Lecture on Pax Romana

so now we&#39;re going to look at the so-called pox romana which means the roman peace this refers to the internal peace that the roman state enjoyed from the time of augustus for a period of time lasting about 200 years right of roughly 200 years of relative internal peace and calm for the roman state the pox romana you see was in contrast to the civil wars the political violence that had wracked the roman republic for about 100 years and in fact we saw last time that one of the reasons why octavian or augustus was successful in consolidating his power over the roman state was there were clearly a lot of people who were grateful for this new period of political stability that had been so elusive for so many years that in the point by the way i can&#39;t uh i can&#39;t hurt to make this point a few times which is that by the time octavian or augustus caesar had begun to rule over rome we&#39;re talking about a period that is decades removed from the normal functioning of the traditional republic so when octavian presented himself or augustus presented himself as just a traditional republican leader we look at that today and say come on you&#39;re really kind of like a king and and you&#39;re just sort of disguising that by saying all these republican sounding things but a lot of people at the time would not have actually remembered within their own lifetime what that republic looked like that probably assisted augustus as well here you&#39;re looking at um a freeze work from an altar that was built to celebrate the peace that augustus had been able to bring the roman state it was built um to commemorate augustus&#39;s return from some battles he was fighting to consolidate the state on the western part of the empire but it&#39;s what&#39;s been depicted here apparently is um an earth sort of goddess that um was seen as sort of the the origin of fertility uh and and therefore the sustenance of life uh the good life really the origin the unnecessary part of the good life for people in the roman state so the idea in fact really for augustus and his successors is that because of their power that this is what rome can now look forward to right this kind of peace wealth and calm it&#39;s not surprising that a lot of people in the roman state would very much have celebrated this and been happy about its arrival um could have been a lot different right if octavian instead had uh been so antagonistic that he had rubbed out the senate altogether and had not wisely distributed power wealth and lucrative positions amongst the elites throughout the states so here you see in this slide text that gives you a more uh specific information about when this period of roman peace again that&#39;s what pox romano means in latin roman peace but it&#39;s said to have begun with augustus in 27 bce that was the year in which he declared he had restored the republic he was given the title augustus and as you can see the pax romana later on would be thought of as having ended with the death of this roman emperor named marcus aurelius and if you do the math you can see that running from 27 bce up until 180 is close to a 200 year period the roman state had grown in size under augustus caesar and it would grow a little bit further as it turns out within the years of the pax romana so and of course that growth externally would not be by peace it would be by actual war so that&#39;s one thing to specify here is that the pox romano roman peace is referring to an internal peace not to a peace between rome and its neighbors although having said that i don&#39;t want you to think that ron was like constantly at war with his neighbors either augustus himself seems to have recognized that the roman state had grown so large that it was probably wiser to consolidate the state as it existed than to try to conquer vast new regions and he seems to have tried to pass on that way of thinking to a successor and although it is true that some later roman emperors did add further to the roman state particularly with the addition of england up here in the rowan province of britannia and other parts of northern africa and in the east for the most part roman emperors following augustus were not necessarily so interested in in rapid expansion as much as they were as i said consolidation of the state as it existed still the pox romano refers to the internal peace not the peace that rome enjoyed with its neighbors that internal piece by the way can also be exaggerated i mean it&#39;s not like there&#39;s no political violence over 200 years it&#39;s sort of a relative piece but having said that there is um remarkably little political violence within the roman state given some of the political dynamics i&#39;m going to get to over during the course of the box romana and also just by comparing it to what had happened in the last hundred years of the roman republic by the standard of the roman republic the pax romani is in fact quite peaceful internally so we have uh seen here that octavian who has given the name augustus by the senate that augustus i suppose i should just call him that for now but augustus had made it seem that he was just trying to restore the republic and we saw that he did not take um untraditional titles for himself and he certainly did not take the title of king for himself or dictator but i pointed out in the last video that in actual practice he essentially monopolized um ultimate political power in rome and people were willing to go along with it partly because they didn&#39;t remember where the real republic had work i mentioned that already in this video but also because they appreciated the piece he brought also because augustus caesar had really tried to give a lot of good things to a lot of different groups in society who appeased them all including showing respect for the senate and giving them lucrative positions in the state but on the condition they remain loyal to himself so there was a lot of good will toward uh augustus um but it does seem that that power of augustus was based in part on this illusion of a republic when in fact we&#39;re dealing with a monarchy and that it seems that when augustus did uh finally get older and eventually of course died that it might create an untenable situation for his heir because if he is really as he claimed simply the leading citizen of rome meaning the person who people just listen to the most because he&#39;s so wise how do you how do you have your you know member of your family succeed that influence right you can&#39;t succeed influence can you well despite this augustus clearly attempted to found a dynasty for himself and actually succeeded because he uh he didn&#39;t have as it turns out a surviving son he could pass on his authority to but he did have a stepson that he adopted as his own son and then named as his heir and that figure then became the new leading citizen of the state following his death and that began a dynasty over the first decades of the first century common era and that&#39;s you know that&#39;s like a dynasty of kings isn&#39;t it or emperors as it would become known so it does seem that given that that seems to contradict the whole sort of idealism of augustus caesar that it might cause some huge political problems uh in fact not so much because there clearly was um a relative amount of contentment out there in the roman states don&#39;t be a part of the elites about the stability and the wealth of the empire and their and their uh benefits from it what it did matter it seems for this air adopted air of augustus the fact that he was well the adoptive heir and thus part of that family of augustus himself and the heir to that man would have the same links familiar links but it it does seem that just as a maybe even more important than that family tie for augustus&#39;s successors would be the backing of the army right the backing of the legions of the roman army and especially the backing as well of the guard that augustus had created to protect his own person right this is this praetorian guard here is the imperial guard it was a small elite force of several thousand soldiers and their number one job was to protect the let&#39;s just call them the emperor for simplicity&#39;s sake and but what happens over time we will see is that sometimes when somebody is in line to be an emperor they will or they won&#39;t based on whether or not they have the support you see these important soldiers they may in other words find that the new emperor is simply determined by the praetorian guard so the importance of the army is really hard to overstate as time goes by in terms of who becomes emperor and who stays emperor and in fact it&#39;s for that reason that the title imperator or emperor becomes more closely associated with power in rome because the person who can command the troops is in fact typically the one right who is going to become the ruler of the roman state and thus one of augustus&#39;s successors so if if you have the family tie with augustus of course that&#39;s going to help all the more and there is as i said something of a dynasty um there&#39;s four rulers after augusta simran who all have family ties to augustus caesar familial ties is that sort of a dynasty maybe not a long long lived dynasty but a dynasty anyway but despite the family name um it it&#39;s interesting that what is proven even within only a few decades of augustus caesar&#39;s own period of rule is um actually within one decade actually now that i say that but it is or two decades actually i should stop doing math either in public or on recording because i just screw it up but the point i&#39;m getting to is that uh is that augustus his heir one of his heirs one of his successors who you may have heard of before a man named young man named caligula came to the throne and despite the fact that it was from the dynasty of julius caesar he of augustus caesar he he acted not just tyrannically he acted in a way that seemed to show that he was mentally unstable caligula as he became known uh not only acted brutally and tyrannically uh almost whimsically sentencing people to die or endure really or really terrible circumstances he he also for whatever reason had a lot of contempt for the senate and showed it in a lot of ways for example he decided at some point apparently to make his horse a senator he made his horse a senator and he walked it into the senate so it&#39;s kind of fascinating that that kind of figure so tyrannical so brutal and so clearly disrespectful of the aristocratic elite in rome didn&#39;t do so well i was eventually murdered by the guard so it goes back to what