[ it is odd, but it's a comfortable odd, as the days grow long. Nero's been here about a week and a half--maybe more by now, already--and Vergil's not even trying to think about the fact that Nero has his own home, his own place to return to at some point. This was just how the house was now, and he was used to it. ]

That is exactly what I am saying. It is a rather critical view on it, to a point where it bothered quite a few nationalists who could not bear to see their precious colonizing homeland being called out for the ... ...trouble they caused back when the world was newer than it is today. [ there's an obvious pause in his speech, where Vergil CLEARLY had struggled to come up with a word to use there. if it was italian... he likely would have used a much ruder word. ]

The play of sport is in this book as well, of course. See, the easiest way for the higher-class to control the lower-class is to enact a sort of war between those under you. Not a war that's played in actual battle, but one that is distracting enough that they become completely engaged in it so those in power above them keep profiting off their suffering, or continue building a structure around them which they cannot escape.

[... never in his life did he think he'd be having THIs kind of conversation with NERO of all people.

The man, oddly, has his full attention, now. ]

We go through the same sort of struggles in this day and age, even if people are blind to it.