понедельник, 20 сентября 2010
From Rome to Latin America:
Transferable LegaciesFrom Rome to Latin America:
Transferable Legacies
The legacies of the Roman presence on the Iberian Peninsula served as a catalyst to spread its ideology and shape Latin America. The Empire left a distinct mark on Spain and Portugal while occupying that territory. After the fall of Rome, the Age of Exploration took Roman ideals and way of life, which was already instilled into the Spanish and the Portuguese, to the New World, particularly, to what today is known as Latin America.
The ideas were so instilled into the Europeans that even after Rome was gone, they went across the ocean and did the same thing to the native populations that was done to them by the Romans centuries ago. The conquistadores brought aspects of the Roman Empire still lingering around that were brought to Latin America by ship. These include three of the aspects of the structure of the Romans that we were introduced to in class: economy, urbanism and architecture, and culture.
Firstly, the Roman Empire was not built as most countries around at that time on subsistence economy, where each region produces enough for the local population. It is essentially local labor for the local community, where little goes to trade, rather for immediate consumption. The Roman economic system was based on trade and commercial enterprise, where everything is not produced locally. Rather, each community specializes in production of one good, and then sends vast amounts of it to market to get other goods produced elsewhere that are essential for the survival of the people in their community. Thus networks of trade were established. This is called monoculture in agriculture, where there is only one crop grown in a field for mass production and trade. Monoculture requires well organized labor and slaves were the main way to make sure that work would be done. The same method was taken into the New World, where monoculture plantations were established by the Europeans and the local populations were enslaved to work those fields.
Another legacy of Rome that is, perhaps, less noticed is urbanism and architecture. For the Romans, the city held a spiritual significance because they believed that gods lived in cities just as us mortals, and that the gods had geometrically perfect cities as well as bodies. By understanding and implementing mathematics into their lives, they believed they could get a glimpse into the secret of the universe and get in touch with their gods. This is where the importance of geometrically perfect and rigid lines of city grids and architecture originate from. An ideal town is one that resembles the way the gods are, a grid. The Romans took this idea to the Iberian Peninsula and it was later transported into the Americas by the Spanish and the Portuguese. The cities build by the Romans still have the same structural idea of geometric precision. And not only cities that the Romans themselves had built, but major cities in the newly conquered New World were all build based on the Roman grids.
Rigidity is not the only architectural legacy of the Roman Empire. The arena is another aspect that was adapted by the Iberian inhabitants for their own purposes. In Rome, the arena was used for the entertainment of the crowds with gladiator and wild animal fights. The sand was used to soak up the blood of the fighters. Today, in Spain and in the Americas the same idea is transformed into another familiar event, bull fighting. Still the same arena, with the same shape and still the sand covering the ring to soak up the blood that may be spilled as crowds gather to view a spectacle of fighting. Another mirror image of the Roman Empire, now tweaked for the day and age of our changing sophisticated society.
Cultural influence is another dramatic way to influence conquered nations. The Romans took everything with them wherever they went. That included language and religion. Latin was lingua franca of the times of the Roman Empire. It was the language that everybody knew and people from remote provinces could come to trade and communicate with each other despite the differences in their native languages. Latin was instilled into the conquered peoples by Rome. The same way Spanish was forced onto the indigenous population of the Americas when the conquistadores came. The Portuguese brought their language as well to the places they took control over. The local languages where often lethally suppressed that they died off and the conquering language would take over. Everything official was done is Spanish or Portuguese, depending on the region, and the locals had to communicate with the conquerors via the official language.
Religion is communicated by language, either written, spoken, or both. The Romans took their religion with them and the Iberians continued the same pattern in this aspect as well. Catholicism was the driving force behind the conquest of the New World. After all it was the Pope and his proclamation that the conquistadors were referring to when they took the indigenous people by force. Religion was a supplement of life for the Romans and the Spanish and the Portuguese later when they came to the Americas. It was something that gave them permission and power to take over what was not theirs but someone else’s. But Catholicism did become the official religion of Latin America despite the way it was forced onto the population of that time.
The Roman Empire had a major impact on the inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula while they were present there. Even after the fall of the empire itself, the ideals were so instilled into the lives of the people, that they absentmindedly took them overseas to the New World that they themselves were now conquering like they were centuries ago by the Romans. Culture, urbanism and architecture and the economic system is a mirror image instilled onto population after population, time after time, even the vast ocean is not powerful enough to stop the persistence of transfer of ideas and ways of life. The Romans were influenced by the Greeks, the Persians and the Germans, taking the new ideas and bending them into a familiar shape. These values and ideas were engraved into the peoples they conquered. They in turn grew so used to the impact to transfer the same ideas and culture where ever they went, which happened to be Latin America of the present day. Thus ideas keep transferring from one place to another. That is how the image of Roman Empire can be observed today in Latin America centuries later and oceans apart.