This document provides an overview of Chapter 6 from the textbook "The Heritage of World Civilizations" which discusses Republican and Imperial Rome. It includes learning objectives for each section that cover topics like prehistoric Italy, the Roman Republic, imperialism, and the fall of the Republic. Key events summarized include the establishment of the Roman Republic in 509 BCE, the Punic Wars with Carthage, reforms attempted by the Gracchi brothers, and the rise of the First Triumvirate between Pompey, Crassus and Caesar which marked the decline of the Roman Senate's power. The chapter also examines the civilizations that developed during this period in Rome and the regions it conquered.
This wall painting from the first century b.c.e. comes from the villa of Publius Fannius Synistor at Pompeii and shows a woman playing a cithara, a type of lyre. Behind her a child, presumably her daughter, provides support.
Much of what we know of the Etruscans comes from their funerary art. This sculpture of an Etruscan couple is part of a sarcophagus.
This map of ancient Italy and its neighbors before the expansion of Rome shows the major cities and towns as well as a number of geographical regions and the locations of some of the Italic and non-Italic peoples.
The lictors were attendants of the Roman magistrates who held the power of imperium, the right to command. In republican times these magistrates were the consuls, praetors, and proconsuls. The lictors were men from the lower classes—some were even former slaves, and they constantly attended the magistrates when the magistrates appeared in public. The lictors cleared a magistrate’s way in crowds and summoned, arrested, and punished offenders for him. They also served as their magistrate’s house guard.
After the establishment of the Roman Republic, the lictor and his fasces and axe were the symbols of those magistrates who held imperium. Twelve lictors accompanied each consul, and a praetor had six. When a dictator was appointed during a crisis, he had an escort of twenty-four lictors to show that he had powers equal to those of both consuls combined.
1. Why do you think the Roman magistrates required such bodyguards?
2. What does their presence indicate about the nature of early Roman public life?
3. How does the presence of lictors suggest that the Roman and classical Athenian republics had different attitudes toward public officials?
This map covers the theater of conflict between the growing Roman dominions and those of Carthage in the third century b.c.e. The Carthaginian Empire stretched westward from Carthage along the North African coast and into southern Spain.
This carved relief from the second century c.e. shows a schoolmaster and his pupils. The student at the right is arriving late.
This map shows the extent of the territory controlled by Rome at the time of Caesar’s death in 44 b.c.e.
This statue, now in the Vatican, stood in the villa of Augustus’s wife Livia. The figures on the elaborate breastplate are all of symbolic significance. At the top, for example, Dawn in her chariot brings in a new day under the protective mantle of the sky god; in the center, Tiberius, Augustus’s successor, accepts the return of captured Roman army standards from a barbarian prince; and at the bottom, Mother Earth offers a horn of plenty.
The altar was dedicated in 9 b.c.e. It was part of a propaganda campaign—involving poetry, architecture, myth, and history—that Augustus undertook to promote himself as the savior of Rome and the restorer of peace. This panel shows the goddess Earth and her children with cattle, sheep, and other symbols of agricultural wealth.
Spoils from the Temple in Jerusalem were carried in triumphal procession by Roman troops. This relief from Titus’s Arch of Victory in the Roman Forum celebrates his capture of Jerusalem in 70 after a two-year siege. The Jews found it difficult to reconcile their religion with Roman rule and frequently rebelled.
The growth of the empire to its greatest extent is shown in three states—at the death of Augustus in 14 c.e., at the death of Nerva in 98 c.e., and at the death of Trajan in 117. The division into provinces is also indicated. The inset outlines the main roads that tied the far-flung empire together.
The Roman provincial city of Pompeii, near the Bay of Naples, was buried by an eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79. The town, together with its private houses and their contents, was remarkably well preserved until its rediscovery in the eighteenth century. Among the discoveries were a number of works of art, including pictorial mosaics and paintings. This depiction of a young woman, on a round panel from a house in Pompeii, is part of a larger painting that includes her husband holding a volume of Plato’s writings. The woman is holding a stylus and a booklet of wax tablets and is evidently in the process of writing. Her gold earrings and hair net show that she is a fashionable person of some means. Late first century. D: 14 5/8 inches.
This is a reconstruction of a typical Roman apartment house found at Ostia, Rome’s port. The ground floor contained shops, and the stories above it held many apartments.
This early Christian art shows Christ arrested by soldiers on the night before his crucifixion. Note that Christ is portrayed clean-shaven and dressed in the toga of a Roman aristocrat.
Thrown to the lions in 275 by the Romans for refusing to recant his Christian beliefs, St. Mamai is an important martyr in the iconography of Georgia, a Caucasian kingdom that embraced Christianity early in the fourth century. This gilded silver medallion, made in Georgia in the eleventh century, depicts the saint astride a lion while he bears a cross in one hand, symbolizing his triumphant victory over death and ignorance.
Diocletian divided the sprawling empire into four prefectures for more effective government and defense. The inset map shows their boundaries, and the large map gives some details of regions and provinces. The major division between East and West was along the line running from north to south between Pannonia and Moesia.
In the fourth century the Roman Empire was nearly surrounded by ever-more-threatening neighbors. The map shows where these so-called barbarians lived and the invasion routes many of them took in the fourth and fifth centuries.
Christianity grew swiftly in the third–sixth centuries, especially after the conversion of the emperors in the fourth century. By 600, on the eve of the birth of the new religion of Islam, Christianity was dominant throughout the Mediterranean world and most of Western Europe.