In his recent lecture at the Pontifical University of Comillas, upon receiving anhonorary doctorate , the former High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security of the European Union, Josep Borrell, stated that History was no longer made from Europe. Apart from 500 years ago, as he recalled, 2000 years ago, when the whole of Europe was Roman, Europe not only made history, but, it could be said, was history itself.

Looking at the reasons that made it possible in a shared framework can illuminate our polarized Europe in which, as he underlined, "history is a product of import". Although the Roman civilization was more a civilization of action than of reflection, pondering the keys to its success became a more or less frequent internship of the scholarship of the time, especially that which wrote in Greek language . Polybius, a writer co-opted in the 2nd century B.C. by the cultural circle of the Scipiones, was clear that the true cause of Rome's success was its "balanced" - we could translate as "moderate" - political constitution that combined the best of the three classical political forms: monarchy, aristocracy and democracy, and which made it possible to generate a common framework of Mediterranean coexistence in less than a century.

Later, a work of the second century A.D., the so-called Eulogy of Rome, by the Smyrna orator Elius Aristides, took stock of the merits of Rome, astonished that "a small city" - which barely exceeded a million inhabitants - governed "the whole earth" converted into a "common house", a global ecumenical entity. And he concluded that, with corruption and periods of polarization, Rome's success was essentially political, constitutional. Rulers who avoided "ruling badly" in order to inspire their subjects; leaders who sought to create conditions that - philanthropic or benevolent, in the original Greek text of this encomium - were favorable to rich and poor; and a clear respect for individual freedom that was not then at odds with "firmness and authority" were among the assets of the politics of the city of the Tiber.

This political order - which was forged law by law, without a joint organic document - was thus presented as a "balanced" constitution, forged in consensus, in "concord" - the expression is from Titus Livy -, in which "citizens, without exception, in public and in private, assist in the fulfillment of the decrees promulgated" and that, in a clear complementarity between the powers of the state and individual initiative, motivated officials and men of the administration to exercise their ministry with a vocation of service and social improvement, something that, for Elio Aristídes, had "no parallel with any of the human constitutions". This was how Rome made history, generated cohesion, created a sense of belonging that was not only cultural but also political with an exemplary involvement of the people in the election of the best magistrates and in the voting of the best laws, something that had never before been known in the West. This capacity, obviously, was not infallible since also the poet Juvenal censured that, in the middle of the first century A.D., only the distribution of grain and the circus games were of interest to a people that, in Rome, was "the arbiter that grants honors or inflicts punishments, the only prop of dynasties and constitutions", according to Polybius.

It does not seem that today's domestic and foreign political courses are exactly those that made Rome, and with it Europe, great. But 2000 years later, Roman political internship continues to nourish the hope that, as the Emperor Claudius reminded the senators in 48 A.D., what we now consider ancient is still valid and still necessary, at least as a model to turn to and draw inspiration from. We need it and we need it if we want to return, effectively, to make, from Europe, History.