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podcast transcript
Rome did not simply disappear when the empire collapsed.
Roads, laws, languages, calendars, architecture, engineering, and political ideas survived and became part of the foundations of the modern world.
From courtrooms to the Capitol Building, from the alphabet you read to the city you live in, Rome is still with us in ways both obvious and invisible.
Join us by asking, “What did the Romans do for us?” In this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
There are many different paths to creating an episode of this podcast. There are also episodes that came to mind in the morning and were recorded later that evening.
Then there are some that took years from original idea to final recording. This episode is one of the first 100 episode ideas I came up with when I first had the podcast idea almost six years ago. Since it was at the top of my list, I figured it was time to finally do it.
Portions of this episode appear in dozens of previous episodes. I won’t go through each previous episode individually as it comes out, but suffice to say there are a lot of them.
What I want to do is provide an understanding of why this civilization that existed 2,000 years ago is still influencing our world today.
This, too, should not be taken as a love letter to ancient Rome. I think it’s worth studying and there are things we can learn, but I wouldn’t want to live there. They had many cultural practices that have thankfully disappeared to the point of disgust to everyone who hears them today.
Also, many of the things handed down from Rome are not in the same form as they were at the time. They evolved over time into modern institutions.
So the first and perhaps greatest way Rome influences the modern world is through law. The law certainly did not originate with the Romans. In other civilizations, there are examples of laws dating back thousands of years.
However, the Roman approach to law was unique and still exists in most Western or Western-influenced countries today.
The idea that law should be written, composed, interpreted by experts, and applied through recognized procedures had an enormous impact on Rome.
Important Roman legal concepts include contracts, property rights, wills, corporations or legal associations, citizenship, legal personality, public law, private law, and the distinction between civil and criminal matters. Even when modern legal systems are not directly Roman law, they often use the categories that Roman jurists helped define.
Rome’s legal influence traditionally dates from the Twelve Marks, dating to the mid-5th century BC. This was Rome’s first major written law. Its importance lies not in being particularly humane or complete, but in making the law available to the public. Rules were no longer to exist solely in the memory and discretion of noble officials.
Another major legacy of Rome is the concept of legal personality. Roman law recognized that certain associations, municipalities, and institutions could have a legal identity distinct from the individuals who composed them.
It helped lay the foundation for later ideas about corporations, municipalities, universities, churches, nonprofit organizations, and other entities that could own property, sue, be defendants, and continue beyond the lives of their members.
The Roman concept of citizenship was also important. Roman citizenship was a legal status that entailed rights, duties, privileges, and protections. Over time it expanded from the city of Rome into Italy and eventually to almost all the free inhabitants of the empire. This helped establish the idea that political affiliation could be defined by law rather than by tribe, ethnicity, or place of birth.
An important turning point came in the 6th century under Emperor Justinian. His government compiled centuries of Roman legal material into the Corpus Juris Civilis.
This included a code that compiled imperial laws. Digest, a compilation of the opinions of leading Roman jurists; Institute, a legal textbook; And the later laws were called novels. This compilation preserved Roman law even after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.
The rediscovery and study of Justinian’s laws in medieval Europe, especially in universities such as Bologna, transformed Western legal history. Medieval scholars viewed Roman law as a rational system that could be studied, analyzed, taught, and applied. This helped create the modern legal profession, legal education, and the concept of law as an intellectual discipline.
Rome’s contribution to modern republican government was not the creation of democracy as we understand it. It wasn’t like that. Rather, it provided later political theorists with one of history’s most influential working models of a state without a king and ruled through offices, parliaments, laws, and competing centers of authority.
The word republic itself comes from the Latin word res publica, meaning “public affairs” or “public affairs.” The idea was that the country was not the personal property of the monarch. They belonged, at least in theory, to a civil community. The concept became one of Rome’s greatest political legacies.
Rome’s most important contribution to this was the concept of mixed government. The republic had consuls who acted as magistrates, the Senate as an aristocratic body, and a popular assembly that gave citizens a formal role in elections, legislation, and public decisions.
Rome also gave the modern republic the concept of checks and balances. No single office could permanently hold all power. The consul offered a limited period of time. There were usually two consuls at a time, so each consul could restrain the other through his veto. A plebeian tribune may veto certain actions to protect ordinary citizens. Magistrates had defined powers and positions were arranged in a hierarchy called Cursus Honorum.
Law and government were not the only contributions to the modern world. They also had a great influence on language.
Romance languages evolved into Latin, including Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Romanian. Through the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church, scholarship, law, and science, Latin became the primary lexical source for English and many other languages.
