Ancient Rome was perhaps the most significant ancient civilization to have existed throughout history, the empire lived for over 1000 years and in that time, it gave us the foundations for our modern society. Democracy, a court-based legal system, Latin languages and alphabet, three-course meals, and perhaps it was one of the first modern economies to move beyond a simple agrarian empire and develop things like modern banking, lending, taxation and yes even financial crisis as we know them today. In the same way that scholars study a dead language like Latin to discerned the foundation of meaning in our modern dialects economists can study the histories of ancient civilizations like Rome to determine basic economic functions in a time before modern financial systems could skew results and Rome was perhaps the most developed case study we could look at.
