Time & Perspective Quote by Martin Scorsese

There is something very Scorsese about treating Ancient History less like a museum wing and more like a crime scene. “Empires rise and fall” is the familiar sweep; the hook is the kicker: “sowing the seeds of their own destruction.” That phrase frames collapse not as bad luck or barbarians-at-the-gate melodrama, but as an inside job: the rot is structural, intimate, often invisible until it isn’t.

Coming from a director who’s built a career on charismatic systems eating themselves - crews, churches, corporations, nations - the line reads like both curiosity and self-portrait. Scorsese’s films are crowded with institutions that feel invincible right up until their own appetites, rituals, and justifications turn fatal. He’s drawn to the mechanics of loyalty: how belonging becomes complicity, how power turns into a moral anesthesia. In that sense, Ancient History isn’t escapism. It’s a long-view storyboard for the same human patterns he stages in more modern costumes.

The intent is almost pedagogical: study empires to learn the plot twist is always planted early. The subtext is a warning about narrative comfort. We want rise-and-fall arcs because they reassure us that history has a clean rhythm; Scorsese insists the rhythm is made by people repeating the same errors with better branding. Contextually, it lands in a contemporary moment obsessed with “decline” discourse. He’s not predicting a single collapse so much as pointing at the timeless culprit: success that confuses itself for permanence.