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And this vast, well-organized empire would muster the largest army the world had ever seen: over half a million soldiers.
Rome was the superpower of the ancient world. Later superpowers never stopped learning the lessons of its spectacular rise and fall. Napoleon was not alone in his obsession with Rome.
Twenty years before Napoleon marched into Rome, on the other side of the Atlantic, a group of men were designing a political system for their new country.
In designing the Constitution of these United States of America, we have at various times sought precedent in the history of that ancient republic, and endeavored to draw lessons both from its leading ideas and from the tumult and factions which finally brought it low. Thomas Jefferson.
The American founding fathers spent most of their childhood and much of their adulthood reading the Latin classics. To the founders, the past was not something that was dead; it was something that was alive, especially the Roman past. It was alive with personal and social meaning. This was crucial, I think, to the American Revolution, because they were doing something really unprecedented in this revolution. And yet, and yet they were able to feel that they were not the first. The basis of our political system, I think, lies in Rome.
The Western world grew up in Rome's shadow, its legends, its laws, its institutions, and its language. Napoleon said the story of Rome is the story of the world. It's a story of great commanders and politicians--- men like Caesar, Augustus, Hadrian, and Constantine. But it's also a story of the poor, who bore the brunt of their leaders' ambitions. It's a story of vast idealism, and an equally vast greed for power. And finally, it's a story of Rome's spectacular fall, and the chaos that followed.
But behind all that are the stories of Rome's beginnings, almost 3, 000 years ago, in the lush hills of central Italy.
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