Ancient Rome -, Ancient Rome, the period between the 8th and 1st centuries BC in which Rome grew from a tiny settlement to an emerging empire while developing from monarchy to a republican form of government.
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Rome |
Nearly 3,000 years ago shepherds first built huts on the hills beside the Tiber River in central Italy. These encampments gradually grew and merged to form the city of Rome. Rome’s history is unique in comparison to other large urban centers like London, England, or Paris, France, because it encompasses more than the story of a single city. In ancient times Rome extended its political control over all of Italy and eventually created an empire that stretched from England to North Africa and from the Atlantic Ocean to Arabia. The political history of Rome is marked by three periods. In the first period from 753–509 BC, the city developed from a village to a city ruled by kings. Then, the Romans expelled the kings and established the Roman Republic during the period from 509–27 BC. Following the collapse of the republic, Rome fell under the domination of emperors and flourished for another five centuries as the Roman Empire from 27 BC–AD 476. This article begins the discussion of ancient Rome’s history with the city’s legendary founder, Romulus, and ends when Augustus becomes the first emperor of imperial Rome, in 27 BC.
Modern motion pictures and television often portray the ancient Romans as military conquerors as well as ardent pleasure seekers, and there is some truth to those images. Their armies did brutally subjugate the Mediterranean world. Today statues of native leaders such as Vercingetorix in France or Arminius in Germany honor those patriots who battled against Roman domination in Europe, just as Christians honor early disciples martyred by the Romans. The ancient Romans also did enjoy lavish and sometimes even cruel entertainments that included gladiatorial combats, chariot races, and animal hunts in the arena.
Yet these same Romans created a civilization that has shaped subsequent world history for 2,000 years. The remains of vast building projects, including roads and bridges, enormous baths and aqueducts, temples and theaters, as well as entire towns in the North African desert, still mark Rome’s former dominion. Cities throughout Western Europe stand on Roman foundations.
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Rome ruins |
The Romans also had enormous cultural influence. Their language, Latin, gave rise to languages spoken by a billion people in the world today. Many other languages—including Polish, Turkish, and Vietnamese—use the Roman alphabet. The Romans developed a legal system that remains the basis of continental European law, and they brought to portraiture a lifelike style that forms the basis of the realistic tradition in Western art. The founders of the American government looked to the Roman Republic as a model. Modern political institutions also reflect Roman origins: senators, bicameral legislatures, judges, and juries are all adapted from the Roman system. In addition, despite recent modernization, the Roman Catholic Church still uses symbols and ritual derived largely from the ancient Romans.
Contrary to popular image, the Roman state was not continuously at war. Roman armies most often served on the frontiers of the empire while Roman lands nearer the Mediterranean were more peaceful and more culturally and economically interconnected than in any subsequent era. The Romans extended citizenship far beyond the people of Italy to Greeks and Gauls, Spaniards and Syrians, Jews and Arabs, North Africans and Egyptians. The Roman Empire also became the channel through which the cultures and religions of many peoples were combined and transmitted via medieval and Renaissance Europe to the modern world.
EARLY HISTORY
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Mount Vesuvius looms above the ruins of Pompeii, one of the ancient
cities that was destroyed by an eruption of the volcano in ad 79.
Volcanic activity also had some benefits, as ash from Vesuvius and
other volcanoes along the western coast of Italy made the soils
of the region more fertile for agricultural development. |
The land and environment of Italy provided the Romans with a secure home from which to expand. Italy is a peninsula surrounded on three sides by the sea and protected to the north by the Alps mountain range. The climate is generally temperate, although summers are hot in the south. Rome was part of a region near the Tiber River in central Italy that was called Latium (now part of Lazio). Its Latin-speaking inhabitants originally joined the waves of Indo-European peoples who crossed the Adriatic Sea from the Balkan Peninsula and settled in central Italy about 1000 BC.
To the north, the Etruscans had established a vigorous civilization (see Etruscan Civilization) in the region called Etruria. These people probably originated in Asia Minor and spoke an entirely different language than neighboring Indo-European peoples. In southern Italy and on the large island of Sicily, colonists fleeing from famine and political conflict in Greece founded new cities between 800 and 500 BC. The city of Naples derives its name from the Greek words Nea Polis (New City).
