Ancient Rome

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Ancient Rome began as a cluster of graves and a timber wall. The first burials in the necropolis on the Esquiline Hill appear around 800 BC. A clay and timber wall on the lower Palatine Hill dates to the middle of the 8th century BC. From this small Italic settlement beside the River Tiber grew a power that would one day cover around five million square kilometres. At its height in AD 117, it held an estimated 50 to 90 million people, roughly 20 percent of the world's population. How does a riverside village become the master of the Mediterranean? Who were the men who marched their own armies into their own capital? And why, after 1200 years of independence, did the rule of Rome in the West finally end? The answers run through wolves and false scales, through poison and proscription, through a black stone worshipped as a sun god.

• 2. Wolves And Trojans

  ›

  Romulus and Remus were the offspring of Mars and a princess of the mythical city of Alba Longa. Sentenced to death, the twins were rescued by a wolf, then returned to restore the Alban king and found a city. After a dispute, Romulus killed Remus and became the city's sole founder. His first settlement on the Palatine Hill was later called Roma quadrata, meaning Square Rome. This founding story dates at least to the 3rd century BC. The antiquarian Marcus Terentius Varro placed the city's foundation at 753 BC. A rival legend, recorded by the Greek historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus, sent Prince Aeneas across the sea after the Trojan War to found a new Troy. His Trojans landed on the banks of the Tiber. A woman travelling with them, named Roma, burned their ships so they could not leave again, and the settlement took her name. The poet Virgil retold this voyage in his epic the Aeneid. Beneath the myth, archaeology tells a steadier story. Settlement evidence around Rome emerges around 1000 BC, and large-scale organisation only around 800 BC. From around 650 BC the Romans drained the valley between the Capitoline and Palatine Hills, where the Roman Forum would later sit, a marshy clearing that would one day hold the heart of an empire.

• 3. Kings And The Republic

  ›

  Fragmentary 6th-century BC texts attest that Rome once had kings. The Romans believed their monarchy was elective, with seven legendary kings largely unrelated by blood. Long after the monarchy was abolished, a vestigial office called the rex sacrorum survived to carry out the king's former priestly duties. By the end of the 6th century BC, Rome controlled roughly 780 square kilometres, with a population perhaps as high as 35,000. The palace called the Regia was built around 625 BC. According to tradition and later writers such as Livy, the Republic was established around 509 BC, when the last king, Tarquin the Proud, was deposed. In his place came annually elected magistrates and representative assemblies, with a constitution of checks and balances and a separation of powers. The two consuls held executive authority, including imperium, or military command. Below and around them stood tribunes, quaestors, aediles, praetors, and censors. These magistracies were at first restricted to patricians, then opened to the common people, the plebeians. Voting happened in assemblies. The comitia centuriata decided war and peace and filled the highest offices, while the comitia tributa chose the lesser ones. This was the machinery that would carry Rome into its long collision with Carthage.

• 4. Iron Not Gold

  ›

  On the 16th of July 390 BC, a Gallic army under the chieftain Brennus crushed the Romans at the Battle of the Allia. The Gauls looted and burned Rome, then besieged the Capitoline Hill for seven months. They agreed to leave for 1000 pounds of gold. According to later legend, the Roman supervising the weighing noticed the Gauls were using false scales. The Romans took up arms again, and their general Camillus declared, "With iron, not with gold, Rome buys her freedom." The Romans then ground down their neighbours across the Italian peninsula, including the Etruscans. The last challenge to their dominance in Italy came in 281 BC, when the Greek colony of Tarentum called in Pyrrhus of Epirus, an effort that also failed. To hold their gains, the Romans planted colonies in strategic places. Carthage was next, the other great power of the Western Mediterranean. The First Punic War began in 264 BC, sparked when the city of Messana first sought Carthage's help against Hiero II of Syracuse, then asked Rome to expel the Carthaginians. Carthage was a naval power, and Rome had neither ships nor experience, so victory came slowly. After more than 20 years a peace treaty was signed. The Second Punic War opened with Hannibal's audacious march through Hispania and over the Italian Alps. His invasion ravaged Italy for over 16 years, yet Carthage was beaten at the Battle of Zama in October 202 BC. The Third Punic War began in 149 BC, when Scipio Aemilianus destroyed Carthage entirely, enslaved its citizens, and turned the region into the province of Africa. Out of these wars came Rome's first overseas conquests, Sicily, Hispania, and Africa, and a new appetite that would soon turn inward.

