Overview
The ancient Romans are today most often associated with their vast empire, which at its height stretched from Spain in the west to Iraq in the east, from Britain in the north to North Africa in the south, and supported a population of diverse peoples 100 million strong. Though that realm was impressive in its day, much more important and influential have been the numerous cultural legacies that Rome passed on to later ages and that continue to shape the modern Western world. Roman government, for instance, lives on to some degree in institutions borrowed from it by later nations. The U.S. Senate, inspired in large degree by the Roman version, is the most familiar example, Even more significant has been the extent to which Roman law has helped to shape the legal and justice systems of European and other Western societies. The Romans also created the models for the urban life and vast road systems taken for granted in the modern West. No less profound has been the survival of the Romans' language, Latin, elements of which are still used in scientific classification and Christian churches. Moreover, those churches exist because the Roman's greatest cultural legacy, their chief religion-Christianity-, went on to become the world's largest faith.