i said before that emperors may have acquired effectively the power of kings but clearly they&#39;re not all powerful and clearly they need to be wise in the way they use that power if they want to keep it there are some other poor emperors i could point to for example yet another successor of augustus caesar i&#39;m guessing you&#39;ve heard of was a man named nero who i think wasn&#39;t nearly as unstable as caligula but nero seems to have had no problem um ordering his perceived enemies to be executed and he became really interested did nero in like singing and acting in public stuff that was thought of as beneath the dignity of the emperors and eventually when the guard and the army pulled their loyalty from him he decided to just commit suicide and so there are emperors who do not do very well but there are many others who do do well i&#39;m going to name a few of those along the way here it turns out that after augustus caesar&#39;s line died out in other words there was a point where the last of these actually was narrow the last of these um julio claudius as they&#39;re called um didn&#39;t produce any obvious air it led um after about a year of turmoil to a new dynasty of emperors who actually ruled fairly well after two dynasties had run their course in terms of heirs it led to this really interesting situation where an emperor you see from the second dynasty was killed but without having named an heir and without a credible like male air to take over and so the senate stepped in and decided to appoint a man who was worthy of the title nerva to be the new emperor and this man nerva who is regarded as being it was favorably regarded by historians and by posterity um before his short reign did come to an end since he did not have an obvious heir he decided to nominate an heir ahead of time as well and he chose someone who he thought would be capable and that man did the same in fact it led to five emperors in a row beginning with nerva and ending with marcus aurelius who were all chosen not based on their family ties but because they were thought of being competent and capable people who could rule the roman state well centuries later these five emperors i&#39;m referring to became known as the five good emperors because they are regarded as being among the five best rulers that the roman empire ever had these were rulers who really in a lot of ways like augustus himself originally had um shown a great deal of respect for roman values for the roman law for roman pietas they showed their respect to the roman senate even though again technically the senate really isn&#39;t so independent it&#39;s kind of hard in the days of the principal or the roman empire if we want to call it that more generically to sort of be in the senate and be opposed to the emperor that&#39;s not going to work out well for you still as we will see the pox romana may have had a few bad rulers like say caligula but there were plenty of very gifted and wise rulers as well marcus aurelius in particular has a pretty positive reputation he actually really enjoyed and studied greek philosophy and he was a a pretty impressive stoic philosopher in his own right he sort of came as close to the ideal philosopher king that plato had imagined you know centuries before as maybe we have found um in the ancient world unfortunately um as well regarded as marcus aurelius was he did unlike his four predecessors have a son and he apparently could not resist the idea of naming that son as his heir unfortunately that son was very bad and it led not only to the end of the five good emperors but traditionally after marcus aurelius died his death is thought of as ending the epoxy mana because rome would start to have some internal political problems afterward which we&#39;ll be getting to in later videos so um rome in the era of the pox romana as you can see here was politically for the most part governed by individuals who kept in mind the same sort of political wisdom that augustus himself had done but that didn&#39;t mean that they all did and you do definitely see some poor leaders once in a while but often those poor rulers are abandoned by the imperial guard or even by the army itself leading to disaster for themselves here you can see the size of the roman state as it the greatest extent of territory it achieved under emperor trajan at 117 um the areas in light green here are the territories that have been added to the empire by augustus himself and you can see um by the time a trajan that these other areas of the empire including a lot of mesopotamia and britain have been added as well so this thing this empire got really big during the parks homana and it really is impressive that the delicate political balance that augustus had created could remain in place for so long it could remain in place for so long clearly it&#39;s not just the relative internal piece of the state that helped keep the system going it was the wealth it enjoyed and it was also the extension of roman citizenship and roman law outside of italy we have seen in here already that one of the it seems key factors in the success of the roman state was its willingness to extend the benefits of living in the roman empire to conquered people and particularly to the elites of conquered people and the most dramatic example of that clearly was roman citizenship itself roman citizenship had over centuries in an earlier period been gradually extended to most of the italian peninsula and it was extended farther and farther to other places throughout the empire as we go into the era of the pax romana here&#39;s yet another by the way of the emperors that has got a favorable reputation he was part of that first dynasty of emperors created by augustus himself his name is claudius he&#39;s famous as it turns out for conquering britain adding it to the roman empire but he also was a man who was interested in extending roman citizenship to people in gaul something that had first been attempted by julius caesar but had been pulled back by augustus claudius argued that extending citizenship to conquer people was what had allowed rome to become a great empire in the first place and he specifically mentioned that story we looked at in a previous video about how romulus the first king of rome you may remember this legendary story i had had invited outcasts from other nearby people to come populate the city of rome and then once those men had arrived you&#39;ll also remember romulus had then staged that absurd uh kidnapping of sabine women in order to populate the new city with women and so as ridiculous as those stories are in terms of myth uh it created this sense for romans that from the beginning their strength had been based on many people&#39;s coming together in juan and that that&#39;s how claudius has emperor justified extending citizenship further this is what we&#39;ve done to get to where we are it&#39;s part of who we are as romans and he argued it should be continued well this extension of roman citizenship to more and more people it&#39;s sort of an uneven process that happens over several centuries but eventually we will see by the year 212 which is just a little bit after our period for this video but by 212 there was a roman emperor who finally just extended the right to roman citizenship to all free men throughout the empire women were if they were free were given something like citizenship rights but they never got the same political rights that men were given still by the standard of the ancient world this is um about as close to naturalized citizenship as you can get by the standards of the time and it does seem to be a very important way for the state to keep itself so cohesive and strong throughout the long years of the pakistan mana and not only was it the spread of roman citizenship that was a factor here but we also have to remember the extension of roman law right we saw that romans ever since the time of the republic believed that their sort of mission was to promote law and justice for more and more of the people of the world and the sort of philosophy behind the law got more and more sophisticated as we go into the years of the pax romana eventually roman law was codified famously codified by a later roman emperor named justinian we&#39;re going to talk about in a later video justinian though actually did not rule until the 500s so quite a bit of time after our period but the the code of roman law produced by justinian was actually based on decisions on legal tracks and on just laws that that were first created in the pax or mana or in some cases that go back even to the roman republic so when you look at justinian&#39;s code you&#39;re not just looking at the legal principles and ideas of the late roman empire you&#39;re also looking at the legal ideals of rom at the height of its power during the pax ramana and while some of those principles we&#39;ve got some of them in the reading you&#39;ll see well some of the principles of that roman code would be considered pretty odious to us today as modern people for example women of course being second-class citizens at best and also of course the legalization of slavery and of torture there are other principles in roman law that would become quite influential on western civilization later on and we could see why they would uh be more effective as a sort of glue to keep the many peoples of the empire together for example the idea that everyone who&#39;s a citizen should have the same standing before the law regardless of you know where they come from right whether they come from gaul or italy or spain or wherever or the idea that anonymous uh accusations against people should not have any legal weight in court or the idea that people should be thought of as being innocent but until the evidence has been seen there&#39;s a lot of concepts now don&#39;t get me wrong it&#39;s not like the romans always perfectly implemented these ideals but to be fair neither do we still the extension of citizenship and along with it the benefits of roman law went a long way it seems toward helping to keep the empire cohesive and strong another factor that led to the long years of the pat of the pax romana was the spread of latin culture itself throughout the empire so the romans in other words they realized that if they were going to keep all these different groups of people in this big far-flung empire together for any length of time that they needed to build a sense of cultural unity at least among the elites of the empire so this romanization i&#39;m referring to it&#39;s really aimed at the elites in conquered territories it&#39;s not so