"We are all on the brink of greatness, we are so close and so far away", and many of the interactions between The East and the West in Eurasia are often in the dark, thousands of miles apart but communicating with each other more frequently.
Looking at world history, if a powerful dynasty appears in China, another corresponding powerful empire will appear in the West. The Tang Empire in the East and the Arab Empire in the West, the Ming Empire and the Ottoman Empire are like twin stars in the historical sky, shining at the same time in the same sky.
To say that the most talked about is the flourishing Han Dynasty and the flourishing Rome. Around the first year of the Common Era, world history just came to a decision point between the East and the West, the Han Dynasty in the East began to gradually exude its influence, and Rome in the West slowly rose in its infancy.
The population of the two empires exceeded 50 million at the same time at almost the same time, and the territory reached 5 million square kilometers at almost the same historical stage. The Han Dynasty and Rome were the same multi-ethnic states, the same pioneering states, and the same powerful and prosperous, but the two countries failed to get together in the end and gradually drifted apart.
The starting points are very different
In the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC, Rome, a small frontier state in the Mediterranean, took advantage of its advantageous geographical location and warlike ethnic characteristics to embark on a path of development and expansion. Between 264 and 146 BC, rome fought three Punic wars with the Mediterranean power of carthage.
At that time, although Rome was always tactically passive, it achieved many key strategic victories, and finally pulled Carthage down from the altar and began its own path to dominate the Mediterranean.
In 214 BC, Rome launched a war with Macedonia, and in the following fifty years, the two sides fought each other four times. At the same time, the Qin Empire in the east also quickly fell into the whirlpool of peasant revolts after unifying the world, and was completely swallowed up, and the world also ushered in its new master, Liu Bang, after four years of "Chu-Han War".
In 202 BC, Liu Bang officially proclaimed himself emperor and established the Han Dynasty. In the early years of the Han Dynasty, due to the influence of the "Huang Lao Doctrine", it did not like war as much as ancient Rome, coupled with the lessons of the Qin Empire, the early Han Dynasty government made almost no changes except for managing public order and maintaining peace and development.
However, it is precisely because of half a century of recuperation that the Han Dynasty will not be constrained by the enemy in its subsequent military diplomacy, and this precious period of development has been praised by historians as "the first rule of the world in Chinese history", and it also has another familiar title - "the rule of Wenjing".
Because of the differences in the regions of the East and the West, the ideological concepts and methods of dealing with problems in the East and the West are also different. The Han Dynasty was founded on the overthrow of the old empire and the establishment of a new empire on its ruins, inheriting its territory, system and culture.
Rome in the west, on the other hand, relied on force to gradually annex neighboring countries and impose its own system and culture on the other side in order to achieve the effect of assimilation.
The two countries have different starting points, destined for the two countries to rise in different ways, when China in the East has experienced half a century of peaceful development and becomes stronger, Rome in the West still continues its own expansion wars to consolidate its rule.
The systems are very different
After nearly a century of war, Rome sat on an unprecedented territory, in order to better manage the land laid, Rome began to implement the provincial system, and most of the roman territory was warlike peoples, so when the provincial system was formulated, in addition to taxation, many other detailed regulations were not well implemented.
This caused the development of many provinces to later have great autonomy, in Rome is still in the slave society and apprentice autonomy period, the Eastern Han Empire in the inheritance of the Qin Dynasty county system at the same time, but also limited to national strength, had to learn from the Western Zhou division on the basis of the county system on the basis of the county system, history called "county-state parallel system".
When the national strength of the Han Dynasty was increasingly prosperous, the problem of the parallel system of counties and states emerged, and the kings flew high and low, eating the finances of the central government but cultivating their own power.
During the reign of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, the "Tui En Order" was implemented to continuously weaken the power of the various princely states in the name of "the emperor dividing the seals", while suppressing the landlord class and strengthening the central government's jurisdiction over local lands.
The differences in land policies between the Roman and Han dynasties were also the reason for the very different relations between Europe and China, the landlord class and the people at the bottom.
In China, where imperial power is supreme, the relationship between peasants and landlords is generally wage-oriented, and the strength of the landlord class cannot be opposed to imperial power; in Europe, peasants and serfs have almost become the personal property of landlords and manor owners, and the king cannot move.
Ideological culture is slightly inferior
When the Han Dynasty was established, it learned the lessons of the demise of the Qin Dynasty and believed that the exclusive Dharma masters made the punishment cruel, which eventually led to a peasant uprising. Therefore, the rulers of the early Han Dynasty did the opposite, adopting the Taoist idea of ruling without doing anything, which led to the continuous expansion of the princely kings and landlord classes.
By the time of Emperor Wu of Han, the ideological viewpoint of "deposing a hundred families and respecting Confucianism alone" put forward by Dong Zhongshu was accepted by Emperor Wu of Han, and the Han Dynasty also began to use "benevolence and morality" to rule the ideology, and achieved fruitful results in the fields of historiography and political system, and appeared such as "History", "Book of Han", "Wu Yue Chunqiu" and other macro works.
However, in the natural sciences, philosophy and other aspects, due to the prosperity of Confucianism, they were snubbed by the rulers and the landlord class, and the development momentum was insufficient, and there were few achievements.
However, in ancient Rome, where the feudal system was not developed, there was a germ of "humanism" that laid the foundation for the whole of Europe, and historical works such as "Orator Dialogues" and "Chronicles" continued to emerge.
Lucretius, Epicurus, Zeno and other philosophers emerged in an endless stream; "Roman Avenue", "Roman Canal" and other magnificent projects rose from the ground to achieve architectural achievements.
Not only that, Christianity, one of the world's three major religions, also originated from the era of the Roman Empire, which became the source of Western humanities in the true sense, and its influence on Europe and even the world in the field of humanities and arts, even the Han Dynasty at its peak was difficult to match.
At the same time as Roman culture became increasingly prosperous, the Han Dynasty entered a chaotic period of foreign monopoly, and finally there was a brief change of dynasties around the first year of the Common Era, which greatly weakened the influence and national strength of the Han Dynasty.
In the 1st century AD, the Han Dynasty, which experienced the "Guangwu Zhongxing", could not return to the prosperity and strength of the "rule of Wenjing" and the "prosperity of the Han Dynasty", coupled with the further promotion of Confucianism, which made the phenomenon of stagnation in the cultural field, especially in the fields of humanities and natural sciences.
The cultural gap between the Han Dynasty and Rome has widened and widened.
In the 2nd century AD, the Roman Empire experienced a decline in imperial power, but the cultural field continued to develop in stability, and by the time of Constantine the Great, he began to use Christianity to mythologize his authority.
Since then, with the support of the emperor himself, Roman art, Roman sculpture, Roman classics, roman law, etc. have begun to spread widely in the empire, and also affected the countries of Eastern Europe and West Asia in the same period.
With the passage of time, the ideology and culture of Rome and the Han Dynasty gradually penetrated into the large areas they ruled, evolving into the main tone of today's politics, ideology and culture of the East and the West, and the civilizations of the East and the West have since moved towards the development path of "exchanges but no infiltration" in the past two thousand years.
By the beginning of the 3rd century AD, the Han Dynasty was completely mired in the Yellow Turban Rebellion and the division of the princes, and even the imperial power to maintain rule no longer existed, let alone the development of culture and technology.
In the west, Rome, although there was no large-scale warlord scuffle, but in the 4th century, it fell under the iron hooves of european barbarians, and Rome and the Han Dynasty eventually became a brilliant page in the history of Eastern and Western cultures.