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In Constantinople, the center of the Greek East, one could find Greek-speaking poets and historians referring to Rome as a foreign city full of vice, corruption, and decadence. The situation of the Romans and Rome began to change rapidly and many local Roman traditions disappeared. It was common to hear Barbarian languages in the Italian ...
Athenian democracy had many critics, both ancient and modern. Ancient Greek critics of Athenian democracy include Thucydides the general and historian, Aristophanes the playwright, Plato the pupil of Socrates, Aristotle the pupil of Plato, and a writer known as the Old Oligarch. While modern critics are more likely to find fault with the ...
The patricians had developed into the upper class by monopolising the priesthoods, which played an important part in the politics of archaic Rome and, in the Early Republic, the consulship (the office of the two annual elected heads of the Roman Republic and the army), and the seats of the (unelected) senate, the advisory body for the consuls ...
The Roman conquest of Ancient Greece in the 2nd century BC. The Greek peninsula fell to the Roman Republic during the Battle of Corinth (146 BC), when Macedonia became a Roman province. Meanwhile, southern Greece also came under Roman hegemony, but some key Greek poleis remained partly autonomous and avoided direct Roman taxation.
Many slaves were created as the result of Rome's conquest of Greece, but Greek culture was considered in some respects superior to that of Rome: hence Horace's famous remark Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit ("Captured Greece took her savage conqueror captive"). The Roman playwright Terence is thought to have been brought to Rome as a slave ...
These activities were often handled by a form of direct democracy, based on a popular assembly. Others, of judicial and official nature, were often handled by large juries, drawn from the citizen body in a process known as sortition. By far the most well-documented and studied example is the Athenian democracy in Athens.
A democracy is a political system, or a system of decision-making within an institution, organization, or state, in which members have a share of power. [2] Modern democracies are characterized by two capabilities of their citizens that differentiate them fundamentally from earlier forms of government: to intervene in society and have their sovereign (e.g., their representatives) held ...
The Roman model of governance would inspire many political thinkers over the centuries, [9] and today's modern representative democracies imitate more the Roman than the Greek model, because it was a state in which supreme power was held by the people and their elected representatives, and which had an elected or nominated leader. [10]