Discovering the humanities 3rd by henry m sayre 2016 chapter 03

Discovering the Humanities
THIRD EDITION

CHAPTER

3

Empire: Urban Life
and Imperial Majesty
in Rome, China, and
India

Discovering the Humanities, Third Edition
Henry M. Sayre

Copyright © 2016, 2013, 2010
by Pearson Education, Inc. or its affiliates
All Rights Reserved


Learning Objectives
1. Characterize imperial Rome, its dual
sense of origin, and its debt to the
Roman Republic.
2. Describe the impact of the competing
schools of thought that flourished in
early Chinese culture—Daoism,
Confucianism, and Legalism.


Learning Objectives

3. Discuss the ways in which both
Hinduism and Buddhism shaped Indian
culture.


Colonnaded street in Thamugadi, North Africa. View toward the Arch of Trajan.
Late second century CE.
Henri Stierlin/akg-images. [Fig. 3.1]


Rome
• One of the two sources for the Roman
culture is the Greek Hellenic culture,
which the Romans adopted for their
own.
• The Greeks had colonized the southern
coastal regions of the Italian peninsula
and Sicily since the eighth century BCE.


City plan of Thamugadi (line drawing).
ca. 200 CE.
©1996 Harry N. Abrams, Inc. [Fig. 3.2]


The Roman Empire at its greatest extent, ca. 180
[Fig. Map 3.1]

CE.

Rome
• The other source for the Roman culture
is the Etruscan culture, which occupied
modern-day Tuscany.
• Women played a far more important
role in Etruscan culture than in Greek,
and Roman culture would later reflect
the Etruscan sense of women's equality.


Republican Rome
• Traditionally, Romans distinguished
between patricians, the landowning
aristocrats who served as priests,
magistrates, lawyers, and judges, and
plebians, the poorer class who were
craftspeople, merchants, and laborers.


Video: Students on Site:
She-Wolf

She-Wolf. ca. 500–480 BCE.
Bronze with glass-paste eyes. Height 33".
Museo Capitolino, Rome. akg-images/Erich Lessing. [Fig. 3.3]


Republican Rome
• In republican Rome, every plebian

chose a patrician as his patron whose
duty it was to represent the plebian in
any matter of law and provide an
assortment of assistance in other
matters, primarily economic.
• This paternalistic relationship—which
we call patronage—reflected the
family's central role in Roman culture.


Head of a Man (possibly a portrait of Lucius Junius Brutus). ca. 300 BCE.
Bronze. Height: 27-1/2".
Museo Capitolino, Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome. © Araldo de Luca/Corbis. [Fig. 3.4]


Roman Rule
• Whenever Rome conquered a region, it
established permanent colonies of
veteran soldiers who received
allotments of land.
• The prosperity brought about by Roman
expansion soon created a new kind of
citizen, the wealthy equites, in Rome.
• The union of the First Triumvirate
ensured Julius Caesar's rise to power.


A Divided Empire
• Caesar brought all of Gaul together
during his time as governor there,

declaring, "I came, I saw, I conquered."
• He assumed dictatorial control over
Rome after the defeat of the other two
members of the Triumvirate.
• On the Ides of March, 44 BCE, he was
stabbed 23 times by a group of 60
senators.


Cicero and the Politics of Rhetoric
• The rhetorician (writer and public
speaker, or orator) Marcus Tullius Cicero
(106–43 BCE) recognized the power of
the Latin language to communicate
with the people.
• By the first century CE, Latin was
understood to be potentially a more
powerful tool of persuasion than Greek.


Cicero and the Politics of Rhetoric
• Philosophically, Cicero's argument
extends back to Plato and Aristotle, but
rhetorically—in the structure of its
argument—it is purely Roman.
• Cicero's argument is purposefully
deliberate in tone, aiming at giving
sage advice.

Portrait Busts, Pietas, and Politics
• A major Roman art form of the second
and first centuries BCE was the portrait
bust.


Document: Cicero (106–43
BCE), Letters to Atticus I. 9–
10 (67 BCE, Rome)

A Roman Man. ca. 80 BCE.
Marble. Life-size.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Rogers Fund, 1912
(12.233). Image © The Museum/Art Resource/Scala, Florence.
[Fig. 3.5]


Portrait Busts, Pietas, and Politics
• Portrait busts are generally portraits of
patricians, and they share with their
Greek ancestors an affinity for
naturalistic representation, but they are
even more realistic, revealing their
subjects' every wrinkle and wart
(verism).


Portrait Busts, Pietas, and Politics
• The essentially propagandistic Roman
busts claim for their subjects the

wisdom and experience of age.
• These images celebrate pietas, the
deep-seated Roman virtue of dutiful
respect toward the gods, fatherland,
and parents.


Imperial Rome
• In 27 BCE, the Senate granted Octavian
the imperial name Augustus and the
authority of imperium over all the
empire.
• Augustus was duty-bound to exhibit
pietas, the obligation to his ancestors
"to rule the people."


Closer Look: Augustus of
Primaporta
Document: Augustus on His
Accomplishments (1st c. CE)
Video: Students on Site:
Augustus of Primaporta

Augustus of Primaporta. ca. 20 BCE.
Marble. Height 6'8".
Vatican Museums, Vatican State. © Araldo de Luca/Corbis.
[Fig. 3.6]

Imperial Rome
• While Augustus is recognizable in his
sculptures, the sculptures are idealized.
• He was over 70 years old when he died,
yet he was always depicted as young
and vigorous, choosing to portray
himself as the ideal leader rather than
the wise, older pater.


Family Life
• With his commission of the Ara Pacis
Augustae, Augustus also addressed
what he considered a crisis in Roman
society—the demise of the family.
• The monument is preeminently a
celebration of family.
• It demonstrates the growing
prominence of women in Roman
society.


Ara Pacis Augustae, Rome, detail of Imperial Procession, south frieze. 13–9 BCE.
Marble. Width: approx. 35'.
© Photo Scala, Florence - courtesy of Sovraintendenza di Roma Capitale. [Fig. 3.7]