Reply #8: No, you're not off-base - and frankly this seems like

[enlightenment]

a pretty infantile assignment for a 9th grade social studies/history class.

Perhaps you should give the teacher a call and determine their motivation for choosing it. If the unit is Roman history, it seems like it would make more sense to examine the Roman response to the Jewish uprisings rather than a non-critical (and not historically accurate unless you take the Bible as an objective source document) exercise that offers nothing toward understanding Roman history.