Unit 11 · Classical Worlds

Look at a map of Greece and you see a ragged land. Mountains cover most of it. The coast twists into bays and peninsulas, and hundreds of islands dot the Aegean Sea. Farmland lies in small valleys cut off from each other by rock. The soil is thin and dry. Wheat grows poorly, but olives and grapes do well on the hillsides, and the sea is never far away.

This geography shaped Greek life. A valley could not easily rule the next valley over the mountains, so each one became its own tiny country. The Greeks called such a community a polis, which we translate as city-state. A polis was a town, the farmland around it and the people who belonged to it. There were hundreds of them, most with only a few thousand people. Each had its own laws, army and coins.

Because farming was hard, Greeks became sailors and traders. They sailed to Egypt for grain and to Italy for metals. By about 600 BCE they had planted colonies, new city-states, around the Black Sea and along the coasts of Italy, France and North Africa. A colony kept the mother city’s gods and customs but ruled itself.

The city-states fought each other often, yet they knew they were all Greek. They spoke the same language, worshiped the same gods and gathered every four years at Olympia for athletic games in honor of Zeus. Wars stopped for the games. A Greek from Sparta and a Greek from Athens might be enemies, but both called outsiders barbarians, people whose speech sounded like "bar-bar" to them.

The two most powerful city-states could hardly have been more different. Athens sat near the sea in the region of Attica. It grew rich from trade, silver mines and the olive oil it shipped abroad. Athenians prized speaking well, building beautifully and arguing about ideas. By the fifth century BCE, its citizens governed themselves in an assembly.

Sparta lay inland in a valley of the Peloponnese, the southern peninsula. Long before, the Spartans had conquered their neighbors and turned them into helots, farm workers who belonged to the state. Helots outnumbered Spartans many times over. To keep them down, Sparta became an army. Two kings led it in war, and a council of elders and a small assembly ran the city.

A Spartan boy left his family at age seven to live in barracks. He learned to endure cold, hunger and beatings. Every Spartan man was a full-time soldier until age sixty, and the helots did the farming. Spartan women had more freedom than Athenian women. They ran the households, owned land and trained in sports so they would have strong children. Spartans distrusted trade, coins and new ideas.

Athenians thought Spartans were grim and closed-minded. Spartans thought Athenians were soft and talked too much. Yet the Greek world respected Sparta’s soldiers and Athens’s ships. When a great danger came from the east, the two rivals would have to fight side by side.

Athens was not always a democracy. Around 600 BCE, nobles ran the city and poor farmers who fell into debt could be sold as slaves. Anger grew. In 594 BCE the Athenians chose a respected leader named Solon to fix things. He canceled the debts, freed those enslaved for debt and let all citizens, not just nobles, sit in the assembly and serve on juries. Nobles still held most offices.

Later, a strongman named Peisistratus seized power as a tyrant. To the Greeks that word meant a ruler who took power by force, not always a cruel one. His sons ruled after him until they were driven out. Then, in 508 BCE, a noble named Cleisthenes rebuilt the government. He broke up the old family power blocs and mixed citizens from different regions into ten new tribes. Each tribe sent fifty men, chosen by lottery, to a Council of Five Hundred that prepared business for the assembly.

The Athenians called their system democracy, from demos, the people, and kratos, power. Its heart was the Assembly, where every citizen could speak and vote directly. Most officials were picked by drawing lots, on the idea that any citizen was fit to serve for a year. Only generals were elected, since war needed skill. Large juries of hundreds of citizens decided court cases with no judge to overrule them.

The Athenians even had a way to protect democracy from an ambitious man. Once a year the Assembly could vote to banish someone for ten years. Citizens scratched a name on a piece of broken pottery called an ostrakon. If enough named the same person, he had to leave. Our word ostracize comes from this. Archaeologists have dug up thousands of these pottery votes with real names on them.

Athenian democracy was direct: citizens did not send representatives, they showed up and voted. But who counted as a citizen? By the middle of the fifth century BCE, a man had to be born to an Athenian father and an Athenian mother, be free and be at least eighteen. Scholars estimate the citizens numbered roughly thirty to forty thousand adult men, out of a total population in Attica of perhaps three hundred thousand.

Women of citizen families were expected to stay mostly at home, weave cloth and manage the household. They could not vote, hold office or own much property in their own name. A woman’s father or husband spoke for her in court. Poorer women did work outside, selling in the market or farming, but still had no political voice.

Metics were free people from other places who lived in Athens. Many were skilled craftsmen, merchants and bankers. They paid a special tax and served in the army, but they could not vote or own land. The philosopher Aristotle himself lived in Athens as a metic. Below them were the enslaved. Perhaps one in three people in Athens was enslaved. They worked in homes, workshops, farms and, worst of all, the silver mines. Athens’s wealth rested on their labor.

So the same city that invented rule by the people also ruled over most of its people without their consent. Historians point this out not to dismiss Athens but to be accurate. The Athenians opened a door that had never been opened. They also decided, deliberately, how narrow the doorway would be. Every democracy since has had to answer the same question: who counts?

