Ming Dynasty and New Rome and Infinite Magic Machine

Chapter 1669 Creating God
"Silence! Silence!"

The Muses Palace was filled with arguments, as the Sages were overwhelmed by the invasion of China.

If they were the Germanic barbarians on the other side of the mountain, they existed before the Common Era and had been interacting with Rome all along.

If they were Celtic barbarians, the Greeks encountered them when they colonized the Black Sea—at that time, Celts were everywhere, not just distributed on the British Isles and Brittany, but also in the vast steppes of the Black Sea.

But the people of China are far away, and the sages really can't handle them.

Previously, when Shangluo was here, they could at least treat him as an individual. However, now that 800 people were taking to the streets with machine guns, they couldn't simply ignore it. If they pointed their cannons at the Library of Alexandria, things would get really messy.

Before entering Cybernia, nothing from the outside world could really harm the already digitized Cybernia. However, once they entered Cybernia, their actions could cause real damage to the digitized Rome. They could actually burn down the Library of Alexandria once.

This is something that someone has done before—Caesar did it.

Although Caesar didn't intentionally burn it down last time, the Library of Alexandria was highly flammable and explosive, making it quite vulnerable. After all, it contained a vast amount of paper documents and preserved a wealth of valuable data. Caesar accidentally set the library ablaze with a few flaming catapults.

Shangluo witnessed the sages arguing in a chaotic manner through a remote camera feed, before he even entered the Great Library.

"Speaking of which, what are the specific details of Caesar setting the Library of Alexandria on fire?"

[Actually, it's hard to say that Caesar's actions weren't entirely unintentional. In fact, he had fought his way to Egypt, pursuing the remnants of Pompey's army. At the time, Caesar's frontline commander suspected that the Library of Alexandria had been used as a fortress—because it was so conspicuous—and therefore targeted it as a military objective.]

"Isn't anyone going to try to persuade them?"

Who would dare to advise against this? The Romans even dared to kill Archimedes when they besieged a city, let alone a single building.

"Wow, so this was the building that burned down?"

"Ah, actually, that's not it," Apollonia explained. "Although the public usually refers to this building as the 'Library of Alexandria,' it wasn't actually a single building; it was an academic organization. This organization had two branches. The first was the Ptolemaic Academy, part of the Ptolemaic dynasty's royal palace. The second was the Temple of Seraphine, the Egyptian embodiment of Dionysus. Both were part of the Library of Alexandria, and in terms of their collections, they can be considered as Branch A and Branch B."

"Then, what did Caesar burn?"

[Caesar burned the Academy within the Ptolemaic Palace—as I mentioned before, it was enormous, and the Ptolemaic Palace was Caesar's primary target. The fleet's trebuchets naturally aimed at the largest building in the palace, burning the Academy down. The Temple of the Muses in front of us is actually Building B, the Temple of Dionysus. Caesar later lived here for a long time, 'coordinating' the materials from several other major libraries around the Mediterranean and filling the Library of Alexandria.] "Eh? So why did it decline later?"

[Ah, because later these books were relocated to Constantinople. You know, every emperor would move a little, day after day, month after month, and plus Alexandria was getting further and further away from the economic center, so the scholars didn't want to leave the city. And then, the library was gone. As for the later construction of the Muses' Palace, that's another story.]

"Now I understand why those wise men didn't have a good impression of Rome. Were they exploiting mysticism?"

[You could say that. Rome was, after all, a secondary civilization. As a secondary civilization, Rome's development, prosperity, and growth were fully exposed in history, which made the Romans themselves less reserved. After all, everyone has seen what Rome was like in its early stages, so Rome couldn't pretend to be some superior, celestial empire, and therefore didn't need to care about its behavior. Of course, even among shameless people, Rome's behavior was considered rather unseemly.]

"So, those sages are panicking?"

The existence of sages is indeed inherently very fragile. In fact, they are the first to enter the virtual state.

The Romans are only now entering, while the sages have been in this state for a long time.

Inheriting the character of these sages, Rome entrusted everything in the Muses' Palace to the technological creations of these predecessors—a very risky move, in fact. This is because almost all of these sages were philosophers. They were fully aware that they were not the original, but rather copies of it, and thus their mindset was quite complex.

These people were all formidable individuals. Even Alexander, who seemed to be just there to fill a spot, possessed considerable academic knowledge. Moreover, because he had a thorough understanding of the principles of drama and mythology, and because he was a monarch with immense authority, he was capable of actively creating a god.

This is also the origin of the city of Alexandria. Without Alexander's creation of a god, this city in the desert would not exist.

Very few people in history have been able to do this, but without exception, they all succeeded.

Machiavelli articulated this view—all unarmed prophets have failed. Anyone attempting to spread an idea needs the protection of force. This is because spreading an idea is itself an attempt to establish a regime.

Zhang Jiao had once considered a "non-violent" Yellow Turban Rebellion, and he hadn't even prepared for armed struggle on the eve of the uprising. However, before he began planning his religious gathering, ambitious members of the order, such as Tang Zhou, had already started their own schemes. When the uprising truly began, even without initial preparation for war, the Yellow Turban army was forced to take up farm tools and fight.

Alexander was a monarch himself; he didn't need Machiavelli to explain it to him, and he understood the importance of all this. Therefore, Alexander actively used his own deification campaign as a weapon, and in turn, used that weapon to protect the deification campaign. Specifically, he consistently tried to portray himself as the incarnation of Hercules. Because Hercules was the son of Zeus, Alexander could thereby establish the title of "Son of Heaven of the Greek World" and ensure that this divine bloodline would be passed down through generations.

(End of this chapter)