Roman Law · Government & the Senate · Engineering & Roads · Architecture · The Latin Language · Literature · Religion & Christianity · The Eternal Legacy
Rome’s greatest and most lasting gift to the world is its law. The process began with the Law of the Twelve Tables (c. 450 BC), the first written code of Roman (and European) law. Over the centuries Roman jurists — the prudentes — developed a sophisticated, scientific legal system based on reason, precedent and written statute: the ius civile (civil law for citizens), the ius gentium (the law of peoples, applied to foreigners) and the ius naturale (natural law, universal principles). Key developments included the Praetor’s Edict (from c. 242 BC, through which the magistrate shaped the law year by year) and the great jurists (Gaius, Ulpian, Paul, Papinian) whose opinions defined the law. The tradition culminated in the Corpus Juris Civilis — the codification commissioned by the Byzantine emperor Justinian in the 6th century AD (the Code, Digest, Institutes and Novels) — which preserved Roman law for posterity. Roman legal concepts — contract, property, tort, the legal person, the presumption of innocence, the maxim "the law is not what the judge wills but what justice commands" — underlie the civil law systems of continental Europe, Latin America and much of the world, and influenced the common law tradition too. The very word "civil" (civil law, civil rights, civilisation) is Roman (World History Encyclopedia, "Roman Law," worldhistory.org/Roman_Law/).
Rome bequeathed the model of republican government — a system of elected magistrates, a deliberative Senate, and assemblies of the people, balanced by checks and precedents. The Senate, the council of elders and former magistrates, became the enduring symbol of aristocratic counsel; the very word "senate" (from Latin senex, "old man") and "senator" survive in modern parliaments. The Roman concepts of the senate, the consul (compare "consular" and modern consulates), the praetor (compare "praetorian"), the tribune, the censor, the dictator, and the veto (from Latin veto, "I forbid," the power of the tribunes) all passed into the political vocabulary of later ages. The American founding fathers, in particular, consciously modelled parts of their Constitution on the Roman Republic (the Senate, the separation of powers, the idea of balanced government), drawing on the Roman histories of Livy and Polybius. Republican Rome, with its "mixed constitution," provided the ideal and the cautionary example of self-governing society for every republic from the Renaissance to the present (World History Encyclopedia, "Roman Government," worldhistory.org/Roman_Government/).
Rome was the great engineer of antiquity. Its roads — "all roads lead to Rome" — bound the empire together: over 80,000 kilometres (50,000 miles) of paved highways, built to military spec with layered foundations and stone surfaces, centred on Rome and extending to every province. The Appian Way (312 BC) was the first and most famous. The Romans invented or perfected concrete (opus caementicium), the arch, the vault and the dome, which revolutionised construction — enabling the towering aqueducts that carried water over valleys (the Pont du Gard), the great bridges, the sewers (the Cloaca Maxima), the baths (Caracalla’s, Diocletian’s), the amphitheatres (the Colosseum) and the Pantheon’s vast concrete dome, still the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world. The Romans built central heating (the hypocaust under-floor system for baths), sophisticated water distribution and public sanitation, and a grid of planned colonial cities. These engineering achievements — the roads, aqueducts, arches, domes and concrete, and the very model of urban infrastructure — are the technical foundation of the modern West (World History Encyclopedia, "Roman Engineering," worldhistory.org/Roman_Engineering/).
Roman civilisation carried the Latin language to the world, and Latin’s legacy is everywhere. From Latin (via the Romance languages — Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian) and as the learned language of law, medicine, science and the church for centuries, Latin vocabulary and grammar underpin the modern vocabulary of Europe and the world. Roman numerals, the Latin alphabet (the most widely used writing system on Earth), Latin legal, medical and scientific terms, and countless words in every European language derive directly from Rome. Latin remained the language of the Western Church and of scholarship through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and it is still used today in law, medicine and taxonomy. The very expression of "civilisation" and "culture" as we understand them is Roman in origin, and the Roman idea of a common language uniting many peoples remained the model for later imperial and international culture (World History Encyclopedia, "Latin Language," worldhistory.org/Latin/).
Roman literature, consciously modelled on and surpassing the Greek, produced some of the greatest works of antiquity. The Golden Age of Latin literature under Augustus (27 BC–AD 14) saw Virgil’s Aeneid (the national epic), Horace’s Odes, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita. The earlier Cicero (106–43 BC) set the standard and the very definition of oratory for two thousand years, and his philosophical works transmitted Greek thought to the Latin world. The age of the empire produced the historians Tacitus and Suetonius, the satirists Juvenal and Martial, the Stoic philosopher and playwright Seneca, the letters of Pliny the Younger, and the epic Pharsalia of the poet Lucan. Roman rhetoric — the theory of the speech and the art of persuasion — descended as a formal discipline to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and the Roman ideal that a cultivated citizen commands the power of language has never lost its force (World History Encyclopedia, "Roman Literature," worldhistory.org/Roman_Literature/).
Roman religion — polytheistic, ritualistic and civic — gave the West many of its festivals and traditions (the Saturnalia, ancestor of Christmas revelry; Kalends and Ides, from which our calendar comes) and bequeathed a pantheon of gods (Jupiter, Juno, Minerva, Mars, Venus) whose names, interpreted as the Roman equivalents of Greek gods, survive in our months and days (January from Janus, March from Mars, etc.). The Julian calendar (45 BC, reformed by Julius Caesar with the help of the astronomer Sosigenes) was the base of the Western calendar, improved by Pope Gregory in 1582 into the Gregorian calendar we use today. Most momentously, Rome was the stage on which Christianity rose from a persecuted sect to the official religion of the empire. The faith spread through the Roman world’s roads, language and cities; was legalised by the Edict of Milan (AD 313, under Constantine) and made official by the Edict of Thessalonica (AD 380, under Theodosius); and, centred on the bishop of Rome (the Pope, the successor of the Apostle Peter), became the dominant religion of Europe. In the fully Christianised empire of late antiquity, the Roman church, Roman law and Latin carried the civilisation of Rome into the Middle Ages (World History Encyclopedia, "Roman Religion," worldhistory.org/Roman_Religion/).
