ANCIENT rome

History

• Ancient Rome grew from a small town on central Italy’s Tiber River into an empire that at its peak encompassed most of continental Europe, Britain, much of western Asia, northern Africa and the Mediterranean islands.
• Rome was founded by Romulus and Remus, twin sons of Mars, the god of war.

Government

• The Roman government was a strange mix of a democracy and a republic.
• The Ancient Romans did not want one man to make all of the laws, they decided to balance the power of the government between three branches, there was first the executive branch, then the legislative branch, and finally the judicial branch.

Religion

• Christianity was made the official religion of the Roman Empire by the Emperor Constantine in the 4th century AD. Before then, Christians got into trouble because they refused to worship the emperor as a god. Some Christians were arrested and put to death.
• The Romans are known for the great number of deities they honored, a capacity that earned the mockery of early Christian polemicists.

Leadership

• Ancient Roman leaders is a difficult task to manage with precision.
• Romans had a shifting definition of what might be considered a Roman leader: •shifting from a local clan chief •to one of the 7 Roman kings •to an elected Roman consul during the Republic •military generals •temporary dictators

social structure

• Social class in ancient Rome was hierarchical, but there were multiple and overlapping social hierarchies, and an individual's relative position in one might be higher or lower than in another.
• Roman society was patriarchal in the purest sense; the male head of household held special legal powers and privileges that gave him jurisdiction over all the members of his familia, a more encompassing term than its modern derivative "family" that included adult sons, his wife married daughters.

Building programs

• The Ancient Romans intended that public buildings should be made to impress and amaze, as well as perform a public function.
• The Pantheon is an example of this, particularly in the version rebuilt by Hadrian, which remains perfectly preserved, and which were over the centuries that has served, particularly in the Western Hemisphere, as the inspiration for countless public buildings.

ancient rome