Volcanoes like Mount Etna and Mount Vesuvius dot the western coast of Italy and its offshore islands, leaving sections of Latium, Campania near Naples, and Sicily fertile from the residue of volcanic ash. The mountains were once rich in timber and had meadows where sheep and goats grazed in the warmest months before they were driven to the plains for the winter. There was salt along the Tiber River and large deposits of iron were located in Etruria. North-south land routes allowed for overland trade, and so commerce as well as agriculture, pasturage, and metalwork drove the economy.
LEGEND OF EARLY ROME
The story of Rome’s founding survives only in primitive myths and meager archaeological remains. An island in the Tiber River afforded the easiest crossing point, and archaeology shows that some Latins established a settlement on the nearby Palatine Hill; perhaps they hoped to rob, or collect tolls, from traders crossing the river on their way from Etruria to southern Italy.
Roman myth created a more glorious tale of the city’s beginnings. These legends trace Rome’s origins to Romulus, a son of the god Mars and also a descendent of the Trojan prince Aeneas, who brought his people to Italy after the city of Troy burned. Romulus and his twin brother Remus were grandsons of King Numitor of the ancient city of Alba Longa in Latium. Numitor was deposed by his brother, who also tried to kill the twins by having them thrown into the Tiber. Instead, the infants washed ashore and were suckled by a she-wolf who became—and remains today—the symbol of Rome. When the brothers grew up, they restored Numitor to his throne and then founded a new city on the Palatine Hill above the river.
There are no contemporary written records of the Roman monarchy, so the stories of the early kings are primarily preserved in the works of historians Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who wrote seven centuries after the time of Romulus. These legends and even some of the kings themselves are probably mythical creations, and the dates that they reigned are either inventions or rough approximations. Nevertheless, such myths often contain bits of historical information that are passed on and transformed through repeated telling.
LEGENDARY PERIOD OF KINGS
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The ancient Italian port city of Ostia dates from the reign of Ancus Marcius
(640-617 bc). Ostia was the terminal for grain shipments from Sicily and Sardinia
and was also a naval base for Rome. It was destroyed in the 9th century
but was active again in the Middle Ages. The well-preserved ruins
make it an important historical site. |
The Romans believed that Romulus and Remus founded Rome in 753 BC, and that Romulus erected a wall around the site of the new city. When Remus tried to assert his leadership by scornfully leaping over the inadequate wall, Romulus killed him and became the city’s first king, giving it his name. He then invited his neighbors east of the Tiber River, the Sabines, to a festival and kidnapped the Sabine women—called the “rape of the Sabine women”—to provide the wives necessary for the Roman population to grow. Other legends about Romulus include his mysterious disappearance in a storm cloud, an event that led the Romans to proclaim him a god.
The second king of Rome, Numa Pompilius, was a Sabine who was regarded as especially just and devoted to religion. Many of Rome’s religious traditions were later attributed to Numa, including the selection of virgins to be priestesses of the goddess Vesta. He also established a calendar to differentiate between normal working days and those festival days sacred to the gods on which no state business was allowed. His peaceful reign lasted from 715 to 673 BC.
Under Tullus Hostilius (672–641 BC) the Romans waged an aggressive foreign policy and began to expand their lands by the conquest of nearby cities like Alba Longa. When the warlike King Hostilius contracted the plague, the people thought it was a punishment for the neglect of the gods so they named Ancus Marcius, a highly religious grandson of Numa, as the fourth king (640–617 BC). Marcius founded the port of Ostia at the mouth of the Tiber.
A wealthy man from the Etruscan city of Tarquinii, Lucius Tarquinius Priscus, came to live in Rome and became such a favorite of King Ancus that he managed to succeed him even though he was considered a foreigner. Tarquinius, who ruled between 616 and 579 BC, was said to have drained the marshes between the hills and paved an area for the market place that became known as the Roman Forum. His successor, Servius Tullius (578–535 BC), organized the Roman army into groups of 100 men called centuries and was said to have built a new wall around the city. The cruel seventh king, Lucius Tarquinus Superbus or Tarquin the Proud (534–510 BC), was expelled in 510 after his son cruelly raped Lucretia, a virtuous Roman matron and the wife of his kinsman Collatinus.