much aimed at regular common people but there doesn&#39;t seem to be any question that romanization was not only successful but that it also is a major factor behind the the power the wealth the longevity of the roman state during this 200-year period known as the pox romana um in fact i&#39;ll point out to you in this slide as well that part of romanization involved actually founding new cities outside of italy here you&#39;re looking at the efforts in this regard that had already been made both by julius caesar himself as well as augustus and these efforts were continued in fact over the long years of the pax romana but the romans would found for example new cities or towns and they would build them in a roman way and then in these new towns they were sometimes considered colonies there would be roman officials sometimes from italy who would colonize the city and bring with them of course the latin language latin culture and then elites in the region could merge in the town and join the ruling elite there and in this way you get pockets or islands of latin culture celebrated by elites throughout the empire there&#39;s no question that this played a really important role at adding a sort of glue that bound the state together for many many years and there are a lot of features of latin culture that would have been seen as desirable as sophisticated i&#39;m sure all of you are already familiar at least in general ways uh about how impressive the architectural and engineering achievements of the ancient romans were i mean that would of course would be particularly the case in the capital of the roman state rome itself but i&#39;ll show you a few images along the way here of how this architecture and engineering was replicated not just in italy but in other areas outside of italy in the roman empire essentially there&#39;s a sense of sophistication and charm that came with latin culture that was very effective in winning over the elites of conquered people to merging with roman civilization right you put the benefits perceived benefits of latin culture together with citizenship and the protection of roman law and it&#39;s no wonder that the roman emperors or perhaps as successful as they were this is as you can see an illustration of by a modern person imagining what the center of the city of rome would have looked like in the ancient period and i i show it to you just to sort of create a sense of why it would be that elites from conquered places elites in conquered places by rome uh would have been very impressed by what i&#39;ve already said before by the architectural engineering feats of roman civilization here we are looking at what would have been the forum the center of in other words of the city of rome in ancient times of course i&#39;ll show you some a few images of the form along the way here as they actually look in photographs today it doesn&#39;t look like this anymore obviously but um it really is fascinating uh in the roman forum to imagine what it must have been like to walk around and see this incredible amount of wealth all around you the romans of course used architectural styles that were virtually taken wholesale in many cases from the ancient greeks but since they developed a form of concrete that the greeks had not used it it gave strength to their constructions that allowed them to build buildings on a much larger scale you know actually bigger buildings than what the greeks had managed to build and it basically leads to a sort of monumental architecture that i think would have been quite impressive to those in the empire whether they were from italy or not one of the towns roman towns that i&#39;ll show you some examples of along the way of this architecture and engineering is one you possibly heard of before the town of pompeii i&#39;ve actually shown you several examples already in looking at roman previous videos of art from paintings from pompeii and the reason why in case you don&#39;t know the story is that this roman town of pompeii which by the way was a pretty well-off town i&#39;ve in the past heard somebody compare it to like a malibu type town for uh the roman state but in any case pompeii uh unfortunately for the pompeians was overwhelmed by a volcanic eruption in 79 79 excuse me common era or 80 depending on how you want to uh label it and in any case it buried the city under a lot of ash and pumice and it the city was therefore preserved in a sense under all his volcanic material until such time and many centuries later of course that pompei was excavated it actually excavated other towns that were overwhelmed by volcanic eruptions as well the pompeii is the largest the most famous of them in any case so we have this remarkable amount of preservation of roman ruins and paintings and other things in pompei and so if you look at pompeii and you look at the architectural structures it exhibits they&#39;re quite clearly the same types of major buildings that you would find in rome itself you can see in fact the forum of pompeii the forum being the central part of the city where economic and cultural activity and even political activity would take place it&#39;s kind of like the marketplace that was the center of the agora of greek in fact cities in an earlier age another kind of structure that was characteristic of roman culture and therefore not only present in rome but in many different cities pompeii and others besides would have been temples built in the greek style honoring gods with latin names that were really you might remember based on greek gods but here you can see one of these temples this by the way is a photograph of the roman forum as it looks today and you can see that the ruins themselves i suppose are fairly impressive but it does make you wonder what it really must have looked like back in antiquity with all these structures still standing but this is the temple devoted to the god saturn the part of pietas for the romans was not just putting rome first but also making sure to keep the gods happy that protected rome because if the gods aren&#39;t happy then they let disaster befall rome and as you may remember i said augustus himself found it very important to revitalize the state cults in order to ensure there was a sense that the gods would continue to pray protect the civilization and given the success that the roman state and the pakistan went on to enjoy it&#39;s sort of to be expected that a lot of romans would have believed that success was directly a consequence of the protection of the roman gods this is um i&#39;m going to show you example of temples from other cities too again as sort of a sign of the spread of roman culture outside of rome itself but i did want to take kind of a side make a side note here really briefly because it&#39;ll be important later in the class there are some unique structures in rome and one of them is a temple that is known as the pantheon and you&#39;re looking of course at a modern photograph of it the pantheon means all the gods and it&#39;s possible the temple was built in devotion to all of the gods it&#39;s not entirely clear the reason this temple ancient temple survived is because it was converted by christians into a church in late antiquity in fact a lot of ancient structures if they have survived relatively intact it&#39;s because of that exact reason and yet having said that most of what is uh seen in the pantheon is still a remnant of the ancient architecture so it&#39;s really a remarkable building you actually can&#39;t see it in this particular photograph because it&#39;s hidden by the facade and the roof but there&#39;s actually a big dome over the circular part of the building and we&#39;re going to look at that dome and why it matters later on this structure actually would eventually become an inspiration during the italian renaissance and actually beyond so it&#39;s a very influential building on later western civilization and for that reason i wanted to point it out it&#39;s not that the pantheon is necessarily influential on other temples that we see around the roman world at least not characteristically so but still we do find the same temples in rome generally speaking are to be found in other roman towns in italy and outside of italy such as pompeii this is the temple devoted in fact to the roman god excuse me the greek god actually apollo but also worshiped in rome um as you can see not a lot is left standing sadly time and volcanic eruption i&#39;ll do a number on your structures but it&#39;s a lot better preserved than it would have been had it just been exposed to the open other structures that are characteristically roman that would be built in other parts of the empire are amphitheaters um the romans by the way also built theaters like you know actual theaters for plays and so forth for drama um and they also had uh horse racing and things like this but the most popular form of entertainment were these brutal bloody gladiatorial contests that were staged between sometimes between slaves between prisoners sometimes between professional gladiators sometimes people who are enslaved or punished for crimes would be forced to go into the amphitheater just basically against hungry wild beasts and be ripped to shreds it&#39;s the most ugly brutal part of roman culture i think uh one of the well i i should stop using superlatives there um there&#39;s some i mean outright slavery is pretty bad too and other things too so let&#39;s i guess i don&#39;t need to rank all this stuff let&#39;s just say it&#39;s pretty bad um so uh but you know there&#39;s clearly thousands and thousands of animals and human beings and all the scent to die in the most bloody impossible ways for the purpose of public enjoyment this is the famous amphitheater that was built um by the leader of the second dynasty of emperors that ruled in rome um it apparently held up to 50 000 people and no question it&#39;s a pretty impressive structure amphitheaters though were to be found throughout the roman world testifying really to the popularity of this bloody sport you can see another ancient roman town that has survived and then excavated in libya today&#39;s libya could let this magna and here you can see the amphitheater from that period pompei by the way has its own amphitheater as well this is something that&#39;s pretty common uh another type of architecture that&#39;s very characteristic of the sort of wealth of latin culture in the pax romana and that is spread outside of italy outside of raw man italy and other places would be these large public bathing complexes that were simply called baths there are several very large baths that