To the east of Greece lay the largest empire the world had yet seen. The Persian Empire stretched from Egypt to the edge of India. Its king, Darius, ruled millions of people. When Greek cities on the coast of Asia Minor rebelled against him, Athens sent ships to help. Darius crushed the revolt and decided to punish Athens.

In 490 BCE a Persian army landed at the plain of Marathon, about twenty-six miles from Athens. The Athenians, with help from one small ally, marched out to meet them. The Greeks fought as hoplites, heavily armored foot soldiers who locked shields in a tight block called a phalanx. They charged at a run and broke the Persian line. The story that a runner raced to Athens with news of victory gave the marathon race its name and distance.

Ten years later Darius’s son Xerxes came back with a far larger force by land and sea. At the narrow pass of Thermopylae, a small Greek army led by three hundred Spartans held the road for days until they were surrounded and killed. The Persians burned Athens. But the Athenian leader Themistocles had persuaded his city to build a navy with its silver. In 480 BCE, in the narrow strait of Salamis, the Greek ships rammed and sank the crowded Persian fleet while Xerxes watched from shore.

The next year a united Greek army defeated the Persians at Plataea, and the invasion was over. How do we know all this? Mostly from one man, the historian Herodotus, who traveled, asked questions and wrote it down a few decades later. The victory left Athens with the strongest navy in Greece and a new confidence. Its greatest age was about to begin.

After the Persians left, Athens led a league of Greek cities that paid money into a common fund for defense. Under the leader Pericles, Athens moved that treasury to its own city and spent much of it at home. Many allies were angry. Athens was becoming an empire. But the money built something the world still visits.

On the Acropolis, the rocky hill above the city, the Athenians raised a marble temple to their goddess Athena. The Parthenon took about fifteen years to build, from 447 to 432 BCE. Its columns lean slightly inward and its floor curves slightly upward, tricks that make it look perfectly straight to the eye. Inside stood a statue of Athena forty feet tall, covered in gold and ivory. Sculptors carved a band of figures around the building showing the people of Athens in procession.

Down the hill, in an open-air theater cut into the slope, Athenians invented drama. Plays began as songs to the god Dionysus and grew into stories acted by masked performers with a singing chorus. Tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides showed kings and heroes destroyed by pride or fate. Comedies by Aristophanes made fun of politicians, philosophers and the war, sometimes with the targets sitting in the audience.

Theater was not a small hobby. Thousands of citizens attended festivals that lasted days, and the city paid for poor citizens’ tickets. Watching a play meant thinking together about justice, power and grief. Many of these plays survive, and theaters still perform them. Our words theater, drama, tragedy, comedy and chorus are all Greek.

Philosophy means love of wisdom. Greek philosophers tried to understand the world by reasoning rather than by retelling myths. The most famous of them, Socrates, wrote nothing at all. He walked the streets of Athens in the late fifth century BCE asking people what they meant by words like courage, justice and goodness. When they answered, he asked another question, and another, until they saw that they did not really know. Teachers still call this the Socratic method.

Many Athenians found him annoying, and some found him dangerous. In 399 BCE, after Athens had lost a long war with Sparta, a jury of citizens convicted Socrates of not respecting the city’s gods and corrupting the young. He refused to beg or to flee. He drank the poison hemlock as the law required. His death showed both the freedom of Athens, which had let him question everything for decades, and its limits.

His student Plato wrote down conversations, called dialogues, in which Socrates is the main speaker. Plato founded a school in Athens called the Academy. He argued that the things we see are imperfect copies of perfect ideas, and that the best state would be run by wise rulers, not by the crowd that had killed his teacher. Plato did not trust democracy.

Plato’s student Aristotle took a different path. He wanted to look at the actual world. He collected and described animals, studied the constitutions of more than a hundred Greek cities, wrote the first books on logic and gave rules for good plays. Aristotle’s habit of careful observation and sorting things into categories became a model for science. For a while he was also tutor to a prince in Macedon named Alexander.

Before the Greeks, people recorded kings’ victories, but no one had asked, in a careful way, why events happened. Herodotus, born in the 480s BCE, did. He traveled through Egypt, Persia and Greece, listened to priests, soldiers and merchants, and compared their stories. Sometimes he reported tales he doubted and said so. Later writers named him the father of history, and the word history comes from his Greek word for inquiry.

Thucydides, an Athenian general, went further. He wrote the story of the long war between Athens and Sparta, from 431 to 404 BCE, which he had lived through. He left out the gods, checked witnesses against each other and looked for causes in fear, ambition and self-interest. He said he wrote not to entertain but to be useful to anyone who wanted to understand how people behave.

Doctors were making the same turn. On the island of Kos, a physician named Hippocrates and his followers taught that disease had natural causes, such as diet, climate and the body’s balance, not angry gods. They watched patients closely and wrote down what they saw, day by day. A famous Hippocratic text on epilepsy, then called the sacred disease, argued that it was no more sacred than any other illness.

The Hippocratic writers were often wrong about the body. They had not dissected humans and believed health depended on four fluids they called humors. But their method, observe, record, look for natural causes, was the right one. Doctors today still speak of the Hippocratic Oath, a promise to help patients and do no harm, which grew from that school.

