Rome is the functioning imperial capital that becomes legible as inadequate only when a different order is projected against it. In Sartre’s account, its significance lies less in a catalogue of defects than in the contrast between what exists and what consciousness can imagine in its place: Rome can be experienced as a center of power, yet judged insufficient only from the standpoint of a future not yet realized. The city thus anchors an account of action, political change, and the freedom through which history acquires meaning.

Imperial Capital and the Project of Constantinople

The example begins with Constantine establishing himself at Byzantium. His intended act was to create a new residence for emperors in the Orient; he did not foresee the full historical consequences attributed to the foundation, including Byzantium’s emergence as a center of Greek culture and language, a development that would ultimately provoke a schism in the Christian Church and contribute to weakening the Roman Empire. The distinction matters: an act is intentional insofar as it realizes a project, not because its author has foreseen every consequence. Constantine’s purpose is sufficient to make the establishment of the new residence an action.

Rome supplies the political point of comparison that gives the project its direction. In Sartre’s formulation, the intention to provide a rival for Rome presupposes an apprehended lack: Rome has no counterweight, and a Christian city is imagined as an answer to the character of a still profoundly pagan capital. Constantinople becomes intelligible as an act because the conception of a new city precedes or organizes the steps that bring it about. The imagined city is not merely pictured as possible; it is apprehended as desirable and not yet realized. Rome’s role is therefore relational: it is the existing center against which a different center can be posited as needed.

How a City Becomes Inadequate

The account resists treating political defects as self-evident properties of the world. The imperial system with Rome as its capital functions positively and can be described as it is. To say that taxes are collected is to report a state of affairs; to say that they are collected badly is to measure that state against an end that is not itself present in the facts. Likewise, Rome’s vulnerability to invasion, its unsuitable geographical position for a Mediterranean empire threatened by barbarians, and the corruption of its morals are not simply positive features waiting to be read off the city. They appear as failures only in relation to standards of security, location, or religious diffusion that exceed the existing situation.

The same structure governs Sartre’s example of the spread of Christianity. Reports might establish a rate of conversion, but calling that rate insufficient means measuring it against a limit conceived in advance, such as a desired rate of religious conversions or a desired level of public morality. The judgment does not merely describe what is happening; it apprehends what is missing from what happens. Even a severely impoverished situation, Sartre argues, cannot by itself disclose an ideal alternative. Like the most beautiful girl, which can offer only what she has, the situation presents only what it is until a project allows it to be surpassed toward what it is not.

This dependence on a projected alternative explains why inhabitants may fail to experience political or economic hardship as a reason for action. Immersed in a historical situation, people can apprehend it in its fullness of being and find it difficult to imagine existing otherwise. Sartre rejects the explanation that they simply become accustomed to hardship: the problem is that its limits have not been detached from their condition and illuminated by a different possible arrangement. A new conception changes the light in which existing suffering appears. Only when another state of affairs can be conceived can present troubles become recognizable as unbearable and motivate action.

Rome in the Mutable Past

Rome also appears as a historical object whose identity is sharply particular without having a permanently settled meaning. Sartre compares the Arch of Titus and the Column of Trajan: to a Roman or a tourist who attends to them, each is an individualized reality, even though the monuments’ historical meanings may evolve elsewhere. The past is not vague simply because it remains in suspense. What a person sees is definite; what that past will mean, and whether the present interpretation will be confirmed, remains dependent on projects that have not yet been realized.

The city’s place among the dead and remembered collectivities makes this dependence visible on a larger scale. Byzantium, Rome, and Athens appear as immense necropolises that can be approached casually or scrutinized closely, from near or far, according to the position the observer takes. A person’s relation to such historical collectivities is not merely passive: projects organize the dead as anonymous masses or as distinct individuals, establish distances from them, and determine which past enterprises receive particular attention. Rome can thus function both as an imperial center in the example of Constantine and as one of the historically constituted worlds through which later observers locate themselves.

Historical Meaning and Freedom

Rome’s recurrence links political action to Sartre’s account of freedom. A projected ideal makes a deficiency visible; that apprehension of lack helps organize an intentional act; and later projects, in turn, give the resulting history its meaning. Constantine need not have intended Byzantium’s eventual cultural and ecclesiastical consequences for his act to be intelligible. Nor does a monument’s or city’s particular past become indeterminate because later observers can reinterpret it. Its details may be precise while the authority of any present interpretation to stand as final remains in question.

As a result, Rome is not simply a backdrop or a fixed standard. It is an existing order that can be treated as adequate in its own positive functioning, criticized against values that do not reside in the facts alone, and recalled as a definite but revisable historical reality. The city’s several roles—capital, rival to be answered, and remembered center among the dead—show how the same place can be caught up in distinct projects. In Sartre’s analysis, this changing significance does not erase Rome’s reality; it reveals how consciousness and freedom make its insufficiencies, historical weight, and relation to the future intelligible.