Two thousand years ago, on a swamp nobody wanted, a handful of builders started working.
Not soldiers. Not politicians. Builders.
Men so obsessed with making things exist that history
still can't fully explain what they did.
They carved roads through mountains because going around took too long.
They diverted rivers to lay foundations. They looked at a swamp on the Tiber and said
"this will be the capital of the known world", and built it within a generation.
They were connected to every resource on earth. Stone from Egypt. Concrete from Pozzuoli.
Labor from Gaul. Timber from Germania. Roads that moved silk from China to Britain,
ideas from Athens to Carthage, and armies from one end of the continent to the other,
before the rest of the world had figured out how to pave a street.