02: Culture and Society in Ancient Rome

Major eras:
1. Kings
Traditional dates: 753-510 BCE

2. Republic: up to 27 BCE

clusters of wealthy families
republican government: city offices, army
regional wars, alliances
- victories over regional rivals; 90 BCE Roman citizenship across Italian peninsula
Expansion into Mediterranean and beyond
- Carthaginians (Punic Wars) end 146 BCE
- Rulers of Hellenistic regions in Mediterranean
- Expansion into Celtic regions (Julius Caesar)

3. Principate (eventually: Empire)

“princeps,” “first citizen” (Octavian=Augustus): 27 BCE -19 CE

Cicero’s Rome: crisis and end of republic

curia iulia

What did it mean to be an educated person in ancient Rome?

What issues did Cicero care about?

Some visuals: life in public in Rome

- Digitales Forum Romanum
- Digital Latin Forum (archived) Curia Iulia
- Center on Forum:
  - Market
  - Worship
  - Governance: Comitium (Senate, rostra, and more)
  - Learning
  - News
- Other public buildings: theaters; stadia; baths; other temples.
- Residences insula;
- Conimbriga reconstruction insula Ostia Antica reconstructions;
- domus; L’Abitazione romana
- Infrastructure
- Tax farming
- Estates: Latifundium. Servi; coloni

Learning and Culture

- Greeks as models
- Some dates as examples:
  Homer 9^th or 8^th c BCE; Hesiod ca 700; Plato 427-347; Aristotle 384-322
- Record-keeping; literature
- Latin: earliest literature ca 3^rd c BCE
- Greek cultural imports
- Greek remains language of scholarship for Romans
  - science, philosophy, religious thought in Greek
  - Latin: practical subjects
  - Gradual development of “serious” literature in Latin
- Education and Literacy
  - Greek and Latin
  - Private
  - Part of life of political positions, public service, wealth
  - ideal: leisure time to devote oneself to learning. Otium
- Features:
  - Liberal arts: studies befitting a “free person”—someone who will have a career in public service
  - Public service, public speaking
  - Rhetoric; literature
  - Natural philosophy—specialized study

Philosophy and Schools

Athens, Alexandria, other centers

“schools” of philosophy.

- - Traditions
  - Specific issues and approaches
  - related to notions of religion
  - general guides for daily living
  - nature and medicine
  - speaking well. Sophists
  - Examples: Stoics, Platonists, Skeptics

Roman era: mix of influences

Cicero (106-43 BCE)

- - Family: wealthy equestrian, from Arpinum (SE of Rome)
  - Educated in Rome, Greece; law, rhetoric
  - public life: Quaestor, Praetor. Sicily: against Verres. Consul in 63: against Catiline.
  - Exile and return
  - Proscribed in second triumvirate, Killed fleeing to in Macedonia.
  - Wrote throughout career: speeches, Letters. Bring Greek philosophy into a Latin readership.
  - De officiis (incipit of 1463 manuscript)
  - Writers and Readers
  - Manuscripts from ancient Rome: Vergilius Romanus (BAV Cod. Vat. lat. 3867) ; Vergilius Vaticanus (BAV Cod. Vat. lat. 3225); Palatine Vergil (BAV Cod. Pal. lat. 1631)
  - First Edition of De Officiis (Mainz, 1465)
  - First English Translation (1534)

Codex Palimpsestus Vaticanus 5757, the Schedae Vaticanae. The under-writing is a fourth or fifth century Latin uncial copy of Cicero’s De Re Publica (I.xvii.26), once at Bobbio, now in the Vatican; the upper writing is of the eighth century.

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