• 5. Generals Against The Republic

  ›

  Gaius Marius held the first of his seven consulships in 107 BC, an unprecedented number. He had argued that his former patron, Quintus Caecilius Metellus Numidicus, could not capture the Numidian king Jugurtha. To fill the ranks against Jugurtha, Marius levied the very poor, an innovation that drew landless men into the army. He won five consecutive consulships from 104 to 100 BC to fight off the Cimbri and the Teutones. The wars that followed turned Rome's armies against Rome itself. The Italian allies, the socii, revolted in the Social War when their demand for citizenship was met with the assassination of their champion, Marcus Livius Drusus. In 88 BC the consul Sulla did something startling and illegal. He marched his legions into Rome to crush the supporters of Marius. The next year Marius returned while Sulla campaigned in Greece, seized power with the consul Lucius Cornelius Cinna, and won a seventh consulship through massacre. Marius died in 86 BC of age and poor health, only months after taking power. Cinna ruled absolutely until his death in 84 BC. Sulla then made a second march on Rome in 83 BC and unleashed a time of terror, executing thousands of nobles, knights, and senators. He held two dictatorships and one further consulship. The Republic was now cracking, and a younger man was watching how power could be taken.

• 6. Caesar To Augustus

  ›

  Julius Caesar brought together Rome's two most powerful men, Marcus Licinius Crassus, who had financed his career, and Crassus's rival Pompey, to whom Caesar married his daughter. This informal alliance was the First Triumvirate. It came apart fast. Caesar's daughter died in childbirth in 54 BC, and Crassus died in 53 BC at the Battle of Carrhae in Parthia. Caesar conquered Gaul, gathered immense wealth, and won the loyalty of hardened legions. When Pompey's party moved to strip him of those legions, Caesar crossed the Rubicon River and invaded Rome in 49 BC. He won the Battle of Pharsalus and destroyed the leaders of the optimates. Pompey was murdered in Egypt in 48 BC. In five years Caesar held four consulships and four dictatorships, one for perpetuity, until the Liberatores killed him on the Ides of March in 44 BC. His friend Mark Antony ruled until the arrival of Octavian, whom Caesar had adopted in his will. In 43 BC, Octavian, Antony, and Lepidus formed the Second Triumvirate. Its proscriptions executed senators by the hundreds, and the Senate deified Caesar as Divus Iulius, making Octavian the son of a god. At Philippi in 42 BC the triumvirs beat Caesar's assassins, Brutus and Cassius. The alliance then frayed. Lepidus was forced out in 36 BC, and Antony took up with Cleopatra VII in Ptolemaic Egypt. His Donations of Alexandria gave her the title Queen of Kings and handed Eastern territories to their children. War followed, and Octavian destroyed the Egyptian fleet at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC. Antony and Cleopatra killed themselves. In 27 BC, at the age of 36, Octavian took the name Augustus. Historians mark that as the beginning of the Roman Empire, and the start of the two centuries Romans called the Pax Romana.

