The Roman Republic (509-27 BCE) at Humanities West

From its legendary origins as a tiny cluster of villages in the Italian countryside, ancient Rome grew into a vast metropolis and the dominant power of the Mediterranean. Leaders of the Roman Republic established a constitutional framework that embodied principles of separation of powers, checks and balances, and the rights and duties of citizenship (for some), a model that endured for centuries. Ultimately civil strife exacerbated by wide disparities in social and economic wellbeing and the strains of governing a far-flung empire doomed Cicero’s Republican Rome in the first century BCE. From its modeling of democratic values to its golden age of drama and its Greek- and Etruscan-inspired art, the Roman Republic was a major turning point in western civilization that inspires us to this day. Presented in collaboration with the Consul General of Italy in San Francisco and the Italian Cultural Institute.
Friday, October 24, 2014, 7:30-9:30 pm
City-State, Republic, Empire: What was the Roman Republic Really Like? / Walter Scheidel (Stanford).
Plautus’ Casina in Performance / Stanford Classics in Theatre (SCIT). 
Saturday, October 25, 2014, 10:00 am - noon and 1:30-4:00 pm
The Religious Republic: How Did Romans Worship Their Gods? / Dan-el PadillaPeralta (Stanford and Columbia). 
Cicero: Eloquence Personified Then and Now / Christopher Krebs (Stanford).