The Roman Empire

1
The Roman Empire

• p. 627-629

2
The Roman Empire

• By 269 B.C. Rome was in control of the whole
  Italian peninsula, was drawn into a 100 year war
  against the Phoenician city of Carthage, on the
  North African coast, and eventually emerged
  master of the western Mediterranean.
• At the end of the first century B.C. Rome was the
  capital of an empire that stretched from the
  Strait of Gibraltar to the frontiers of
  Palestine.
• This empire gave peace and orderly government to
  the Mediterranean area for the next two
  centuries, and for two centuries after that
  maintained a desperate but losing battle against
  the invading savage peoples moving in from the
  north and east.
• When it finally went down, the Roman Empire left
  behind it the ideal of the world-state, an idea
  that was to be reconstituted as a reality by the
  medieval church, which ruled from the same
  center, Rome, and with a spiritual authority as
  great as the secular authority it replaced.

3
Roman Character and Achievements

• Unlike the Greeks, Romans were above all a
  practical people.
• The Romans were conservative to the core a
  monument of this conservatism, the great body of
  Roman law is one of their greatest contributions
  to Western civilization.
• The quality Romans most admires was seriousness
  of attitude and purpose, and their highest words
  of commendation were manliness, industry, and
  discipline.

4
Literature vs History

• Greek history begins, not with a king, a battle
  or the founding of a city, but with an epic poem.
  (Homer)
• The Romans, on the other hand, had conquered half
  the world before they began to write.
• The stimulus for Roman literature was Greek
  literature that the Romans discovered when they
  assumed political responsibility for Greece.
• Latin literature began with a translation of The
  Odyssey, made by a Greek prisoner of war, and the
  model for Roman literature (up until
  Christianity) became the Greek epic poems.

5
Tribute to Greek Poetry

• While Latin poetry pays tribute to Greek poetry,
  it is also profoundly original.
• This is true above all of Virgil, who chose as
  his theme the coming of the Trojan prince Aeneas
  to Italy, where he as to found a city from which,
  in the fullness of time, would come the Latin
  race and the city of Rome.

6
Roman Religion

• While the Romans borrowed their gods from the
  Greeks, they worshiped them less intently, less
  seriously.
• The literature of the second century of Rome is
  especially spiritually empty.
• The old religion offered no comfort to those who
  looked beyond mere material ends. New religions
  arose or were imported from the East.
• Eventually, the Hebrew prophet Jesus was
  crucified in Jerusalem, and a new religion arose,
  working underground and often suppressed, which
  eventually triumphed and became the official and
  later the exclusive religion of the Roman world.
• As the empire in the 3rd and 4th centuries
  disintegrated under the never-ending invasions by
  barbarian tribes from the north, the church with
  its center and spiritual head in Rome, converted
  the new inhabitants and so made possible the
  preservation of much of the Latin and Greek
  literature that was to serve the European Middle
  Ages, and, later, the Renaissance as a model and
  a basis for their own great literary achievements.

7
Virgil

• Publius Virgilius Maro is best know for The
  Aeneid, the Roman epic, left unfinished at his
  death.
• The story of Aeneas, the Trojan prince who comes
  to Italy and whose descendants founded Rome,
  combines the themes of the Odyssey (the wanderer
  in search of home) and the Iliad (the hero in
  battle).
• Virgil borrows Homeric turns of phrases, similes,
  sentiments, and whole incidents his Aeneas, like
  Achilles, sacrifices prisoners to the shade of a
  friend and, like Odysseus, descends alive to the
  world of the dead.
• But unlike Achilles, Aeneas does not satisfy the
  great passion of his life, nor like Odysseus,
  does he find home and peace.

8
Aeneas

• Aeneas is more than an individual. He is the
  prototype of the ideal Roman ruler he has the
  devotion to duty and seriousness of purpose that
  gave the Mediterranean world two centuries of
  ordered government.
• Aeneas leaves the burning city of Troy carrying
  his father (symbolizing the past) and holding his
  son (symbolizing the future) by the hand.
• His mission is to found a city, a home for the
  gods of Troy whose statues he carries with him.
  His mission provides political and religious
  continuity for a whole race of people.

9
Suffering

• Aeneas suffers and fights, not for himself, but
  for the future.
• His own life is unhappy, and his death miserable.
• Yet he can console himself with the glory of his
  sons to come (revealed to him on his journey in
  the world below).
• Aeneass future is Virgils present the
  consolidation of the Roman peace under Augustus
  is the reward of Aeneass unhappy life of effort
  and suffering.

10
The Roman Ideal of Duty

• The Roman ideal of devotion to duty has another
  side, the suppression of many aspects of the
  personality.
• The man who wins and uses power must sacrifice
  much of himself.
• Aeneas betrays the great passion of his life, his
  love for Dido, queen of Carthage, to fulfill his
  destiny.
• Aeneas has sacrificed his love to something
  greater, but this does not insulate him from
  unhappiness.
• The Aeneid is Virgils emphatic statement of the
  sacrifice the Roman ideal of duty demands.
  Aeneass sacrifice is so great that few of us
  could make it ourselves, and none of us can
  contemplate it in another without a feeling of
  loss.