were in rome itself of course this actually doesn&#39;t look that particularly impressive on its own i realize it&#39;s actually just the curve recessed wall of one edge actually this massive bath complex that had existed near the roman forum in antiquity but baths were of course not only important for some degree of hygiene in a crowded city but we&#39;re also important apparently social and recreational centers baz are also found in a lot of different romanized towns throughout the empire here&#39;s one famous example of a bath that was actually built in the new roman province of britannia although in this particular image um basically everything from a water on up is added later by modern people but actually if you go to this location these ancient roman baths there&#39;s actually a lot that&#39;s been excavated that you can go down and see for yourself around the water a lot of roman ruins underneath the fountain you know the foundations and so forth that you can still see under the modern structure they&#39;ve actually created a roman museum down there as well it&#39;s a pretty cool place to go so baths amphitheaters you know temples in the greco-roman style all this are characteristic not just of rome in italy itself but a sort of culture and architecture that&#39;s deliberately spread throughout the empire as part of a process of assimilating at least the elites of conquered people and creating greater cohesion between the different groups that made up the state yet another form of architecture that&#39;s quite important was that of the basilica which was a law court in fact the word basilica has at its base the greek word for king so in other words it&#39;s it&#39;s a building where the ruler sort of holds forth but for the romans it was a law court and it was a building of course during the republic and it&#39;s maintained as well in the empire it&#39;s a sort of structure that would of course be important for a civilization that prides itself on promoting law and justice the basilica here you see a typical floor plan for it was like this long rectangular building and at each end of the building was this curved recess and the way it worked was that there would be a judge in each of these curve resource recesses and the cases that he would hear like the litigants for example would stand in front of the judge and then the judge would make courses decision from the recess is a law courts here you can see on the roman forum one of the law courts or basilicas that was built by julius caesar himself and then actually completed by augustus caesar of course unfortunately now you can just see uh the floor plan so to speak of it as it remains here here you can see going back to that roman town i mentioned before in northern africa and libya you can see another basilica that was built this one was built in the second century common era but you can also see the long rectangular structure and some of the pillared supports that remain that law court is really important i mean not only is it important for the romans because of the conception about the law and their view that they spread justice that that&#39;s their mission in the world um but as we are going to see in a later video that&#39;s the building that&#39;s adopted by christians when rome becomes officially christian as their new house of worship but that&#39;s something we&#39;ll come to in a later video another characteristic form of architecture you&#39;ll see in rome and then elsewhere in rome because of romanization are triumphal arches which were typically built in order to celebrate particularly important victories usually military victories won by particular emperors or rulers this is one in fact from the roman forum itself but um here you can see there&#39;s numerous examples of them but here you can see one that was built across the adriatic in croatia celebrating a victory in battle for some of those who had fought on the side of octavian i don&#39;t want to belabor this more than i should i think i&#39;ve done enough just to point out that roman architecture um what latin culture had to offer conquered people certainly would play an important part at creating a sense of wealth a sense of prestige a sense of unity that otherwise would have been difficult for such a far-flung empire now you can see more examples of engineering genius this is from france or what would have been gaul in the time of the ancient romans but you can see the sophistication of the aqueduct here uh if you go to pompeii by the way the ancient roman city pompeii you can see they actually had a system that delivered running water to the street corners of the residential blocks there it&#39;s pretty impressive for the ancient world here you can see also another form of roman engineering of sorts which is the construction of roads the romans are famous for the amount of roads they built it was critical part of not only military mobility but also fostering trade and also spreading roman culture part of that process of romanization i mentioned before it&#39;s a vital part of the wealth and the um stick togetherness the cohesion really that helped the empire become so strong for so long you could see a map that the red line show where all the main roads of the roman state were located this by the way i should point out this is a road that leads out of the center of rome and was ultimately destined for southern italy in a town called brindisi but this is what it looks like today rome&#39;s actually surprisingly compact despite its uh population and you don&#39;t actually have to walk that far south of the forum to get to the via opia and to see this kind of road for yourself so again the road system here i mean along with the roads and the sort of unity the empire been describing you is all this included a great deal of trade and some manufacturing as well various goods no question that long-term peace over such a far-flung region would lead right to a lot more trade than otherwise would have been the case but having gone on and on about the charms of latin civilization as i keep calling them uh talking about the trade and the relative wealth and all that it should be remembered that despite the prosperity of the time we&#39;re talking about a relative prosperity and we&#39;re talking about the relative wealth of the ancient roman uh empire compared to say its neighbors and shouldn&#39;t be forgotten that the vast majority of people who lived in the roman world would have been very very poor right would have had living standards that would horrify modern people mainly today most people in the roman state wouldn&#39;t have even lived in cities actually referring to city people here but let me just point out here that people when they live and work as farmers it&#39;s hard for them to grow a lot more than they need for themselves so if if living in the city is going to be supported by a surplus of agriculture it takes a lot of people to provide that surplus so there&#39;s this vast number of people in the roman empire who would have been basically very poor farmers and it took that large number of rural poor people in order to support urban life as it existed but even within the cities of course most people in the cities would have been extremely poor themselves in fact i&#39;ve already pointed out to you that uh augustus himself along with his successors the other emperors they all found it politically mandatory to regularly give out money and free bread or grain right to the people in order to placate them and even that wasn&#39;t enough to placate them because we have of course the games i mentioned before here by the way is one of the what would you call them apartment blocks like poor apartment blocks that have been excavated this is from the port city near rome of austria but there are plenty of these types of buildings that have been excavated in the city of rome itself bread and games was the phrase that one rowan writer used to refer to the technique used by roman elites to placate poor people in the cities right free food in other words in gladiatorial con contests this is a painting by the way from pompeii showing one of these gladiatorial contests uh underway so we don&#39;t want to forget therefore that a lot the vast majority in fact the people in the roman world would not have enjoyed the wealth i&#39;m sort of alluding to in the cities cities were the center of roman life in a lot of ways but it&#39;s really the elites that we&#39;re talking about that reap the benefits and i should also point out here that a lot of people in the roman empire would have been slaves some i&#39;ve seen some estimates as high as one-third of the population may have been slaves at least in the early empire because rome didn&#39;t expand as rapidly following augustus as it had before it meant that there weren&#39;t as many slaves coming into the empire through conquest so it does seem that slavery was reduced somewhat in size as time went by but i mean the fact that the romans were constantly freaked out about slave revolts is a pretty clear indication about the number of slaves that existed as well as the desperate nature of the circumstances so we don&#39;t want to forget those realistic assessments of rome and but having said all that i&#39;ll finish here by pointing out that this period of roman history during the pax romana is generally regarded as being the high point of roman civilization and certainly for later western civilization they will look back at this period of roman history and see it as the high point of history altogether roman rulers roman emperors would be envied by the kings we will see of western civilization because these emperors well as i listed here on the slide so much power they controlled this wealth the state was so stable relatively speaking internally the prestige of these rulers as was the longevity of the state for centuries so it&#39;s no wonder it became so widely admired in western culture later on and so influential as well in western culture what we&#39;re going to do with our next topic is we&#39;re going to look at the interesting cultural change that would come along with the rise of the christian religion in the years of the pox romana so we&#39;ll look at that in the next set of videos

