History of Rome

This course is the story of Rome, told from the top down and in order — how a village on a river became a republic that governed itself without a king, conquered the Mediterranean, strained and broke under its own success, traded the republic for an empire and the Roman Peace, and even in its fall left law, language, engineering, and the very shape of the West standing under our feet. Two threads carry the telling: the machine — the constitution of consuls, Senate, and checks, and its eventual breakdown — and the workshop — the roads, aqueducts, law, and practical genius. Admiration is the default posture, earned by honesty: slavery, the brutality of conquest, the arena, and the long decline stay on the page, and the civil wars and the fall of the West are told as constitutional breakdown and power dynamics, not as moral drama.

The primary voices are on the page throughout — Rome's own historians and biographers, in translation and in fresh, plain English — with the legendary early record (Romulus, the kings) marked as legend against what we know. It is the second movement of the one-year ancient history that begins with History of Greece, opening where Greece hands off the Hellenistic world. The capstone unit, What Rome Left, turns directly to the student and the inheritance he still lives inside — the law in his courts, the Latin under his words, the republic his own founders copied — and closes on the question the whole school is built to form a person for, the good man before the skilled speaker: where is your line? What wouldn't you do to keep a system alive — and how would you know when a system is past saving?

One half of History of Greece & Rome — a ≈1 credit year taken in two parts. The other half is History of Greece.

The full course opens September 1. Founding Families watch the ladder fill in — at a price that never moves.