Archaeology shows that there is some truth to these legends. There were huts on the Palatine Hill above the Tiber River by the 8th century BC, and the evidence of both burials and cremations indicate that two different cultures like the Romans and the Sabines had intermingled. The Forum was first covered with a pebble pavement about 575 BC and its draining dates to the period of Etruscan kings. On the other hand, archaeologists believe that the earliest wall around the city was built in the 4th century BC—two centuries after the reign of Servius Tullius. Even if the names, dates, and legends of early Rome remain highly questionable, remnants of Roman material culture help to document significant transformations in Roman life.
LIFE IN EARLY ROME
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Within the Roman family, women played an important role in childrearing
and the management of the household. Part of their duties included control over
slaves who performed many domestic tasks. This scene from a Roman mural
found in the ancient city of Herculaneum depicts several women with their
slave hairdressers. Roman women were noted for their strength and loyalty,
but also for their social independence. |
Beginning with the era of the kings, the Roman family mirrored the patriarchal nature of the Roman state in the absolute and lifelong power (patria potestas) that the father (paterfamilias) exercised over his wife, children, and slaves. Each father was the priest of the cult of his ancestors and of the hearth gods of the family. Ancestor worship focused on the genius of the family (gens) which was the inner spirit passed on from one generation to another. Their genius bound Romans to their ancestors and their descendents in a single continuous community. The primary purpose of Roman marriage was to produce children, and all legitimate offspring belonged only to the father’s family. In event of divorce, children remained with the father. For centuries a father had the right to abandon an infant at birth. Usually this unwanted child was a deformed boy—or a girl whose family wished to avoid paying a dowry. The law even allowed a father to execute a grown son for treasonous behavior.
Despite the father’s extreme authority, Roman writings provide evidence of warm family feeling. Parents were closely involved with the education of their children; Roman boys would accompany their fathers to the forum to observe public meetings as preparation for citizenship. When members of the Roman nobility died, their sons delivered speeches in praise of the deceased and also their ancestors, while masks of these loved ones were displayed. This custom helped to sustain family pride and cultivate family myths, but as the statesman Cicero later commented, “the history of Rome has been falsified by these speeches for there is much in them that never happened.”
Within the Roman family, there was also much greater intimacy between a husband and wife than in Greece, where men and women saw relatively little of each other. After marriage, a Roman girl left her father’s authority to enter the household of her husband (or father-in-law, if he was still alive). A girl was usually between 14 and 17 years of age at her wedding, while her husband was often in his mid-20s. Young Roman children would not be forced to enter marriage unwillingly, but few could refuse parental arrangements. In early Rome divorce was rare and only happened if the husband desired it; later, divorce became more frequent among the upper classes. A shortage of women resulted from the abandonment of infant girls and deaths during childbirth. Roman women could almost always find husbands, even for second or third marriages. No unmarried women were recorded among the aristocratic class in Republican Rome.
Roman women could attend public and private banquets and enjoyed far more social freedom than their counterparts in Greece. Mothers were in charge of domestic servants and played an important role in child rearing, providing strong moral guidance to sons as well as daughters. According to earliest Roman law, daughters shared equally with sons in the estate of a father who died without a will, and they were usually included in their father’s bequests. The moral strength and loyalty of Roman women became an important theme in literature as wives stood by husbands through civil wars and exile.
SLAVERY
The Roman household included slaves who labored beside the family in the fields. The earliest slaves were poor peasants who were reduced to slavery by debt. Slavery had no ethnic or racial basis: birth, conquest, or debt condemned men and women to that condition. Early slaves were thought to be part of the family and were treated reasonably well. Slaves were permitted to keep some private savings (peculium), with which they might eventually purchase their freedom. After emancipation a freed slave became a Roman citizen. Freedmen often remained with families as paid laborers on farms or in households.
It was only much later, in the 2nd century BC, that huge numbers of foreign captives were brought to Rome to work on immense plantations. Romans then began to treat slaves with a cruelty that eventually provoked several terrible slave revolts. One of the most famous leaders of slave uprisings was Spartacus, an army deserter who was sold into slavery as a gladiator. He and his followers defeated Roman forces several times, including a series of battles known as the Third Servile War, or Gladiators’ War, before Spartacus was killed. Despite insurrections, slavery survived as an institution throughout Roman history.
