When in Rome, do as the Romans do. Back in 2012, on that $199 cheap cruise that we booked on Royal Caribbean, we were wandering around Rome, and everywhere we looked, there were these water fountains. Just running.
Then we learned they were safe drinking fountains. Mind blown. There's over 2,500 of them.
Thanks, Roman aqueducts. And thanks for saving us a euro every time we wanted a bottle of water. Rome. What a great city, and all that it's remembered for during the classical era.
I'm Steph Gergis, or Mrs. Gergis in the classroom, and today we are going to learn about yesterday so we can understand today to write a better tomorrow. Specifically, today we're going to talk about Rome. Things that come to mind when I think of Rome. The movie Gladiator.
It came out in 2000, so that probably doesn't come to mind because you probably weren't born yet. The Colosseum. The Vatican, which is the smallest country in the world within the city of Rome.
St. Peter's Basilica, where you'd find Michelangelo's painting on the top of Sistine Chapel. While Greece was the birthplace of democracy, Rome is the birthplace of the Republic. So let's talk a little bit more about the Republic. A Republic is where representatives represent people. And that replaced a monarchy or a king that existed there before.
Their government's interesting. They had consuls. There was actually two of them, and they were like the highest position. Think of like a president or a prime minister.
And they were in charge of the military. The second thing that you need to know about their government in Rome was that they had a senate. Typically about 300 senators who represented the people. And they were appointed by the consuls. They were not elected like we think of republics today.
Typically this appointment was for life unless you did something that was dishonorable. Also, the Senate mostly represented the rich, landowning class known as the patrician class. This is really like the highest class in Roman society, and it was maybe about 5% of the population. Without complicating it too much, it really had to do more with your family name or your heritage, some sort of early nobility. Basically, you were born into the patrician class.
The other class of people were the plebeians, or the average working class person. You're... your Roman farmers, your bakers, your craftsmen, your teachers.
Basically everyone else, or the 95% of Roman citizens were plebeians. Over time, the plebeians felt they weren't represented, because they weren't. And no one was thinking of them, because they weren't. Enter the creation of the assemblies and the tribunes.
Think of assemblies as legislative bodies that operated in a more democratic fashion, where people would vote yes or no on certain proposals. All Roman citizens, patricians, and plebeians could attend these discussions in the Roman forum, and they could have their voice heard. However, the Senate could veto any of those decisions that they made.
So the plebeians were still not very happy about their position in society. So they created a new position called a tribune. Tribunes had to be chosen from the plebeian class, and they went to all the meetings of the Senate. They could basically veto anything that the Senate did, which would be bad for the poor people.
Veto in Latin really just means, I forbid it. And so these tribunes were able to veto things that were happening in the Senate. The plebeians also pushed for laws that they would be written down and codified, and they would place these in a public square so that everyone could read them. Very similar to the Code of Hammurabi. This is known as the 12 tables, as they posted 12 plaques in the forum for all to see with all the laws written down.
All of this classical history is important to learn, as it should sound very familiar to you if you live in the U.S. or basically any democratic nation around the world. In the United States, our representative democracy or constitutional republic is built on the ideas of the classical Romans and Greeks, which reemerges in the Renaissance, refined during the Enlightenment, and now is in many of our countries today. Was it identical? No. Should we be married to the idea of how our Constitution was written in 1787 and it should remain the exact same way?
That's a great discussion to think about as we continue to write a better tomorrow. You see, the Roman Republic was epic. They had amazing architecture. Aqueducts all across the empire. They had the Roman Forum, the Colosseum, which some pretty terrible things happened there.
But the arena itself looks cool. But we are forgetting something pretty major. It didn't stay a republic.
Everything changed with one man named Julius Caesar. The very short version of this story is Julius Caesar gained more and more power, and he started to look more and more like a king. He was a consul, and then declared himself dictator for life, which is never a good thing.
And some Roman senators felt like he was getting too much power. So they stabbed him 23 times on the 15th of March, also known as the Ides of March in 44 BCE. The debate continues and there were two camps.
Caesar was highly liked, so people were really upset and they saw the senators as assassins. Meanwhile, Cassius and Brutus tried to rally people to protect the Republic and what they did was a good thing. The nephew of Julius Caesar, Octavian.
vowed revenge and said that these assassins were wrong. And there's a civil war of sorts. Spoiler, he wins, the Republic dies, and it moves towards an empire where the leader is known as an emperor.
The Senate still exists, but loses a lot of its power. The Roman Empire continues on for 400 some years and has some pretty crazy stories that maybe you'll learn more on your own. Some of the emperors that you want to remember is probably the first one.
Octavian who started to go by Caesar Augustus, and he ruled for a while. The second emperor is Tiberius, and this is important because he lived during the life of Jesus, which we'll learn more about in the Christianity video. The fifth one was Nero. He killed his mom.
He killed a bunch of Christians, which was on the rise at that time. And as the legend goes, he fiddled while Rome burned to the ground. There's maybe even a debate if he started the fire to make more room for his building projects.
Fast forward a lot, the 51st emperor was Diocletian, who divided their vast empire to have more of a bureaucracy to help control vast areas that they had. The 57th emperor was Constantine. He converts to Christianity, issues the Edict of Milan that allows freedom of religion, and he moves the capital to Byzantium, which used to be a Greek city-state.
He renamed it after himself, now known as Constantinople, or... As you're probably more familiar with today's date, Istanbul, which is a part of Turkey. Oh Rome, you're so classic. They don't make you like you used to, and you're never going out of style.
But my friends, Rome will fall like all classical civilizations. But did they ever really go out of style? More on that later. Thanks for tuning in. Feel free to subscribe below as we continue to learn about yesterday, to understand today, and help write a better tomorrow.