European Union’s Roman Empire

Is the European Parliament Tower in Strasbourg modeled on the Tower of Babel, the Colisseum in Rome, or both? Why was Rome called ‘the Eternal City’? Who was the first Eurocrat, who drafted the Treaty of Rome and decided where it would be signed? What did he say about reviving the Roman Empire? View my video and find out!

After my video asking why the European Parliament was modeled on the Tower of Babel in Pieter Bruegel’s famous painting, someone suggested it is actually designed with Rome’s Coliseum in mind. So, being in Rome, I thought I should take a look.

Bruegel’s painting is also said to have been at least partly inspired by the ruins of the Coliseum. So do we have a bit of an architectural menage a trois? The Tower of Babel is accurately painted by Bruegel as a Ziggurat tower, intended as a political and religious centre of rebellion against God.

Now, if the Capitoline Hill was the political and spiritual heart of Rome, the Coliseum was a statement of her imperial dominance. Built with money looted from the temple in Jerusalem in AD70, it was built to entertain the masses with armed duels to the death between gladiators.

We know the Tower of Babel remained unfinished because the Lord confused their language. An act of God also destroyed the Colosseum. It was ruined by a succession of earthquakes and then looted for the stone.

But if the Tower of Babel was built with an Antichrist spirit of rebellion, the Coliseum is not exactly pure as the driven snow. It’s not washed in the blood of the lamb, it’s bathed in the blood of the martyrs.

During lunch intervals, executions ‘ad bestias’ would be staged. Those condemned to death would be sent into the arena, naked and unarmed, to face beasts, notably lions, which would tear them to pieces.

Christians were among those put to death in the Coliseum in the Rome of Revelation 17. In Acts we read (Act 17:6b) ‘These that have turned the world upside down are come hither also; 7 Whom Jason hath received: and these all do contrary to the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, one Jesus.

That was sedition. You could worship who you wanted in ancient Rome, so long as you also worshiped the Roman gods. In Revelation chapter 2 and verse 13 we read of the martyrdom of Bishop Antipas for refusing to make sacrifice to Zeus. Well, the Romans adopted Zeus as Jupiter, the head of their Pantheon, Iupiter Conservator, to conserve and protect the Eternal City.

Rome was personified and deified as the goddess Roma, and regarded as Urbs Sacra, the sacred city. Roma sat on Jupiter just as Revelation seventeen says the woman sits on the beast. Or as Europa sits on Zeus as the Bull all over the European Union.

But Jupiter couldn’t save Rome. The eternal city was sacked in the fifth century. To this day, the ruins of Rome are a tourist attraction.

Or could it be that it is the antichrist spirit of Rome that is ‘eternal’? The Emperor Hadrian, the first man to use the expression ‘eternal city’ – that’s ‘urbs aeterna’ in Latin – suggested that Rome could be forever reborn all over Europe.

But could Imperial Rome itself be revived? The leaders of the six founding countries of the European Economic Community, the EU’s forerunner, gathered to sign the Treaty of Rome on top of the site of Jupiter’s Temple in March 1957.

A Belgian, Paul-Henri Spaak, a socialist and agnostic, had authored the Treaty and decided the venue. On the eve of the ceremony, he was overlooking the ruins of the Roman Forum with his right-hand man, Baron Robert Rothschild. Rothschild remembered Spaak saying to him,‘I think that we have re-established the Roman Empire without a single shot being fired.’

When the heads of state gathered to sign the European Constitution in 2004, in the same place as Spaak’s Treaty of Rome was signed all those years before, the Italian Government erected a plaque which spoke of ‘this most sacred Capitoline Hill, which is the citadel of this bountiful city and of the entire world.’ Under the Constitution, ‘the nations of Europe might coalesce into a body of one people with one mind, one will and one government’. The Eurocrats are convinced they are reviving the Roman Empire.

Looking at it from a spiritual point of view, the same spirit of rebellion, arrogance and futility which began at Babel was still going strong in Ancient Rome. And I think I see a revival of it in the European Union.