My favourite Star Trek The Next Generation episodes are the ones with the Borg, especially the initial encounter ones. The episode that sticks with me is the one where Jean Luc reflects on what the Emperor Honorious might have thought as he stood on the walls of Rome anticipating with dread the approach of a barbarian army. Did Honorious think that this would mean the end of the empire and its civilization? Jean Luc, in the same vein, wondered what the coming of the Borg would mean for The Federation.
Yesterday, standing on the walls of Belgrade fortress looking north I wondered what the Romans and Byzantines thought as a flood tide of Goths, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Gepids, Avars and Slavs (to name but a few) washed against and eventually over the Danubian frontier of which Singidunum was a key point. Buried deep under later constructions are a few sections of Roman and Byzantine walls. That's symbolic of how the Roman and especially Byzantine heritage is a foundational part of Serbia. The Serbian Dinar and more importantly Orthodox Christianity are two examples of that heritage.
Some see similarities between the world of late antiquity and the present. No, I'm not talking end times craziness. But read this, Augustine's World and then read Paul Krugman's The Great Unraveling.
Here in Belgrade we saw a park near the bus and train stations filled with refugees from Syria and beyond, all heading for the rich North. Kind of an ironic reversal of the invasions of late antiquity. I'd like to think that our response will dictate how we will survive. To that end we saw that the refugees in the park had health care, toilets, water and a place for tents. It wasn't luxury accommodation or even close, but it is help. For a poor struggling country like Serbia it is significant and some grounds for hope.
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