When was ancient rome significant

The Romans developed the principle that all citizens were equal in the eyes of the law, and that their persons and property were protected from arbitrary demands by the state. These rights, originating and evolved within the Republic, were not taken away under the emperors, at least for the majority of the population who were not within the personal reach of the emperor.

The great legal digests of the Late Empire enshrined these principles and passed them on to future European civilization. Roman religion was very similar to that of the Greeks. Like the Greeks, the Romans worshiped a pantheon of gods and goddesses, headed by the chief of the gods, Jupiter. Other gods included Minerva, goddess of wisdom and learning; Mars, god of war; Venus, goddess of love; Ceres, goddess of the Earth; and Pluto, god of the underworld.

As well as these major gods, numerous lesser deities, gods of hearth and home, and forest and field, populated the spirit world.

Roman religion placed great emphasis on proper rituals — it was important to do things right. Roman priests were, by and large, not professional, full-time religious practitioners. They tended rather to be the leading people in their community, magistrates and senators.

Unlike Greek religion, Roman religion had a strong moral dimension. This was to do with behaving in an honest and dignified way towards others, keeping oaths and agreements on the shake of a hand, and in displaying courage and fortitude when misfortune struck.

The Romans were very superstitious, always looking for good or bad omens before embarking on a course of action. Like the Greeks, they also consulted famous oracles — priests or priestesses at certain shrines who, in a trance, uttered messages from the gods.

One innovation that the emperors introduced was their own cult, emperor-worship. To what extent this was a real religion rather than an outward show of loyalty is difficult to say; however, in most Roman towns a temple to the emperor would be among the larger buildings.

As with Greek religion, Roman religion was not aimed at meeting private spiritual needs — it was a public, outward thing.

As time went by, new religions and cults became popular in the Roman world: the Eleusian Mysteries and cult of Orpheus from Greece; the cult of the Egyptian goddess Isis ; the religion of Mithras, from beyond the empire, in Iran; and later, Christianity. Despite or because of? However, it was the conversion to Christianity of the emperor Constantine, and the favor bestowed on the Christian Church by succeeding emperors, that turned it into the most popular religion in the empire.

In the s it was made the official religion of the empire, a development which would have a huge impact on the future history of Europe. Roman art was closely related to late Greek art — indeed, as the Romans conquered more and more Greek cities, more and more Greet art found its way to Rome. The same is true of Greek artists, who found in the Roman ruling classes keen patrons of their work. Culturally, the Roman period is to a large extent an extension of the Hellenistic period, especially in the eastern parts of the empire.

Nevertheless, Roman sculpture in particular has an unmissable characteristic all its own. The sculptural portraits of leading Romans of the late Republic and early Empire are simple and dignified, and above all startlingly realistic. We really do know what Julius Caesar looked like! What is true for art is even more true for architecture.

One can see Greek influences powerfully at work in the buildings of Ancient Rome, but transformed into a uniquely Roman style. There was nothing in Greek architecture similar to the arched facades of the Colosseum or of the theater of Pompey; nor to the arched construction of the great Roman aqueducts, or the triumphal arches which adorn many Roman cities.

The arch is a new innovation in Roman architecture, reflecting Roman engineering capabilities in solving the problem of carrying greater weight. The same is true for the dome, which appeared most famously in the Pantheon, in Rome, and which allowed Roman architects and builders to span much greater spaces than before. The theme here is size and grandeur — the Romans built big to reflect their power and confidence. Roman literature is written in the Latin language.

The Latins were a people who had settled in central Italy some centuries before Rome was founded; Rome was originally one of their towns, and although the Romans came to be of somewhat mixed Italian stock Latin, Sabine, Etruscan , they spoke the Latin dialect. Writing came to the Latins as for other Italians via the Greeks, and early Latin writers modeled themselves on Greek precursors when they were not actually translating Greek works into Latin.

However, as the Republic neared its end, and the Empire lived through its first century, a group of Roman writers turned Latin into a great literary language in its own right, which later ages admired enormously, and sought to emulate. One of the extraordinary features of much Latin writing is that, to a degree probably without precedent in any other literature, much of it was produced by busy politicians.

Some of these reached the highest eminence in their own turbulent lifetimes: Cicero, Caesar, Seneca all these died violent political deaths. Other writers did not make quite the same mark, but still had successful careers in public service: Sallust, Varro, Tacitus and Pliny the younger, all successful senators; and Suetonius and the Pliny the elder, both senior civil servants. They found time in their busy lives to produce a great volume of writing — commentaries on philosophy and politics, histories, biographies, satires, speeches, letters, drama, and works on science and nature.

Throughout all this literature there permeates a realism and reflectiveness which comes from the practical lives these men led. Other Latin writers of the period lived more conventional literary lives: the poets Virgil, Catallus, Horace, Ovid, Martial and Juvenal; the historian Livy.

In fact these too were all near the seat of power, but as writers, not as politicians. Later writes continued the tradition of combining politics with writing — most notably an emperor, Marcus Aurelius, who jotted down his thoughts on philosophy. Right at the end of the Roman period, Ausonius the poet, Symmachus the man of letters and Boethius, the philosopher, all held high office while producing literature which is still read today.

Meanwhile, in a completely different social setting, an entirely different genre was being produced. This was the writings of early Christian thinkers.

Most of these spoke and wrote Greek, but from the third century onward some major Christian Latin writers appeared. Their works, of encouragement and exhortation, theology and pastoral concern, are still regarded as classics of Christian literature. He was a man right at the top of Roman society, and a deeply committed Christian. He wrote works reflecting on his life and times, and in doing so greatly influenced western thinking for centuries to come.

Roman thinkers looked to Hellenistic philosophy for inspiration. From Cicero, in the late Republic, though Seneca and later Marcus Aurelius, under the Empire, Stoicism continued to exercise a strong attraction over Roman minds. Epicureanism was also popular in some circles, with poets such as Lucretius championing its teachings. Like Stoics, Epucureans believed that life is ultimately without hope, and that one should focus on living daily life in a positive spirit. A major philosophical strand of thought in the later Roman empire was Neoplatonism.

Given the large overlap between the Hellenistic and Roman civilizations, it is sometimes hard to disentangle which civilization took some technological steps. In a sense it doe not matter, as Rome rose to power within a Hellenistic context, and carried forward the Hellenistic culture a further few centuries.

Some of the greatest technological achievements of the Roman period were in construction engineering. These rested on the development of the first form of concrete in history, a step that took place in southern Italy in the 2nd century BCE.

This material which used volcanic lava as its base was crucial to Roman architectural innovations such as the arch and the dome. These allowed Roman engineers to span much larger spaces than ever before. Huge stone bridges, the first of their kind, were thrown across rivers; multistoried aqueducts marched across valleys; and awe-inspiring buildings such as the Pantheon in Rome, and much later the Cathedral of S. Sophia in Constantinople, used domed roofs to enclose larger areas than any other building until the 16th century.

The Romans were clearly adventurous and highly skilled engineers. More than anything else, this is seen in their roads, which ran for hundreds of miles across all sorts of terrain, and played an important part in knitting the empire together so effectively.

Laying out these roads involved advanced surveying techniques, using instruments which were adapted from those used by astronomers to measure angles. The Romans seem to have been the first to use mechanical means for the ubiquitous task of grinding corn, which previously, had always been done by hand.

Dating from the second century BCE, heavy millstones have been found which would have ground grain with the aid of animal power. The Roman world saw the next major step along this path with the building of the first water mills recorded by history.

They probably originated in the Greek-speaking eastern empire, but in the first century CE, one mill, in southern France, had no less than sixteen overshot water wheels, fed by the main aqueduct to Arles. It has been estimated that this mill could supply enough bread for the entire 12,strong population of Arles at that time.

Roman science was an extension of the Hellenistic scientific activity — indeed, most of the scientific thinkers of the Roman period were Greeks or Greek speakers living in the Greek-speaking eastern part of the empire.

One exception was Pliny the Elder, a senior Roman official writing in Latin. He compiled a huge collection of facts interspersed with many fictions! In many cases he sought to explain natural phenomena — for example, he was the first to realize that amber is the fossilized resin of pine trees. Ptolemy of Alexandria one of the great cities of the Hellenistic world systematized Greek knowledge of astronomy.

His theories of the movements of the heavenly bodies would have a profound influence on later European thinkers. The doctor Galen also systematized Hellenistic anatomical knowledge; but he also extended this knowledge considerably, based on his own careful dissections of animals.

He was the first to assert that veins carried blood, not air; and his writings formed the primary foundation for Medieval medical theory and practice.

The rise and fall of Ancient Rome formed a crucial episode in the rise of Western civilization. Through Rome the achievements of ancient Greek civilization passed to Medieval Europe — with unique Roman contributions added.

Roman architecture, sculpture, philosophy and literature all built on Greek models, developed their own distinct elements, and then left a legacy for later periods of Western civilization to build on. However, it was in law and politics that Roman influence can be felt most strongly today. Much European law is still derived from Roman law. We will deal further with the impact of Rome when we look at the roots of Western civilization.

Government and Warfare under the Roman Republic. Government and Warfare under the Roman Empire. The Society and Economy of Ancient Rome. Etruscan Civilization. History of Ancient Europe at the time when ancient Roman civilization flourished.

History of the Ancient Middle East , showing the role the Roman empire played in that region. Ancient Europe , showing the rise and fall of the Roman empire in the context of European history. The Middle East , showing the impact of the Roman empire on that region. The World when ancient Roman civilization flourished. Stobart, J. Flower, H. Cowell, F. Talbert, R. McEvedy, C. Despite its title, this small book, with its lovely clear maps, only covers the ancient West.

Haywood, J. The section on Rome covers its history up to the 4th century BC i. The text and the maps are excellent. Grant, M. Burn, A. The section on Rome starts at p.

Connolly, P. For an overview of the archaeology of ancient Rome, I found the following useful and enjoyable due to its lavish illustrations : Renfrew, C. A work on general archaeology aimed more at students, but readable and with very good coverage of ancient Greece, is Scarre, C. For an insightful look at government in ancient Greece, especially at how Athenian democracy worked, see Finer, S.

Syme, R. Scullard, H. Adcock, F. Birley, A. I make no apology for many of these sources being several decades old. The gap between rich and poor widened as wealthy landowners drove small farmers from public land, while access to government was increasingly limited to the more privileged classes. Attempts to address these social problems, such as the reform movements of Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus in B. Gaius Marius, a commoner whose military prowess elevated him to the position of consul for the first of six terms in B.

By 91 B. After Sulla retired, one of his former supporters, Pompey, briefly served as consul before waging successful military campaigns against pirates in the Mediterranean and the forces of Mithridates in Asia. During this same period, Marcus Tullius Cicero , elected consul in 63 B.

When the victorious Pompey returned to Rome, he formed an uneasy alliance known as the First Triumvirate with the wealthy Marcus Licinius Crassus who suppressed a slave rebellion led by Spartacus in 71 B. After earning military glory in Spain, Caesar returned to Rome to vie for the consulship in 59 B. From his alliance with Pompey and Crassus, Caesar received the governorship of three wealthy provinces in Gaul beginning in 58 B.

With old-style Roman politics in disorder, Pompey stepped in as sole consul in 53 B. In 49 B. With Octavian leading the western provinces, Antony the east, and Lepidus Africa, tensions developed by 36 B.

In 31 B. In the wake of this devastating defeat, Antony and Cleopatra committed suicide. By 29 B. In 27 B. He instituted various social reforms, won numerous military victories and allowed Roman literature, art, architecture and religion to flourish.

Augustus ruled for 56 years, supported by his great army and by a growing cult of devotion to the emperor. When he died, the Senate elevated Augustus to the status of a god, beginning a long-running tradition of deification for popular emperors. The line ended with Nero , whose excesses drained the Roman treasury and led to his downfall and eventual suicide. The reign of Nerva , who was selected by the Senate to succeed Domitian, began another golden age in Roman history, during which four emperors—Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius—took the throne peacefully, succeeding one another by adoption, as opposed to hereditary succession.

Under Antoninus Pius , Rome continued in peace and prosperity, but the reign of Marcus Aurelius — was dominated by conflict, including war against Parthia and Armenia and the invasion of Germanic tribes from the north. When Marcus fell ill and died near the battlefield at Vindobona Vienna , he broke with the tradition of non-hereditary succession and named his year-old son Commodus as his successor.

The decadence and incompetence of Commodus brought the golden age of the Roman emperors to a disappointing end. His death at the hands of his own ministers sparked another period of civil war , from which Lucius Septimius Severus emerged victorious. During the third century Rome suffered from a cycle of near-constant conflict. A total of 22 emperors took the throne, many of them meeting violent ends at the hands of the same soldiers who had propelled them to power. Meanwhile, threats from outside plagued the empire and depleted its riches, including continuing aggression from Germans and Parthians and raids by the Goths over the Aegean Sea.

The reign of Diocletian temporarily restored peace and prosperity in Rome, but at a high cost to the unity of the empire. Diocletian divided power into the so-called tetrarchy rule of four , sharing his title of Augustus emperor with Maximian. A pair of generals, Galerius and Constantius, were appointed as the assistants and chosen successors of Diocletian and Maximian; Diocletian and Galerius ruled the eastern Roman Empire, while Maximian and Constantius took power in the west.

The stability of this system suffered greatly after Diocletian and Maximian retired from office. Throughout the classical period, Britain was at the fringes of civilization.

Conquest of Britain began in earnest under the emperor Claudius in 43 AD. Over the next four decades, Roman troops explored the entire island, including the northernmost parts of Scotland. But the Romans only conquered an area roughly corresponding to modern-day England and Wales. The Romans would govern this territory until , when the declining Western Roman Empire was forced to abandon the remote province. Most of his predecessors had sought glory by conquering new territory, steadily expanding the size of the empire.

Hadrian had a different vision. He believed the empire was becoming overextended militarily, and immediately upon taking office he focused on consolidating Roman control of the territories that had already been conquered. He withdrew from a few Eastern territories conquered by his predecessor, Trajan, and he negotiated peace agreements with rivals such as the Parthians. Over time, similar fortifications would be built all around the edges of the empire, transforming what had been a fluid frontier into a clearly defined border.

The new wall was only manned for a few years before the Romans were forced to abandon the new territory and retreat to the border Hadrian had chosen. The Roman empire provided its subjects with a reliable and standardized system of currency.

Uniform money brings major economic benefits because cash transactions are a lot more efficient than those done by barter. This map, drawn from a database of amateur archeological finds, shows where Roman coins were found between and As Rome was rising in the West, the Han dynasty was consolidating power in China.

These two great empires were too far apart to have a direct relationship. But they became linked together indirectly through trade networks. This map, based on geographical data recorded by a Greek writer in the early years of the Roman Empire, shows the trade route from Rome to India. Elites in India and China prized Roman-made glass and rugs, while Roman aristocrats enjoyed purchasing silks made in the Far East. For the first two centuries after Augustus became emperor in 27 BC, the Roman Empire experienced a period of unprecedented political stability and economic prosperity.

But the situation deteriorated rapidly in the third century AD. Between and , Rome had more than 20 emperors, and as this map shows, most died violent deaths. Some were murdered by their own armies. Others died in civil wars against rival claimants to the throne. One died in battle against foreign foe; another was captured in battle and died in captivity.

But in , Emperor Diocletian took power and managed to get the empire out of its tailspin. In a year reign, he temporarily ended the cycle of bloodshed and instituted reforms that allowed the empire to endure until the late s. He wanted to provide more localized leadership for an empire that had become too sprawling and complex for any one man to manage. He created a new imperial capital at Byzantium and renamed it Constantinople, laying the foundations for an Eastern Roman Empire that would endure long after the West fell.

When he took the throne, he began the transformation of Rome into a Christian empire. While some of his subjects resisted Christianity, the change ultimately stuck.

As a result, Christianity became the dominant religion of Europe for the next 1, years. Constantine ruled over a unified Roman empire, but this would be increasingly rare. This cycle would repeat itself several times over the next half-century. It became clear that the empire was too big for any one man to rule. The last emperor to rule a united empire, Theodosius, died in This map shows the result: an empire permanently divided between east and west.

Why had the empire become too big to govern? The empire never fully recovered from the political crisis of the third century, or from a plague that began in and killed millions of people. As its financial health deteriorated, the empire became increasingly vulnerable to invasion.

That started a vicious cycle. Frustrated provincials began fortifying their towns and organizing their own local militias for self-defense. People were increasingly forced to stay close to fortified towns for safety, making them less productive and more dependent on local lords. And so the Roman army grew weaker, and the empire as a whole became more vulnerable to barbarian attack. A symbolic turning point came in , when Aleric, king of the barbarian Visigoth tribe, sacked Rome for the first time in years.

It was a psychological blow from which the Western Empire would never really recover. Probably the most famous of the barbarian invaders was Attila the Hun, who built an empire in Eastern Europe between and Their style of warfare centered on mounted archers, who could fire arrows with deadly accuracy while on horseback.

They prized speed and the advantage of surprise. The Romans proved unable to defeat Attila on the battlefield, and the Huns even forced the Romans to pay them tribute for several years. However, the Huns were unable to sustain prolonged sieges, which made them incapable of taking large cities such as Constantinople or Rome. Nor could they consolidate their gains and build a long-lived empire.

When Attila died in , his sons squabbled over how to divide his empire, which quickly disintegrated. Historians generally date the end of the Western Empire to AD. The last few emperors before Romulus Augustulus were increasingly emperors in name only. Starved of the tax revenues they needed to raise a serious military, their control over nominally Roman territory was increasingly tenuous. When Odoacer and other barbarian generals carved the Roman Empire up into kingdoms, they were largely just formalizing the de facto reality that the emperors had little actual power over their distant domains.

This map looks dramatically different from the map of the Western Roman Empire as it existed a few decades earlier.

Western Europe was populated by largely the same ethnic groups in as they had been a century earlier. Long before it finally collapsed, manpower shortages had forced the empire to incorporate barbarian peoples into the legions. So the barbarian tribes who carved up the old empire — the Franks, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, the Vandals, and so forth — were much more Romanized than the tribes that had menaced Rome centuries earlier. The rulers of these new kingdoms generally sought to co-opt Roman elites that still held significant wealth and power across the former Western Empire.

So while Romans certainly found it jarring to be suddenly ruled by outsiders, Western Europe in was not so different from how it had been in People in the Byzantine Empire continued to think of themselves as Romans, and their empire as the Roman Empire, for centuries after In , the Emperor Justinian took power in the Byzantine Empire and began a campaign to reconquer the Western half of the empire.

By his death in , he had made significant progress, retaking Italy, most of Roman Africa, and even some parts of Spain. Between and , it would control most of modern-day Germany and portions of modern-day France, Italy, and Central Europe. The empire was ruled by Germans rather than Italians, lacked traditional Roman institutions such as the Senate, and was more decentralized than the Roman Empire had been at its height.

After Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, religion and state were closely aligned — just as they had been under earlier pagan emperors. But that began to change after the Western Empire collapsed.

Most of the barbarian kings who became the new masters of Western Europe were themselves Christians, and they recognized the authority of the church in Rome over religious matters.

This set a precedent for the modern separation of church and state, and it allowed the church to thrive even as the Western Roman Empire crumbled. Indeed, popes began stepping into the power vacuum Rome had created. This map shows the papal states, sovereign territory that was governed by the popes from the s until secular Italian authorities annexed most of it in the s.

Today, the Catholic Church still operates in Latin from Vatican City, a tiny sovereign state inside the modern city of Rome. One of the most obvious ways Rome shaped the modern world is the languages people speak today. This map shows where people speak Romance languages such as Spanish, French, Italian, and Romanian that are descended from Latin. Notice that the line between the French-speaking and German-speaking parts of Europe looks a lot like the line between those portions of Europe that were conquered by the Romans and those that remained beyond the Roman frontier.

The other notable thing about the map is that most people in what used to be the Eastern half of the Roman Empire do not speak Romance languages. While Latin became the language of government, commoners continued speaking Greek. And as the Western Roman Empire collapsed, Greek became the dominant tongue of the remaining Eastern provinces.