Six Reasons Why Rome Matters

Do you think of the Roman Empire every day?  We are here to weigh into the debate! 

Transcript

Six Reasons Why Rome Matters

September 2023

“The tender respect of Augustus for a free constitution which he had destroyed, can only be explained by an attentive consideration of the character of that subtle tyrant. A cool head, an unfeeling heart, and a cowardly disposition prompted him, at the age of nineteen, to assume the mask of hypocrisy, which he never afterward laid aside. With the same hand and probably with the same temper, he signed Cicero’s proscription and Cinna’s pardon. His virtues, and even his vices, were artificial; according to the various dictates of his interest, he was first the enemy, and finally the father, of the Roman world.”

Edward Gibbon, the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

A seemingly odd question is circulating around particular environs concerning the Roman Empire. The answer says something about the person and, arguably, their gender.  

How often do you think about the Roman Empire?  

Several men, as opposed to few women, have answered this with “every day.” Almost disappointingly, my son replied, “Maybe once per week.” This is followed by my lamentation, “Where did I fail him? Twenty-six years as a role model, and I have badly erred.” Actually no. He is one of the best people I know, though that is due primarily to the influence of his mother. After answering, my son posited the question to me, then thought better of it. Of course, I think of the Romans several times every day. But I, as frequent listeners know, am not exactly a suitable control group. I also think of the Tang Dynasty, the Islamic Empire, and 18th-century British industry and why the Middle Kingdom or Egypt, without pyramids, King Tut, or Karnakian Temples, is the middle child of that oldest of nations.  

Do I think of these things every day, though? No, because Rome has a special place in our history. By our, I mean what would be over simplistically called the West. I have studied the Qin Dynasty, Gupta India, pre-Mohammad Arabia, and the Incas. But it is hard to eliminate that bias for which one was raised. I have studied middle-aged Korean Goguryeo (Go gur eye o) history, but I was raised in the United States. Next month will be October, my birth month and a Roman word. The Korean equivalent month is Siwol, but I had to look that up. October, I know. Rome and its influence are intertwined with our present-day society in almost omnipresent ways. The difference between me, those daily thinkers, and the rest of society is that we are conscious of our awareness, but others subconsciously think about it. Here are six reasons why.  

Longevity

When Octavian, later Augustus, defeated all his enemies in the final civil war in 30 BCE, he did not declare an end to the Roman Republic but instead claimed a restoration. I have discussed this fiction at length in other podcasts, but suffice it to say the break of Republican history to Imperial is a construct of later historians. And was Octavian the critical man at the time upon which history would be different if it were another figure? I argue yes, but Rome produced strong rulers when they were most needed. Octavian after the civil wars. Vespasian after Nero and later Diocletian after the chaos of the 200s CE.  

What is recognized by both Octavian and us today is the ancient nature of his state—at the time of his assuming the title of Augustus, Rome, as an entity, had been around for 700 years. It was undoubtedly a spotty history. For centuries, Rome was the ruler of a single region in Italy. In the 400s, the city was sacked by marauding Gauls and nearly conquered in the 200s by Hannibal Barca of Carthage.  

And was the city founded by a guy named Romulus, descended from the Trojans, fathered by the war god Mars, and suckled by a She Wolf? I would think not. But we can pinpoint the city’s beginnings seven centuries before Augustus. Unlike Alexandria, created by Alexander of Macedon, to be an epic city. It quickly rose in population, and in less than two centuries, Alexandria had a population of over 300,000. The city of Rome probably began as a simple village on a hill near the Tiber River and grew slowly, taking four times as long to reach Alexandria’s numbers. Though living in the shadow of the Etruscans to the north and Greek settlements to the South, this small enclave in Latium eventually discovered that they were pretty good at war and grew from that point.    

I said good at war. Their innovation was to think of war more like a chessboard than gathering a bunch of men, arming them, and throwing them at their enemies. The ancient world often had military innovations unique to each nation. From Egyptian Chariots to Persian Cavalry to the Macedonian Phalanx, war was both art and science. But the Romans brought flexibility and a word I will use later: efficiency. Breaking down an army into legions and then, initially, maniples, later cohorts, and centuries so that different formations could be constructed depending on the circumstances. They were also excellent engineers.  

