Читать книгу World History For Dummies - Peter Haugen - Страница 84

Roman legend says that the half-god, half-mortal Romulus, a son of the Greek war god Mars, built the city of Rome on the Tiber River in 753 BC and ruled as its first king. The legend also says that a female wolf suckled baby Romulus and his twin brother Remus, whom Romulus later murdered. Historians tend to disagree, especially about the wolf, and put the founding of Rome a bit later, around 645 BC. (For more about Romulus and Remus, see Chapter 19.)

Although he may not have tasted wolf’s milk or killed his twin, legend credits Romulus as being the first of seven kings who ruled Rome as a city-state, not unlike the Greek city-states around the Mediterranean (which you can find out about in Chapter 4), until 509 BC. That year was when King Tarquinius Superbus got on the wrong side of his advisory body of citizen-magistrates, the Roman Senate.

The Senate gave Tarquinius Superbus the boot and set up a republican system of government designed to prevent a tyrant from ever misruling Rome again. Two consuls, elected annually, served as administrative executives under the supervision of the Senate. The republic system worked, bringing the stability that Rome needed as it grew. And did it grow.

Rome borrowed freely from other cultures — a pantheon of gods from the Greeks; Athenian-style democracy; and metalworking technology from an older Italian culture, the Etruscans. (I talk about cultural diffusion in Chapter 4.) Yet the Roman civilization did so much with what it borrowed that you can’t overestimate its impact, both in its own time and since. You can feel Rome’s influence even today. For one thing, the Roman language, Latin, is the foundation of not just Italian, but also of French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian. Latin also left a deep impression on non-Latin languages, such as English. Even after Latin fell out of everyday use, it remained a unifying language of learning, particularly in medicine and science.