IIRome研究生英语提高.doc

II. Rome 1. Political and Social Structure, people and life Rome united the ancient Mediterranean and joined it to western Europe. In the process, the Romans created an amalgam of ideas and institutions that would become the basis of later European life. This achievement, while enormous, was not especially original. The Romans excelled in the practical arts of war, law, engineering, and administration. They possessed in Latin a language of great richness and flexibility that would become the mother of many other tongues, but they borrowed virtually everything else from the Greeks, the Etruscans, the Egyptians, and other ancient cultures of the Near East. This was not simple mimicry but creative assimilation, for Roman culture had a coherence and integrity of its own. The Romans borrowed selectively, taking only what they found useful and transforming it according to their own traditions and social norms. In the years when Greek civilization was at its height, Rome was still a modest settlement in central Italy. Poor and surrounded by powerful enemies, it survived by developing a superb army and a political system that, though authoritarian enough to be effective in times of crisis, was based upon the active participation of its citizens and the rule of law. By the middle of the third century B.C. Rome controlled the Italian peninsula. By 133 B.C. it had defeated both Carthage and Macedon and acquired an empire that stretched from Spain to Greece. The creation of this empire was, at least in the beginning, a response to adversity rather than the product of deliberate intent. Surrounded by more powerful enemies, it developed a culture that stressed the military values of courage, discipline, and endurance. The early history of Rome is therefore one of harsh adaptations followed by explosive growth—the tale of how a poor, often beleaguered community developed political and military institutions capable of ruling an empire. The city that conquered Italy was similar in i