It was not just the armies. Rome produced roads for commercial and martial uses: the first to keep trade and commerce going and the second to quickly transport the legions. But even more than that, Rome produced exceptional generals. Other peoples could conjure one or two highly successful warriors. Thutmose III of Egypt, Cyrus of the Persians, Alexander of Macedon, and Antiochus III of the Seleucids all were exceptions in their time and countries. But because of Rome’s Republican nature, they were not wedded to a hereditary ruler’s capabilities, but often the job of general went to the best man available. From Scipio Africanus, Scipio Amelianus, Gaius Marius, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, Gneaus Pompeius Magnus, and most of all, Gaius Julius Caesar, it is a list nearly unparalleled in history for martial brilliance. Even after the end of the Republic, good generals such as those serving Augustus, including Marcus Agrippa, Tiberius, Drusus Nero, and Germanicus, were all talented soldiers. Even the later Emperors, such as Trajan, Septimius Severus, and Diocletian, proved exceptional warriors.  

When Octavian looked back across Roman History from his time to the founding, it is the equivalent of us looking to the 14th century, a time of the Hundred Years War, the Black Death, and the rise of the Ming Empire in China. Augustus’s state was to endure for four centuries after his death. Then, the Eastern Roman Empire, which became the Byzantine Empire, survived for a thousand years after that. This does not even include the Holy Roman Empire. This shifting state existed for millennia from 800 to 1809 and was hoped to be the reincarnation of the dead Roman Empire at its inception under Charlemagne.  

Contrast that with other famous empires. A contemporary Empire to the Roman Republic, the Indian Mauryan Empire lasted under 300 years. The Chinese Han Empire began in 202 BCE and fell after 400 years. If we date the British Empire to the founding of Jamestown in 1607, it lasted about 375 years. If we include successor states such as Tamerlane’s, the Mongol Empire was about 300 years old. The Soviet domination of Eastern Europe lasted less than 80 years, and Napoleon’s French Empire survived less than 20 years. Hitler’s German Reich, less than 15.  

Out of all recorded history, about 5,000 years, there was a Roman-founded entity for nearly half that time.  

Word Play 

In French, the term for greeting is Bon Jour. In Italian, it is Bonjourno. The word “good” in Spanish is bien, same in French and Italian, bene. There are reasons these languages sound familiar. Add Portuguese and Romanian to that list, and we have the Romance languages. 

It is not that they are the best for wooing some exciting person on a date, though French is better than guttural Swiss German, it is because they are Latin in origin and were once all part of the Roman Empire.  

Romania, both its name and its language, is an outlier in central and Eastern Europe. But in the early 100s, Emperor Trajan conquered what was then part of Dacia, and Rome held the land for the next 175 years. That Romania kept its language and linked back to Rome is astounding, considering that invasions from Goths, Slavs, and even conquest by the Ottoman Turks are all part of the nation’s history. 

As I write this, the date is September or the seventh month from the Roman number septa. Next month is October, as in eight, and words such as Octopus or Octagon. But isn’t September our ninth month, not our seventh? The original Roman calendar had ten months (December being the final one, deca as in ten, (decathlon or decade), but the Roman calendar would often get out of season. It was Caesar, with the help of Alexandrian Egyptians, who developed a workable calendar, a version of which, changed in the 1500s, we use today. Every time you look at a calendar and consider a date, you are looking at the influence of the Romans.

There are hundreds of additional words directly linked to the Romans, ranging from the obvious, a type of birth called a Cesarean section, to words like aberration, allusion, anachronism, dexterity, enthusiasm, imaginary, juvenile, pernicious, and sophisticated. When biologists set about animal taxonomy, they used Latin. Thus, we have canines, felines, and equines. Even rodent is from the Latin form rodentia.  

Our language is also suffused with Greek words. Politics, police, and all cities ranging from Annapolis to Indianapolis have that telltale Greek suffix. But were it not for the Romans, would the Greek terms have come down to us?  

Law 

The Constitutional Rights Foundation, a nonprofit committed to civic participation by teaching civics itself, groups the Roman law code into three areas: the judge system, juries, and individual courts, and how trials work. All three are critical pillars of our judicial framework. 

Around 570 BCE, the Romans created the praetor system for settling conflicts. It replaced the role of families and fathers in the legal system. Under the new system, the praetor, a powerful government official, took written complaints from citizens and investigated them. The praetor decided whether to authorize a trial before a judge. 

Around 80 BCE, the government created jury courts specializing in particular crimes. Each court had a presiding judge and up to 75 jury members, who were chosen by lot to decide a case. I just saw the great Sidney Lumet movie 12 Angry Men and am glad it was not the Roman number. At first, only patrician senators could serve as jurors, but later, juries included men from other propertied classes.

The trial procedure would be familiar today:

• Opening speeches
• Examination and cross-examination of witnesses
• Introduction of other evidence, such as documents
• Closing speeches

The Romans considered significant evidence about the defendant’s character. The judge could order the punishment of a witness who committed perjury. A majority of the jurors needed to find a defendant guilty. If the jury split evenly, the defendant would go free.

