Part of the reason I stopped reporting was the fact that I have found Rome to the south me and kind of written this game off. But there are some encouraging signs, so let me give you an update.
This is my empire at the current point of the game. I got Stonehenge and just this turn landed Islam in Big Brother. Sort-term I would prefer Minitrue for a better northern border but long-term Big Brother would be a powerful cottage city which synergizes greatly with the Shrine. I forgot to take a picture of demos but I am first in GDP, next to last in power and middling in all other relevant stuff. GDP lead is pretty dominant however, it is not just the effect of henge and Holy City.
And this is Roman Empire.
You cannot see it here but Rome is actually built on plains hill sheep: I assume Xist moved there because he wanted Gems in BFC. He also lucked into getting himself Copper in the capital which, I think turned out to be his doom. Observe this:
This is a much older picture made on T47. Observe that he uses an Axe for scouting (!) and judging by how far it is from Roman territory plus the fact that it is actually going back, I think we can assume it was built at some absurdly early date. And it was not his only axe at that point, I noticed at least one more inside his territory.
If this axe went north instead of south, I would most likely join Dreylin in lurker's thread by this point but I won 50/50 roll. And now going heavy on axes early starts to bite xist in the ass. As you can notice, he is seriously behind. Also, he made a classical noob mistake of building no spears. Cumae us currently defended by two axes and I am itching to raze it. An even better idea, however, is to put my GDP towards horse archers and just eliminate Rome entirely, so this is my current plan.
To be sure, there are severe costs associated with this idea.
1) I don't have Sailing and as I need to go with this plan ASAP, I don't really have time to research it.
2) I will have to sit at four cities until I start taking more from Rome. This is because I need my eonomy but also because I literally don't have good places to expand to without Sailing. There is a spot 1S from Ivory that I can settle if I raze Cumae but it is a very slow city.
3) I want Colossus really badly here but if I invest in this rush, it becomes extremely unlikely I will be able to get it. Frankly, this last consideration almost made me call off the attack but ultimately I want Rome too much.