so now we&amp;#39;re going to look at the so-called pox romana which means the roman peace this refers to the internal peace that the roman state enjoyed from the time of augustus for a period of time lasting about 200 years right of roughly 200 years of relative internal peace and calm for the roman state the pox romana you see was in contrast to the civil wars the political violence that had wracked the roman republic for about 100 years and in fact we saw last time that one of the reasons why octavian or augustus was successful in consolidating his power over the roman state was there were clearly a lot of people who were grateful for this new period of political stability that had been so elusive for so many years that in the point by the way i can&amp;#39;t uh i can&amp;#39;t hurt to make this point a few times which is that by the time octavian or augustus caesar had begun to rule over rome we&amp;#39;re talking about a period that is decades removed from the normal functioning of the traditional republic so when octavian presented himself or augustus presented himself as just a traditional republican leader we look at that today and say come on you&amp;#39;re really kind of like a king and and you&amp;#39;re just sort of disguising that by saying all these republican sounding things but a lot of people at the time would not have actually remembered within their own lifetime what that republic looked like that probably assisted augustus as well here you&amp;#39;re looking at um a freeze work from an altar that was built to celebrate the peace that augustus had been able to bring the roman state it was built um to commemorate augustus&amp;#39;s return from some battles he was fighting to consolidate the state on the western part of the empire but it&amp;#39;s what&amp;#39;s been depicted here apparently is um an earth sort of goddess that um was seen as sort of the the origin of fertility uh and and therefore the sustenance of life uh the good life really the origin the unnecessary part of the good life for people in the roman state so the idea in fact really for augustus and his successors is that because of their power that this is what rome can now look forward to right this kind of peace wealth and calm it&amp;#39;s not surprising that a lot of people in the roman state would very much have celebrated this and been happy about its arrival um could have been a lot different right if octavian instead had uh been so antagonistic that he had rubbed out the senate altogether and had not wisely distributed power wealth and lucrative positions amongst the elites throughout the states so here you see in this slide text that gives you a more uh specific information about when this period of roman peace again that&amp;#39;s what pox romano means in latin roman peace but it&amp;#39;s said to have begun with augustus in 27 bce that was the year in which he declared he had restored the republic he was given the title augustus and as you can see the pax romana later on would be thought of as having ended with the death of this roman emperor named marcus aurelius and if you do the math you can see that running from 27 bce up until 180 is close to a 200 year period the roman state had grown in size under augustus caesar and it would grow a little bit further as it turns out within the years of the pax romana so and of course that growth externally would not be by peace it would be by actual war so that&amp;#39;s one thing to specify here is that the pox romano roman peace is referring to an internal peace not to a peace between rome and its neighbors although having said that i don&amp;#39;t want you to think that ron was like constantly at war with his neighbors either augustus himself seems to have recognized that the roman state had grown so large that it was probably wiser to consolidate the state as it existed than to try to conquer vast new regions and he seems to have tried to pass on that way of thinking to a successor and although it is true that some later roman emperors did add further to the roman state particularly with the addition of england up here in the rowan province of britannia and other parts of northern africa and in the east for the most part roman emperors following augustus were not necessarily so interested in in rapid expansion as much as they were as i said consolidation of the state as it existed still the pox romano refers to the internal peace not the peace that rome enjoyed with its neighbors that internal piece by the way can also be exaggerated i mean it&amp;#39;s not like there&amp;#39;s no political violence over 200 years it&amp;#39;s sort of a relative piece but having said that there is um remarkably little political violence within the roman state given some of the political dynamics i&amp;#39;m going to get to over during the course of the box romana and also just by comparing it to what had happened in the last hundred years of the roman republic by the standard of the roman republic the pax romani is in fact quite peaceful internally so we have uh seen here that octavian who has given the name augustus by the senate that augustus i suppose i should just call him that for now but augustus had made it seem that he was just trying to restore the republic and we saw that he did not take um untraditional titles for himself and he certainly did not take the title of king for himself or dictator but i pointed out in the last video that in actual practice he essentially monopolized um ultimate political power in rome and people were willing to go along with it partly because they didn&amp;#39;t remember where the real republic had work i mentioned that already in this video but also because they appreciated the piece he brought also because augustus caesar had really tried to give a lot of good things to a lot of different groups in society who appeased them all including showing respect for the senate and giving them lucrative positions in the state but on the condition they remain loyal to himself so there was a lot of good will toward uh augustus um but it does seem that that power of augustus was based in part on this illusion of a republic when in fact we&amp;#39;re dealing with a monarchy and that it seems that when augustus did uh finally get older and eventually of course died that it might create an untenable situation for his heir because if he is really as he claimed simply the leading citizen of rome meaning the person who people just listen to the most because he&amp;#39;s so wise how do you how do you have your you know member of your family succeed that influence right you can&amp;#39;t succeed influence can you well despite this augustus clearly attempted to found a dynasty for himself and actually succeeded because he uh he didn&amp;#39;t have as it turns out a surviving son he could pass on his authority to but he did have a stepson that he adopted as his own son and then named as his heir and that figure then became the new leading citizen of the state following his death and that began a dynasty over the first decades of the first century common era and that&amp;#39;s you know that&amp;#39;s like a dynasty of kings isn&amp;#39;t it or emperors as it would become known so it does seem that given that that seems to contradict the whole sort of idealism of augustus caesar that it might cause some huge political problems uh in fact not so much because there clearly was um a relative amount of contentment out there in the roman states don&amp;#39;t be a part of the elites about the stability and the wealth of the empire and their and their uh benefits from it what it did matter it seems for this air adopted air of augustus the fact that he was well the adoptive heir and thus part of that family of augustus himself and the heir to that man would have the same links familiar links but it it does seem that just as a maybe even more important than that family tie for augustus&amp;#39;s successors would be the backing of the army right the backing of the legions of the roman army and especially the backing as well of the guard that augustus had created to protect his own person right this is this praetorian guard here is the imperial guard it was a small elite force of several thousand soldiers and their number one job was to protect the let&amp;#39;s just call them the emperor for simplicity&amp;#39;s sake and but what happens over time we will see is that sometimes when somebody is in line to be an emperor they will or they won&amp;#39;t based on whether or not they have the support you see these important soldiers they may in other words find that the new emperor is simply determined by the praetorian guard so the importance of the army is really hard to overstate as time goes by in terms of who becomes emperor and who stays emperor and in fact it&amp;#39;s for that reason that the title imperator or emperor becomes more closely associated with power in rome because the person who can command the troops is in fact typically the one right who is going to become the ruler of the roman state and thus one of augustus&amp;#39;s successors so if if you have the family tie with augustus of course that&amp;#39;s going to help all the more and there is as i said something of a dynasty um there&amp;#39;s four rulers after augusta simran who all have family ties to augustus caesar familial ties is that sort of a dynasty maybe not a long long lived dynasty but a dynasty anyway but despite the family name um it it&amp;#39;s interesting that what is proven even within only a few decades of augustus caesar&amp;#39;s own period of rule is um actually within one decade actually now that i say that but it is or two decades actually i should stop doing math either in public or on recording because i just screw it up but the point i&amp;#39;m getting to is that uh is that augustus his heir one of his heirs one of his successors who you may have heard of before a man named young man named caligula came to the throne and despite the fact that it was from the dynasty of julius caesar he of augustus caesar he he acted not just tyrannically he acted in a way that seemed to show that he was mentally unstable caligula as he became known uh not only acted brutally and tyrannically uh almost whimsically sentencing people to die or endure really or really terrible circumstances he he also for whatever reason had a lot of contempt for the senate and showed it in a lot of ways for example he decided at some point apparently to make his horse a senator he made his horse a senator and he walked it into the senate so it&amp;#39;s kind of fascinating that that kind of figure so tyrannical so brutal and so clearly disrespectful of the aristocratic elite in rome didn&amp;#39;t do so well i was eventually murdered by the guard so it goes back to what i said before that emperors may have acquired effectively the power of kings but clearly they&amp;#39;re not all powerful and clearly they need to be wise in the way they use that power if they want to keep it there are some