Hello, I'm Zae Harding.
In the 19th century and early part of the 20th century, archaeologists began unearthing
evidence of many ancient civilizations across the planet, civilizations that left behind
remarkable ruins.
As they were ancient, they were often viewed as primitive, and because the writers of history
and archaeology came from countries embroiled in war, these early civilizations were most
often interpreted almost exclusively in terms of war, invasion, and conquest.
Now we shall see these civilizations in a new light and appreciate their accomplishments
afresh.
A case in point were the Romans.
Often thought of as heartless militarists, they actually created a great civilization
from the poorest of beginnings, and they did this in a unique way.
They welcomed all people to their empire, from freed slaves to conquered communities,
and they did this through twin values of individual courage and honor.
Building cities, ports, and roads, the Romans managed a civilization that lasted for over
700 years.
Today, the ruins of the Roman Forum echo with long ago debates, deciding the fate of the
greatest city-state in the ancient world.
These debates were by free men, citizens of the world's first republic, a citizenship
based on an unprecedented way of sharing power, a way of sharing power that still has a profound
meaning for the western world in the 21st century.
There are very many incredible accomplishments of the Romans.
In the republican period, I think a fantastically important contribution for us still today
is the constitution.
So they created a system, checks and balances with an executive order, a judicial order,
legislative order that was the model for our own in the United States.
So that is extremely important.
It also became the model for very many countries in Europe.
Roman policies, Roman government political policies were always discussed in public, in
front of men, women, children and slaves, before they were formally decided by the men
who were entitled to vote.
Nowhere has the idea of shared and restricted political power than more critical than in
the founding of the United States of America.
The American founders did not take ancient Greek democracies as their model.
They thought that was dangerous and volatile and too uncontrolled.
But the power sharing model of the Roman Republic, they thought, did have some interesting ideas
and practices perhaps to imitate and modify for the American situation.
The story of Rome is a long one.
This great city-state lasted longer than any other city-state in the ancient world.
Nearly three-quarters of a millennium.
Rome's story is divided into two nearly equal parts.
One part, the last and best known part, is often represented as the exploits of great
and not so great imperial rulers of the Roman Empire.
The first part of the Roman story is the rise of the Roman Republic from very humble beginnings.
It is a 450-year saga of self-rule and colonial growth unequalled in the ancient world.
And it was accomplished through a most unusual collection of guiding principles and values.
The famous Michelangelo steps lead to the top of Rome's Capitoline Hill and the glorious
Capitoline Museums, housing breathtaking remnants of Roman antiquity.
The Capitoline Hill is just one of the famous seven hills of Rome that, along with the surrounding
plains, formed the nexus of this great city-state.
Today, a sprawling urban center, Rome was once nothing more than a humble iron-age village
along the Tiber River.
Rome is centered in the middle of the Italian peninsula, a boot-shaped geographic feature
that extends south into the Mediterranean Sea.
Italy itself is separated from the rest of Europe by the towering Alps.
Unlike much of the Mediterranean region, such as Greece, Italy is a rich combination of
fertile plains, lush valleys, and green hills.
With a mild, year-round Mediterranean climate, an ample rainfall, geography put Italy and
Rome in a unique position for growth and development.
Darius Arya is one of the world's renowned archaeologists at work in Rome today.
When Rome got its start, it had many great factors that helped contribute to its success.
It had really good hills that they could be easily fortified with, protected from attack.
It had the commerce that was available to them by living on the Tiber River, and the
Tiber River ends up leading into the Mediterranean Sea just 24 miles away.
The land around the city of Rome was rich in fertile, its volcanic soil, so they had
a lot of good produce that was available to them in the nearby vicinity.
Even with these geographical advantages, Rome started as an impoverished village with enemies
on three sides.
Its own story of origin is one of a great struggle.
It is the myth of Romulus and Remus, as depicted in this sculpture.
One of the most famous stories the Romans told themselves about who they were was the story
of the brothers' Romulus and Remus.
They were thrown out of the family, raised by a wolf in a cave, and then became rebels
against the king.
But eventually, they conquered with the help of the people there and decided that they
would form a new city that they were going to call Rome.
But the brothers got into a big fight about who would be in charge.
And when Romulus was building a wall around his new little city, Remus said, "You don't
know what you're doing," and jumped over the beginning of the wall just to show how little
his brother's accomplishment was, at which point Romulus killed Remus.
So this story that the Romans told themselves about their earliest beginnings and the founding
of Rome involved first cooperation, but then conflict that actually turned into fraternal
murder.
Is this a story about how hard it is to found something that's really going to endure even
when the people who are doing it are close and love each other?
Legend has it that Romulus, the first king of Rome, began his reign around 750 BC, about
the same time as the emergence of the Greek city-states.
Just as the idea of democracy arising in those city-states seem to have come out of nowhere,
the idea of a Roman republic is just as mysterious and unexpected.
Rome lives successfully with a monarchy for several hundred years, but at a certain point,
the aristocracy, the nobles of Rome's society were fed up.
They were fed up with the way that they felt they were treated by the last kings, and those
last kings were trust kings.