Although English is a Germanic language in structure, much of its formal, legal, scientific, religious, and intellectual vocabulary comes from Latin, often through French.
The biggest contribution comes from the Latin alphabet. The Latin alphabet is used in some form in most languages in the world today, even in languages that are not descendants of European languages. The Latin alphabet has become a widespread language operating system, applied to languages as diverse as Vietnamese, Swahili, Hawaiian, and Navajo.
Another major innovation used almost everywhere in the world today is the calendar. The calendar used by almost the entire world today is the Gregorian calendar, a modification of the Julian calendar implemented by Julius Caesar.
It was a solar calendar that made it much easier to determine when to plant and harvest.
Additionally, the names of the months are all taken from Roman month names.
Rome also made major contributions to modern roads and infrastructure. Roman roads were one of the most important infrastructure systems in history. They linked cities, fortresses, ports, mines, farms and provincial capitals throughout the empire.
At their peak, the Romans built tens of thousands of miles of paved roads and many more secondary roads. These roads allowed armies to travel quickly, officials to administer distant regions, merchants to transport goods, and information to travel at unusual speeds in the ancient world.
Although not all Roman roads were perfectly paved stone roads, the best were so durable that some routes continued to be used for centuries. Many modern roads in Europe still follow Roman alignments, as the Romans often chose the most practical route through the terrain.
Rome also helped establish the idea of road networks rather than isolated roads. The famous proverb “All roads lead to Rome” reflects the fact that the imperial roads were part of an integrated system.
Roman bridges were another major piece of heritage. They made extensive use of arches, allowing them to traverse rivers and valleys with great strength and durability. Roman bridge construction influenced later European engineering, and some Roman bridges still remain or are in use today.
Roman aqueducts, sewers, and baths influenced the modern world less by providing precise technology that could be replicated, and more by establishing the civic ideal that cities should provide large-scale public systems for water, waste, and sanitation.
Roman aqueducts showed that cities did not have to rely solely on nearby wells, rivers, and rainwater. Fresh water can be harvested from remote springs and transported to urban centers through carefully designed aqueducts, tunnels, bridges, reservoirs, and distribution tanks.
Modern urban water systems with reservoirs, mains, pipes and public distribution are not direct copies of Roman aqueducts, but they follow the same basic principles. Water supply is an engineered public network.
Roman sewers had a similar effect. The Romans did not understand germs in the modern sense, and their sanitation system was patchy at best by modern standards. But they understood that dense cities require drainage and waste removal. The Cloaca Maxima in Rome became a famous symbol of urban engineering. A large-scale drainage system that helps remove rainwater and sewage from parts of the city.
Cloaca Maxima is the world’s oldest man-made object still in use for its original purpose.
The Romans’ main contribution here was the idea that sanitation was part of urban planning. Streets, toilets, drains, sewers and water supplies had to work together.
The Roman public baths were perhaps the most culturally influential institutions. It wasn’t just a place for cleaning. It was a social center, a sports facility, a library, a meeting place, a place of business, and a symbol of civilized urban life.
Their influence can be seen in later hammams, hammams, hammams, spas, saunas, health resorts, gyms and even modern recreation centers.
Rome also built the world’s first planned city. Rome itself was not planned, but many local outposts were. Created in a grid layout of city streets. Many cities, such as Mérida, Spain, still use the same street layouts that were created 2,000 years ago.
In well-preserved Roman cities such as Timgad in Algeria, the original layout can still be seen. The grid system used in places like Manhattan is the same basic system that the Romans used.
Roman influence on modern armies is more about organization, professionalism, logistics, and engineering than battlefield tactics.
The Roman army helped establish the concept of a professional standing army. Previously, citizen armies were often called up for campaigns and then disbanded.
Over time, Rome developed a long-serving military force that was trained, paid, equipped, garrisoned, promoted, and retired through the state. Modern armies are much closer to the Roman model than to the ancient temporary levies.
This model was also very different from cultures such as Sparta. In Rome, you can pursue military career. They had contracts that soldiers had to sign, lengths of service (often very long), and pension plans, usually in the form of land.
Rome’s legacy is not found in a single invention or institution, but in the systems it left behind. Modern laws, republican government, roads, urban infrastructure, language, architecture, calendar, civil rights, and military organization all still bear traces of Rome.
The Romans weren’t always original, and they certainly weren’t always respectable, but they were unrivaled in taking ideas, organizing them, expanding them, and perpetuating them. More than 1,500 years after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, we still live in a world built in part on the foundations of Rome.
