Rome

Alexander the Great

  • Conquered the Persian Empire and marched to India, stopping at the Indus River
  • Destroyed the Persian Empire
  • Wasn’t good at “empire-building-” was good at tearing places down, but not at building a functional empire out of what he teared down
  • Empire broke into 3 hellenistic kingdoms
    • Antigonids in Greece
    • Ptolemeies in Greece
    • Seleucids in Persia
  • Good at being a dead person
    • Everyone loved him
    • Military model for many generals
    • Introduced main idea of Persian absolute monarchy
    • State, Government, People to the Greco-Roman world
    • Named many cities after himself (“Alexandria”)
  • Gave the region a common language: Greek
    • A more interconnected world in terms of trading and communicating with other people
    • Legendary truths or rumors
    • Died at 32, before he could have epic battles?
    • Tutored by Aristotle
    • Chased Persian king Darius across Iraq and Iran for no reason
      • One of Darius’ generals assassinated him and then Alex chased him?
    • Ravens coming from the sky
    • His hot wife assassinating his wives
    • Died of either alcohol or assassination poisoning, epic people can’t die from a fever right?

    ### He’s great because we chose to make him great. * Implies history is primarily made by great people and men * We decide what to make great!

Colosseum & Roman Arches

  • Built with Roman-pioneered concrete, bricks, and rounded arches
  • All 3 Greek column arches
  • 2 theatres facing each other so twice as many can enjoy
  • Passageways below where animals and gladiators shuffled around
  • Romans show violence: gladiators, criminals, and wild animals fighting- gore
  • Predated by corbel (false) arch and post-and-lintel
  • Didn’t invent it, but they mastered it
  • Strung them in a row, stretched out (vaults), and made domes
  • Drawback: exert pressure, thick base walls and thus small windows
  • voussoir - “keystone;” typ part connecting 2 sides of a rounded arch

Panthenon

  • well-preserved Roman temple
  • Granite columns from Egypt
  • Dimension based on classicism
  • Oculus is the eye on the top; lets in light
  • Survived because continuously used for 2000 years
  • Made of poured concrete
  • panthenon - “all the gods”

Roman Forum

  • first half was the Republic, then second was the Empire
    • Republic - ran by elected senators
    • Empire - unelected emperors
  • Rome meant “the city” back then; Romans cnsidered it the whole world
    • You were Roman or Barbarian!
  • Story: founded by Romulus and Remus, abandoned by kids
  • Senate met in the Curio
  • Julius Caeser marked transition between Republic and Empire
    • Republic was trying to rule most of Europe and needed to be more powerful, so Caeser became ruler for life
  • Via Sacra - “Sacred Way” - main street of Rome
  • Triumphal arches were public relations tools, decorated by reliefs to show how war & expansion was their business
  • Economy fueled by plunder and slaves

Roman Engineering

  • Inherited knowledge from the Greeks
  • We remember the Romans for their engineering- not their deep thoughts (Greece)
  • Most famous architect: Archimedes
    • Area of a Circle
    • Infinestimals
    • Exponents
    • Water Screw - pumps water by turning a screw
    • Pulleys
    • War Machines
  • Aristotle divided knowledge into useful and theoretical
    • Useful - technology
    • Theoretical - epistomology - science
  • Ptolemy - interested in the universe and the cosmos
    • View of the universe adopted in medieval Christian and Islam worlds
    • His book, Geography - provides a source for maps by century
  • Concrete - important because super durable and can be poured into shapes like domes
  • Archeaqueducts - move water
    • Effects: irrigation, cities grow, mines to run, draining marshes of their home cities
  • Highways: important b/c allowed Roman troops to crush their enemies
    • Still around after 2000 years!
  • Engineering feats built by slaves (lots of labor needed);
    • Roman slavery; slaves could be highly educated or could buy their freedom

Roman Philosophy & Design

Roman Philosophy

  • Contributed a lot to law, but not much to philosophy
    • More practical than speculative; didn’t produce philosophy comparable to Plato and Aristotle
Preserved Hellenistic/Hellenic Writing:
  • Lucretius (Latin Poet)
    • Popularized materialist theories of Democritus and Leucippus
    • Describe the world in purely physical terms, denied gods and other supernatural beings
    • There is no reason to fear death

Stoic Attitude

Rational detachment that was cultivated among many Romans.

  • believed an impersonal force (or Divine Reason) governed the world, and that happiness lay in one’s ability to accept the will of the universe
  • DNC attitude
  • rejected any emotional attachments that might enslave them
  • the ideal spiritual condition and the one most conducive to contentment; depends on self-control and the subjugation of the emotions to reason
  • Zeno of Cyprus founded stoicism
  • virtue, tolerance, and self-control
  • stoic - someone who’s calm under pressure
  • believed that everything around them was in a web of cause and effect (logos)
  • 4 cardinal virtues
    • wisdom, temperance, justice, courage
  • Great thinkers
    • Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Mandela
    • Marcus was a Roman emperor
    • Mandela fought racial injustice
    • Philosopher Epictetus another one
    • logotherapy - we can harness our willpower to fill our lives with meaning
Effects of Stoicism
  • encouraged Roman sense of duty
  • belief in the equality of all people had a humanizing effect on Roman jurisprudence
    • jurisprudence - theory/philosophy on law and anticipated the direction of early, Christian thought
  • popular among intellectuals like Lucius Seneca and Marcus Aurelius
    • wrote classic treatises on it
  • Seneca’s Tranquility of Mind
    • offered a reasoned retreat from psyphic pain and moral despair, as well as a practical set of solutions to the daily strife between the self and society

