Another week. I'm still a little snakebit by the California History course, as my lesson ran significantly short both Monday and Wednesday (because I didn't do a whole lot to revise them before I taught them). This weekend I'm FIXING things for the next two weeks. We began Mexican California Wednesday, and I ended with the Mexican War. This Monday, I'm going to get us RIGHT up to the Gold Rush (and you know that 40% of my students are writing term papers on some aspect of the Gold Rush) with a discussion of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which did a lot more than just move the Mexican border south.
For today's Western Civ diary, I'm going to be discussing some of the effects that the Roman Empire had on the subsequent cultural history of Europe.
Yes. C.E. If you're older than 40, you'll remember that dates were labeled B.C. (Before Christ) and A.D (Anno Domini, or the year of Our Lord). Not tremendously friendly to Jews, who started using C.E. (for the Common era) and B.C.E. (Before, etc.) as early as the 1950s, if not earlier. My textbook calls it
a recent revision in the system most common in the Western secular world. This system reckons the dates of solar years by counting backward and forward from the traditional date of the birth of Jesus Christ, over two thousand years ago.
Different terms, same underlying concept. Change over time, no matter how we reckon it. I could get annoyed by the identification of the birth of Jesus as the most important thing that ever happened, but then, the Muslim calendar has B.H. and A.H (Anno Hegira, Muhammad's flight from Mecca, in 622 C.E) and this is 1435 A.H.
Anyhow, we start with the accession of Augustus (Julius Caesar's grandnephew and adopted son Octavian) to the position we call emperor in 27 B.C.E. In this position (he called himself princeps, or first man, to give the Senate the idea they were still running Rome, which they weren't) he first began to reshape Rome, a city of nearly one million.
Dedicated in 2 B.C.E, this complex of temples and monuments was constructed to commemorate Augustus's victories oven the assassins of Caesar. It's been the subject of art:
(
Rome: Rounds of the Forum, Looking Towards the Capitol, Canaletto, 1741; Royal Collection, Windsor Castle, London, UK)
Augustus also made the gladiatorial show popular entertainment, but the building associated with it wasn't constructed until 70 C.E, when the emperor Vespasian, to celebrate his triumph over Nero, built the Colosseum where the lake had been in Nero's palace grounds. It seated 50,000.
As you can see, it's still very much there.
We see a distinct architectural style. Rome also had a distinct language, Latin, that came to supplant Greek as the "official" language of Europe and produced the modern-day languages Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and Romanian. Here's a map of the Roman Empire in 117 C.E.
To explain what happened, I'm going to refer to the premise David Hackett Fischer introduces in his magisterial book,
Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America:
Folkways and manners brought from the home country/region persist in the destination country/region - in fact, some migrants bring their entire way of life with them.
That's what happens here too. Maybe not art, but articles, and
here's the New York Times from May 2009 on Roman France.
France, of course, celebrates a "Gallic" past, but there are definitely ruins in Southeastern France, in eastern Provence and western Languedoc. Two Rruins" stand out: the arena in Nimes, constructed in 70 and refitted as a bull ring in 1863
and the Roman theater in Orange, which is the centerpiece of an annual opera festival. Here's the theater
and here it is with a performance of Aida taking place on the stage. For more pictures of roman ruins in Provence, most notably a Roman amphitheater in Arles,
see Steveningen's diary about Provence here.
No map for Spain, but Merida, in the Extremadura region of southwestern Spain near the Portuguese border, has a Roman theater too.
Built in 16-15 B.C.E, this theater also hosts performances. Merida has the greatest collection of Roman ruins in Spain.
In Britain? Here's a map:
and here's
a fairly jaundiced explanation of how Roman Britain came into being from the BBC. Here's a segment of Hadrian's Wall, built starting in 122 and probably completed in six years, to keep the Picts and Scots out of England.
And here's
Wikipedia's caption for said picture:
Sections of Hadrian's Wall remain along the route, though much has been dismantled over the years to use the stones for various nearby construction projects.
I'm not sure that that's actually sad.
Ancient Rome is evident from the ruins, but it's even more evident from the writing that has been preserved, like Virgil's Aeneid and from the religion that supplanted pagan worship in Rome by the year 364. Nobody really remembered much about Roman architecture, and Europe even forgot how to build a dome, which is why the late medieval cathedral in Florence, Santa Maria della Fiore, is never called anything but "Il Duomo" because Brunelleschi's dome was a serious big deal.
This is actually more than I showed my Western Civ class last fall because I frankly had more time to prepare this that I did to prepare most of my lectures last semester.
10:00 AM PT: Not quite "all of the above" for next week. The Visigoths are winning so far, with the Holy Roman Empire second. I'll cover them both (because they fit in the aftermath of Rome), but I'm also going to write a few words over the lay investiture controversy in the Church because it fascinated me and it shows that something else didn't happen in the vacuum popular culture makes us think it did.