The long war between Athens and Sparta left the Greek city-states weak. To their north lay Macedon, a kingdom the Greeks considered half-barbarian. Its king, Philip II, built a professional army with long pikes and clever tactics. In 338 BCE he defeated the Greek cities and forced them into a league under his control. Two years later he was murdered, and his son Alexander became king at age twenty.

Alexander had been tutored by Aristotle and had grown up on the poems of Homer. In 334 BCE he led about forty thousand men across into Asia to attack the Persian Empire. He won battle after battle, at the river Granicus, at Issus and at Gaugamela in 331 BCE, where he broke the army of King Darius III. He took Egypt, where he was welcomed as pharaoh, and the great cities of Babylon and Persepolis.

He kept marching east, through what is now Afghanistan and into the Indus valley of India. His soldiers, exhausted after eight years of fighting, finally refused to go farther. Alexander turned back. In 323 BCE, in Babylon, he died of a fever at age thirty-two. He had never lost a battle.

Alexander founded cities along his route, many named Alexandria, and settled Greek soldiers in them. He married a Persian princess and encouraged his officers to do the same. Was he a visionary uniting peoples or a conqueror who burned Persepolis and killed those who crossed him? The sources say both. How you judge him depends on whether you stand with the Greeks who followed him or the peoples he conquered.

Alexander left no clear heir, and his generals fought over his empire for decades. It broke into several kingdoms: Egypt under the family of Ptolemy, much of Asia under the Seleucids, and Macedon itself. Historians call the next three centuries the Hellenistic age, from Hellas, the Greek name for Greece. It means Greek-like, because Greek culture spread far beyond Greece and mixed with local ways.

The greatest Hellenistic city was Alexandria in Egypt. Its harbor was marked by a lighthouse so tall it was counted among the seven wonders of the world. Its kings built the Museum, a research center, and the famous Library, which aimed to collect every book in the world. Greeks, Egyptians and Jews lived side by side, and the Hebrew scriptures were translated into Greek there.

Scholars in Alexandria and other cities made remarkable discoveries. Euclid organized geometry into a system of proofs that students studied for two thousand years. Eratosthenes measured the size of the Earth by comparing shadows in two cities, and came close to the real number. Archimedes of Syracuse worked out the law of the lever and the principle of floating bodies. Doctors in Alexandria dissected human bodies and described the nerves.

The Hellenistic world was not simply Greece made bigger. A Greek-speaking merchant in Egypt might pray to a god who was half Greek Zeus and half Egyptian Osiris. Buddhist statues in what is now Pakistan were carved in a Greek style. Greek became the shared language of trade and learning across the eastern Mediterranean, which is why, centuries later, the New Testament was written in Greek.

When the writers of the United States Constitution met in 1787, they had read about Athens. They admired the idea that citizens should govern themselves, but they also feared the Athenian crowd that had executed Socrates and voted for reckless wars. So they chose a republic with elected representatives instead of direct democracy. Still, whenever a town holds a meeting where every resident can speak and vote, it is doing what Athenians did on the Pnyx.

Other Greek ideas run through our system. Aristotle wrote that a good constitution mixes rule by one, by a few and by many, and that laws should be above rulers. The jury of ordinary citizens, the idea of a written constitution and the practice of debating in public all have Greek roots. In Illinois, a defendant in a serious case is judged by twelve citizens; an Athenian was judged by hundreds, but the principle is the same.

The Greek habit of asking why, and looking for natural causes, became science. Hippocrates’ method of observing patients, Aristotle’s classification of living things and Euclid’s proofs are still taught. When a doctor takes a medical history, when a biologist sorts species or when a geometry class proves that angles in a triangle add up to a straight line, they are using Greek tools.

Finally, listen to the words. Democracy, politics, philosophy, theater, athlete, marathon, mathematics, biology, physics, geography, history, alphabet, school. All are Greek. About one in ten English words comes from Greek, and in science and medicine the share is far higher. Every time you say telephone or photograph, you are speaking a little Greek.

The Romans told a story about their beginning. Twin baby boys, Romulus and Remus, were thrown into the Tiber River, rescued and nursed by a she-wolf. When they grew up, they founded a city. Romulus killed his brother in a quarrel and named the city Rome after himself. Romans dated this to 753 BCE. It is a legend, a story told so long that no one knows how much is true. But it tells us Romans wanted to see themselves as tough, and touched by the gods.

Archaeology tells a plainer story. By the 700s BCE, farmers and herders lived in huts on hills beside the Tiber, about fifteen miles from the sea. The hills were easy to defend. The river gave fresh water and a route to the coast, and an island made a good crossing point. Trade routes running north and south through Italy met there. Slowly the villages joined into one town with a marketplace, the Forum, in the marshy valley between the hills.

Italy was a better place to build a large state than Greece. The peninsula has mountains, the Apennines, down its spine, but it also has wide, fertile plains and a mild climate. Rome could feed a growing population. To the north lived the Etruscans, skilled builders and traders who ruled Rome for a time and taught the Romans much about engineering, religion and the alphabet, which they had borrowed from the Greeks.

