Elements of Roman Civilisation

1The source: a Roman water commissioner boasts

In 97 CE the emperor Nerva appointed the senator Frontinus curator aquarum, the official in charge of Rome's aqueducts. Frontinus wrote a report on the water supply, and in the middle of his lists of channels and pipes he stops to make a comparison:

"With such an array of indispensable structures carrying so many waters, compare, if you will, the idle Pyramids or the useless, though famous, works of the Greeks!"

Frontinus, The Aqueducts of Rome, 1.16, translated by Charles E. Bennett (1925).

The sentence tells you as much about Roman values as about Roman water. Frontinus prizes what is useful to the public over what is beautiful or famous. Hold that idea through this lesson: Greek civilisation's genius was for ideas, Roman civilisation's genius was for organisation, law and building. (Lesson 4 tests whether that contrast is fair.)

2Element 1: government, from Republic to Empire

The Republic (509 to 27 BCE, by tradition) was designed so that no one man could become a king again. Power was divided and every office was shared or checked.

Under the Empire (from 27 BCE) these institutions survived in name, but real power passed to the emperor, who commanded the army and governed the provinces through officials he appointed. One imperial change mattered greatly for Africa: in 212 CE the emperor Caracalla's edict gave full Roman citizenship to all free men in the Empire. Before 212, it had been held mostly by people living in Italy.

3Element 2: law

Rome's first written code, the Twelve Tables, was drawn up by a board of ten men from about 451 BCE and formally published in 449 BCE in the Forum, where every citizen could read his rights and duties. A written law limited the power of judges, who could no longer claim the law said whatever suited them. Nine centuries later, the emperor Justinian ordered Roman law collected into the Corpus Juris Civilis ("Body of Civil Law", 529 to 534 CE), which, rediscovered in the Middle Ages, became the foundation of every civil-law system, the family of legal systems used across most of continental Europe and many countries beyond it.

4Element 3: engineering and architecture

In 312 BCE the censor Appius Claudius Caecus began both Rome's first great road, the Appian Way, a military road to the south, and its first aqueduct, the Aqua Appia. By the 3rd century CE the city had eleven aqueducts, supplying a population of over a million and its many public baths. Two inventions made such building possible:

• The arch, which carries heavy loads across wide gaps (see the diagram).
• Roman concrete, made with lime and pozzolana, a volcanic sand from Pozzuoli near Naples, which set hard even under water. The dome of the Pantheon in Rome is still the world's largest unreinforced concrete dome.

5Elements 4 to 6: language, religion and time

• Language and literature. Latin was the language of government, law and the army in the West. Between the 6th and 9th centuries, the spoken Latin of different regions evolved into the Romance languages: Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian. Latin writers such as Cicero (speeches), Virgil (the epic Aeneid) and Livy (a history of Rome) were read in schools for centuries.
• Religion. Romans worshipped many gods and adopted others from the peoples they conquered. Christians, who refused to worship the emperor's gods, were at times persecuted. On 13 February 313 CE the emperors Constantine and Licinius agreed at Milan to treat Christians with tolerance (the Edict of Milan), and on 27 February 380 CE Theodosius I made Nicene Christianity the state church of the Empire (the Edict of Thessalonica).
• Time. Julius Caesar's calendar of 365 days with a leap day every fourth year took effect on 1 January 45 BCE. Its month names, from January to December, are still ours.

6Case study: Roman Africa

The province of Africa was not a colony that only gave grain to Rome. It produced emperors, writers and church leaders:

• Septimius Severus, born in Leptis Magna (Libya) in 145 CE, ruled as emperor from 193 to 211 CE.
• Tertullian (c. 155 to 220 CE), from Carthage, was the first Christian theologian to write in Latin, and has been called "the father of Latin Christianity".
• Augustine of Hippo (354 to 430 CE), born at Thagaste (Souk Ahras, Algeria) in a family that scholars generally agree was Berber, became Bishop of Hippo and wrote The City of God as the Western Empire was falling.

The city of Carthage, destroyed in 146 BCE, was rebuilt as a Roman city, and the 132 km Zaghouan aqueduct in the photo above brought it water. Sources link the aqueduct to the emperor Hadrian, who visited in 128 CE.