Dunstan - Ancient Rome

Leading his formidable Macedonian-Greek army, Alexander the Great astonished his contemporaries by carving out the largest empire the world had ever seen, stretching from Greece and Egypt across the vast land mass of western Asia into the Indus valley. Imagine how different subsequent history might have been if Alexander, rather than dying at Babylon in 323 BCE at the age of thirty-two, had realized his apparent intention of marching his forces westward into Italy, Sicily, and North Africa. Here he would have encountered three vigorous culturesRoman, Greek, and Carthaginiana trio reflecting the expanding Roman Republic in central Italy, prosperous Greek cities in southern Italy and Sicily, and powerful Carthage in eastern North Africa. The seafaring Phoenicians, sailing from their handful of coastal city-states in what became modern Syria and Lebanon, penetrated the western Mediterranean around 800 BCE to establish trading stations, including Carthage, forger of an extensive maritime empire extending from North Africa to western Sicily, Sardinia, and parts of southern Spain. Meanwhile the Greeks, attracted by new opportunities and lands across the sea, were planting their own unique settlements in the region.

Rome began as a group of modest shepherd villages on the banks of the river Tiber yet slowly rose to unite the entire Mediterranean world and beyond in a great empire under a single stable government. Within sixty years of the death of Alexander, Rome had gained undisputed control of peninsular Italy and would continue to extend its power and territory for centuries, a military preview of the spiritual unification of the Mediterranean world under the zeal of Christianity. At the pinnacle of their territorial expansion, achieved during the reign of the emperor Trajan (98117 CE), the Romans ruled what now constitutes parts of more than forty modern countries, with frontiers extending from Britain in the west to Armenia in the east and from North Africa and Egypt in the south to the Rhine, the Danube, and the Black Sea in the north.

Rome presided over a diverse realm with a wide array of cultural traditions. While owing a substantial debt to the Greeks, the Romans did not blindly imitate brilliant Greek cultural models but fused them with their own and other traditions, passing the resulting rich mosaic on to the western and eastern reaches of Europe. The Greeks, impulsive and speculative, were fascinated with beauty and sought to attain harmony of form in literature, art, and architecture. The Romans proved eminently practical, patronizing architects and engineers who constructed durable concrete buildings for public needs and also laid a comprehensive network of superb straight roads carried on great bridges and viaducts and through cuttings and tunnels. Rome made extraordinary contributions in law, government, and imperial organization. Unlike the Greeks, who refused to share citizenship, the Romans extended theirs first to the Italians and later to the peoples of the provinces. Centuries of Roman citizens, albeit widely dispersed in a vast sweep of territory, paid their taxes to the same treasury, answered to the same law, and entrusted their protection to the same armies. While staging certain undeniable brutalities, Rome also established general conditions of peace and prosperity within its domains and passed the vital Greco-Roman culture to all subsequent ages in the west.