In 509 BCE, according to Roman tradition, the Romans drove out their last Etruscan king, Tarquin the Proud. They swore never again to be ruled by a king. That hatred of kings shaped Roman government for the next five centuries. Rome would be a republic.

A republic is a state without a king, where citizens choose their leaders. In Rome, two consuls were elected each year to run the government and lead the army. Each could block the other, and after one year they had to step down. This kept any one man from becoming a king. In a real emergency, the Romans could name a dictator for six months, and then he too had to give up power.

The Senate was a council of about three hundred older men, mostly from wealthy families, who served for life. It did not make laws in a strict sense, but its advice was almost always followed. It controlled money and foreign policy. Assemblies of citizens voted on laws and elected officials, but the voting was arranged so that the rich had more weight.

Roman citizens were divided into two classes. The patricians were a small number of old, powerful families who held all the offices at first. The plebeians were everyone else: farmers, shopkeepers, soldiers. Around 494 BCE the plebeians simply walked out of the city and refused to fight until they got rights. Over two centuries of struggle they won their own officials, called tribunes, who could veto any action that harmed them. Eventually a plebeian could even be consul.

One early victory was the Twelve Tables, about 450 BCE. Before then, only patrician priests knew the laws, so they could bend them. The plebeians demanded the laws be written down and posted in the Forum on twelve bronze tablets for all to read. Many of the laws seem harsh today, but the idea that law should be public and apply to everyone was a foundation for all later Roman law.

By 265 BCE Rome ruled all of Italy. Across the sea in North Africa stood Carthage, a rich trading city founded by the Phoenicians, with a great navy and colonies in Spain and Sicily. The Romans called the Carthaginians Punici, so the three wars between them are the Punic Wars. They lasted, with breaks, from 264 to 146 BCE.

In the first war, Rome, a land power with no fleet, copied a wrecked Carthaginian warship and built a navy from scratch. It won Sicily. In the second war, the Carthaginian general Hannibal did the unthinkable. In 218 BCE he marched an army with war elephants from Spain over the Alps into Italy. At Cannae in 216 BCE he surrounded and destroyed a much larger Roman army in a single day. Roman losses were in the tens of thousands.

Rome did not surrender. It refused to fight another big battle, raised new armies and let Hannibal roam Italy for fifteen years without taking Rome. Then a Roman general, Scipio, attacked Carthage itself. Hannibal was called home and lost at Zama in 202 BCE. Carthage gave up its navy and its lands abroad.

The third war was short and brutal. In 146 BCE the Romans took Carthage after a siege, burned it, sold the survivors into slavery and declared the land Roman. In the same year they destroyed the Greek city of Corinth. Rome now ruled the western Mediterranean and much of Greece. Its generals came home with plunder, prisoners and armies loyal to them rather than to the Senate. That would prove dangerous.

Conquest made Rome rich, but not all Romans. Wealthy men bought up farms and worked them with enslaved prisoners of war. Small farmers who had served for years in the army came home to find their land gone and moved to the city, poor and angry. Two brothers, the Gracchi, tried to give public land back to the poor in the 130s and 120s BCE. Both were killed by mobs organized by senators. Politics had turned to violence.

Generals now built armies of landless men who fought for pay and land, not for the Republic. Whoever paid them had their loyalty. In the 80s BCE the general Sulla marched his army on Rome itself and killed his enemies by the thousands. The lesson was clear: soldiers, not votes, decided power.

Julius Caesar learned it well. A brilliant general and politician, he conquered Gaul, modern France, between 58 and 50 BCE and wrote his own account of it. The Senate, fearing him, ordered him to give up his army. Instead, in 49 BCE, he crossed the Rubicon, a small river at the border of Italy, with his troops. That was treason. In the civil war that followed he won, and in 44 BCE he had himself named dictator for life.

Caesar cut debts, gave land to veterans, fixed the calendar and planned public works. But dictator for life sounded like king, the word Romans hated most. On March 15, 44 BCE, the Ides of March, a group of senators led by Brutus and Cassius stabbed him to death in a Senate meeting. They thought they had saved the Republic. Instead they set off thirteen more years of civil war.

Caesar’s will named his eighteen-year-old grandnephew Octavian as his heir. Few took the young man seriously. Within fourteen years he had outfought or outmaneuvered every rival. His last opponent was Mark Antony, Caesar’s old general, allied with Cleopatra, queen of Egypt. Octavian’s fleet beat theirs at Actium in 31 BCE. Antony and Cleopatra killed themselves, and Egypt became Roman.

Octavian was careful. He had watched what happened to a man who called himself dictator for life. So in 27 BCE he announced that he was restoring the Republic. The Senate still met, consuls were still elected, and he took the modest title princeps, first citizen. The Senate gave him a new name, Augustus, meaning revered. In fact he controlled the army, the treasury and the provinces. Historians call him the first emperor, and the Roman Empire begins with him.

Augustus ruled for about forty years, until 14 CE. He ended the civil wars, built roads and temples, created a police force and fire brigade for Rome and set up a system for paying and retiring soldiers so that they no longer depended on a general’s promises. He liked to say he had found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble.