And even after the fall of the West, the Eastern Roman Emperor, Justinian, aimed to create codified law. This monumental work preserved, clarified, and updated centuries of Roman lawmaking since the Twelve Tables codified early Roman law almost a thousand years earlier. Justinian’s Code kept Roman law alive in the Eastern Empire for nearly another thousand years.

Politics

Regarding politics, the Romans appreciated the concept of separation of powers. They described the government as Senatus Populusque Romanus or Senate and People of Rome, two distinct entities. They differentiated Aediles into four, with two Curile Aediles and two Plebians. There were ten Tribunes of the Plebeians who had veto power over Roman laws and were in place to thwart the ambitions of the once-powerful patricians. Roman government featured six, and later eight Praetors. 

At the top of the government, the guys upon whom the years were named, the Consulship had two representatives so that no one person could amass absolute power. The fact this did not work in the end was more due to imposing a city-state structure upon a vast empire rather than the concept needed to be fixed. Our founders managed to use the idea of Roman separation of powers for a continental, even global structure. Note their primary governing body, the Senate, has the same name as ours, but we added the House of Representatives, a mirror of Populusque.   

Literature

As the great Williamson of the Dispatch notes, “While Rome did not have political parties as such, the major factions of the time were the populists led by Julius Caesar and the conservatives led by Cicero. Both men were statesmen of the first order, and both of them were gifted and copious writers. Williamson adds, “Other writers of the critical Roman period included Virgil, Pliny the Elder, Seneca, and Horace. The history of that time was written in the subsequent years by such figures as Livy (about 15 years old at the time of Caesar’s assassination) and, later, Suetonius (born A.D. 69, the Year of the Four Emperors).”

Here is some Horace, or his full name Quintus Horatius Flaccus. from his ode to Augustus.   

Or you, winged son of kindly Maia,

changing shape on earth to human

form, and ready to be named as

Caesar’s avenger:

Don’t rush back to the sky, stay long

among the people of Quirinus,

no swifter breeze take you away,

here to delight in triumphs,

in being called our prince and father,

making sure the Medes are punished,

lead us, O Caesar.

Beautiful, sycophantic, of course, but still beautiful. Horace was a guy who knew on which side of the bread to find the butter. 

And this from Ovid or Publius Ovidius Naso’s Metamorphoses, 

“As wave is driven by wave

And each, pursued, pursues the wave ahead,

So time flies on and follows, flies, and follows,

Always, for ever and new. What was before

Is left behind; what never was is now;

And every passing moment is renewed.”

And finally, Virgil or Publius Vergilius Maro

“Do you

believe the enemy have sailed away?

Or think that any Grecian gifts are free

of craft? Is this the way Ulysses acts?

Either Achaeans hide, shut in this wood,

or else this is an engine built against

our walls...

I fear the Greeks, even when they bring gifts.”

Virgil, The Aeneid, Book 2, lines 60-70

Wait a second, that is the Trojan Horse! Only briefly mentioned in the Odyssey, this idea was brought to full flower not by the Greek Homer but by the Roman Virgil. 

These writers wrote at the end of the Republic and the beginning of the early Empire, the so-called Golden Age. But 150 years later, we have a Roman Emperor writing down his thoughts concerning his Stoic beliefs. For tens of thousands of Americans, especially, again, men, Marcus Aurelius is not a dusty name, some droning history teacher mentioning him in passing, nor Richard Harris in a movie from over 20 years ago. Instead, Marcus is a vivid teacher of morals and even life. These from Meditations:

“You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”

“When you arise in the morning, think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love ...”

Another Emperor, Claudius, wrote several respected histories of Rome, including about Carthage, that have been agonizingly lost to us today. We have had Presidents write (well, co-write) memoirs, but as Williamson noted, except for Jefferson or Grant, none were actual writers, much less historians. It would be as if, instead of painting, George W. Bush had the interest and talent of David McCullough or Victor Davis Hanson.  

And consider the works of literature about the Romans. Did Marc Antony say, “Friends, Romans Countrymen, lend me your ears” In a funeral oration after the death of his leader Caesar? We cannot be sure, but Shakespeare would not have written those words without that inspiration.  

Netflix recently featured a documentary (I am using the word loosely) about Cleopatra, who, again, is known in context to her and Egypt’s relationship with Rome. Even the medieval fantasy of Game of Thrones features Rome in the religions of the “seven,” in which the temples are Septs, and the nuns are Septas. And George RR Martin, who frankly admits that he based his fantasy on history, it is hard not to think of the old Valerian Empire, revered by the characters of his books, as a stand-in for Rome.  