RELIGIOUS PRACTICE
The earliest Romans were primarily an agricultural people and focused their religion on spirits who, according to their beliefs, presided over nearly every aspect of the natural world, including springs, forests, and rivers. Some of these deities survived over time to become the gods honored with small shrines at crossroads throughout Italy. Early superstitions, such as the magical power of the evil eye, also continued long after the Romans introduced new religious practices. Some taboos, such as those that prohibited the high priest of the god Jupiter from touching a horse or dog, were mysterious even to the Romans themselves and were attributed to the remote past. To these primitive beliefs the Romans added such Etruscan practices as interpreting the will of the gods by the flight of birds (auspices) or by the study of an animal’s liver.
The Etruscans had also adopted gods from the Greek pantheon, or family of gods, and many of these divinities were passed on to the Romans. Zeus, the Greek god of the skies, for example, had a counterpart in the Roman god Jupiter, while Hera, the wife of Zeus and queen of the gods, became the Roman goddess Juno. Other Greek gods with Roman equivalents included Aphrodite, the goddess of love, known to the Romans as Venus, and the Greek god of war, Ares, who was called Mars by the Romans.
The ancients believed that religion held the Roman state together. Kings, and later civil magistrates, were obligated to ensure that the community remained at peace with the gods. Public pageantry emphasized the importance of devotion to the gods and included prayers, festivals, and sacrifices. A certain element of reciprocity existed in religion, as the Romans expected their gods to respond to offerings. The Latin phrase quid pro quo (one thing for another) which described such an exchange is still used today. Gradually, groups of priests and priestesses took responsibility for the worship of specific gods and goddesses. The most notable of these groups were the vestal virgins who served Vesta, the goddess of the hearth
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The Romans, like the Etruscans before them, adopted some of their gods from
the early Greeks. Jupiter, shown here, was the head of the Roman pantheon,
or family of gods, and was the counterpart of the Greek god Zeus. The Romans
worshiped Jupiter as the master of rain, thunder, and lightning, but also
considered him the protector of Rome. |
The Roman calendar was fundamentally a religious document. Some months were named after gods, including January for Janus, who presided over beginnings, and March for Mars, the war god. Other months were merely numbered. The Roman calendar originally began with March, so the seventh month, September, took its name from the Latin word septem for seven. The name of the eighth month, or October, derived from octo for eight, and others followed suit.
The Romans also named the days of the week for gods. The Romance languages continue to use Roman gods for these days, while in English the names of their ancient Germanic counterparts are used. Hence Friday, the day of the goddess of love, Venus, is vendredi in French, but takes its English name from Freia, the German goddess of love. In 45 BC when Julius Caesar acted as the dictator of Rome, he revised the calendar to reflect the solar year, making it 365 days long and adding an extra day every fourth or leap year. See also Calendar: The Roman Calendar
Like the calendar, Roman religion did not remain static. The Romans adopted new gods whose specific powers were needed by the people. At the siege of the Etruscan city of Veii in 396 BC, the Romans tried to entice Juno, the patron goddess of the Veians, to their side. When Veii fell, the Romans claimed that the goddess had deserted the people of that city and so they erected their own temple to Juno in Rome. Further Roman conquests brought other gods into its pantheon. This flexibility in Roman religion mirrored a similarly flexible attitude toward political institutions during the era of the Roman Republic.
POLITICAN INSTITUTION
The early Romans were a practical and conservative people whose political organization evolved very slowly; as a result, there was considerable continuity from the time of the monarchy to the republic. The Roman constitution always remained unwritten and was changed less frequently by law than by custom. Just as Roman religion retained inexplicable rituals and taboos, outdated political institutions were rarely abolished. The Romans preferred to retain familiar institutions and procedures while adapting them to the changing circumstances of a growing state. For example, the interrex was originally an official whose name derived from his duty of performing religious ceremonies in the interregnum or period between the reigns of different kings. The interrex survived in the republic as an official who presided over elections when both consuls had died or been killed.
