Legacy of the Roman Empire

The legacy of the Roman Empire includes the set of cultural values, religious beliefs, and the technological and other achievements of Ancient Rome that were passed on after the demise of the empire itself and continued to shape other civilizations, a process which continues to this day. The city of Rome was the civitas (reflected in the etymology of the word "civilization") and consequently the actual western civilization on which subsequent cultures built.

Latin was the lingua franca of the early Roman Empire and later the Western Roman Empire, while particularly in the East indigenous languages such as Greek and to lesser degree Egyptian and Aramaic language continued to be in use. Despite the decline of the Western Roman Empire, the Latin language continued to flourish in the very different social and economic environment of the Middle Ages, not in the least because it became the official language of the Roman Catholic Church. Koine Greek, which served as a lingua franca in the Eastern Empire, is still used today as a sacred language in some Eastern Orthodox churches.

In Western and Central Europe and parts of Africa, Latin retained its elevated status as the main vehicle of communication for the learned classes throughout the medieval period well into the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Works which made a revolutionary impact on science, such as Nicolaus Copernicus' De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543) were composed in Latin, which was not supplanted for scientific purposes by modern languages until the 18th century, and for formal descriptions in zoology and botany survived to the later 20th century: the modern international Binomial nomenclature holds to this day that the scientific name of each species is classified by a Latin or Latinized name.

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