They were considered foreigners, so they gathered together and formed a conspiracy to
eject these foreign kings and then to rule on their own by themselves.
And in doing so, they created what they called a republic, which then gave them some democratic
principles, allowed the male citizens to vote, but gave the concentration of power into the
hands of the few, the Roman nobles, that were literate, that were educated.
Freed from the shackles of the social structure imposed by a ruling monarchy, the Roman republic
developed a novel idea of what it meant to be a citizen of Rome.
This would become Rome's greatest strength.
Under the republic and the stories that the Romans told themselves from the very beginning,
they said our strength came from taking in other people.
This little city that Romulus founded, it didn't have enough people, especially didn't
have enough women so that they could have families and children, so they actually used
trickery to capture some women from a neighboring people whom they then said, "Now, we want
you to be with us.
We're not going to make you slaves.
We want you to be our wives and citizens."
This was a story to explain the Roman policy that if you are willing to join us, we will
take you in.
We are not going to rule you out just because we say, "Oh, you're a different people,"
because they had started out so small and so weak.
And so they had a policy of inclusion that if you were willing to join them, they would
take you in and you would then become part of the Roman enterprise, part of this civilization.
For its first 200 years, under Etruscan rule, Rome grew from a small village of farmers and
shepherds into a city-state with a prosperous elite class.
This civilization was based on a rather unusual social hierarchy, one that defined the sharing
of political power among its citizens.
The Roman Republic began in 510 BC with the ousting of the last Etruscan king.
He was ousted by the Roman elite, an elite that lived in lavish beautiful homes as this
one once was, and others that archeologists are today unearthing.
These homes are adorned with beautiful tiles depicting stories of these nobles and the
glories of Roman society.
However, these homes were not just for the nobles themselves, but also for their clients,
that is, people of lesser status.
In the Roman Republic, status was a function of social relationships based on a client-patron
system.
One of the most fundamental ideas that the Romans had about how the world worked was that
all free people count, but they don't count exactly the same.
And so that you can have people who are more important than other people, social superiors
and social inferiors.
Now it doesn't mean that the infer is necessarily bad or worthless, and in fact, it's a kind
of ranking system.
Society is seen as people constantly negotiating for where they rank in the pecking order.
And in the Roman Republic, this understanding of how the world worked was formalized in
what's called the client-patron system.
The client-patron system was very successful.
That is, you have these educated people with a lot of wealth concentrated into the hands
of the few.
These are the patrons, and they can give favors.
They can give money loans.
They can give all kinds of things to a larger population.
But larger population doesn't have very much money, doesn't have very much land.
But they are numerous.
So you have these clients frequently going to the patron asking for favors, asking for
loan, asking for a dispute to be settled, the patron doing so, and then getting in return,
something that's advantageous for him, such as their votes.
What's important to understand about this is that a client and a patron are linked together
formally and legally.
They have obligations to one another.
The patron, as the more important person of higher status, is supposed to aid the client
in becoming a more important and more successful person.
And the client is supposed to support the patron as the patron goes about his business
of becoming a more important person as well, perhaps by supporting his campaign for election
to public office, by showing up at his house in the morning and then following him down
to the forum, the center of the city, because a patron wanted to have as many clients as
possible following him around, like a very big posse.
So it's a mutually obligatory relationship, each is supposed to help the other.
And remember, you could be a client to someone who's your patron who's more important to
you, but you could also be a patron to other people who are your clients.
So this is like one giant interlocking spider web of social relationships between people
in which they are constantly negotiating how to help each other with the understanding
that we are not all the same in terms of how important we are.
It was a social system that had a shared set of ethical values such as heroism and valor
in service to Rome and the community.
These values included devotion to the gods and family, maintaining self-control, and in
doing so, aligning with the most quintessential of Roman values, never giving up no matter
how difficult the situation.
The reward for living in accordance with these values was increased status in Roman society.
The more you behaved in accordance with these principles, the greater your prestige and
authority.
The beauty of the system was its social and economic fluidity, a fluidity much like modern
democratic capitalistic systems.
Yet, when those early Romans chose a system of self-governance, it was not democratic.
It was not tied to one man, one vote.
The most important place in the Roman Republic was the forum.
When Rome was first founded and it was a really tiny little settlement, it was on a hill called
the Palatine, from which we get our word palace because later the palaces of the rulers
were there, and it overlooks a lower flat area that came to be known as the forum, which
is where Romans would gather for all kinds of interaction with each other, set up stalls
to sell things to each other, have political meetings, hold court sessions when you're
trying to decide legal issues, have social interaction.
So the forum becomes the real sort of place where everybody meets and greets and does
the kind of business of every kind that was necessary in this community, and as Rome became
larger, the forum became filled with buildings to help facilitate these kind of interactions.
Large buildings in which meetings could be held, temples in which the worship of the gods
could take place, expressing the Roman idea that they could only survive, it can only
prosper with the favor of the gods, and it was their human duty to always express their
respect for the gods.
And so the forum became the real sort of center filled with personal electricity for
all the kinds of interactions that this community needed in order to grow and survive.
