Roman Empire

Based on Wikipedia: Roman Empire

Imagine a single political entity controlling everything from rainy northern England to the sunbaked deserts of Syria. From the Rhine River cutting through Europe to the lush Nile Valley in Egypt. The Mediterranean Sea—which the Romans casually called "our sea"—was an internal lake, its entire coastline under one government's control.

This was the Roman Empire at its peak.

It lasted roughly five hundred years in the West, and an astonishing fifteen hundred years if you count the Byzantine continuation in the East. At its largest extent under the emperor Trajan around 117 A.D., it covered five million square kilometers. To put that in perspective, that's about half the size of the modern United States, but packed with an estimated fifty-five to one hundred million people—between one-sixth and one-fourth of the entire world's population at the time.

From Republic to Empire

The story begins not with emperors, but with a republic. By 100 B.C., Rome had already conquered most of the Mediterranean through military campaigns directed by elected magistrates called consuls. These consuls held imperium—a Latin word meaning "command" in the military sense. The Republic was essentially a network of self-ruled towns and provinces administered by military commanders, all theoretically answerable to the Roman Senate.

But the first century B.C. brought chaos. Civil wars erupted as ambitious generals competed for power. Julius Caesar briefly became perpetual dictator before being assassinated in 44 B.C. by senators who feared his concentration of power. His assassins were defeated at the Battle of Philippi by Mark Antony and Caesar's adopted son, Octavian.

Then Antony and Octavian split the Roman world between them. It didn't last.

In 31 B.C., Octavian's forces crushed Mark Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium. Four years later, in 27 B.C., the Senate granted Octavian the title Augustus—meaning "the venerated one"—and gave him overarching imperium. The Republic officially still existed. In reality, Augustus held all meaningful authority.

This marked the beginning of the Principate. The word comes from princeps, meaning "foremost." Augustus was careful with language. He wasn't calling himself king or dictator—those were dirty words in Rome. But make no mistake: a new constitutional order had emerged. When Augustus died after forty years of rule, his stepson Tiberius succeeded him. The age of emperors had begun.

The Pax Romana

The two centuries following Augustus's rise are known as the Pax Romana—Roman Peace. This wasn't peace in the sense of no wars happening. Roman legions constantly fought on the frontiers. But within the empire's vast territories, there was unprecedented stability and prosperity.

Think about what this meant. A merchant in Alexandria could ship goods to Antioch, then overland to Rome, all within a single legal and economic system. Roads built for military logistics doubled as commercial arteries. Uprisings in the provinces were rare and brutally suppressed when they occurred.

After Augustus came the Julio-Claudian dynasty: Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero. Then the messy Year of the Four Emperors in 69 A.D., from which Vespasian emerged victorious. His brief Flavian dynasty gave way to the Nerva-Antonine dynasty, which produced what historians call the "Five Good Emperors"—Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius.

Trajan expanded the empire to its greatest extent, pushing into Dacia (modern Romania) and briefly into Mesopotamia. But his successor Hadrian took a different approach: consolidation instead of expansion.

Hadrian's Wall and Hadrian's Jerusalem

Hadrian is particularly famous for two things that reveal the empire's approach to managing its vast territories.

First, Hadrian's Wall. This massive fortification stretched across northern England, separating Roman Britain from what Romans viewed as barbarian lands to the north. It wasn't just a military barrier—it was a statement. The empire had limits. Those limits would be clearly marked and heavily defended.

Second, his rebuilding of Jerusalem. The city had been destroyed during the First Jewish-Roman War decades earlier. When Hadrian visited the region around 129 to 130 A.D., he refounded Jerusalem as a Roman colony called Aelia Capitolina—named after his family name, Aelius, and the Capitoline Triad of Roman gods.

The Romans overlaid the destroyed Jewish city with a new Roman urban plan. They built a Temple to Jupiter on the site of the former Jewish Temple. Archaeological evidence suggests they also built a Temple of Venus near what would later be venerated as the site of the Holy Sepulchre.

These provocations, combined with restrictions on Jewish religious practices, sparked the Bar Kokhba Revolt from 132 to 135 A.D. After crushing the uprising, Roman forces expelled most Jews from Jerusalem, barring their entry except on certain days. The city became a statement of imperial power—a visible demonstration of what happened when a province rebelled.

The Beginning of Decline

The Greek historian Cassius Dio, writing during this period, marked the accession of Commodus in 180 A.D. as a turning point—a descent "from a kingdom of gold to one of rust and iron." Edward Gibbon, the famous eighteenth-century historian, would later take Commodus's reign as the beginning of the empire's decline.

Whether or not you accept that specific date, the third century brought undeniable crisis. Emperors were routinely murdered or executed. In 212, Caracalla granted Roman citizenship to all freeborn inhabitants of the empire—a move that sounds progressive but was probably motivated by the need to expand the tax base.

Then came the Crisis of the Third Century, a forty-nine-year period of invasions, civil wars, economic disorder, and plague that nearly destroyed the empire. Parts of the empire—the Gallic Empire in the west and the Palmyrene Empire in the east—broke away entirely. A parade of short-lived emperors tried and failed to restore order.

