Anthropomorphic: In the image of human beings.
Catapult: A device for slinging large objects, such as boulders, a great length.
Chastity: The act or state of remaining pure by not engaging in sex.
Checks and balances: Built-in safeguards to protect a government from the possibility of one person or group of people gaining too much power.
Conscript (n.): Someone who is drafted into military service.
Constitution: A set of written laws governing a nation.
Dictator: A ruler who holds absolute, or complete, power.
Faction: A political group.
Guerrilla warfare: Warfare by unconventional methods, often involving surprise attacks.
Legal precedent: When a previous legal case has established a certain ruling, that ruling can then be applied to a later case.
Magistrate: An official entrusted with administration of laws.
Middle class: A group in between the rich and the poor or the rich and the working class.
Millennium: A thousand years.
Pagan (n.): Someone who worships many gods, usually deities associated with Nature.
Peasant: A farmer who works a small plot of land.
Plague: Used in a specific sense to describe an epidemic disease that kills a great number of people.
Province: A political unit, like a state, that is part of a larger country or empire.
Republic: A form of government, led by a president or a prime minister rather than by a monarch or a dictator, that is usually but not always democratic in character.
Romanization: The spread of Roman culture and civilization.
Sack (verb): To destroy; usually used in reference to a city.
Satire: A type of literary work that makes fun of human follies and vices.
Standing army: A full-time, professional army.
Toga: A type of loose outer robe worn in ancient Rome.
Veto: The power of one part of a government to prevent another part from taking a particular action.
The story of Aeneas (uh-NEE-uhs), in fact, seems to have arisen among Greek colonists living in southern Italy and Sicily. According to the legend, Aeneas was a Trojan prince who organized a group of escapees from the defeated city and set sail for Italy to establish a new Troy across the seas. Along the way, however, he had a series of trials and tribulations not unlike those of Odysseus in Homer's Odyssey.
After a wind blew his ship off course, he wound up on the shores of northern Africa, where he met the founder of Rome's future rival, Carthage (kahr-THEJ). The founder of Carthage was not a man but a woman, Dido (DEE-doh). Dido was queen of Tyre as well as Carthage, a reflection of her people's Phoenician origins. She fell deeply in love with Aeneas. When the gods commanded him to sail onward, he left her behind, whereupon she committed suicide.
After another series of adventures, Aeneas arrived in Latium (la-TEE-uhm). Latium was the ancient name for a region in western Italy, southeast of Rome. Historically, it was inhabited by a group of people called the Latins, or Latini (la-TEE-nee). It appears that the Latins, who were primarily cattle-farmers, came down the Italian peninsula along with other Indo-European tribes some time before 1000 b. c. They passed by the swamps of the Italian countryside until they came to an area of seven rolling hills south of the Tiber River (TIE-buhr). There they began building simple clay huts covered in thatch. Thus began one of the most glorious cities on earth.
The saga of Aeneas went on to tell of an alliance between Latium and another group of people known to have inhabited the region in early centuries: the Etruscans (eh-TRUHS-kuhns). This combined force went up against Aeneas, who had formed an alliance of his own with a group of Greek colonists living on the seven hills of Rome. In fact the Greek colonies were well south of Rome. This part of the legend served to identify the Romans with the Greeks, as the people of Rome would continue to do throughout their history.
Having defeated Turnus, king of Latium, Aeneas married the Latin princess Lavinia and founded a city called Lavinium in her honor. Generations later, the legends recount, another Latin princess named Rhea Silvia (REE-uh) gave birth to twin sons fathered by the war-god Mars. As punishment for violating her pledge of chastity, she was forced to abandon the twins, Romulus (RAHM-yoo-luhs) and Remus (REE-muhs), on the banks of the flooding Tiber.
But a she-wolf found them there, and she nursed them until a shepherd found the boys and raised them. In time, Romulus and Remus built a city on the seven hills. Eventually the two brothers clashed. Romulus survived and went on to give the city its name. The legend of Romulus emerged long after Rome did and was used to explain the city's name—along with its symbol, that of a wolf. The wolf symbol would prove a fitting emblem for what became the strongest, fiercest nation in the region. In time the Romans would triumph over the dominant power in Italy, the Etruscans.
World History
