Barbarians all around

Rome was sacked by Alaric, King of the Visigoths in 410 and then again 45 years later by Geiseric, appropriately named King of the Vandals and in 546 Totila, King of the Visigoths sacked it and depopulated almost as an aside in his war against the Byzantines. Yet none of these managed to even scratch the Aqua Virgo (or Virgin Water) one of the city's underground viaducts supplying one of its most famous fountains, until this month of course when in 2007 Ano Domini, builders building an underground car park damaged its structure and then, adding insult to injury and sealing for eternity the cretinous nature of their ilk (and I will explain why I so strongly word this here in a minute) they walled it off stopping the waterflow and causing further damage (which they thought they had successfully hid).

We live in an age where most things are permissible. We can all get hold of 'recreational' drugs that would knock out an elephant and we all are capable of finding the kind of porn online that would have got us behind bars a few short years ago.

Our children go around, if you believe the pundits, in a perpetual, mind-warping sex, violence and video-game fuelled fugue which will serve in little more than dissociating them from reality to the point that they become aliens to their own world. Yet none of this is really worrying. Whether you think the arrow of progress points north or south it is all part of evolution, the flip side of moving on and we have to learn to deal with it.

Yet there are a few things which are sacred and that is the beauty found in objects from our distant past.

Whether it's the structure of the Aqua Virgo, created to flow water to a fountain in the ancient world's most important city, or the world's tallest statues of Buddha mindlessly destroyed by a bunch of illiterate, bearded, goat-herding, insecure misogynists (and guys feel free the Fatwa me over this allegation) they are sacred because in them we see not what they are but what they represent.

Their existence, their creation, speak volumes of thought and human passion. Ingenuity, endeavour, the ability to overcome problems, the ability to dream and the ability to hope. In them we see not just the past but also the future because they are part of what makes us intrinsically human rather than better-equipped apes.

There are exceptions. The builders in Rome. The Taliban in Afghanistan. Mindless acts of such destruction repudiate not the past but our future. Our ability to be human. Our sense of being special. Everything that we can be as well as many things of what we were.

Stoning was too good for the Taliban and as a liberal Westerner raised on accepting other people's faiths I was all for nuking them after they destroyed the Buddhas for in that act they showed that they cannot be reasoned with any more than one would be able to reason with a herd of cattle, without the means of a cattleprod.

Ok, now it's your turn. What do you think should happen to the builders in Rome? They succeeded in doing what even the barbarians who sacked the city failed. I've had a few issues with builders in the past (albeit not Italian ones and over a conservatory rather than an aqueduct) so this now makes me a little biased (though nuking is out of the question, Rome is full of antiquities), so let me know what the punishment should be.