The Roman law, ius—iubeo, I command—is rooted in the same essential domain of the imperial, command, and obedience. Command is the ground of the essence of domination; which is why a clearer and more proper translation of imperium is "high command." To be superior is part and parcel of domination. And to be superior is only possible through constantly remaining in the higher position by way of a constant surmounting of others. Here we have the genuine actus of imperial action. In the essence of the constant surmounting there resides, as the valley amid the mountains, the holding down and the bringing to a fall. Mere "felling" in the sense of striking down is the coarsest way, but not the genuinely essential imperial way, of bringing to a fall. The great and most inner core of the essence of essential domination consists in this, that the dominated are not kept down, nor simply despised, but, rather, that they themselves are permitted, within the territory of the command, to offer their services for the continuation of the domination. The bringing to a fall aims at keeping the overthrown standing in a certain sense, though not standing high. Imperial bringing to a fall, fallere, is therefore a going after and a going around that lets stand. For the Romans, the essence of deceiving, of leading into error, of dissembling, and thus of ψεῦδος, is determined by fallere, by felling. The erroneous becomes falsum.
Supposing now that this distinction between the Greek ψεῦδος and the Roman falsum originates in other domains and has another weight than the distinction in the style of Greek and Roman pots and pans and spear points, and supposing that here a transformation takes place in the essential ground of the historicity of all history, then we need to reflect more thoughtfully on this Roman transformation of Greece. That the Occident still today, and today more decisively than ever, thinks the Greek world in a Roman way, i.e., in a Latin, i.e., in a Christian way (as paganism), i.e., in the Romanic, modern-European, way, is an event touching the most inner center of our historical existence. The political, which as πολιτικόν arose formerly out of the essence of the Greek πόλις, has come to be understood in the Roman way. Since the time of the Imperium, the Greek word "political" has meant something Roman. What is Greek about it now is only its sound.
c) The imperial in the form of the curial of the curia. The connection between verum and "true." The un-German meaning of "true" through the Roman-Christian verum. Verum: the established right as counter-word to falsum. Verum and a-pertum; λαθόν and its counterpart to ἀληθές.
How then how do matters stand as regards the essence of the false, the Roman falsum? A closer consideration of the process by which the Romans took up Greek poetry, thought, speech, and artistic production