Epicureanism

  • 3 fold division of desires
    • Natural
    • Necessary - air, water, food, shelter
    • Unnecessary - expensive food and drink, mansions
    • Not natural
    • Not necessary (hollow) - fame, riches, glory, political, immortality
      • Pursuing these causes more unhappiness than happiness, because they are difficult or impossible to achieve
      • No amount will satisfy us
  • 4 part cure for unhappiness (the Tetrapharmakos)
  1. God is nothing to fear
  2. Death is nothing to worry about
  3. It is easy to acquire the good things in life
  4. It is easy to endure the terrible things
  • tetrapharmakos - “four part cure/remedy”
  • Epicurean definition - encapsulation of their maxims in a formula one can meditate on to relieve anxiety
  • Relationship to death
    • Don’t worry about death
    • God will not punish you after death
    • Death cannot affect you while living or dead
  • What is it we truly need to be happy?
    • Stuff that’s difficult to obtain, we don’t need
    • When we realize we have enough to alleviate most of our pain, we become relieved and tranquil
    • Happiness becomes possible
  • Limits of nature benefit us, we should derive tranquility from this
Summary: Stoicism (suck it up and deal with it) Epicureanism (don’t worry, just be happy).

Roman Drama

  • roughly modeled tragedies on that of Greece
  • moral and didactic in intent; themes from Greek & Roman history
    • didactic - intended to teach
  • ludi - armed combat and other violent public games
    • theatre was offered as entertainment along with ludi that marked the major civic festivals
    • might explain the bloody and ghoulish character of the tragedies written to compete with them
    • vividly harsh players of Seneca drew crowds and inspired Shakespeare 1500 years later
    • simple plots and broad humor (often obscene)
  • Everyday life > fantasy. The real, if imperfect world, was natural setting for down-to-earth human beings

Roman Architecture

  • sprawling empire’s needs shown in their architecture
  • 50k mi of paved roads
  • aqueducts
    • most significant technological achievement
    • delivered over 40 million gallons of water per day
  • arch
    • inherited knowledge of from the Etruscans
    • used to enclose great volumes of uninterrupted space
    • clear technical advancement over post and lintel
    • used it inventively
    • made a barrel vault
    • put them at right angles (cross or groined vault)
    • dome (around a center point)
  • practicality and innovation
  • concrete
  • Parts of a building
    • foundation - concrete
    • raised structures with - brick, rubble, stone
    • finished exterior structures - veneers of marble, tile, bronze, or plaster
    • veneers - thin decorative covering of fine wood

Roman Design

Roman architecture and engineering were considered one and the same discipline.

Vitruvius Ten Books On Architecture
  • instructions for hydraulic systems, city planning, and mechanical devices
  • for the Roman architect, the function of a building determined its formal design
Pont-du Gard
  • large-scale engineering project
  • practical functions of an arch at 3 levels
    • Bottom row → supporting a bridge
    • Second row → undergirding a top channel
    • Top channel → water runs through by gravity to its destination
Ampitheatre

Popular taste of entertainment like chariot races, mock sea battles, gladiatorial contests, and brutal blood sports

Colosseum:

  • Apparent in the design of the modern sports area
  • 3 levels of seating
  • Beneath the floor, complex of rooms and tunnels the entertainers arose from
  • Owning at the roof can be extended with pulleys
  • Arches formed by decorative columns on exterior
  • Post-and-lintel architecture
  • Gladatorial contests introduced in 264 BCE
Pantheon

Temple with technical ingenuity and spatial design determining its structural majesty.

  • dedicated to the seven planetery deities
  • Exterior
    • once covered with white marble and bronze - features a portico with corinthian column
    • portico - a colonnade or covered ambulatory especially in classical architecture and often at the entrance of a building. invented by the Greeks
    • almost intact, 19-ft. thick rotunda capped with dome of 5000 tons of concrete
  • Interior
    • has a 30-ft oculus at the top that admits light and air
    • proportions are that of Vitruvius’ classical symmetry principles
Other Roman Buildings
  • Temples in Nimes, France
    • stands like a mini Greek shrine on a high podium
    • stairway and colonnaded portico
      • colonnaded - bunch of columns at regular intervals
    • Virginia State Capital
Baths
  • buildings with hot natural springs
  • welcome refuge from the noise and grime of the city
  • steam and exercise rooms, art galleries, shops, cafes, reading rooms, and physical intimacy rooms
  • very popular
  • basilica - rectangular clonnaded hall commonly used for public assemblies
    • ideal structure for courts of law, meeting halls, and marketplaces
  • Basilica of Maxentius
    • huge meeting hall
    • apse - semicircular recess
    • completed by Constantine in the 4th century CE
Roman Science and Technology
  • 45 CE - technique of glassblowing
  • 90 CE - aqueducts for the city of Rome
  • 122 CE - in Roman Britain, Hadrian begins construction of a wall to protect them to the north
  • 140 CE - Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy produces the Almagest; geocentric universe
    • basis for western astronomy for centuries
  • 160 CE - Claudius Galen writes over 100 medical treatises
    • basis for western medical practice for centuries
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