What huge oval arena did the ancient Romans build for public games?
Which famous Roman leader was assassinated on the Ides of March?
What stone channels did the Romans build to carry fresh water into their cities?
What were the three phases of Roman government?
What was the Roman Republic's system of government?
Who was Julius Caesar?
Who was Augustus and what did he establish?
What was the Pax Romana?
What were the main causes of Rome's fall (476)?
What was the significance of the Edict of Milan (313)?
Many historians argue that the military reforms attributed to Gaius Marius (from 107 BC) helped undermine the Republic. Which consequence of those reforms best explains why?
Hint: Ask where a soldier's loyalty would settle once his livelihood after service rested on one man rather than on the state.
During the Conflict of the Orders, the Lex Hortensia (287 BC) is often called the plebeians' decisive victory. What made it so significant?
Hint: The Twelve Tables were a much earlier step; this law was about the binding force of one assembly's decisions.
What was the most lasting consequence of Rome's victory in the Second Punic War (218-201 BC) for the Republic's internal society?
Hint: Distinguish the war that ended in 201 BC from the later war that razed the city; the social change here is about who farmed the land.
How did the way Augustus structured his power after 27 BC differ from the openly autocratic systems that came later?
Hint: Augustus kept the Republic's outward forms; the four-ruler arrangement belongs to a much later emperor's reform.
Edward Gibbon's 'The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' (1776-1789) advanced a famous and much-debated thesis about Rome's collapse. Which claim is most characteristic of Gibbon's argument?
Hint: Two of these name real scholarly positions on Rome's end; only one is the argument Gibbon himself is famous for making.
When Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BC, contemporaries saw it as a grave act because of what it meant under Roman law. What made the crossing so transgressive?
Hint: The river was a legal boundary for armies under a commander's military authority, not a religious or foreign one.
Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus (tribunes in 133 and 123-122 BC) are often treated as the opening of the Republic's final crisis. Which factor best explains why their reform programs ended in violence?
Hint: The Gracchi were elite reformers working through the tribunate decades before the conspiracy Cicero famously exposed.
The Constitutio Antoniniana issued by the emperor Caracalla in AD 212 is regarded as a landmark in the legal history of the empire. What was its most significant effect?
Hint: This edict concerned who counted as a citizen, not the later codification of the laws themselves.