The Caesars of old knew very well an indelible truth to the human condition: the masses tend to care far more for their personal, immediate well-being than their existential goal of freedom. And to an advanced culture such as the Romans had in their heights of power, what more could their citizenry desire than constant satiations for their infinite curiosity, ever building in its appetite for the exotic, the wild, and the grotesque.
A brush of tyranny here, a splash of occupation there was often overlooked and cast from thought when there was another, more rapturous spectacle at hand. The ancient architects devised these stadiums which channeled the attention of the populi into a central location, to a stage of play war. Why indulge in a deeper occupation of discovering the divine worth of the human soul when such troubling thoughts could easily be sublimated by the spectacle of sword and fang.
Thus the lion trade of old was established. To feed the coliseum’s lust for the profane, lions, by the pride, were dragged into their holding cells awaiting an untimely rendezvous with death, a unilateral sacrifice for the sake of another peaceful day in the house of the Caesar god.
By and by, the pacified citizens spewed in and out of the vomitoriums of old. To and fro, over and over, their trips to the pseudo sacramental stadiums left the blood of the once mighty animals crying for redemption, roars and tears which fell silent against the empty, blood-soaked stadium walls. With enough displays of flesh and feast, the boast of the animal kingdom would fall silent as the final roars of so many fantastic felines gave way to the cheers of soul-dead spectators.
In the countryside, a curious co-incident arose. An indigenous goat population began to swarm across the landscape. These hoofed mountain dwellers expanded their reign across the Roman hills, and with their new occupation came new demands for sustenance.
Now, there was a thriving town on the lee of a mountain, a prosperous and well-renowned trading site. Under the shadow of the empire, the citizenry had grown accustomed to their opulence. With a Legion at its borders, threats from the various predators of the wild were now a thing of the past. While the drama in Rome came now and then, the local citizens enjoyed the fruits of the kingdom, with fresh supplies of wine, slaves, and building materials replete at the summer sun. Such was the magnanimity of the moment that schools of arts, schools of law, and schools of engineering presented themselves as viable indulgences to the inspired young.
One day, such a student found himself wandering along the mountainside and noticed a curious phenomena among the fading flora. The whispers heard in the market may just be true. It would seem indeed that the dear ecology of this protective mound of land was in its early stages of degradation. Small landslides of benign nature spilt subtle deposits of dirt and clay along the natural boundaries of the proud city.
To the distracted citizen, an inconsequential occurrence in light of the freneticism of the market square. But to the observing elders, more than a mere curious episode.
With enough observations by the town engineers and enough vocalizations from the town crier, it became clear to most that these spills of sand were of graver weight than mere routine shrugs of the mountain’s shoulders.
The investigation didn’t take long; it was clear that the vegetation which once held fast the beckoning slides was not what it once was in its constitution. The town’s attention steered a course toward this strange and unexpected turn of events, leveraging its resources in the procurement of seeds and stone to repair and replace the lost natural strongholds against what would otherwise be an eastward torrent that, without the mountain, could easily upend each and every citizen’s livelihood with a poorly angled gust.
The town’s schools sent for the wisest in the kingdom, seeking all the most erudite of minds in the land on matters of erosion and forestry. And come they did, for the pompous town had much in its reserves to offer those who might answer the call to protect their way of life. After much trial and error, the might of the empire provided the most ample trees and the most efficient of shrubbery to keep the slippery soil from spilling onto the livelihood of thousands.
Such was the demand for new growth that tradesmen and their sons spent their live’s earnings on remaking their various crafts to contribute to the singular, collective effort to produce enough town-saving shrubs to satisfy the requirements passed down by the empire's elite. The business was good and many families found that the strategic abandonment of their old ways led to greater prosperity than they could have fathomed. Fishermen, smiths, and architects all found sustenance at the table set by the new erosion control authorities.
Despite the investment, the vegetation was degrading at a more rapid rate than it could be replaced and the soil, despite its fertility, could not provide a fast enough avenue for new roots to grip the mountainside, to otherwise prevent the coming disaster. For years, it seemed that the best the empire had to offer could but just offset the looming catastrophe. Until at last, a breakthrough.
With several seasons and harvests past, consortiums come and gone, parsing out why the academic power was impotent in solving the problem and why the proud town should still be under such a threat, an intrepid young ecologist, indeed, the same who first noticed the slides, made another observation. With a counsel of the kingdom’s best gathered to listen to final arguments, he uttered a question which would forever alter the understanding of the town’s salvation. It seemed the goat population was far more than it once was. The beasts, being the consummate faucet of Roman life that they were, were easily dismissed as causing any harm. The herds had been around longer than the kingdom itself. But the steady, stealthy increase in their numbers went heretofore unperceived by the distracted populous.
Goats, with their ever insatiable appetite for tree roots, were now the enemy of the town. Bounties on the heads of the wild livestock led to a mass slaughter of every goat a man could find. For a while, it seemed the problem was solved as the vegetation made a modest rebound.
Until one fateful day, disaster. The mountain that was once the city's sentry had unhinged enough of a mass of earth to bury a significant portion of a neighborhood which housed many prominent members of the city’s middle class, encasing them in their final home. It would seem to the young engineer that there was a gross underestimate of how much vegetation there once was which clung to the mountain’s flanks. Somehow, the loss of the forest was happening at a far greater rate than anyone appreciated.
The day the call went out to bring the heads of goats to the empire elite, a novel entrepreneurial spirit took up residence in some of the town’s outskirts. So high was the price on the head of this livestock that, with the right business acumen, one could well make a good living raising his own goats, only to deliver the decayed body over to the authorities and fetch a higher incentive than one might acquire through typical means of husbandry. And with the proper contacts and guile, one may even make an agreement with the plant growers on the manner and volume of goat food to plant, generating a cycle of prosperity for a few at the expense of those living under the old mountain’s protection.
The predatory appetite of those creatures could never be satisfied by the available, but thinning, flora on the mountain. All proposed solutions, bred from a Roman culture of abundance and economies riding on the backs of the summarily slain, only proved to expose the fragility of a people unwilling to allow their lions to roam free.
