The Aztecs, the Romans, and the Ottoman Turks

In each case, you've got an ancient culture of almost unbelievable richness and spontaneous creativity that just seems to spring right out of the earth. Rite these young cultures all collapse or exhaust themselves through internacine conflict, and then they are inherited by people that they consider to be a kind of rough barbarians. We have a tendency to want to reduce everything down to a list of rules, but it just doesn't work like that with a system that's still in the process of becoming. Now i'm going to slow things down a little bit and take us into the final stretch of this introduction about their mythology. One of the most useful ways to triangulate the similarities and differences between cultures