Mary Beard, the Cambridge scholar and author of an engrossing new history of ancient Rome called S.P.Q.R., knows about success. Beard, our podcast guest this week delights BBC viewers with bicycle tours of Rome and its long-gone denizens, tweets to a half million antiquity fans, and wows academic colleagues still.

Mary Beard.

And then there is the success of her subject. We speak of the fall of Rome, and worry about the fall of our own republic. But Beard is primarily tuned in to those things that made Rome thrive — as a military power, cultural hothouse, and, most importantly, the first true cosmopolis. Listen for Beard’s take on the Roman civilizational secret sauce:

Rome is an incorporating state which distributes and shares its citizenship with the outside world. It sees itself as a nation of immigrants and, as it expands, instead of drawing a very firm boundary between Romans and the people they govern, what Rome does is it lets people into the rights of its citizen polity.

The “Roman Dream” wasn’t all wooly and liberal, Beard reminds, but it worked until it didn’t. Our friend Chris Hedges — the war correspondent turned critic, revolutionary, and hobbyist classicist — fears it’s too late for our own civilization to learn from the eventual decay of Rome’s ‘incorporating state’. More and more the Western world wants imperious control, tighter borders, stronger men, and excess divorced from cost.

Kathleen Coleman & Chris Hedges.

Will the American dream go the way of the Roman dream? Hedges’s classics professor Kathleen Coleman of Harvard says yes — even as our patricians and official class strain, often nobly, to preserve a doomed order: