Roman Antiquity

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. 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.

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.

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.

Legends 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.

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.

 

Etruscan influence

 

The Etruscans had enormous cultural, social, and political influence on early Rome. The origins of this seafaring people remain obscure, but most scholars now believe that the Etruscans brought their language, their religion, and their love of music and dance from the Near East to northern Italy. Their distinctive culture was further shaped in the Italian region of Tuscany, which bears their name.

Tomb paintings provide a record of Etruscan civilization and illustrate their cultural sophistication, intense religious beliefs, and artistic accomplishments. Their skill at urban planning, engineering, and waterworks had a deep influence on the development of Rome. In Rome itself, projects attributed to the Etruscan kings included the building of city walls, the engineering of the Forum, and the construction of the great drain to channel both rainfall and sewage into the Tiber. For centuries the Romans also built and decorated their temples in the Etruscan style. They were in awe of the extraordinary metalwork of Etruscan craftworkers shown in products ranging from iron plows to bronze mirrors, silver bowls, and fine gold jewelry. Elaborate aristocratic tombs in central Italian towns such as Praeneste (now Palestrina) as well as rural drainage trenches cut into rock to preserve topsoil show that Etruscan influences even spread to the countryside around Rome.

Other aspects of Etruscan culture also had a lasting impact on the Romans. The Etruscan cities were controlled by the nobility and ruled by kings. Rods and axes, symbols of civil and military authority, represented royal power to the Etruscans. Later, bundles of rods surrounding an ax, called fasces in Latin, were carried before Roman magistrates in ceremonial processions. Etruscan women possessed a social freedom which scandalized Greek writers, since they were allowed to recline on couches with their husbands at public banquets. Women received greater respect and visibility than in other cultures, and this treatment became an important legacy to the Romans.

The Etruscans had extensive commercial exchanges with the Greeks; for example, Greek pottery reached Etruria, while Etruscan ironwork has been found in Greek sites. The Etruscans also took the alphabet from the Greeks and incorporated the Olympian gods into their own array of deities. Etruscan power reached its peak in the 6th century bc when three successive Etruscan kings ruled at Rome and their control extended from the Po Valley in northern Italy to the Bay of Naples in the south.

The Etruscan cities shared both language and culture and came together for religious festivals, but they were also rivals and sometimes had bitter disputes. This internal turbulence prevented the Etruscans from uniting against common enemies. A generation after the Romans expelled Tarquin the Proud, the last of their Etruscan kings, the Greek colonies of southern Italy and Sicily defeated the Etruscans in a sea battle at Cumae near Naples (474 bc). The Etruscans forever lost their outposts in southern Italy, and their civilization began a slow decline.

 

Some features of Roman culture

 

From earliest times the family lay at the center of all personal and social relations in Rome and even influenced public and political activities. Religion was the other principal element that shaped early Roman life, and religion and family remained closely intertwined as the twin pillars of Roman society for the five centuries of the Roman Republic.

The Romans held moral values that were typical of a conservative agrarian society with strong family networks. They were hardworking and frugal, self-reliant and cautious, serious about their responsibilities and steadfast in the face of adversity. They particularly valued virtus, the physical and moral courage suitable to a man (vir). The stress on family responsibility was evident in the idea of pietas, the belief that every Roman owed loyalty to family authority and to the gods of Rome. Likewise fides (good faith) made a Roman’s word his or her bond—in both public and private life. The early books of Livy’s History provide many examples of the virtues and values that Romans believed made them different from, and superior to, other peoples.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In two centuries Rome transformed itself from a small city-state to the ruler of the Mediterranean. A poor agricultural community had become a commercial giant whose conquests poured gold, grain, and slaves into Italy. Rome had permanently altered its economy, society, and culture, as well as the surrounding Italian countryside. Yet, after almost four centuries of successful adaptation, the political institutions of the republic were not sufficiently flexible to accommodate these changes. The Roman elite no longer retained their traditional values as evidenced by laws against electoral bribery and provincial corruption, luxury, and excessive victory processions, called triumphs. Nor did they understand that republican institutions, developed for a city of 10, 000, could not administer an empire of millions. For example, Rome had no adequate financial system and relied on annual income from tribute and taxes as operating capital. When income and, thus, expenditures declined, severe economic crises could result. Roman senators were unwilling to address the problems of the army, the noncitizen Italian allies, the urban poor, the exploited provincials, or the brutality of the slave plantations. They responded only to crisis, and they would soon be confronted by the greatest internal crisis in centuries.

The Roman Republic was a dynamic and flexible political organism that was a noble system of government for a small city-state. It made Rome a world power, but it was unsuitable for a large and diverse empire. Furthermore, it had become rigid in the hands of a tiny elite by the time Julius Caesar swept it away. Although some institutions such as the Senate and magistrates survived, Caesar’s successor, Augustus, created a new government that allowed Rome and its people to survive, to grow, and to prosper.

TheRomans excelled in architecture and engineering long before they could approach the Greeks in the quality of their literature or art. Roman conquests encouraged the spread of their innovations throughout the Mediterranean world.

True Roman originality appears more often in engineering and construction than in the decorative arts. By 300 BC Appius Claudius Caecus had commissioned work on the paved military road south to Capua, which became known as the Appian Way. He also initiated construction of Rome’s first aqueduct to bring water to the city from nearby hills. These projects later became the models for hundreds of miles of aqueducts and thousands of miles of paved highway built throughout Rome’s empire. In addition, the Romans took the arch from the Etruscans and, on their own, pioneered the use of concrete covered by brick as the basis for most monumental buildings, including baths, amphitheaters, aqueducts, and markets.

The earliest Roman temples followed the Etruscan style and were built with wood decorated with terra-cotta. Roman architects designed and decorated these structures with the idea that they would be viewed from a single perspective. In contrast, Greek temples were intended to be observed from all sides. When the Romans turned to stone buildings in the 3rd century bc, they preserved a similar structure.

The construction boom of the 2nd century BC, spurred by the profits of conquest and the desire of aristocrats for luxury, led to the incorporation of Greek features such as the use of colonnades and marble. The Greek style of colonnaded courtyards, for example, became an important part of Roman villas. In the 2nd century BC the Romans even devised their own characteristic public buildings called basilicas—large covered spaces for politics, law, and commerce. Much later in the 4th century ad, the early Christians adopted the same type of structure for their churches.

The first literary work in Latin was a translation of the Greek poet Homer’s Odyssey by Lucius Livius Andronicus (284? -204 BC), who was probably born in one of the Greek colonies of southern Italy and brought to Rome as a slave. Livius and others also translated Greek tragedies into Latin. Only fragments exist of these works as well as the epics and tragedies of Quintus Ennius (239-169? BC), who is sometimes called the Father of Latin Literature.

The first works in Latin that survive in their entirety are 20 plays of the earthy writer of comedy, Plautus(254? -184 BC). According to Plautus, his plays were performed at fairs where snake charmers and acrobats competed for the audience’s attention, so he spiced up adapted Greek plays with coarse humor.

The most accomplished historian to write in Republican Rome was Polybius, a Greek hostage brought to Rome in 167 BC. His history of Rome’s rise to the domination of the Mediterranean, written in Greek, is the best source available for this period. Polybius combined rigorous methodology with a philosophical approach to history that made him unique among historians of Rome.

By the 1st century bc, Roman writers and intellectuals were reading widely in Greek philosophy and literature. The poet Lucretius (94? -55? BC) wrote De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), a long poem that passionately expounded the ideas of the Greek philosopher Epicurus on the mechanical working of the universe.

Among works of Roman prose, the commentaries of Julius Caesar (100-44 BC c) on the Gallic War and the Civil Wa r (De Bello Gallico and De Bello Civili) are masterpieces of propaganda. Caesar, a famed military commander and later dictator of Rome, was also a skilled writer who chose to present his conquests with a contrived objectivity and third-person detachment that gave added credibility to his account.

One of Rome’s greatest writers, Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC), was also a noted orator, statesman, philosopher, and essayist. Cicero’s speeches and letters are most widely known, but he also wrote essays on the history and practice of oratory. Cicero created a philosophical vocabulary in Latin by translating and adapting Greek philosophical works. Cicero’s works influenced the development of political philosophy, rhetoric, and prose style through the centuries and exceeded the impact of any other Roman writer.