My spiders regularly pick up items which show how much the Classical languages have influenced our own, but rarely is an incipit of a piece so ‘classical’:
THE Mater Dei College (MDC) in Tubigon, Bohol conducted a gubernatorial candidates’ symposium on voters’ education.
… I usually just send these to trash, but it later mentions:
Three Bohol gubernatorial candidates, namely, Cesar Montano, lawyers Julius Caesar Herrera and Edgar Chatto were all present during the two-hour forum.
… a couple of Caesares holding a symposium in the forum under the auspices of some college for gubernatorial purposes … seems to be right out of our ancient sources, no? Then again, the Mater Dei wouldn’t be within the pomerium …
rogueclassicism 
To start with:
http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson021410.html
And why Rome fell, and why it looks like the USA.
But let me add another factor, mentioned by Gibbon. Crassus manipulated the grain market and bankrupted yeoman farmers all over Italy. The senators were delighted to see all this land come on the market to be consolidated into what we now call ‘agribusiness’. Land that had been worked by yeoman, who managed it sustainably for the benefit of sons to inherit, were replaced by impoverished imported workers who could care less.
It was the yeoman farmer sons who manned the Legions. But as Hanson notes, were replaced with immigrants. Gibbon notes how the standard of the Legions was reduced now that the supply of yeoman sons was gone, and how by the time of Claudius, the Praetorian guard was 100% Germans. “Das Kaiser” goes back a ways.
And today, Robt Kaplan, in his study of the military, “Imperial Grunts” reports half the Green Berets grew up on family farms. Which are but 1% of the total population. But I note the diff in childhood nutrition, that rather than being raised on sugar cereals, junkfood, and soda, they’re more likely to be raised on home grown ‘organic’ veggies. That still have all the trace minerals needed to maximize mental development.
Both Hanson and Gibbon note the competent emperors were raised- not in Rome, but out in the boonies on ‘family farms’. Where the boys got a far healthier diet then just the bread given to the masses in Rome. So, the masses now grow up to be far less rational voters, who support demagogues and cant deal with intractable political problems.