1. The Roman Empire p

2. 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.

3. 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.”

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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 never-ending 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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.