Short answers, pulled from the story.
Classical antiquity covers the period from the 8th century BC to the 5th century AD. Conventionally it begins with the earliest recorded epic Greek poetry of Homer and ends with the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD.
Classical antiquity encompasses ancient Greece and Rome, known together as the Greco-Roman world, along with the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Etruscans, and other cultures of the Mediterranean basin. Together they shaped the culture of Europe, North Africa, and West Asia.
According to legend, Rome was founded on the 21st of April 753 BC by Romulus and Remus, twin descendants of the Trojan prince Aeneas. Archaeological evidence supports early settlement at the Roman Forum from the mid-8th century BC.
The Roman Republic, established around 509 BC, was subverted through a series of civil wars and gradually transformed into the Principate and then the Imperial period. The early Julio-Claudian emperors maintained the fiction that the res publica still existed, even as they held extraordinary power.
Historians propose three main candidate dates: the deposition of the last Western Roman Emperor in 476 AD, the closing of the last Platonic Academy in Athens by Justinian I in 529, and the Muslim conquests of the Mediterranean region from 634 to 718, which severed the cultural and economic ties of the classical world.
The Founding Fathers of the United States modeled their government on Roman republicanism, naming it a republic from the Latin res publica and giving it a Senate and a President rather than using English terms like commonwealth or parliament. In Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, Roman martial virtues and republican ideals shaped state architecture and imagery, visible in the Panthéon and the Arc de Triomphe.