• 7. The Emperors

  ›

  Augustus kept a standing army of 28 legions and created the Praetorian Guard, securing total control. He gathered the republican powers under the title princeps, first citizen, while the government officially remained a republic. Under him Latin literature flourished in its Golden Age, with Virgil, Horace, and Ovid as close friends, and the month of August took his name. The Julio-Claudian dynasty he founded ran through Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero. Tiberius retired to Capri in 26 AD, leaving Rome to the praetorian prefect Sejanus. The Praetorian Guard murdered Caligula four years after Tiberius died, then proclaimed Claudius, who began the conquest of Britannia. Nero's general Suetonius Paulinus crossed the Menai Strait to the island of Mona in 60 AD and massacred the druids. While he did so, Queen Boadicea of the Iceni led a revolt that burned Camulodunum, Londinium, and Verulamium before Paulinus crushed it. Nero, the first persecutor of Christians, killed himself in 68 AD. After the chaos of the Year of the Four Emperors, Vespasian founded the Flavian dynasty and began building the Colosseum. His son Titus destroyed Jerusalem and its Second Temple in 70 AD; Josephus claims 1,100,000 people died in the siege. The Nerva-Antonine dynasty brought the five good emperors, Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius. Under Trajan the Empire reached its greatest extent, spanning five million square kilometres. Hadrian abandoned Trajan's eastern conquests and built the wall separating Roman Britannia from the tribes of modern Scotland. Marcus Aurelius, the Philosopher, wrote the Meditations and fought the Marcomannic Wars while the Antonine Plague killed nearly five million people across the Empire between 165 and 180 AD. His son Commodus broke the run of good emperors. Cassius Dio said Rome had turned "from a kingdom of gold to one of iron and rust."

• 8. Crisis And Christianity

  ›

  After Commodus was killed in late 192 AD, the Praetorian Guard auctioned the empire to the highest bidder, Didius Julianus, for 25,000 sesterces per man. Septimius Severus, the Pannonian commander, then invaded Rome, had Julianus killed, and founded a dynasty that ruled through the legions. His son Caracalla murdered his brother Geta and may have killed 20,000 of his followers. In 212, Caracalla issued his edict granting Roman citizenship to nearly all free men in the Empire. The historian Mary Beard calls it a turning point, after which Rome was "effectively a new state masquerading under an old name." The years that followed nearly broke the state. Twenty-six emperors ruled across a 49-year span. The Plague of Cyprian broke out in 250 and killed a vast portion of the population. In 260 AD the Palmyrene Empire under Queen Zenobia split away, the Gallic Empire formed under Postumus, and the emperor Valerian was captured by the Sassanids of Persia, the first Roman ruler taken by his enemies. Aurelian reconquered both breakaway empires between 271 and 275. The crisis was overcome under Diocletian, hailed as Imperator in 284 AD, who divided rule among four emperors in the Tetrarchy and launched a major persecution of Christians in 303. He abdicated in 305, the first Roman emperor to resign. Constantine then rose, defeated Maxentius in 312, and issued the Edict of Milan in 313, granting Christians liberty to worship. Converting to Christianity, he rebuilt Byzantium as Nova Roma, soon known as Constantinople. That new capital would outlast the old by a thousand years.

  In 363, the emperor Julian the Apostate, who had tried to restore the old Roman and Hellenistic religion, was killed at the Battle of Samarra against the Persians. The Battle of Adrianople then took the life of the emperor Valens, and the victorious Goths were never expelled nor assimilated. Theodosius I strengthened the Christian faith, and after his death the Empire split between his sons, Arcadius in the East and Honorius in the West. The collapse accelerated after the general Stilicho died in 408 and the professional field army fell apart. In 410 the Visigoths sacked Rome. Across the 5th century the Vandals took North Africa, the Visigoths took southern Gaul, the Suebi took Gallaecia, Britannia was abandoned, and Attila's Huns invaded. When the general Orestes refused the demands of the barbarian troops who now formed the army, their chieftain Odoacer killed him, took Ravenna, and deposed Romulus Augustus. That event of 476 usually marks the end of Classical antiquity and the beginning of the Middle Ages. Julius Nepos ruled on as emperor from Dalmatia until his death in 480, and some historians count him as the last Western emperor instead. Many reasons have been offered for the fall, from moral decay and military tyranny to disease and economic stagnation. The Eastern Empire survived almost 1000 years more. Under Justinian it reconquered Italy, North Africa, and southern Hispania, and preserved Roman law in his codes. It finally ended when Mehmed the Conqueror took Constantinople on the 29th of May 1453, the last living thread of a state begun by a wall of clay and timber on the Palatine Hill.