The two centuries that followed are called the Pax Romana, the Roman peace, from 27 BCE to about 180 CE. Wars continued on the borders, and emperors ranged from wise to monstrous. But inside the empire, from Britain to Syria, perhaps sixty million people lived under one law, one currency and mostly without war. Trade and cities grew as never before.

Roman soldiers built as much as they fought. They laid more than fifty thousand miles of paved roads, straight as a ruler where the land allowed, with deep foundations of stone and gravel. Milestones marked distances. Armies, tax collectors, merchants and letters moved along them fast. The saying that all roads lead to Rome was nearly literal. Some Roman roads are still under modern highways in Europe.

Cities needed water, and Rome’s engineers delivered it. An aqueduct is a channel that carries water from hills to a city by gravity alone, sloping gently for miles, sometimes on tall stone arches across valleys. Rome itself had about eleven aqueducts feeding fountains, baths and toilets. The Romans also made concrete from volcanic ash that could set underwater, letting them build domes, harbors and the arena called the Colosseum.

Just as important was law. Over centuries Roman judges and legal scholars built up rules for contracts, property, marriage and crime that applied across the empire. Key ideas took shape: a person is innocent until proven guilty, the accused has a right to face the accuser, and law should be based on reason. Centuries later the emperor Justinian’s collection of Roman law became the base of legal systems in much of Europe and Latin America.

The language of the empire’s west was Latin. Soldiers, officials and merchants carried it everywhere, and it slowly changed into Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Romanian, the Romance languages. English is not a Romance language, but about half its words come from Latin, mostly through French. Words like justice, senate, republic, legal and even the month names are Latin.

Rome in the empire was a city of perhaps a million people, the largest in the world. Most lived in insulae, apartment blocks several stories tall, built of wood and brick, crowded and prone to fire. The poor cooked on braziers or bought hot food from shops. Water came from public fountains. The rich lived in houses with courtyards and gardens, and in country villas. To keep the poor calm, emperors gave free grain to citizens in the city.

Everyone with any money owned slaves. Perhaps one person in three in Italy was enslaved. Most were prisoners of war or their children. Enslaved people cooked, taught children, kept accounts, farmed vast estates and died in mines. A master could beat, sell or kill them. Yet Roman slavery was not based on skin color, and freeing slaves was common. A freed slave became a citizen, and his children could rise. Some of the wealthiest men in Pompeii were former slaves.

Slavery could also explode. In 73 BCE a gladiator named Spartacus led a revolt that grew to tens of thousands of enslaved people and defeated several Roman armies before it was crushed. Rome lined the road from Capua to Rome with thousands of crucified rebels as a warning.

Gladiators were enslaved men, prisoners and a few volunteers trained to fight in arenas for crowds. The Colosseum, opened in 80 CE, held about fifty thousand spectators for fights between men and hunts of wild animals. Romans also loved chariot races at the Circus Maximus. Emperors paid for these shows to win the crowd’s favor. The poet Juvenal complained that the people who once ruled themselves now wanted only bread and circuses.

In the province of Judea, under the emperor Tiberius, a Jewish teacher named Jesus of Nazareth preached to crowds, and around the year 30 CE the Roman governor Pontius Pilate had him crucified. His followers said he had risen from the dead. They began to spread his teaching. A traveler named Paul carried it along Roman roads and sea lanes to cities across the eastern Mediterranean, writing letters to new groups of believers. Those letters, and accounts of Jesus’s life called Gospels, became the New Testament, written in Greek.

Christianity grew slowly at first, mostly in cities, among the poor, women, slaves and traders, though not only them. It offered a community that cared for its members and a promise of life after death to anyone, regardless of rank. Christians met in homes and shared meals. They refused to worship the Roman gods or the emperor.

That refusal caused trouble. Romans allowed many religions, but they expected everyone to honor the state’s gods, which they saw as loyalty. Christians would not, so they were blamed for disasters. The emperor Nero killed Christians after a great fire in Rome in 64 CE. Later emperors ordered wider persecutions, especially around 250 and 303 CE. Many Christians were executed. Their courage impressed some onlookers and won converts.

In 312 CE the emperor Constantine, before a battle, said he saw a sign from the Christian God and then won. The next year he made Christianity legal across the empire. He built churches and called a council of bishops at Nicaea in 325 to settle disputes about belief. By 380 the emperor Theodosius made Christianity the empire’s official religion and began to restrict the old gods. A faith once outlawed now ran the empire’s temples.

After 180 CE the empire ran into trouble. In one fifty-year stretch of the 200s, more than twenty men claimed the title of emperor, most of them generals who were killed by their own troops or by rivals. Wars on the borders needed more soldiers, and paying them needed more money. Emperors put less silver in each coin, so prices soared. Plague swept through the empire more than once and cut the population.

The emperor Diocletian, around 300 CE, tried to fix things by splitting the empire into eastern and western halves with separate rulers. Constantine built a new capital, Constantinople, in the richer, safer east. The west, poorer and with a longer frontier along the Rhine and Danube rivers, was left with fewer resources.

Beyond those rivers lived Germanic peoples such as the Goths, Vandals and Franks. For centuries they had traded with Rome, served in its armies and sometimes settled inside the empire. In the late 300s, pushed by the Huns from central Asia, whole peoples crossed the border seeking safety and land. Rome could not stop them or fully absorb them. In 410 the Goths sacked Rome itself, the first time in eight hundred years an enemy had taken the city. In 455 the Vandals did it again.

