Sophia and Ella's Blog

We departed for the Roman Forum at 8:45 a.m after eating our first breakfast at our hotel. After 12 bus stops and a short walk past several forums belonging to past Roman emperors, we arrived at the main Roman Forum, which many of us recognized from our Latin studies. In our AP Latin course, we had the opportunity to read Julius Caesar's De Bello Gallico and Vergil's The Aeneid, both of which at their time would have been read aloud at the Roman Forum by constituents of consuls and authors. In the spirit of Roman oratory traditions, the two of us read aloud a passage from De Bello Gallico that recounted the bravery of two soldiers during the Gallic Wars. We chose this passage because it represents traditional Roman values and appeared on our AP exam. Many of our peers, including ourselves at times, often forget the modern relevance of classics; recreating a scene from Roman warfare that we've analyzed gave us a unique sense of life to what we all consider a "dead language."

As we continued to walk beside fora, we learned that Mussolini commissioned the statues of each respective emperor placed in front of his forum in order to promote nationalism through a renewed awareness of ancient Rome. This served as another example of how classics have been applied in recent government and history. Additionally, the same nationalism that Mussolini wanted to evoke through the restoration of many ancient Roman sites is still extremely prevalent in Italian politics, especially in regard to current immigration crises.





 


And, as Cato would say: Ciao Papa