The Roman Tradition: a legacy of identity and belonging
Portugal, embedded within the global context, possesses a living and fertile heritage that allows us, as historical beings, to delineate civilizational paths that lead us to rootedness and belonging, simultaneously unified and diverse. The Roman tradition is (re)clothed in a set of practices, principles, and customs rooted in ancient Rome, intersecting various spheres of action within politics, law, religion, and culture, shaping not only Roman society but also subsequent cultures, bearing living witness to the complexity of human history.
The process of Romanization
Romanization seeks to frame the study of the spread of Roman culture, carried out primarily through acculturation and cultural assimilation. Not infrequently, we find some incongruity in the interpretation of these forms of the process. In fact, acculturation occurs when distinct groups or individuals from different cultures come into contact and begin to exchange cultural elements, such as language, customs, beliefs, and habits. The effects produced by each of these modalities are normally bilateral, although it is observed that one culture always exerts a greater influence on the other, not necessarily leading to the loss of the main traits of the original culture. In turn, cultural assimilation is a deeper and tendentially irreversible process, in which a minority cultural group adopts the culture of the dominant cultural group permanently, and can occur voluntarily or forcibly, generally in contexts of domination. In extreme cases, assimilation can determine the complete replacement of one culture by another, thus being a unidirectional process.
Analyzing our cultural heritage presupposes a careful look at the feelings and thoughts resulting from that heritage, in sociological and identity terms, and not merely an analysis of the vestiges of monumentality still existing among us—a legacy that marks us and adds to our history, but which lacks a global understanding. A deeper analysis of the Roman tradition is, however, incompatible with small sketches like this one, which prima facie seeks to constitute a challenge in the form of an introduction to this vast and important theme that significantly shaped Western civilization.
Rome achieved hegemonic dominance over Lusitania, leading to strong miscegenation and shaping the region with distinctive cultural and customary traits that constitute the roots of what is today our cultural identity, as well as that of the entire Western world, where it is possible to identify enduring cultural elements, particularly with regard to language and customs that have endured, not because they were imposed by force, but because they were successful.
Romanization, enriched by the contribution of Hellenic culture, brought to us a vast palette of cultural, scientific, architectural, philosophical, and aesthetic elements that have made us what we are today. In fact, the Roman people transmitted to the subsequent world a vast and rich legacy, capable of assimilation. Roman civilization contributed significantly to the development of forms of government, language, law, art, especially architecture, literature, and religion.
A civilizational legacy
The political system, grounded in fundamental concepts such as law, citizenship, and governance, effectively constitutes one of the pillars of the Roman tradition, having exerted influence on modern democracies, based on the separation of powers and citizen participation in political action, as well as in matters of social and administrative organization. The mark of Roman law on Portuguese law is so indelible that it has been perpetuated among us for the last two millennia, whether through foundational legal principles such as Ulpian's Iuris Praecepta , or through the masterful compilation of Roman Law, called the Corpus Iuris Civilis, ordered by Justinian. Under the diverse forms and meanings of ius civile and ius gentium, the Roman legacy, at the level of law, shapes branches such as civil law, family law, and property law, thus building a magnificent culture and civilization that, even today, constitutes the basis of relations between men and between peoples.
In the religious field, given that religion played a central role in the lives of the Romans, encompassing a vast array of gods and religious practices, we witness the incorporation of elements from various cultures as they conquered new territories, building temples that allowed for an intertwining of daily life and spirituality, promoting a sense of community and belonging, in the same way that they initiated the transition from polytheism to Christianity, strongly impacting Western spirituality.
In terms of art and architecture, the Romans, true masters of engineering, created exemplary structures such as aqueducts, amphitheaters and temples, roads and bridges, revolutionizing construction with a grandeur that still impresses today. In Roman Aquae Flaviae, Trajan's Bridge continues to withstand time and the elements, as does the city of Conímbriga, and, with similar splendor, the Roman temple of Évora. Roman art, inscribed in sculptures, mosaics and paintings, likewise demonstrates the pursuit of beauty, the taste for portraiture, for concrete expression, and the representation of the human ideal.
In the field of philosophy, Seneca and Cicero, in developing thought on ethical, educational, and political issues, established the necessary harmony between reason and virtue, facts and values, broadly necessary for the construction of a full life. In literature, consider the importance of social criticism in satire, as well as the taste for epitome or moral portraiture, examples of which are Cicero's portraits of Mark Antony and Verres; Tacitus' portraits of Tiberius and Nero; and Sallust' portraits of Jugurtha and Caesar, among others.
The legacy of Roman tradition is indelibly vast and multifaceted in terms of knowledge and culture, revealing the keen sense of observation, realism, idealism, dynamism, traditionalism, and innovation of the Roman people, impacting various societal spheres and continuing to be a real force in shaping the future. Centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire, the influence of Roman tradition continues to be felt in the light of continuous and renewed revisitations and reinterpretations, based on deeply rooted inspiration and reflection, insofar as adaptation and imitation also define the ethos of our Portuguese people.
[The articles in the Portugal 900 Years series are a weekly collaboration of the Historical Society of the Independence of Portugal. The opinions of the authors represent their own positions.]
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