In 476 a Germanic general named Odoacer removed the last western emperor, a boy named Romulus Augustulus, and did not bother to name another. Historians use that date for the fall of the western empire. But nothing dramatic happened that day. Roman roads, laws, towns and the Latin language went on under new kings. The eastern half, which we call the Byzantine Empire, lasted another thousand years, until 1453.

The empire fell, but Rome did not disappear. Look at government first. The founders of the United States studied Rome closely. They chose the word republic. They created a Senate. They divided power so no one person could hold it all, an idea straight from Rome’s two consuls. Their fear of a Caesar is why the Constitution limits the president and puts the army under civilian control. In Washington, the Capitol building, with its dome and columns, deliberately looks Roman.

Law is next. The principle that laws apply equally to all citizens, that the accused is innocent until proven guilty and that a case rests on evidence all come through Rome. Justinian’s code of Roman law shaped the legal systems of France, Spain, Italy and their former colonies, including Louisiana and Quebec. Even our word justice is Latin.

Then language and learning. Latin became the language of the Christian church and of scholars for a thousand years. Every scientific name for a plant or animal is still in Latin. Roman letters are the alphabet you are reading. Roman numerals mark clock faces and Super Bowls. Roman concrete, arches and domes taught later builders; the dome of the Pantheon in Rome, built about 125 CE, still stands unreinforced.

Finally, the church. When the emperors were gone, the bishop of Rome, the pope, remained. Christian monks copied Roman books and kept them alive through centuries of war. The empire that had once crucified Christians became the road by which Christianity reached the world. Rome shows how a state can end while its ideas, for better and worse, keep going.

Northern India is a land of great rivers, the Indus in the west and the Ganges in the east, watered by summer monsoon rains. By 500 BCE it held many small kingdoms and republics. Not long after Alexander the Great reached the Indus and turned back, a young leader named Chandragupta Maurya seized the kingdom of Magadha on the Ganges, around 321 BCE. He built the Maurya Empire, the first to rule most of the Indian subcontinent.

The Mauryan state was well organized. A minister’s handbook from the period describes spies, tax collectors, roads with rest houses and a huge army. The capital, Pataliputra, had wooden walls with hundreds of towers. A Greek ambassador who visited wrote about its size and order, though his book survives only in pieces quoted by others.

Chandragupta’s grandson Ashoka came to the throne around 268 BCE. Early in his reign he conquered the coastal kingdom of Kalinga in a war that, by his own account, killed and displaced hundreds of thousands of people. Ashoka said the suffering horrified him. He turned to Buddhism and announced that he would rule by dharma, a word meaning right conduct and duty.

How do we know? Ashoka had his messages carved on rocks and tall polished stone pillars across his empire, in local languages. More than thirty of these edicts survive. In them he urges kindness to servants and animals, respect for all religions, and planting shade trees and wells along the roads. He sent Buddhist missionaries as far as Sri Lanka and the Greek kingdoms. After his death around 232 BCE, the empire weakened and broke apart within about fifty years.

Hinduism is not one founder’s religion. It grew over thousands of years from the hymns of the Vedas, composed by about 1500 to 1000 BCE, and from later teachings. Hindus honor many gods, such as Vishnu the preserver and Shiva the destroyer, often as faces of one ultimate reality called Brahman. Two ideas shape Hindu life. Karma means that every action has consequences that follow a person. Reincarnation means the soul is reborn in new bodies, and good karma leads to a better rebirth.

Indian society was divided into groups by birth, later called castes: priests, warriors and rulers, merchants and farmers, and laborers, with others considered outside the system altogether. Hindu teaching linked each group to its own dharma, or duty. This gave order, but it also locked people into place. Reformers, then and now, have challenged it.

Around 500 BCE a prince named Siddhartha Gautama, born near the border of today’s India and Nepal, left his palace after seeing sickness, old age and death. After years of searching he sat under a tree and, his followers say, reached enlightenment. He became the Buddha, the awakened one. He taught that life involves suffering, that suffering comes from craving, that craving can be ended, and that the way is a middle path of right living, meditation and wisdom.

Buddhism accepted karma and rebirth but rejected the caste system and the need for priests. Anyone could follow the path. Monks and nuns organized communities, and rulers like Ashoka spread the teaching. Over centuries Buddhism reached Sri Lanka, central Asia, China, Korea and Japan, while in India itself Hinduism remained the faith of most people. Both religions are alive today with hundreds of millions of followers, including many in the Chicago area.

About five hundred years after the Mauryas fell, another family united northern India. The Gupta Empire lasted from about 320 to 550 CE. It was smaller than Ashoka’s and its kings let local rulers keep much of their power. But it was peaceful and rich, and historians often call it India’s classical age. A Chinese Buddhist monk named Faxian who traveled there around 400 CE wrote that the people were prosperous and the roads safe.

