What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?

Podcast Transcript

Rome did not simply vanish when its empire fell.

Its roads, laws, languages, calendars, architecture, engineering, and political ideas survived and became part of the foundation of the modern world.

From the courtroom to the Capitol building, from the alphabet you read to the cities you live in, Rome is still with us in ways both obvious and invisible.

Join me as I ask the question “What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?” on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

The process of creating an episode of this podcast has many different routes. I have had some episodes I thought of in the morning and recorded later that evening.

Then there are some that have taken years from the original idea to the final recording. This episode is one of the first 100 episode ideas I came up with when I first hatched the idea for the podcast almost 6 years ago. It’s been sitting at the top of the list, so I figured it was time to finally do it.

There are bits of this episode that appear in dozens of previous episodes. I’m not going to individually go through every previous episode when it comes up, but suffice it to say there are a lot of them.

What I want to do is provide you with some understanding of why this civilization that existed over 2,000 years ago still influences our world today.

This also shouldn’t be taken as a love letter to ancient Rome. While I think it is worth studying, and there are things we could learn, I wouldn’t want to live there. They had a host of cultural practices that have thankfully died out, that everyone listening would find abhorrent today.

Also, many of the things handed down from Rome aren’t in the same form as they were back then. They have evolved over time into modern institutions.

So, with that, the first and perhaps biggest way in which Rome influences the modern world is law. Law certainly didn’t originate with the Romans. There are examples of laws going back thousands of years in other civilizations.

However, the Roman approach to law was unique and still exists in most Western or Western-influenced countries today.

The idea that law should be written, organized, interpreted by specialists, and applied through recognized procedures owes an enormous amount to Rome.

Important Roman legal concepts include contracts, property rights, wills, corporations or legal associations, citizenship, legal personhood, public law, private law, and the distinction between civil and criminal matters. Even when modern legal systems are not directly Roman, they often use categories that Roman jurists helped define.

Rome’s legal influence begins with the Twelve Tables, traditionally dated to the mid-fifth century BC. These were Rome’s first major written laws. Their importance lay not in being especially humane or complete, but in making the law public. The rules were no longer supposed to exist only in the memory and discretion of aristocratic officials.

Another major Roman legacy is the concept of legal personality. Roman law recognized that certain associations, municipalities, and institutions could have legal identities distinct from the individuals composing them.

This helped lay the groundwork for later ideas of corporations, municipalities, universities, churches, non-profit organizations, and other entities that can own property, sue, be sued, and continue beyond the lives of their members.

Rome’s idea of citizenship was also crucial. Roman citizenship was a legal status carrying rights, duties, privileges, and protections. Over time, it expanded from the city of Rome to Italy and eventually to nearly all free inhabitants of the empire. This helped establish the idea that political belonging could be defined by law rather than only by tribe, ethnicity, or birthplace.

A major turning point came under the emperor Justinian in the sixth century. His government compiled centuries of Roman legal material into the Corpus Juris Civilis, or Body of Civil Law.

It included the Code, which collected imperial laws; the Digest, which gathered opinions of major Roman jurists; the Institutes, a legal textbook; and later laws called the Novels. This compilation preserved Roman law after the Western Empire had collapsed.

The rediscovery and study of Justinian’s law in medieval Europe, especially at universities such as Bologna, transformed Western legal history. Medieval scholars treated Roman law as a rational system that could be studied, analyzed, taught, and applied. This helped create the modern legal profession, legal education, and the idea of law as an intellectual discipline.

Rome’s contribution to modern republican government was not that it created democracy as we understand it. It didn’t. Rather, it gave later political theorists one of history’s most influential working models of a state without a king, governed through offices, assemblies, laws, and competing centers of authority.

The word republic itself comes from the Latin res publica, meaning “the public thing” or “the public affair.” The idea was that the state was not the personal property of a monarch. It belonged, at least in theory, to the community of citizens. That concept became one of Rome’s biggest political legacies.

Rome’s most important contribution to this was the idea of mixed government. The republic had consuls who served as executives, the Senate, which was an aristocratic body, and popular assemblies that gave citizens a formal role in elections, legislation, and public decisions.

Rome also gave modern republics the idea of checks and balances. No single office was supposed to hold all power permanently. Consuls served limited terms. There were usually two consuls at a time, so each could restrain the other through vetoes. Tribunes of the plebs could veto certain actions to protect ordinary citizens. Magistrates had defined powers, and offices were arranged in a hierarchy known as the cursus honorum.

Law and government weren’t the only contributions to the modern world. They have also heavily influenced language.

The Romance languages developed from spoken Latin: Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Romanian, and others. Through the Roman Empire, the Catholic church, scholarship, law, and science, Latin also became a major source of vocabulary for English and many other languages.

