Ben Hur

This morning, western civilization started off with Mr. Schick asking about our Rome Song video. A couple people should their videos and the class picked out a grade that their video worth out of 10. Some of them were in the 7 to 9 range while others were worth a 5 or less. Mr. Schick thought we were cold humans beings. After finishing up with the videos, we continued with learning about the lyrics of the Rome song. What we learned today was :

• Punic Wars
• 3 Punic Wars
• Sicily - Rome wanted to own Sicily and take it away from Carthage [Rome:1 - Carthage:0]
• *Hannibal* - general from Carthage
• he attacked from the North going through the Alps
• but they lost a lot of people and elephants [Rome:2 - Carthage:0]
• Rome and Carthage - Rome went on the attack and took control of Carthage [Rome: 3 - Carthage:0]
• Life in Roman Empire 
• The rich are getting richer
• 1/3 of the population are slaves
• while man were fighting, women ran things but the had trouble, and so the rich people buy their land -- latifundia
• Latifundia - a massive estate farm
• Opportunities were in Rome
• But millions of people moved to Rome as well
• Rome started "welfare" so the people wouldn't revolt
• + they entertained them : gladiators, chariot races, fight to the death
• people put in there :
• Christians
• Criminals
• Animals
• Brothers Gracchus
• they tried to reform the government
• they asked the aristocrats to give some land away to the poor but the aristocrats just laughed  and were furious at the fact they wanted the rich to the give away all the stuff they bought
• the rich people killed one of the brothers to show the other one not to mess with them
• with that, the people noticed and were oturaged

After were worked on this, Mr. Schick showed use a chariot race clip from the movie Ben Hur. It was great except we didn't get to get very far, so tomorrow we are going to art off our day watching this clip.