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Name _______________________________________ Date _________________ Period _________
Rome: Engineering an Empire Video Questions
Use the word bank to complete the questions as you watch the video.
Word Bank
Bridge
Hadrian
Christians
Colosseum
Rotunda
Pantheon
Germanic Tribes
Golden Palace
Water
Northern England
Julius Caesar
Fire
Trajan
Wall
Vespasian
Claudius
Nero
Agrippina
Caracalla
Gladiators
Appian Way
1. The death of _____________________________, who founded himself on the receiving end of
twenty-three stab wounds on the floor of the Roman Senate in 44 B.C., touched off a 600-year
succession of Roman dictators that was a historical rollercoaster ride of extraordinary
proportions.
2. For centuries, the Rhine River was a buffer protecting ____________________ from Roman
expansion. No previous army could cross it with the might that was needed for conquest, but
Julius Caesar was unlike any previous warrior. Before Caesar's soldiers could conquer Germania,
his engineers first had to conquer the Rhine. So his legions set out to build the first Roman
military ____________________ across the river, and force Mother Nature to bend to Caesar's
will.
3. No single emperor can claim credit for the success of the aqueducts – they were built over the
course of several centuries. However, it was the disfigured, stuttering Emperor
_______________________ who arguably had the greatest impact on Rome’s ______________
supply. During his reign, he built two major aqueducts – the Aqua Claudia and the Anio Novus
– which dramatically increased the amount of water flowing into Rome.
4. ____________________, the mother of Emperor Nero and wife of Emperor Claudius, came
from a line of ambitious women. She was able to convince Claudius to adopt Nero and make
him Emperor over his natural son. Ultimately, she was murdered on the orders of her son Nero,
whose belief of her haunting drove Nero further into insanity.
5. Emperor ____________________ blamed the ____________________ on a new religious cult
called the ____________________, and had hundreds of them strung up and burned to death in
the streets of Rome. He then confiscated a third of the charred city as his own personal property.
He used slave labor and public money to build the empire’s most extravagant monument to selfindulgence – a pleasure palace covering some 200 acres of downtown Rome. This pleasure
palace became known as the ____________________.
6. Emperor ____________________ put Rome’s greatest architectural minds to work for the
people. He started to build Rome’s most famous engineering marvel by draining the massive
lake that the previous emperor had built on his palace grounds. It was called the Flavian
Amphitheater – though we know it today as the ____________________.
7. The Colosseum gave ____________________ a permanent, state-of-the-art playing field for the
games to take on a level of carnage never before seen in the empire’s history. This was a huge
venue and the entertainment came to the people. Animals from the farthest corners of the known
world and captives from faraway lands were brought to the arena.
8. Emperor ____________________ secured his architectural legacy by commissioning the most
massive Roman forum ever built. The emperor employed the skills of a Greek architect named
Apollodorus to accomplish this monumental task. The architect had previously designed
military bridges for this emperor during the battle with Dacia. During that war, Apollodorus had
proven to be an architectural mastermind.
9. Emperor ____________________, like his predecessor, was a military man and an accomplished
one. He saw that the empire would be unable to maintain its expanded borders. The longer the
borders were extended, the more money it took to defend; consequently, the new emperor was
not looking for more lands to conquer but to hold onto what was already won. Concrete
evidence of his defensive policy shift can be found today in a remote section of
____________________, 1,500 miles from Rome. There, the emperor commissioned a massive
barrier, a ____________________, to keep Roman citizens in and everyone else out.
10. The _______________________ was the most amazing structure ever built by the Romans
because of the ____________________ – a huge interior space capped by a magnificent dome
ceiling – the heart of its design. At its center, the concrete dome rises nearly 150 feet and spans
exactly the same length across without any support from columns or buttresses. The dome of
this engineering and architectural feat remained the largest unsupported concrete span in the
world for eighteen centuries.
11. Roman architects’ crowning achievement was a complex of Roman baths commissioned in A.D.
212 by a corrupt power monger named ____________________. He became emperor after
killing his brother, Geta, in front of their mother. Blood once again flowed through the imperial
chambers and the empire was back in the hands of a tyrant who ruled by fear, taking on a godlike persona. The new emperor attempted to cleanse his past sins by building a bath complex. In
a bath complex like Caracalla's, many great achievements of Roman engineering come together
using bricks, masonry concrete and marble. Water systems, aqueducts, drainage and sewer
systems formed part of the foundation for vast spanning domes and vaults.
Bonus: (5 points)
The ____________________, one of the world’s first highways, was an engineering marvel due to its
solid construction, drainage systems, and distance markers along its length.