By Simba Jama

THE Roman Empire was very similar to the Greek Empire in its conduct.
Every Roman, from the Emperor to the servant lived in a way that we as Africans would find inhumane.
For instance, the Romans had sporting games which were held in large pavilions the size of a stadium and these games involved fighting, man against man, man against beast and so on.
The Romans imported vicious beasts from Africa and Asia along with African and Asian slaves for such uncivilised games.
The crowds would fill the stadia in their thousands and the Roman leaders would invent games to entertain the audiences.
The common and popular game involved the identification of the strong and the athletic, among the slaves and those charged with various offences from all parts of the Roman Empire and make them fight dreadful beasts, such as lions and tigers.
Those that were lucky to prevail were sometimes promoted into the ranks of the Roman army although their status of slave did not change.
These fighters were known as gladiators.
The bloody games were the centre of Roman entertainment.
Most of the black Judeans who were captured in 70 AD, as discussed in earlier articles, eventually died in these barbaric ways.
The Romans were also brutal in their rule and regularly conducted public executions that involved crucifixion, hanging and death by the guillotine.
The victims were not necessarily criminals.
They were people who had ‘offended’ the emperor or had gone against the unpopular laws.
Yahshua (Jesus) and John the Baptist are examples of the innocent people whose blood was shed for the pleasure of the Roman officials and not because they had committed any crime.
The emperors were engrossed with pomp splendour.
As the empire grew, so did their wealth, allowing the emperors to import new raw materials and more superior technology from Africa and Asia.
The emperor would also have slaves, concubines and servants of all races.
Out of all the emperors of Rome, the one who is remembered, even by the Romans, as the most evil emperor in the world, was Emperor Caligula.
This emperor got into power at a very young age and all the days of his short life were full of evil deeds.
He regularly slept with his army general’s wife and raped and deflowered virgins and brides before they got married.
He would rape them even at their weddings.
This notorious emperor also sodomised men and would hold public orgies inside the palace.
On one occasion when Caligula found out that some of his nobles were plotting to remove him from power, he ordered the wives of the nobles to join one such sexual orgy, on which occasion the wives of the nobles were treated like prostitutes as they were forced to sleep with several men.
This was Caligula’s way of humiliating the nobles.
Caligula also had gruesome ways of executing those that offended him.
He had one gigantic machine which looked like an octopus and also attracted huge numbers of people when in use.
The bloodthirsty Roman authorities would first dig graves deep enough to accommodate a standing man, up to the neck.
They would then bury the rest of the man’s body and leave only his head above the ground.
The octopus machine had large and sharp rotating blades which would chop off and crush the heads of hundreds of partially buried men in one fell swoop.
The army general whose wife the emperor sexually abused at will was killed by way of the octopus machine.
Caligula was finally assassinated, but his legacy is not worth remembering.
The immorality and cruelty of the Romans are unmatched in history.
The irony of it is that Rome became the headquarters of Catholicism.
For all black people the question to ask is: In view of the large number of black people killed by the Romans purely for entertainment sake, is their god also our God?