Today, most of the ruins found in the forum are from the imperial period, except for the
remains of the splendid temple of Saturn.
When those early nobles of the republic gathered here to choose a government, the greatest
evil they saw was absolute power in the hands of one man or woman.
So they devised a system of government that prevented that from happening by distributing
and limiting power.
The primary way this was accomplished was to have not one leader but two equal ruling
councils.
Guided by the senators, each council served for one year.
Always, the republic's decisions were debated in public, open to all.
Governing under the Roman Republic was a complicated and sometimes messy business.
There was the senate who were these advisors who were in office for life.
Then there were elected officials from the consuls to the preachers to many others of
lower rank.
And then there were various meetings of free adult males, assemblies like our legislatures
that could also serve as courts.
And so government decisions were made in a kind of sometimes conflict ridden and often
very, from a certain perspective, inefficient process of negotiation between the senate,
the consuls, and the assemblies of the free adult male citizens.
In the republic, all citizens had a say and were heard, just not equally.
What the republic did do was to unite everyone in efforts toward a common goal, the building
of the city itself, and participating in its colonial expansion through negotiation and
war.
During the first 200 years of the republic, Rome grew into an economic and military powerhouse.
These armies had all but conquered the entire Italian peninsula.
However, much of Rome's success and prosperity was fueled by its remarkable engineering feats.
Another really important thing that we also associate frequently with the Romans is their
engineering.
So one thing that they're very proud of wasn't just the aqueducts that actually surround
us here, but it's also the sewage system, the drainage system, the way that they could
have land recollection projects to make areas that were uninhabitable, inhabitable.
Then you take it into Rome and they have this great system of water flowing into the city
to supply up to a million people, even a million and a half people, with water up to 87 kilometers
away.
So they're doing this with great skill, they're doing this with great engineering.
Not many of the republic's ruling councils are well known to history, but one who should
be is Apius Claudius Cecus, stricken with blindness in his old age.
He was a populace who started both of the republic's greatest engineering wonders, permanent
roads, and aqueducts.
The first Roman aqueduct, the aqua apia, was started by Cecus in 312 BC.
Today the aqueduct arches found throughout the Mediterranean and Western Europe are the
above ground portions of a much larger, complete Roman aqueduct.
In fact, most of each aqueduct was below ground.
At the head end of each aqueduct was a reservoir of water, often sourced by a spring.
Once identified, the hilly terrain between the source and Rome had to be carefully surveyed.
Then engineers and architects had to design and build a structure that could deliver a
constant stream of water, powered by gravity alone over many miles into Rome.
This meant spanning low-lying areas with the above ground part of the aqueduct.
A cross-section of one of the structures reveals that water flowed through channels
encased inside the arches.
And all, Roman engineers built 11 different aqueducts to supply the city of over a million
and a half people with 200 million gallons of fresh water daily, including its famous
baths.
In fact, every large city Rome built or conquered would eventually have aqueducts to supply
it with fresh water.
The second great engineering wonder initiated by Sikas was the Roman road system.
The first, and the world's most famous military highway, was the Via Abia, which ran straight
across the hilly terrain from Rome to near-present-day Naples.
The famous saying of the ancient world was, "All roads lead to Rome."
Indeed, the Roman road system spanned over 50,000 miles throughout Europe and the Mediterranean,
with 372 connecting links.
So you're thinking when you look at that expertise, skill, efficiency, that's what you're thinking
about when you see Rome.
And then when the Romans build their roads, it's the same kind of thing.
They're beautiful, they're long-lasting, they still exist today, but it was also assigned
to you, "Hey, the Romans can mark their army right down into my part of the world and defeat
me."
Roman road builders aimed for strictness as demanded by the laws of twelve tables, the
founding documents of the Roman Republic.
The goal was to make them as maintenance-free as possible, including drainage under the
cobbled rocks.
But were called via, and named for the official who ordered its construction, hence via apnea
for that first road, which is still visible in places today.
When Roman engineers encountered rivers, they built bridges.
Roman bridges were the first large and lasting bridges ever built, most utilized concrete
and stone, and had the arch as its basic architectural structure.
Built during the Republic, the Ponds Amelia's Bridge, once spanning the Tiber River, is
still visible in Rome today.
Hagia Secos was a remarkable man in other ways.
He argued for the building of Roman fortifications throughout the Italian peninsula.
This process gradually expanded the power of the Roman city-state, and he also pushed
for the creation of an independent Roman literature.
One of his speeches was the first recorded in Latin, and is the source of his famous saying,
"Every man is an architect of his own future."
Latin was the language of the Romans.
Early on, inscriptions in Latin were carved by Romans on their stone buildings and monuments.
The Romans used only 23 letters, all capitals, to write Latin.
But it wasn't until the second half of the Republic that Roman literature began to flourish,
particularly political satire.
By 260 BC, Rome had everything it needed to become the greatest city-state in the ancient
world.
A nearly invincible army.
Superior engineering skills.
And a political policy and social structure directed toward colonial expansion.
Thanks for watching Ancient History.
The Romans.
And say, "Harting."
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