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The Romans
The Real Meaning of Patriotism
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Read the study questions
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Read the study questions
The politics of the Romans was based on love of
country
- Romulus and Remus – legend
- Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori – Horace
- World War One
Rome – a single city that grew until it became an
Empire, which in turn gave birth to a Church that
sought to encompass the globe itself
The Greeks – theoreticians, philosophers
The Romans – sober and cautious farmer warriors
Left us two distinct vocabularies with which to
explore political life
- Greeks: policy, politics, police
- Romans: civility, citizen, civilization
Our ideas are inherited from the Greeks, our
practices are inherited from the Romans
Latin – not only the language of the Roman Empire
but also the language of the Church
The collapse of Rome`s political power went hand in
hand with the rise of the spiritual empire of the
papacy
Roman legacy all over Europe
Rome has been admired as both, a republic and an
empire
- Charlemagne crowned himself emperor of the
(Holy) Roman Empire, an empire that continued to
exist until the 19th century
- Dante: the empire which brought peace to the world
- Machiavelli - the virtues of the Roman republic
- The story of Rome as the endlessly fascinating
adventures of a people who thought of themselves
as having a mission to civilize the world
Minoque argues that the Romans had an
extraordinary ability to make profound
modifications to their constitution which yet left
most of the scaffolding standing
- 753-509: kingdom
- 509-31: the republic
- 31 BC – 476 AD: the empire
The roman senate was the continuing institution – its
powers were different from one period to another
and even within the same period
- 300 men (aristocracy), senators for life
Rome was able to find wise or workable solutions to
political conflicts through constitutional responses
- e.g., the conflict between patricians (aristocracy)
and plebeians (the rest) was settled by allowing the
plebeians to have their own office-holders, called
tribunes
The heroic exploits in war
- Best known of those wars is the fight against the …
- Patriotism – precursor of what we call nowadays
nationalism
- Opportunistic rather than planned expansion
- The more they expanded, the more threats to their
security, the more wars they had to fight – déjà vu?
The growth of slavery
- The Romans were the champions of slavery,
particularly after the conquest of the
Mediterranean – war and piracy
- Cato: it was cheaper to work slaves to death and
then replace them than to treat them well
- Treated very poorly – those who worked in
agriculture and particularly in Southern Italy
- Revolts – 73-71 BC, Spartacus
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvTT29cavKo
Polybius, a Greek historian, used the theory of
recurring cycles in order to analyze the success of
the Roman republic
- Rome`s success was due to the fact that one can not
really describe her constitution as monarchical, or
aristocratic, or democratic, for it contained
elements of all three
The dramatic events through which the republic gave
birth to the empire – too many powerful people
- 82: Lucius Cornelius Sulla, the first general to seize
Rome for himself
- 59: the first triumvirat – Caesar, Pompey, Crassus
- 49: Caesar remained the uncontested leader
- 44: …
- 43: the second triumvirat: Octavian,
Lepidus, Marcus Antonius
- 31: Octavian defeats the other two
- 27: Octavian became Augustus
The Age of Augustus (31 B.C. – A.D. 14)
- With all his power, Octavian still had to please the
senatorial aristocracy
- He also understood that the republic could not be
fully reinstated
What Augustus ruled as an empire retained the
forms of the republic for the next 200 years
Compromise:
- 27 B.C.: the Senate gave him the title Augustus, ‘the
revered one’
- He preferred the title princeps – chief citizen or first
among equals
- The system of rule established by Augustus is sometimes
called the principate – a constitutional monarch that corules with the senate
- Practically, Augustus had all the power - appearances
The New Order
- A princeps and an aristocratic senate
- Augustus remained a consul and, from 23 BC, a tribune
(could propose/veto laws)
- He kept the appearances
- He controlled the army directly: 28 legions (150,000)
and the auxiliary forces – the praetorian guard (elite
troops, 9,000)
- Imperator: when victorious, a military commander
was acclaimed by its troops as imperator – emperor
Rome`s fame largely rested on the moral strength
evident to all who had dealings with her
- Any other super-power claiming moral authority?
- Bribery of officials was a capital crime
- Romans could be relied on to stand by their oaths
- Love of country predominated, at least during the
first hundreds of years
- Virtue and freedom declined together – richness
- Any parallels today?
The Romans were convinced that the good of the
patria must take precedence over merely private
concerns
- Within their overarching concern for Rome itself,
they were very competitive and quarrelsome
Machiavelli argued that this competitiveness was a
positive development
- Conflict within the state, as long as it was subordinated
to the public interest, merely reflected the Roman
concern for liberty and for the protection of civil rights
- The policy of Rome issued not from some supposedly
supreme wisdom but from a freely organized
competition between interests and arguments within a
society
Today`s Western politics: conflict is resolved by the
free discussion and the acceptance of whatever
outcome emerges from constitutional procedures
Vocabulary
- potentia: physical power
- potestas: the legal right and power inhering in an
office
- imperium: the total quantum of power available to
the roman state
- auctoritas: more than advice but less than
command – the senate
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More in the textbook …