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The Roman Empire
p. 627-629
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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 neverending 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.
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.
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.
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).
• Aeneas’s future is Virgil’s present; the
consolidation of the Roman peace under
Augustus is the reward of Aeneas’s unhappy life
of effort and suffering.
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 Virgil’s emphatic statement of the sacrifice
the Roman ideal of duty demands. Aeneas’s 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.