Aurelian managed to stabilize things militarily from 270 to 275, but the real reorganization came under Diocletian, who ruled from 284 to 305. Diocletian divided the empire into four regions, each ruled by a separate tetrarch—a system called the Tetrarchy. He also launched the empire's most systematic persecution of Christians, later called the "Great Persecution."

The Tetrarchy collapsed shortly after Diocletian's abdication. Order was eventually restored by Constantine the Great, who did two momentous things. First, he became the first emperor to convert to Christianity. Second, in 330, he moved the imperial seat from Rome to the city of Byzantium, which he renamed Constantinople—"Constantine's city."

The Split

Over the fourth century, the empire increasingly operated as two separate entities: the Greek-speaking East centered on Constantinople, and the Latin-speaking West centered on Rome. Dual power centers emerged. Julian briefly attempted to restore classical Roman and Greek polytheistic religion in the 360s, but the succession of Christian emperors continued after his death.

In 395, Theodosius the First died. He was the last emperor to rule over both East and West. He had made Christianity the state religion. After his death, the empire would never again be unified under a single ruler.

The Fall of the West

The Western Roman Empire disintegrated through the fifth century. The Romans fought off major invasions—most famously turning back Attila the Hun—but the empire had absorbed so many Germanic peoples of questionable loyalty that it began to tear itself apart from within.

In 476, a Germanic warlord named Odoacer forced the last Western emperor, Romulus Augustulus, to abdicate. Odoacer declared Zeno, the Eastern emperor in Constantinople, as sole emperor and positioned himself as Zeno's nominal subordinate. In reality, Italy was now ruled by Odoacer alone.

This is the date most chronologies use for the end of the Western Roman Empire. But here's what's interesting: the Eastern Roman Empire—what later historians would call the Byzantine Empire—continued for another thousand years. Constantinople remained the capital of a state that considered itself the continuation of Rome. The last Byzantine emperor, Constantine the Eleventh Palaiologos, died fighting during the Ottoman siege of Constantinople in 1453.

When Mehmed the Second conquered the city, he adopted the title of caesar, claiming a connection to the Roman legacy. The Patriarchate of Constantinople recognized his claim. European monarchs did not.

The Geography of Domination

At its height, the Roman Empire was one of the largest contiguous empires in history. The Latin phrase imperium sine fine—"empire without end"—captured the ideology. In Virgil's Aeneid, Jupiter grants the Romans limitless empire, bounded by neither time nor space. When the empire became Christian in the fourth century, this claim of universal dominion was renewed in Christian theological terms.

The Romans didn't just conquer territory—they altered geography itself. They cut down entire forests. They built roads that are still visible today. Under Augustus, a "global map of the known world" was displayed publicly in Rome for the first time, coinciding with the creation of Strabo's Geography, the most comprehensive political geography that survives from antiquity.

The empire's three largest cities—Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch—were each almost twice the size of any European city at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Think about that for a moment. Roman urbanism wouldn't be matched in Europe again until the early modern period.

Language and Administration

The empire was deliberately multilingual. Latin and Greek were the main languages, but as the scholar Andrew Wallace-Hadrill put it, "The main desire of the Roman government was to make itself understood." Knowledge of Greek marked you as educated nobility. Knowledge of Latin was essential for a career in the military, government, or law.

Bilingual inscriptions from the period show how the two languages interpenetrated daily life. Latin words flowed into Greek, especially for military, administrative, and commercial terms. Meanwhile, Greek grammar, literature, poetry, and philosophy profoundly shaped Latin language and culture.

There was never a legal requirement to use Latin in the empire, but it represented status. High standards of Latin—what Romans called Latinitas—emerged with Latin literature and were defended against the stronger cultural influence of Greek. Over time, using Latin became a way to project power and social class. Most emperors were bilingual but preferred Latin in the public sphere for political reasons, a practice that started during the Punic Wars centuries earlier.

The Long Shadow

Why does any of this matter fifteen centuries after Constantinople fell?

Because the Roman Empire's institutions and culture profoundly shaped everything that came after. Latin evolved into the Romance languages—Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian. Medieval Greek became the language of the Byzantine East. The empire's adoption of Christianity created medieval Christendom, which in turn shaped the entire structure of European civilization.

Roman and Greek art formed the foundation for the Italian Renaissance. Roman architectural principles—the arch, the dome, the vault—became the basis for Romanesque, Renaissance, and Neoclassical architecture, and even influenced Islamic architecture. When medieval Europe rediscovered classical science and technology, it sparked the Scientific Renaissance and Scientific Revolution.

Modern legal systems, including the Napoleonic Code, descend directly from Roman law. The republican institutions of Rome influenced the Italian city-state republics of the medieval period, the founding of the United States, and modern democratic republics around the world.

The phrase "all roads lead to Rome" is more than a cliché. In a very real sense, we're still traveling on those roads.