By god, Socrates, I'll tell you exactly what I think [of getting old]. A number of us, who are more or less the same age, often get together in accordance with the old saying ["God ever draws together like to like"]. When we meet, the majority complain about the lost pleasures they remember from their youth, those of sex, drinking parties, feasts, and the other things that go along with them, and they get angry as if they had been deprived of important things and had lived well then but are now hardly living at all. Some others moan about the abuse heaped on old people by their relatives, and because of this they repeat over and over that old age is the cause of many evils. But I don't think they blame the real cause, Socrates, for if old age were really the cause, I should have suffered in the same way and so should everyone else of my age. But as it is, I've met some who don't feel like that in the least. Indeed, I was once present when someone asked the poet Sophocles: "How are you as far as sex goes, Sophocles? Can you still make love with a woman?" "Quiet, man," the poet replied, "I am very glad to have escaped from all that, like a slave who has escaped from a savage and tyrannical master." I thought at the time that he was right, and I still do, for old age brings peace and freedom from all such things. When the appetites relax and cease to importune us, everything Sophocles said comes to pass, and we escape from many mad masters. In these matters and in those concerning relatives, the real cause isn't old age, Socrates, but the way people live. If they are moderate and contented, old age, too, is only moderately onerous; if they aren't, both old age and youth are hard to bear.

Plato, Republic 329a-d

This is true for Empire as well. The height of Rome for instance was during the Pax Romana, the era of great Imperial order beginning with the reign of Caesar Augustus until the end of Marcus Aurelius'. Youth may be an idealistic state, but the result of a good youth is that later, in maturity, the ideal is actualized.

Nowhere does truth appear with such brutality as in war and justice. In the face of such overwhelming force the individual is cut out from being, divided from the simple movement of himself. The will is driven out into the elements.
In war, there are marching songs, drumming which gives order to thunder – certainty and direction are formed over and above the will, so that it does not separate from itself too early. Then, at that very moment of the highest decision, the music gives way to silence – an order appears before which no artistic understanding can express itself. Only fate and judgement remain. The will experiences its second death.
If truth wants to be known, one's perspective will be shaken to the core with the utmost violence, until this violence becomes the entirety of the world, until one is but a fissure within a storm, an earthquake, a collapsing mountain. A slow erosion may be the most forceful of all judgements. This is the essence of tragedy and apocalypse – the world is reversed, the brutal decision of law imposes itself upon all men until the final perspective can hold out. It is uprooted, freed.
Nemesis – behind her, the earth a spectre.

"All precipitable matter comes from a primary substance, or tenuity beyond conception, filling all space, the Akasha or luminiferous Ether, which is acted upon by the life giving Prana or creative force, calling into existence, in never-ending cycles all things and phenomena." -Nikola Tesla