Gupta artists carved stone temples and painted cave walls, and poets wrote in Sanskrit, the classical language of India. The playwright Kalidasa wrote dramas still performed today. Buddhist monasteries such as Nalanda grew into universities that drew students from across Asia. Doctors performed surgery and described many diseases.

The greatest Gupta gift was mathematics. Indian scholars developed a decimal system with ten digits, in which a digit’s value depends on its place, and they used a symbol for zero. That last step sounds small. It was enormous. With zero as a placeholder, you can tell 205 from 25, and with zero as a number, you can subtract, multiply and build algebra. The Romans, with their numerals, could barely multiply.

The astronomer Aryabhata, around 500 CE, calculated the length of the year and the value of pi with great accuracy and argued that the Earth turns on its axis. Indian numbers traveled west to Arab scholars, who spread them to Europe, which is why we call them Arabic numerals. Every time you write a 0, you use an idea from Gupta India.

For centuries, China was split among rival kingdoms that fought endlessly, a period known as the Warring States. One of them, Qin, in the west, had rebuilt itself around a philosophy called Legalism. Legalists believed people were selfish and had to be controlled by strict laws, heavy punishments and rewards. Qin’s armies were large and disciplined, and its king was ruthless.

By 221 BCE he had crushed every rival and united China for the first time. He gave himself a new title, Shi Huangdi, First Emperor, and expected his family to rule for ten thousand generations. Our word China probably comes from Qin. He divided the land into districts run by officials he appointed, not by nobles who inherited power.

The First Emperor made everything the same. One system of writing, so officials anywhere could read orders. One set of weights and measures, one coin with a square hole, and even one axle width for carts so that all wheels fit the same ruts. He built roads and canals and forced hundreds of thousands of laborers to work on them. He linked older walls in the north into a long barrier against nomadic raiders, an early version of the Great Wall.

He also feared ideas. Traditional accounts say he ordered books of history and philosophy burned, keeping only useful ones on farming and medicine, and had scholars who resisted executed. He searched for a potion of eternal life and may have died from one. When he died in 210 BCE, revolts broke out at once. The Qin dynasty lasted only four years more. Yet the unified empire it built lasted, in one form or another, for two thousand years.

In 1974 farmers near the city of Xi’an were digging a well in a dry season. They hit pieces of hardened clay shaped like a man. Archaeologists came and began to dig. They uncovered pits holding an army of terracotta, baked clay, soldiers standing in battle formation. So far about eight thousand figures have been found: infantry, archers, charioteers, officers, horses. Each is life-size, and no two faces are the same.

The soldiers guard the tomb of the First Emperor, a mound about a mile away that has never been opened. An ancient historian, Sima Qian, wrote a century later that the tomb held a model of the empire with rivers of flowing mercury and that the craftsmen who built it were sealed inside so its secrets would die with them. Tests of the soil have found unusually high mercury levels, which suggests his account may contain truth.

The figures were once painted in bright colors and held real bronze weapons, some still sharp. Workers made them in an assembly line: legs, bodies, arms and heads molded separately, then joined and finished by hand. Stamps on the clay give the names of the workshops and foremen who were responsible for quality. Sima Qian says seven hundred thousand laborers worked on the tomb complex, a figure historians treat as very rough.

The terracotta army is evidence in several ways. It shows how Qin soldiers dressed, stood and were armed. It shows the emperor’s belief that he would rule in the next world as in this one. And it shows the cost of that belief: a generation of forced labor for a single man’s tomb. The same power that standardized carts and writing could also consume the lives of its people.

After Qin fell, a peasant-born rebel leader named Liu Bang won the wars that followed and founded the Han dynasty in 206 BCE. It lasted, with one short break, until 220 CE, about four hundred years. The Han kept the Qin’s unified empire, districts and officials, but softened the laws. Chinese people today still call themselves Han.

The Han turned to an older thinker for ideas about how to rule well. Confucius lived around 551 to 479 BCE. He never found a ruler who would take his advice. His students wrote down his sayings. He taught that society works when everyone fulfills the duties of their role: rulers should be just and set a good example, officials honest, children respectful of parents, and all people should study and improve themselves.

This was Confucianism. It said a ruler held power by the Mandate of Heaven, the approval of the heavens. Heaven could withdraw that approval if he ruled badly. Floods, famines and revolts were signs of that. So a wise emperor listened to his advisers and cared for his people. The Han emperor Wudi, who ruled from 141 to 87 BCE, made Confucian teaching the official learning of the state and set up an imperial academy to train officials in it.

Han China was, alongside Rome, one of the two great powers of the ancient world. The two empires each had about sixty million people at their height. They knew of each other only faintly. The Han pushed west into central Asia to protect the trade routes. They expanded south and fought long wars against the Xiongnu nomads on the northern steppe. Sima Qian, the court historian, wrote a history of China from its legendary beginnings to his own day.

Before paper, Chinese writing went on strips of bamboo tied with cord, heavy and bulky, or on silk, which was costly. Around 105 CE a court official named Cai Lun is credited with reporting a new method to the emperor. Workers mashed tree bark, old rags, hemp and fishing nets into a pulp, spread it thin on a screen, and let it dry into a sheet. Paper was cheap, light and easy to write on. Archaeologists have found even older scraps, so Cai Lun probably improved a process already in use.

