Capital Cities

     Although I spent the first 45 years of my life in Washington, D.C., one of the things I would do if I were elected President would be to weigh the option of moving the capital out to somewhere in the country's midsection where it belongs.  D.C. wouldn't necessarily lose all its utility, and in the meantime it could be renamed  "Monument City."
      It's very strange that events conspired to leave the nation with its capital city sitting on  one extreme edge like that, so distant from most of the other parts of the country.  Most other countries have done a better job of trying to have a centrally located capital.   But in 1776 who was to know that the U.S. would get its britches enlarged so much, especially because of the invention of places as unlikely as Hawaii, Alaska, and especially California?
      Lest the forefathers be charged with not being as foresighted in geography as they were in other respects, let it be noted that they did centralize a little, but mostly in the wrong direction, when they shifted the government southward from Philadelphia to the Potomac River, which, as it happened, was right next door to the plantation belonging to the winning Revolutionary War general, G. Washington.
     Ancient Rome was the model for so much that those founders decided to do, but not in the capital city's shape.   Instead of Rome's circle, D.C. was laid out in a diamond shape, with each of the four sides extending 10 miles, except that today that shape looks like something took a big bite out of the bottom corner -- the result of some "Indian-giving" by the home state of the Father of the Country.
     I think Ed Gibbon was a bit envious of Rome for its population.   Apparently in its heyday Rome had well over a million people, which made it larger than any European city of his time, which was in 1776.   But I think that not much later, in the next century, his town, London, reached that "magic number."
     I wonder where Rome put all those people, between all the public buildings and forums and temples and the huge villas and palaces.   Apparently they had a lot of what we would call tenements or apartment buildings.   These buildings had a height limitation of 70 feet, because apparently they weren't built with the same care as the Pantheon and suffered quite a few collapses.   Similarly, Washington, D.C. also has a height limitation, or at least it did during my days there, but for a different reason, having to to do with not wanting to subtract from the aspect created by all the various monuments and what-not.
     I've always found the "chewed diamond" shape and that height limitation of D.C. handy whenever I've tried to picture a million or more people.   Even today, D.C. proper doesn't have that many citizens, though of course with all its deeply encircling suburbs, it is part of a metropolitan area that totally dwarfs Ancient Rome.
     Still its impressive to think that any city of such antique times could accommodate that many people.
     The Romans themselves never seemed to have gotten around to conducting an accurate, scientific census, though you would think that that would have been easy for them, considering all their incredible engineering feats.
      Instead it got to the point where Elagabalus -- admittedly one of the most way-out of their emperors -- is said to have tried to determine Rome's population by checking out spiderwebs.
      Well, I guess that's one way!