English is Germanic in structure, but much of its formal, legal, scientific, religious, and intellectual vocabulary comes from Latin, often through French.

The biggest contribution comes from the Latin alphabet. The Latin alphabet is used, in some form, by most languages in the world today, even those that are not descended from European languages. The Latin alphabet has become a widespread linguistic operating system adapted for languages as diverse as Vietnamese, Swahili, Hawaiian, and Navajo.

Another major innovation used almost everywhere in the world today is the calendar. The calendar that almost the entire world uses today is the Gregorian Calendar which is a modification of the Julian Calendar, which was implemented by Julius Caesar.

It was a solar calendar, which made it much easier to time the planting and harvest seasons.

Moreover, all of the names of the months come from the Roman names of the months.

Rome also had major contributions to modern roads and infrastructure. Roman roads were among the most important infrastructure systems in history. They connected cities, forts, ports, mines, farms, and provincial capitals across the empire.

At their height, the Romans built tens of thousands of miles of paved roads, with many more miles of secondary routes. These roads allowed armies to move quickly, officials to administer distant provinces, merchants to transport goods, and information to travel with unusual speed for the ancient world.

Not every Roman road was a perfectly paved stone highway, but the best ones were durable enough that some routes remained in use for centuries. Many modern roads in Europe still follow Roman alignments because the Romans often chose the most practical routes through the landscape.

Rome also helped establish the idea of a road network rather than isolated roads. The famous saying “all roads lead to Rome” reflects the fact that the empire’s roads were part of an integrated system

Roman bridges were another major legacy. They made heavy use of the arch, which allowed them to span rivers and valleys with great strength and durability. Roman bridge-building influenced later European engineering, and some Roman bridges still stand or remain in use today.

Roman aqueducts, sewers, and baths influenced the modern world less by providing exact technologies to copy and more by establishing a civic ideal: a city should provide large-scale public systems for water, waste, and hygiene.

Roman aqueducts showed that cities did not have to depend only on nearby wells, rivers, or rainwater. Fresh water could be captured from distant springs and carried into urban centers through carefully engineered channels, tunnels, bridges, reservoirs, and distribution tanks.

The modern city water systems, with reservoirs, mains, pipes, and public distribution, is not a direct copy of Roman aqueducts, but it follows the same basic principle: water supply is an engineered public network.

Roman sewers had a similar influence. The Romans did not understand germs in the modern sense, and their sanitation systems were at best uneven by modern standards. But they did understand that dense cities needed drainage and waste removal. The Cloaca Maxima in Rome became a famous symbol of urban engineering: a massive drainage system that helped remove stormwater and sewage from parts of the city.

The Cloaca Maxima is the world’s oldest man-made object that is still used for its original purpose.

The key Roman contribution here was the idea that sanitation is part of urban planning. Streets, latrines, drains, sewers, and water supply had to work together.

Roman public baths were perhaps the most culturally influential institutions. They were not just places to get clean. They were social centers, athletic facilities, libraries, meeting places, business venues, and symbols of civilized urban life.

Their influence can be seen in later public bathhouses, Turkish baths, hammams, spas, saunas, health resorts, gymnasiums, and even modern recreation centers.

Rome also created some of the world’s first planned cities. Rome itself wasn’t planned, but many of its provincial outposts were. They were created with a grid layout of city streets. Many cities, like Merida, Spain, still use the same street layout created 2,000 years ago.

In well-preserved Roman cities, such as Timgad, Algeria, you can still see the original layout. The grid system used in places like Manhattan is the same basic system as the one the Romans used.

Rome’s influence on modern armies is less about battlefield tactics and more about organization, professionalism, logistics, and engineering.

The Roman army helped establish the idea of a professional standing army. Earlier, citizen militias were often raised for a campaign and then dismissed.

Over time, Rome developed long-service soldiers who were trained, paid, equipped, stationed, promoted, and retired through the state. Modern armies are much closer to that Roman model than to temporary ancient levies.

This model was very different than even cultures like Sparta. In Rome, you could pursue the military as a career. They had contracts that soldiers had to sign, tours of duty (which were often quite long), and pension plans that were usually in the form of land

Rome’s legacy is not found in a single invention or institution, but in the systems it left behind. Modern law, republican government, roads, urban infrastructure, language, architecture, calendars, citizenship, and military organization all still bear Roman fingerprints.

The Romans were not always original, and they were certainly not always admirable, but they were unmatched at taking ideas, organizing them, scaling them, and making them last. More than fifteen centuries after the fall of the Western Empire, we still live in a world partly built on Roman foundations.