Paper changed everything a government does. Records, tax rolls, maps and letters could be made and stored in quantity. Books multiplied. Centuries later the Chinese would add printing. Paper spread slowly along the Silk Roads to central Asia, reached the Arab world by the 700s and Europe by around 1100. Every page you read on paper began in Han China.

The Han also faced a question every large state faces: how do you pick honest, capable officials? The Qin had appointed loyal men. The Han began to ask local leaders to recommend people of good character and to test them on Confucian learning. The imperial academy trained thousands of students. Over later dynasties this grew into the civil service examination, a set of written tests open, in theory, to any man who could study, which decided who governed.

The examination system had limits. Studying took years and money, so most winners came from families that could afford it, and women were excluded. But the idea that officials should earn their post by knowledge, not birth, was powerful. In the 1800s Britain and then the United States copied it. When someone in Illinois takes a test to become a state employee, they are following a Han idea.

There was never one silk road. The name was invented by a German geographer in the 1800s for a network of routes that connected China with the Mediterranean. The main land routes ran west from Chang’an through the Gansu corridor, split around the Taklamakan Desert, crossed the Pamir Mountains and continued through Persia to Syria. Sea routes joined southern China, Southeast Asia, India, Arabia and Egypt with the monsoon winds.

The Han opened the western routes on purpose. Around 138 BCE the emperor Wudi sent an envoy named Zhang Qian west to find allies against the Xiongnu. He was captured and held for years, escaped and came home with reports of rich kingdoms and fine horses in the Ferghana valley. Han armies followed, set up forts and made the roads safer. Trade grew.

Goods flowed both ways. From China came silk, lacquerware, bronze mirrors and later paper and porcelain. From India came cotton cloth, pepper and other spices, ivory and gems. From Persia and Rome came glass, wool, horses, wine, silver coins and gold. Rome’s writers grumbled that the empire was pouring gold into Asia to pay for luxuries. Along the way, oasis cities such as Samarkand and Kashgar grew rich as middlemen.

Almost no merchant traveled the whole distance. Goods passed from Chinese to Sogdian to Persian to Greek traders, each adding a markup. Silk that cost little in China was, by some ancient accounts, worth its weight in gold in Rome. Rome and China each knew the other existed and sent envoys that never quite arrived. A Chinese record describes a Roman embassy reaching the Han court in 166 CE, though scholars think it may have been a group of merchants claiming official status.

Merchants carried more than cloth. A trader who spent a season in an oasis town heard new prayers, saw new tools and tasted new foods. The most important traveler on the Silk Roads was not a good at all. It was Buddhism. Monks from India walked east with the caravans, and by the first century CE Buddhist communities existed in China. Over the next centuries Chinese pilgrims, including Faxian, made the reverse trip to India to collect scriptures.

Buddhism changed as it traveled. Along the routes, in what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan, artists influenced by Greek sculpture carved the first statues of the Buddha in human form. In China, Buddhism mixed with local ideas and grew into new schools. Cave temples cut into cliffs along the routes, such as those at Dunhuang, hold thousands of painted walls and manuscripts that show this blending. From China, Buddhism went on to Korea and Japan.

Other faiths traveled too: Christianity, Zoroastrianism from Persia, Judaism, and later Islam. Technology moved as well. Paper went west. The crossbow, the stirrup and methods of making iron and steel spread. Crops crossed between regions: grapes, walnuts and alfalfa came east to China, while peaches and apricots, native to China, went west and were later called Persian by the Romans.

Knowledge crossed as well. Indian numbers, including zero, went west with traders and scholars. Greek astronomy reached India. Chinese silk-making itself finally escaped, the story goes, when silkworm eggs were smuggled to the Byzantine Empire in the 500s CE. The Silk Roads show that no civilization built itself alone. Each borrowed, adapted and passed things on.

Trade routes connect people, and people carry germs. A disease that one population has lived with for generations can be deadly to another that has never met it. As caravans and ships tied Eurasia together, sicknesses moved along with them. Historians cannot always name the exact disease from ancient descriptions, but they can trace the outbreaks.

In 165 CE, Roman soldiers returning from a war in the east brought home a plague that spread through the empire for fifteen years. The doctor Galen described its fever and rash; many scholars think it was smallpox. Millions may have died, and some estimates put the loss at a tenth of the empire’s population. A century later another wave hit. China’s records show major epidemics in the same period, and the Han population fell sharply between the census of 2 CE and the counts of the late 100s.

Disease was not the only cause, but both great empires ran into deep trouble at about the same time. Han China collapsed in 220 CE into three kingdoms and then centuries of division. Rome survived its crisis of the 200s but never fully recovered in the west. Nomads pressed on both frontiers. Some historians argue that the very connections that made the empires rich also made them fragile.

The lesson is not that connection is bad. The Silk Roads gave the world paper, zero, Buddhism in East Asia and a thousand smaller gifts. It is that a connected world shares everything, good and bad, and needs ways to manage that. Illinois today ships corn to Asia and receives electronics, and O’Hare Airport links Chicago to every continent. The questions traders faced on the Silk Roads, about trust, fair exchange and risk, are still ours.