Rome Flashcards
The crossroads of the world and the greatest Empire ever!
rome
Trojan prince, son of Anchises, Prince of Troy, and none other than…
Aeneas
an ancient Greek goddess associated with love, beauty, pleasure, passion and procreation. She was syncretized with the Roman goddess Venus. Aphrodite’s major symbols include myrtles, roses, doves, sparrows, and swans.
aphrodite
One of the heroes of the fall of Troy, and one of the few to survive
• He embarks on a journey to find a new home prophesized by the gods—Virgil’s “The Aeneid,” written c. 29-19 BCE
Aeneas
the paradigmatic classic in Western art and education; as one scholar has put it, Virgil “occupied the central place in the literary canon for the whole of Europe for longer than any other writer.” (After the Western Roman Empire fell, in the late fifth century A.D., knowledge of Greek—and, hence, intimacy with Homer’s epics—virtually disappeared from Western Europe for a thousand years.)
the aeniad
has been indispensable to everyone from his irreverent younger contemporary Ovid, whose parodies of the older poet’s gravitas can’t disguise a genuine admiration, to St. Augustine, who, in his “Confessions,” recalls weeping over the Aeneid, his favorite book before he discovered the Bible; from Dante, who chooses Virgil, l’altissimo poeta, “the highest poet,” as his guide through Hell and Purgatory in the Divine Comedy, to T. S. Eliot, who returned repeatedly to Virgil in his critical essays and pronounced the Aeneid “the classic of all Europe.”
virgl’s poetry
Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin liked to quote Virgil in their speeches and letters. The poet’s idealized vision of honest farmers and shepherds working in rural simplicity was influential, some scholars believe, in shaping the Founders’ vision of the new republic as one in which an agricultural majority should hold power. Throughout the nineteenth century, Virgil was a central fixture of American grammar-school education; the ability to translate passages on sight was a standard entrance requirement at many colleges and universities. John Adams boasted that his son John Quincy had translated the entire Aeneid. Ellen Emerson wrote her father, Ralph Waldo, to say that she was covering a hundred and twenty lines a day; Helen Keller read it in Braille. Today, traces of the epic’s cultural authority linger on: a quotation from it greets visitors to the Memorial Hall of the 9/11 Museum, in New York City. Since the turn of the current century, there have been at least five major translations into English alone, most recently by the American poet David Ferry (Chicago), in the final installment of his translation of Virgil’s complete works.
yeah
He embarks on a journey to find a new home prophesized by the gods—Virgil’s “The Aeneid,” written c. 29-19 BCE
• Notably, his ships are blown off course and he lands in Carthage, where he meets Dido, its legendary founder and first Queen. Of course, they fall in love, but, he has to leave, and she commits suicide by throwing herself on a funeral pyre, but not before cursing Aeneas and his descendants…
aeneas
quite possibly rests on a basic historical reality, even if efforts to treat all its details as sober fact should be avoided.” D. Hoyos
• “There are too many coincidences between the eastern and the classical sources to allow us to think that the story of Elissa had no historical basis.”
the story of ellisia (dido)
Twin sons of Rhea Silvia (princess of a city in central Italy, and a descendent of Aeneas) and Mars.
• His mother was victimized by her evil uncle who usurped his brother’s throne and forced her to become a priestess to Vesta.
• In order to prevent her divinely conceived sons from challenging him to the throne, he ordered them drowned in the Tiber River.
• The servant charged with the task had mercy on the boys and floated them down the river in a basket.
• They came ashore and a she-wolf finds and fed them.
They are eventually adopted by a shepherd and his wife. They care for them until the evil uncle kidnaps Remus. Romulus saves him and kills the uncle.
hey restore the rightful king and go off to found their own city.
• The choose a place along the Tiber River surrounded by seven hills.
• They quarrel over the best hill on which to build the city, a fight not even a prophecy can stop.
• Augury “…he is a bird reader.” from The Iliad
• At one point Romulus is building a wall on “his” hill. Remus, scoffs at his puny fortifications, jumping over the as yet uncompleted wall, remarking how easily invaders will breech these defenses.
• Romulus gets angry and says, “Then this is what they will get” and slays his brother
• He founds the city and names it Roma, after himself, of course.
romulus and rhemus
Three and a half thousand years ago, the ______ were using them for a very similar reason to us today: to serve drinks at parties. The only difference is the material,” she said…“With ceramics being a higher status material to us now, it seems strange to throw them away after just one use. But like plastic today, clay was readily available, cheap to acquire, easy to mold. But also like plastic, clay stays in the ground for many, many years,” she added.
minoians
The wreck of the 110-foot ship, along with its cargo of 6,000 amphorae, was discovered during a sonar-equipped survey of the seabed off the coast of ________ – one of the Ionian islands off the west coast of Greece.
• It lies about 1.5 miles from the entrance to the harbor of _______…the archaeologists think that the discovery indicates that here was an important stop on Roman trading routes.
Kefalonia; Fiskardo
moved into the Italian peninsula c. 9th century BCE
• Conquered most of central and northern Italy by the sixth century BCE
Etruscans
Etruscans - wrote they were an advanced people from Ionia
• So…
Herodotus
etruscan civilization
Un-deciphered language, archaic Greek alphabet, but unlike any other, no other civilization (that we know of) has used it.
• Had tremendous influence on the Romans who eventually defeated them
• Architecture, civil engineering, processions, gladiatorial combat passed on to Romans
• Etruscans had a high standard of living, based on trade, large cities, market towns, relative equality of men and women!
etruscans part 2
Government evolved from a monarchy into oligarchy
• Social stratification
• Polytheistic religion, very ceremonial, marked by sacrifices and reading of signs—storms, lightening strikes, entrails of slaughtered animals, birds
• Eventually defeated by the Romans and absorbed into the Republic