Early Rome was ruled by kings who had wide military and judicial powers and represented the people to their gods. After the death of Romulus, the king was selected by the Senate (derived from the Latin senex, which means “old man”), a governmental body comprised of the heads of noble families. The Senate also advised the king. This institution survived into the republic and became the dominant political force through which the noble, landowning families controlled the religious, political, and economic life of the new aristocratic state. Under senatorial leadership Rome conquered Italy and much of the Mediterranean world.
Under the monarchy, another governmental organization, the Assembly of the People, included all male Roman citizens. Members of the Assembly were divided into 30 clans (curiae). In earliest times the Assembly met to witness the announcement of a new king or a declaration of war. Eventually each clan could cast a single vote to approve wills and adoptions, both of which were important for the transfer of land.
BUILDING PROJECT
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The Roman Forum was founded at the beginning of the Roman republic (around 500 bc),
and it continued to develop into the late 2nd century ad. Among the ruins seen
here are the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina (since converted into a church,
background, left), the foundations of the Basilica Julia (foreground, center), and
the three remaining columns of the Temple of Castor and Pollux (background, right). |
The earliest remnants of buildings at Rome are the postholes of huts built on the Palatine Hill. By the 6th century BC, the Romans had drained the swampy area between the Palatine and Capitoline hills and then paved it. They used this area as the main forum where public meetings, markets, religious ceremonies, and burials were held. The Romans also constructed temples and some houses in the Forum, as well as an impressive drainage system, which is still visible where the main sewer empties into the Tiber River. They built the first bridges across the Tiber during this early period of the kings, although most of the surviving stone bridges are from later periods. Contemporary sources suggest that both Romulus and Servius built walls around the early site of Rome, but archaeology has not yet uncovered any walls constructed before the 4th century BC. By the end of the monarchy, the villages on the hills had added an urban center and a group of public buildings.
ROMAN REPUBLIC
The historian Livy (59 BC–AD 17) described the foundation of the Roman Republic (republic is from the Latin res publica, which means “that which belongs to the people”) as a morality tale. In his account, valiant Roman patriots under the leadership of Lucius Junius Brutus overthrew the cruel foreign tyrant Tarquin in 509 BC. The truth was certainly more complex. The Etruscans faced increasing military threats from the Gauls, a Celtic people to the north, and from the Greeks in the south. The fall of the Etruscan kings was part of a much larger story, but only the heroic Roman version survives.
The Roman aristocrats provided the leadership for the establishment of the Roman Republic, and they continued to dominate it for centuries. During the five centuries of the republic, Rome grew from a small city of 10,000 into a great cosmopolitan metropolis of 1 million whose empire of 15 million subjects encompassed the entire Mediterranean basin. Social and political conflict inevitably arose as the conservative Romans attempted to keep their old values and institutions in place while exercising their authority over subjects of many different nationalities.
The Romans adapted to changing circumstances with a great deal of political struggle but relatively little internal violence. Despite the eventual collapse of the republican system of government in the 1st century BC, it was a remarkable achievement both in its length and scope. Even the collapse of the republic did not lessen Rome’s domination of the Mediterranean world, for its empire remained largely intact for another five centuries under the rule of the emperors.
CONQUEST, THEN COLLAPS
In the early years, the Roman Empire kept on growing. But later Roman emperors found the lands of the empire too vast and too varied to control. In ad 284, the Roman Empire was divided among four rulers. Emperor Constantine united it again in ad 324. Constantine became a Christian, and gave Christianity a favored position in the empire.
Soon after Constantine’s rule, the empire was attacked by fierce tribes from the north and east. Their raids caused terror and food shortages. In ad 395, the empire split into an Eastern Empire and a Western Empire. The wealthy Eastern Empire was ruled from Constantinople (now Istanbul). It remained strong. But poor and weak Western emperors could not defend their land. The last Western emperor was forced out of Rome by invaders in ad 476. The Eastern Empire survived as the Byzantine Empire.
The fall of the Roman Empire in 476 did not mean the end of Roman civilization. The Latin language lived on, and it developed into modern European languages such as French, Spanish, and Italian. Roman art, buildings, and writings influenced later cultures.