other poor emperors i could point to for example yet another successor of augustus caesar i&amp;#39;m guessing you&amp;#39;ve heard of was a man named nero who i think wasn&amp;#39;t nearly as unstable as caligula but nero seems to have had no problem um ordering his perceived enemies to be executed and he became really interested did nero in like singing and acting in public stuff that was thought of as beneath the dignity of the emperors and eventually when the guard and the army pulled their loyalty from him he decided to just commit suicide and so there are emperors who do not do very well but there are many others who do do well i&amp;#39;m going to name a few of those along the way here it turns out that after augustus caesar&amp;#39;s line died out in other words there was a point where the last of these actually was narrow the last of these um julio claudius as they&amp;#39;re called um didn&amp;#39;t produce any obvious air it led um after about a year of turmoil to a new dynasty of emperors who actually ruled fairly well after two dynasties had run their course in terms of heirs it led to this really interesting situation where an emperor you see from the second dynasty was killed but without having named an heir and without a credible like male air to take over and so the senate stepped in and decided to appoint a man who was worthy of the title nerva to be the new emperor and this man nerva who is regarded as being it was favorably regarded by historians and by posterity um before his short reign did come to an end since he did not have an obvious heir he decided to nominate an heir ahead of time as well and he chose someone who he thought would be capable and that man did the same in fact it led to five emperors in a row beginning with nerva and ending with marcus aurelius who were all chosen not based on their family ties but because they were thought of being competent and capable people who could rule the roman state well centuries later these five emperors i&amp;#39;m referring to became known as the five good emperors because they are regarded as being among the five best rulers that the roman empire ever had these were rulers who really in a lot of ways like augustus himself originally had um shown a great deal of respect for roman values for the roman law for roman pietas they showed their respect to the roman senate even though again technically the senate really isn&amp;#39;t so independent it&amp;#39;s kind of hard in the days of the principal or the roman empire if we want to call it that more generically to sort of be in the senate and be opposed to the emperor that&amp;#39;s not going to work out well for you still as we will see the pox romana may have had a few bad rulers like say caligula but there were plenty of very gifted and wise rulers as well marcus aurelius in particular has a pretty positive reputation he actually really enjoyed and studied greek philosophy and he was a a pretty impressive stoic philosopher in his own right he sort of came as close to the ideal philosopher king that plato had imagined you know centuries before as maybe we have found um in the ancient world unfortunately um as well regarded as marcus aurelius was he did unlike his four predecessors have a son and he apparently could not resist the idea of naming that son as his heir unfortunately that son was very bad and it led not only to the end of the five good emperors but traditionally after marcus aurelius died his death is thought of as ending the epoxy mana because rome would start to have some internal political problems afterward which we&amp;#39;ll be getting to in later videos so um rome in the era of the pox romana as you can see here was politically for the most part governed by individuals who kept in mind the same sort of political wisdom that augustus himself had done but that didn&amp;#39;t mean that they all did and you do definitely see some poor leaders once in a while but often those poor rulers are abandoned by the imperial guard or even by the army itself leading to disaster for themselves here you can see the size of the roman state as it the greatest extent of territory it achieved under emperor trajan at 117 um the areas in light green here are the territories that have been added to the empire by augustus himself and you can see um by the time a trajan that these other areas of the empire including a lot of mesopotamia and britain have been added as well so this thing this empire got really big during the parks homana and it really is impressive that the delicate political balance that augustus had created could remain in place for so long it could remain in place for so long clearly it&amp;#39;s not just the relative internal piece of the state that helped keep the system going it was the wealth it enjoyed and it was also the extension of roman citizenship and roman law outside of italy we have seen in here already that one of the it seems key factors in the success of the roman state was its willingness to extend the benefits of living in the roman empire to conquered people and particularly to the elites of conquered people and the most dramatic example of that clearly was roman citizenship itself roman citizenship had over centuries in an earlier period been gradually extended to most of the italian peninsula and it was extended farther and farther to other places throughout the empire as we go into the era of the pax romana here&amp;#39;s yet another by the way of the emperors that has got a favorable reputation he was part of that first dynasty of emperors created by augustus himself his name is claudius he&amp;#39;s famous as it turns out for conquering britain adding it to the roman empire but he also was a man who was interested in extending roman citizenship to people in gaul something that had first been attempted by julius caesar but had been pulled back by augustus claudius argued that extending citizenship to conquer people was what had allowed rome to become a great empire in the first place and he specifically mentioned that story we looked at in a previous video about how romulus the first king of rome you may remember this legendary story i had had invited outcasts from other nearby people to come populate the city of rome and then once those men had arrived you&amp;#39;ll also remember romulus had then staged that absurd uh kidnapping of sabine women in order to populate the new city with women and so as ridiculous as those stories are in terms of myth uh it created this sense for romans that from the beginning their strength had been based on many people&amp;#39;s coming together in juan and that that&amp;#39;s how claudius has emperor justified extending citizenship further this is what we&amp;#39;ve done to get to where we are it&amp;#39;s part of who we are as romans and he argued it should be continued well this extension of roman citizenship to more and more people it&amp;#39;s sort of an uneven process that happens over several centuries but eventually we will see by the year 212 which is just a little bit after our period for this video but by 212 there was a roman emperor who finally just extended the right to roman citizenship to all free men throughout the empire women were if they were free were given something like citizenship rights but they never got the same political rights that men were given still by the standard of the ancient world this is um about as close to naturalized citizenship as you can get by the standards of the time and it does seem to be a very important way for the state to keep itself so cohesive and strong throughout the long years of the pakistan mana and not only was it the spread of roman citizenship that was a factor here but we also have to remember the extension of roman law right we saw that romans ever since the time of the republic believed that their sort of mission was to promote law and justice for more and more of the people of the world and the sort of philosophy behind the law got more and more sophisticated as we go into the years of the pax romana eventually roman law was codified famously codified by a later roman emperor named justinian we&amp;#39;re going to talk about in a later video justinian though actually did not rule until the 500s so quite a bit of time after our period but the the code of roman law produced by justinian was actually based on decisions on legal tracks and on just laws that that were first created in the pax or mana or in some cases that go back even to the roman republic so when you look at justinian&amp;#39;s code you&amp;#39;re not just looking at the legal principles and ideas of the late roman empire you&amp;#39;re also looking at the legal ideals of rom at the height of its power during the pax ramana and while some of those principles we&amp;#39;ve got some of them in the reading you&amp;#39;ll see well some of the principles of that roman code would be considered pretty odious to us today as modern people for example women of course being second-class citizens at best and also of course the legalization of slavery and of torture there are other principles in roman law that would become quite influential on western civilization later on and we could see why they would uh be more effective as a sort of glue to keep the many peoples of the empire together for example the idea that everyone who&amp;#39;s a citizen should have the same standing before the law regardless of you know where they come from right whether they come from gaul or italy or spain or wherever or the idea that anonymous uh accusations against people should not have any legal weight in court or the idea that people should be thought of as being innocent but until the evidence has been seen there&amp;#39;s a lot of concepts now don&amp;#39;t get me wrong it&amp;#39;s not like the romans always perfectly implemented these ideals but to be fair neither do we still the extension of citizenship and along with it the benefits of roman law went a long way it seems toward helping to keep the empire cohesive and strong another factor that led to the long years of the pat of the pax romana was the spread of latin culture itself throughout the empire so the romans in other words they realized that if they were going to keep all these different groups of people in this big far-flung empire together for any length of time that they needed to build a sense of cultural unity at least among the elites of the empire so this romanization i&amp;#39;m referring to it&amp;#39;s really aimed at the elites in conquered territories it&amp;#39;s not so much aimed at regular common people but there doesn&amp;#39;t seem to be any question