World History

Unit 2: Civilizations of the Mediterranean World

Chapter 7: The Roman World

Mon, Oct 21, 2013

15. Tue, Oct 22, 2013

Rome — the first truly imperial state of the West, is a complex nexus of historical reality and myth. A small town, legendarily composed of refugees and fugitives from society, it became a player in central Italy, then eclipsed the Etruscan overlords, then became dominant up and down the Italian peninsula, and eventually came to dominate the Mediterranean Sea and much of Europe. It imposed peace and law wherever it went — sometimes with almost unimaginable brutality. It held to some of the highest standards of honorable human behavior, and yet Rome has come virtually to iconize degradation of every known sort.

For good or ill, the West will never be free of Rome's influence. The language of the Latini who originally settled the area — a splinter of the family of Italic languages, which included also Oscan and Umbrian — became the basis of a majority of the languages of Western Europe and influenced many others; the author Waquet has called the language itself "the Empire of a Sign". The state that was founded in about 750 B.C. in Italy finally expired over two millennia later when Constantinople fell to the Turks in A.D. 1453. The long memory of Rome in Europe continues to linger for good and for ill. Charlemagne in 800 A.D. was crowned the Holy Roman Emperor — theoretically an extension of the original; the Holy Roman Empire in some form or other lasted until the beginning of the twentieth century. The King Arthur legends set down by Thomas Malory in the 1470s in England recall the strain of Britain's separation from Rome a millennium earlier. It's not entirely an honorable roll call: Hitler characterized his regime as the Third Reich — the Third Empire, in other words — of which Rome was the first.

During the time of Roman supremacy, massive changes occurred in world populations; there was for perhaps the first time vast — nearly global — blending and movement of peoples from one part of the world to another, and association with different tribal groups to forge a unitary entity. In the heyday of the Roman empire, travelers could cross Roman territories in relative safety — more safely than they can cross some of those territories today. The highest point of Roman rule also saw the birth, ministry, death, and resurrection of Christ. Rome imposed a different concept of statehood, citizenship, and law than had ever been known in the world before, and those are still with us. The Roman engineers created buildings and systems that remain operational to this day, and a network of roads that can still be seen in the farthest provinces they reached.

Roman culture has been seen by some as the highest ever seen in the world, and by others as barbarous and soulless. Many who aren't willing to go to either extreme still consider it distinctly inferior to that of the Greeks. Roman poetry, Roman art, and Roman oratory are all derivative from Greek models, and even at their best they show a strain and tightness that fails to capture some of the almost unconscious exuberance of the Greeks. What's more, they knew that; but it was something that at least some of them were able to accept. The Roman poet Vergil — himself writing in a derivative Greek poetic form — wrote most famously:

Excudent alii spirantia mollius aera
(credo equidem), vivos ducent de marmore vultus,
orabunt causas melius, caelique meatus
describent radio et surgentia sidera dicent:
tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento
(hae tibi erunt artes), pacique imponere morem,
parcere subiectis et debellare superbos.

Others will more elegantly hammer out the breathing bronzes
(I do believe), and bring forth living faces from the marble;
others will plead cases better, and will define the courses
of the heavens with an outstretched line, predict the rising stars;
but you, Roman, remember — for these are your skills — to rule
the nations with just law, to crown peace with decorum,
to spare the subjects and battle down the proud.

• Once again, geography is one of our favorite and most reliable starting places: how did the landscape of Italy and its position in the Mediterranean affect the unfolding pattern of its growth in power? How did they affect the economic realities and the political realities that pushed it forward? (Though as usual it doesn't have a great deal to do with the text, the map on p. 149 is reasonably interesting here: spend a little time with it.)
• What were some of the social and political problems that Rome encountered in its rise from village to global power, and how did it meet those challenges?
• It might be useful to spend a little time talking about the Roman vocabulary of power. Even those who haven't studied Latin should find some interest in the range of different words that come into play — each with a somewhat different sense:
  • potestas: capacity, ability
  • imperium: duly constituted right of command
  • auctoritas: inherent authority of a person, based on who he was and what he had done
  • vis: force (often implicitly in a violent sense)
  • ius: right — the legal right to do something (distinct, however, from lex, a different word for law)
• How did the Roman Republican form of government encapsulate and balance the forms we saw outlined by Aristotle above?

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