Where Rome fell, New York endures

AFTER the attack on the World Trade Center 10 years ago, people sought to put it in context.

They wanted, as all humans do, to understand how and why such a devastating event could have happened.

Some have argued that 9/11 marked a new era in history, while others, such as Richard Haass, who writes today as part of the Irish Examiner’s coverage of the tenth anniversary, have argued that it was just an event. But we are a species looks for patterns, so we looked to history for parallels.