming (e.g. never consuming the earth in its entirety).

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