There's this funny thing about empires: They fall. In less than a week, Seattle Art Museum's exhibit of Roman art from the Louvre will close, and all those amazing statues, busts, columns, mosaics, frescoes and decorative objects -- nearly 200 pieces of art in all -- will be packed up and moved to the Oklahoma City Museum of Art. It's strange, this inexplicable attraction Oklahoma seems to have for the things Seattle holds dear. But I digress.

The good news is that SAM isn't going to render Caesar unto those hoop-sucking hayseeds without first throwing the Romans one hell of a going-away party -- a 35-hour colosseum-burner beginning at 10 a.m. Saturday the 10th and continuing all day and night through 9 p.m. on the 11th. The museum promises live music and entertainment, free gifts for Mom on Mother's Day, 'round-the-clock operation of the museum shop and the TASTE restaurant and even a 10 percent discount on merchandise for everyone who wears a toga.

The real attraction, however, is the art. This is much more than just a random collection of polished-marble crapola, presented without context; a real effort is made to present the pieces in context, and to give you a vivid picture of what ancient Rome was really like -- their religion, their capacity for making war, even their hairdos.

The wonder and awe are there, but it's tempered with an unexpected humanity. The Romans were just like us -- they loved big meals and professional sports, and some of them even lived in apartments. Looking at these pieces, you just know that the Romans would have gone crazy for iPhones, breakfast burritos and "Grand Theft Auto" if only they'd thought to invent them.

Come on, you've got to visit the Romans. Make it a late-night Saturday visit and meet the kind of people who would check out a museum at two in the morning. I can't speak to your feelings on this, but to my mind the mere idea of an all-night exhibition of Roman art at America's most modern big-city museum is just about the sexiest damn thing ever. Let's see Oklahoma City top this.

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