that romanization was not only successful but that it also is a major factor behind the the power the wealth the longevity of the roman state during this 200-year period known as the pox romana um in fact i&amp;#39;ll point out to you in this slide as well that part of romanization involved actually founding new cities outside of italy here you&amp;#39;re looking at the efforts in this regard that had already been made both by julius caesar himself as well as augustus and these efforts were continued in fact over the long years of the pax romana but the romans would found for example new cities or towns and they would build them in a roman way and then in these new towns they were sometimes considered colonies there would be roman officials sometimes from italy who would colonize the city and bring with them of course the latin language latin culture and then elites in the region could merge in the town and join the ruling elite there and in this way you get pockets or islands of latin culture celebrated by elites throughout the empire there&amp;#39;s no question that this played a really important role at adding a sort of glue that bound the state together for many many years and there are a lot of features of latin culture that would have been seen as desirable as sophisticated i&amp;#39;m sure all of you are already familiar at least in general ways uh about how impressive the architectural and engineering achievements of the ancient romans were i mean that would of course would be particularly the case in the capital of the roman state rome itself but i&amp;#39;ll show you a few images along the way here of how this architecture and engineering was replicated not just in italy but in other areas outside of italy in the roman empire essentially there&amp;#39;s a sense of sophistication and charm that came with latin culture that was very effective in winning over the elites of conquered people to merging with roman civilization right you put the benefits perceived benefits of latin culture together with citizenship and the protection of roman law and it&amp;#39;s no wonder that the roman emperors or perhaps as successful as they were this is as you can see an illustration of by a modern person imagining what the center of the city of rome would have looked like in the ancient period and i i show it to you just to sort of create a sense of why it would be that elites from conquered places elites in conquered places by rome uh would have been very impressed by what i&amp;#39;ve already said before by the architectural engineering feats of roman civilization here we are looking at what would have been the forum the center of in other words of the city of rome in ancient times of course i&amp;#39;ll show you some a few images of the form along the way here as they actually look in photographs today it doesn&amp;#39;t look like this anymore obviously but um it really is fascinating uh in the roman forum to imagine what it must have been like to walk around and see this incredible amount of wealth all around you the romans of course used architectural styles that were virtually taken wholesale in many cases from the ancient greeks but since they developed a form of concrete that the greeks had not used it it gave strength to their constructions that allowed them to build buildings on a much larger scale you know actually bigger buildings than what the greeks had managed to build and it basically leads to a sort of monumental architecture that i think would have been quite impressive to those in the empire whether they were from italy or not one of the towns roman towns that i&amp;#39;ll show you some examples of along the way of this architecture and engineering is one you possibly heard of before the town of pompeii i&amp;#39;ve actually shown you several examples already in looking at roman previous videos of art from paintings from pompeii and the reason why in case you don&amp;#39;t know the story is that this roman town of pompeii which by the way was a pretty well-off town i&amp;#39;ve in the past heard somebody compare it to like a malibu type town for uh the roman state but in any case pompeii uh unfortunately for the pompeians was overwhelmed by a volcanic eruption in 79 79 excuse me common era or 80 depending on how you want to uh label it and in any case it buried the city under a lot of ash and pumice and it the city was therefore preserved in a sense under all his volcanic material until such time and many centuries later of course that pompei was excavated it actually excavated other towns that were overwhelmed by volcanic eruptions as well the pompeii is the largest the most famous of them in any case so we have this remarkable amount of preservation of roman ruins and paintings and other things in pompei and so if you look at pompeii and you look at the architectural structures it exhibits they&amp;#39;re quite clearly the same types of major buildings that you would find in rome itself you can see in fact the forum of pompeii the forum being the central part of the city where economic and cultural activity and even political activity would take place it&amp;#39;s kind of like the marketplace that was the center of the agora of greek in fact cities in an earlier age another kind of structure that was characteristic of roman culture and therefore not only present in rome but in many different cities pompeii and others besides would have been temples built in the greek style honoring gods with latin names that were really you might remember based on greek gods but here you can see one of these temples this by the way is a photograph of the roman forum as it looks today and you can see that the ruins themselves i suppose are fairly impressive but it does make you wonder what it really must have looked like back in antiquity with all these structures still standing but this is the temple devoted to the god saturn the part of pietas for the romans was not just putting rome first but also making sure to keep the gods happy that protected rome because if the gods aren&amp;#39;t happy then they let disaster befall rome and as you may remember i said augustus himself found it very important to revitalize the state cults in order to ensure there was a sense that the gods would continue to pray protect the civilization and given the success that the roman state and the pakistan went on to enjoy it&amp;#39;s sort of to be expected that a lot of romans would have believed that success was directly a consequence of the protection of the roman gods this is um i&amp;#39;m going to show you example of temples from other cities too again as sort of a sign of the spread of roman culture outside of rome itself but i did want to take kind of a side make a side note here really briefly because it&amp;#39;ll be important later in the class there are some unique structures in rome and one of them is a temple that is known as the pantheon and you&amp;#39;re looking of course at a modern photograph of it the pantheon means all the gods and it&amp;#39;s possible the temple was built in devotion to all of the gods it&amp;#39;s not entirely clear the reason this temple ancient temple survived is because it was converted by christians into a church in late antiquity in fact a lot of ancient structures if they have survived relatively intact it&amp;#39;s because of that exact reason and yet having said that most of what is uh seen in the pantheon is still a remnant of the ancient architecture so it&amp;#39;s really a remarkable building you actually can&amp;#39;t see it in this particular photograph because it&amp;#39;s hidden by the facade and the roof but there&amp;#39;s actually a big dome over the circular part of the building and we&amp;#39;re going to look at that dome and why it matters later on this structure actually would eventually become an inspiration during the italian renaissance and actually beyond so it&amp;#39;s a very influential building on later western civilization and for that reason i wanted to point it out it&amp;#39;s not that the pantheon is necessarily influential on other temples that we see around the roman world at least not characteristically so but still we do find the same temples in rome generally speaking are to be found in other roman towns in italy and outside of italy such as pompeii this is the temple devoted in fact to the roman god excuse me the greek god actually apollo but also worshiped in rome um as you can see not a lot is left standing sadly time and volcanic eruption i&amp;#39;ll do a number on your structures but it&amp;#39;s a lot better preserved than it would have been had it just been exposed to the open other structures that are characteristically roman that would be built in other parts of the empire are amphitheaters um the romans by the way also built theaters like you know actual theaters for plays and so forth for drama um and they also had uh horse racing and things like this but the most popular form of entertainment were these brutal bloody gladiatorial contests that were staged between sometimes between slaves between prisoners sometimes between professional gladiators sometimes people who are enslaved or punished for crimes would be forced to go into the amphitheater just basically against hungry wild beasts and be ripped to shreds it&amp;#39;s the most ugly brutal part of roman culture i think uh one of the well i i should stop using superlatives there um there&amp;#39;s some i mean outright slavery is pretty bad too and other things too so let&amp;#39;s i guess i don&amp;#39;t need to rank all this stuff let&amp;#39;s just say it&amp;#39;s pretty bad um so uh but you know there&amp;#39;s clearly thousands and thousands of animals and human beings and all the scent to die in the most bloody impossible ways for the purpose of public enjoyment this is the famous amphitheater that was built um by the leader of the second dynasty of emperors that ruled in rome um it apparently held up to 50 000 people and no question it&amp;#39;s a pretty impressive structure amphitheaters though were to be found throughout the roman world testifying really to the popularity of this bloody sport you can see another ancient roman town that has survived and then excavated in libya today&amp;#39;s libya could let this magna and here you can see the amphitheater from that period pompei by the way has its own amphitheater as well this is something that&amp;#39;s pretty common uh another type of architecture that&amp;#39;s very characteristic of the sort of wealth of latin culture in the pax romana and that is spread outside of italy outside of raw man italy and other places would be these