Even beyond its law, government, engineering, language and literature, the enduring idea of Rome itself became a legacy. For two millennia "Rome" has stood for order, law and the unity of civilised humanity — the ideal that inspired the Holy Roman Empire, medieval and Renaissance claims to "the glory that was Rome," the educational ideal of classical (Graeco-Roman) learning, and the phrase "the eternal city." Modern republics invoke its Senate; courts invoke its law; engineers inherit its concrete and arches; and half the world’s languages and calendars bear its stamp. As the Latin tag has it — Roma aeterna, "eternal Rome." Though its western empire fell in AD 476, its law, language and idea proved immortal: Rome never truly died, but was transformed into the civilisation of Europe and, through it, of the modern world (World History Encyclopedia, "Roman Empire," worldhistory.org/Roman_Empire/).
Roman architecture was the most influential in the West until modern times, and its two defining achievements were the materials and the forms. The Romans perfected concrete (opus caementicium — a mortar of lime, volcanic ash (pozzolana) and rubble), which could be poured into any shape, set under water, and support enormous weights; and they mastered the arch, the vault and dome — forms that carried great loads with the least material and transformed what engineering could achieve. With these tools the Romans built: the great aqueducts (the Pont du Gard in southern France and the aqueducts that brought water scores of kilometres to Rome) that carried running water to cities across the empire; the roads and bridges (some still in use) over every valley and river; the monumental public buildings — forums, basilicas (the model of the later law-court and of Early Christian churches), baths, amphitheatres — of which the Colosseum (begun c. AD 72, seating some 50,000) is the supreme example; the Triumphal arches (that of Titus, of Septimius Severus, of Constantine) which commemorated victories and whose form still marks public monuments; and the Pantheon in Rome (rebuilt c. AD 126 under Hadrian), whose vast coffered concrete dome (43 metres across) remained the largest in the world for over a millennium and is still the largest unreinforced concrete dome ever built. Through these buildings — and the engineers who spread the techniques across the empire and on through the Byzantine and medieval worlds — Roman architecture became the direct ancestor of Western public architecture, from the Renaissance revival to the dome of the Capitol in Washington D.C. and the arches and columns that still dignify our government buildings and monuments (World History Encyclopedia, "Roman Architecture," worldhistory.org/Roman_Architecture/).
The Roman road network was the sinews of the empire and one of its greatest legacies. Over 80,000 kilometres (50,000 miles) of paved highways radiated from Rome (hence the maxim "all roads lead to Rome") and reached every province, from the Appian Way (the "Queen of Roads," begun 312 BC) south from Rome to the great Via Egnatia crossing the Balkans, the Via Domitia through southern Gaul, and the roads of Britain and the east. Built on stone foundations with a cambered paved surface, with milestones, bridges, and posting-stations for fresh horses and accommodation, they carried armies, officials, trade and ideas at unprecedented speed, and their enduring remains still underlie many modern highways. Along these roads and the sea lanes of the Mediterranean — which Rome cleared of pirates to become the Mare Nostrum ("our sea") — flowed an immense trade: grain from Egypt and Africa fed Rome; wine, olive oil, pottery, metalwork, cloth and manufactured goods moved between provinces; and luxury goods — silk, spices, ivory, gems, Indian pepper — arrived from the east. This unity, unprecedented and for centuries (in the peace of Rome) unbroken, knit the Mediterranean into a single cultural and economic world whose outlines survived the western empire’s fall and shaped the history of Europe, North Africa and the Near East for all subsequent time. The very notion of a united, civilised Mediterranean world — and the instrument of roads and trade that made it possible — is Rome’s gift (World History Encyclopedia, "Roman Roads," worldhistory.org/Roman_Roads/).
Beyond its institutions, Roman law bequeathed the West its fundamental legal concepts and rights. The Romans developed the idea of the legal person (the bearer of rights), of property and possession, of contract and obligation, of tort and delict (civil wrongs and their compensation), of inheritance and the will, of guardianship, of procedure and evidence — and the great maxims of justice that still govern law: "the burden of proof is on the claimant", "no one is bound to accuse himself", "the law does not command what is impossible", and "justice is the constant and perpetual will to render to each his due." The presumption of innocence, the idea that a person is innocent until proven guilty, has its roots in Roman procedure; and the Roman jurists’ habit of reasoning from principle and precedent founded the science of law itself. Through the Corpus Juris Civilis of Justinian (529–534), the Institutes, Digest and Code, this body of law was preserved; revived in the 12th century in the universities of Bologna and the rest of Europe, it became the civil law of continental Europe, Latin America, Scotland and much of the world; and even the common law of England and its heirs absorbed Roman principles and vocabulary. Whenever a modern court speaks of contract, tort, property, persons, guardianship, or the protection of the accused, it is, however unknowingly, speaking in terms first given legal shape by the jurists of ancient Rome (World History Encyclopedia, "Roman Law," worldhistory.org/Roman_Law/).
https://www.worldhistory.org/Roman_Law/https://www.worldhistory.org/Roman_Government/https://www.worldhistory.org/Roman_Engineering/https://www.worldhistory.org/Latin/https://www.worldhistory.org/Roman_Literature/https://www.worldhistory.org/Roman_Religion/https://www.worldhistory.org/Roman_Empire/The glory that was Greece, And the grandeur that was Rome.— Edgar Allan Poe, "To Helen" (1831)