Christianity

Christianity and Rome are intertwined entities seen in everything from the Latin mass (which ended only 60 years ago) to the naming convention of Catholic leaders. Whether you like Pope Francis or preferred his predecessor (as I did), the title of Pontiff is a direct descendent of Pontifex or priest in Latin. Add to that the location of the seat of the largest faction of the world’s largest religion, and you get the point. Even the Greek Eastern Orthodox calls their leaders Patriarch, originally from a Greek word, but comes to us in a Latinized form.  

Unlike Islam, the early church leaders, including Jesus, Paul of Tarsus, and St. Jerome, eschewed military organizations. The Roman Legions would have crushed them if they had gone that route. But unlike Arabia in the 600s, the Christians in the first century CE already had the roads and the polity upon which to move, and in Latin and Greek, two languages upon which to spread the religion moving beyond the Aramaic spoken by Jesus.  

There is another example of the conflation of the Roman world and Christianity. As the historian Thomas Cahill noted, depictions of Jesus’ crucifixion were not depicted until the Middle Ages. The timing was not a coincidence. Only those who had never witnessed a crucifixion could bring themselves to show Jesus on the cross, the symbol of the religion he founded. Crucifixion was so terrible that after the slave revolt in 72 BCE, wherein Marcus Crassus crucified 6,000 slaves, there was not another significant slave revolt in the empire. It is so heinous that early Christians would not portray it.  

If there was one word to capture the entire Roman ethos, it was efficiency. With their roads, they were efficient at moving trade and armies through their sprawling empire. They were efficient at war, politics, and government. And they efficiently kept the millions of slaves within the Empire and the millions of conquered peoples under the yoke of their tyranny. 

To think of the Romans is not necessarily to revere them. I admire their road system and the aqueducts that could transport clean water to hundreds of thousands. I appreciate the arch and their building prowess. After they fell, it would be hundreds of years before Europeans could build anything above seven stories. But to condemn the practices of slavery and conquest is also to display the historical folly of presentism. This is an all too common practice in which we project our sensibilities and beliefs onto people who existed millennia before our time. It was not that the Romans held slaves; every ancient civilization, and most modern ones, did so until about 175 years ago. Instead, the Romans brought such efficiency to their barbarity and brutality. Horrors were visited by the Carthaginians, Gauls, Greeks, Germans, and Jews throughout the Empire, unmatched by what came before. In 146 BCE, the Romans wiped out the Carthaginians. Caesar’s Gallic campaigns, celebrated in his brilliantly written commentaries, led to the death of hundreds of thousands of Gauls. In 70 CE, the Romans destroyed the 2nd Jewish temple in Jerusalem and a good part of the city. This began a displacement of the Jewish people that was to last for 2,000 years.  

Napoleon Bonaparte purposefully used the concept of the Roman eagle, introduced by Gaius Marius, as part of his army and his taking of the title of Emperor. Christopher Siwicki, an architectural historian, writes, “The imagery of Napoleon’s regime drew heavily on that of Imperial Rome: French legions carried the representation of an eagle as part of their battle standard, the Arc de Triomphe in Paris was modeled after the triumphal arches of the ancient city, and the Vendôme Column—a spiraling pictorial frieze which shows Napoleon’s 1805 victory over the Austrians and Russians—is based on the Emperor Trajan’s column, which narrates his conquest of the Dacians 1700 years earlier.”

There is no direct link to the rigid arm salute though the Nazis may have believed it emanated from Rome. However, the Third Reich’s use of an eagle was based on its use by the German Empire, and before that entity, Charlemagne was trying to link the Holy Roman Empire back to the time of Rome itself. It is no coincidence that two more brutal tyrants in modern European history harkened back to Rome. Nor that the Nazis emulated the Romans in bringing an almost business-like efficiency to the murder of entire civilizations.   

I despise the latest campaign against so-called cultural appropriation. Any historian worth their salt knows that appropriation is the stuff upon which cultures are built. And we, too, have appropriated Rome, but hopefully, the best part of their legacy. The intelligence of their governmental system. The wisdom of their judicial structure. The depth and breadth of their beautiful literature. And in their Architecture, how they built for both style and substance. And we reject the brutal aspects of their state.  

So, you may be thinking of the Romans at this exact moment and unaware of it. But for now, I am hungry; I will attend to my dinner. A salad finished with Caesar dressing, some fructas or fruit, vino and cheese. If nothing else, Rome gave us the words for some of the tastiest things on the menu.