large public bathing complexes that were simply called baths there are several very large baths that were in rome itself of course this actually doesn&amp;#39;t look that particularly impressive on its own i realize it&amp;#39;s actually just the curve recessed wall of one edge actually this massive bath complex that had existed near the roman forum in antiquity but baths were of course not only important for some degree of hygiene in a crowded city but we&amp;#39;re also important apparently social and recreational centers baz are also found in a lot of different romanized towns throughout the empire here&amp;#39;s one famous example of a bath that was actually built in the new roman province of britannia although in this particular image um basically everything from a water on up is added later by modern people but actually if you go to this location these ancient roman baths there&amp;#39;s actually a lot that&amp;#39;s been excavated that you can go down and see for yourself around the water a lot of roman ruins underneath the fountain you know the foundations and so forth that you can still see under the modern structure they&amp;#39;ve actually created a roman museum down there as well it&amp;#39;s a pretty cool place to go so baths amphitheaters you know temples in the greco-roman style all this are characteristic not just of rome in italy itself but a sort of culture and architecture that&amp;#39;s deliberately spread throughout the empire as part of a process of assimilating at least the elites of conquered people and creating greater cohesion between the different groups that made up the state yet another form of architecture that&amp;#39;s quite important was that of the basilica which was a law court in fact the word basilica has at its base the greek word for king so in other words it&amp;#39;s it&amp;#39;s a building where the ruler sort of holds forth but for the romans it was a law court and it was a building of course during the republic and it&amp;#39;s maintained as well in the empire it&amp;#39;s a sort of structure that would of course be important for a civilization that prides itself on promoting law and justice the basilica here you see a typical floor plan for it was like this long rectangular building and at each end of the building was this curved recess and the way it worked was that there would be a judge in each of these curve resource recesses and the cases that he would hear like the litigants for example would stand in front of the judge and then the judge would make courses decision from the recess is a law courts here you can see on the roman forum one of the law courts or basilicas that was built by julius caesar himself and then actually completed by augustus caesar of course unfortunately now you can just see uh the floor plan so to speak of it as it remains here here you can see going back to that roman town i mentioned before in northern africa and libya you can see another basilica that was built this one was built in the second century common era but you can also see the long rectangular structure and some of the pillared supports that remain that law court is really important i mean not only is it important for the romans because of the conception about the law and their view that they spread justice that that&amp;#39;s their mission in the world um but as we are going to see in a later video that&amp;#39;s the building that&amp;#39;s adopted by christians when rome becomes officially christian as their new house of worship but that&amp;#39;s something we&amp;#39;ll come to in a later video another characteristic form of architecture you&amp;#39;ll see in rome and then elsewhere in rome because of romanization are triumphal arches which were typically built in order to celebrate particularly important victories usually military victories won by particular emperors or rulers this is one in fact from the roman forum itself but um here you can see there&amp;#39;s numerous examples of them but here you can see one that was built across the adriatic in croatia celebrating a victory in battle for some of those who had fought on the side of octavian i don&amp;#39;t want to belabor this more than i should i think i&amp;#39;ve done enough just to point out that roman architecture um what latin culture had to offer conquered people certainly would play an important part at creating a sense of wealth a sense of prestige a sense of unity that otherwise would have been difficult for such a far-flung empire now you can see more examples of engineering genius this is from france or what would have been gaul in the time of the ancient romans but you can see the sophistication of the aqueduct here uh if you go to pompeii by the way the ancient roman city pompeii you can see they actually had a system that delivered running water to the street corners of the residential blocks there it&amp;#39;s pretty impressive for the ancient world here you can see also another form of roman engineering of sorts which is the construction of roads the romans are famous for the amount of roads they built it was critical part of not only military mobility but also fostering trade and also spreading roman culture part of that process of romanization i mentioned before it&amp;#39;s a vital part of the wealth and the um stick togetherness the cohesion really that helped the empire become so strong for so long you could see a map that the red line show where all the main roads of the roman state were located this by the way i should point out this is a road that leads out of the center of rome and was ultimately destined for southern italy in a town called brindisi but this is what it looks like today rome&amp;#39;s actually surprisingly compact despite its uh population and you don&amp;#39;t actually have to walk that far south of the forum to get to the via opia and to see this kind of road for yourself so again the road system here i mean along with the roads and the sort of unity the empire been describing you is all this included a great deal of trade and some manufacturing as well various goods no question that long-term peace over such a far-flung region would lead right to a lot more trade than otherwise would have been the case but having gone on and on about the charms of latin civilization as i keep calling them uh talking about the trade and the relative wealth and all that it should be remembered that despite the prosperity of the time we&amp;#39;re talking about a relative prosperity and we&amp;#39;re talking about the relative wealth of the ancient roman uh empire compared to say its neighbors and shouldn&amp;#39;t be forgotten that the vast majority of people who lived in the roman world would have been very very poor right would have had living standards that would horrify modern people mainly today most people in the roman state wouldn&amp;#39;t have even lived in cities actually referring to city people here but let me just point out here that people when they live and work as farmers it&amp;#39;s hard for them to grow a lot more than they need for themselves so if if living in the city is going to be supported by a surplus of agriculture it takes a lot of people to provide that surplus so there&amp;#39;s this vast number of people in the roman empire who would have been basically very poor farmers and it took that large number of rural poor people in order to support urban life as it existed but even within the cities of course most people in the cities would have been extremely poor themselves in fact i&amp;#39;ve already pointed out to you that uh augustus himself along with his successors the other emperors they all found it politically mandatory to regularly give out money and free bread or grain right to the people in order to placate them and even that wasn&amp;#39;t enough to placate them because we have of course the games i mentioned before here by the way is one of the what would you call them apartment blocks like poor apartment blocks that have been excavated this is from the port city near rome of austria but there are plenty of these types of buildings that have been excavated in the city of rome itself bread and games was the phrase that one rowan writer used to refer to the technique used by roman elites to placate poor people in the cities right free food in other words in gladiatorial con contests this is a painting by the way from pompeii showing one of these gladiatorial contests uh underway so we don&amp;#39;t want to forget therefore that a lot the vast majority in fact the people in the roman world would not have enjoyed the wealth i&amp;#39;m sort of alluding to in the cities cities were the center of roman life in a lot of ways but it&amp;#39;s really the elites that we&amp;#39;re talking about that reap the benefits and i should also point out here that a lot of people in the roman empire would have been slaves some i&amp;#39;ve seen some estimates as high as one-third of the population may have been slaves at least in the early empire because rome didn&amp;#39;t expand as rapidly following augustus as it had before it meant that there weren&amp;#39;t as many slaves coming into the empire through conquest so it does seem that slavery was reduced somewhat in size as time went by but i mean the fact that the romans were constantly freaked out about slave revolts is a pretty clear indication about the number of slaves that existed as well as the desperate nature of the circumstances so we don&amp;#39;t want to forget those realistic assessments of rome and but having said all that i&amp;#39;ll finish here by pointing out that this period of roman history during the pax romana is generally regarded as being the high point of roman civilization and certainly for later western civilization they will look back at this period of roman history and see it as the high point of history altogether roman rulers roman emperors would be envied by the kings we will see of western civilization because these emperors well as i listed here on the slide so much power they controlled this wealth the state was so stable relatively speaking internally the prestige of these rulers as was the longevity of the state for centuries so it&amp;#39;s no wonder it became so widely admired in western culture later on and so influential as well in western culture what we&amp;#39;re going to do with our next topic is we&amp;#39;re going to look at the interesting cultural change that would come along with the rise of the christian religion in the years of the pox romana so we&amp;#39;ll look at that in the next set of videos

Transcript for:Lecture on Pax Romana

Transcript for:
Lecture on Pax Romana