Roman Italy

• 1. Introduction

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  Roman Italy begins with a myth and ends with a deposition. In 476 AD, a young emperor named Romulus Augustulus was removed from power by a Germanic chieftain named Odoacer, closing more than a thousand years of Roman rule over the Italian peninsula. The name of that last emperor was almost a taunt: Romulus, the name of Rome's legendary founder; Augustulus, a diminutive of Augustus, the first emperor who had organized Italy into a unified whole. Between that founding and that fall lies one of the longest unbroken political stories in the ancient world.

  Italy in the Roman period was never simply the backdrop for Roman power. It was the source of it. The peninsula gave Rome its soldiers, its food, its sense of destiny. For centuries, Italy held a legal status that no other territory in the empire could claim. And when that status finally eroded, it tracked something deeper: the slow migration of the empire's center of gravity away from the Latin west and toward the Greek east.

  What made Italy so central for so long? How did a collection of rival tribes, city-states, and Greek colonies become the heartland of the ancient world's largest empire? And why, even after Rome's political grip loosened, did the peninsula retain an almost mythic importance that outlasted the empire itself? Those are the questions this documentary will follow.

• 2. A Peninsula Divided

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  Before Rome dominated Italy, the peninsula was a patchwork of peoples with little in common beyond geography. In the north, the Gauls, Ligures, Veneti, Camunni, and Histri held the land below the Alps. The center was home to the Etruscans, Latins, Falisci, Picentes, Umbri, and Sabines. In the south, Iapygian tribes like the Messapians, Oscan-speaking peoples like the Samnites, and Greek colonies such as Sybaris each maintained their own cultures and ambitions.

  Rome itself began as an Italic city-state, governed first as a kingdom. Between 753 BC and 509 BC, seven kings ruled in succession before the Romans abolished the monarchy and established a Republic. That shift set Rome on a different course from its neighbors: a government that, at least in principle, distributed power among citizens rather than concentrating it in a single ruler.

  The borders of what Romans called Italia were themselves a moving boundary. According to Strabo's Geographica, Greek speakers originally used the name only for the land between the strait of Messina and the line connecting the gulf of Salerno and the gulf of Taranto, roughly what is now Calabria. Romans later stretched the name northward to the Rubicon, the river dividing northern and central Italy. Julius Caesar's Lex Roscia in 49 BC extended Roman citizenship to the people of Cisalpine Gaul, and in 42 BC that northern province was formally dissolved, pushing Italy's boundary to the southern foot of the Alps. Augustus then subjugated the peoples of the Aosta Valley and the western Alps, moving the western border to the Varus river and the eastern border to the Arsia in Istria. The city of Emona, modern Ljubljana in Slovenia, stood as the easternmost town within Italy's limits.

• 3. The Italian Confederacy

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  Rome did not simply conquer its Italian neighbors. It bound them to itself through a system of formal associations, creating what historians call the Italian confederacy. Most local tribes and cities entered permanent alliance with Rome; their inhabitants fell into distinct legal categories. Some were Roman citizens outright. Others held Latin Rights, a middle status with fewer privileges. Still others were socii, allies bound by treaty obligations, particularly in military service.

  This arrangement proved decisive when Rome began looking beyond Italy. The strength of that confederacy was a key factor in the Punic and Macedonian wars fought between the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC. Roman armies fighting in Spain, Africa, and Greece drew heavily on Italian manpower. In exchange, Italy held a special status as Roman provinces spread across the Mediterranean: political, religious, and financial privileges that no provincial territory enjoyed. Roman magistrates exercised what was called the imperium domi, a form of police authority, inside Italy. In the provinces, they exercised the imperium militiae, military power. The legal distinction kept Italy at a different altitude from everywhere else Rome controlled.

  That arrangement came under strain in the period between the late 2nd century BC and the early 1st century BC. The Servile Wars destabilized the south. Populist reformers clashed with the aristocratic elite. Then came the Social War, a direct military conflict between Rome and its Italian allies who demanded the full citizenship they had long been denied. Rome prevailed militarily, but the political outcome conceded the point: Roman citizenship was extended to the rest of the Italians by the conflict's end.

• 4. The Augustan Settlement

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  Around 7 BC, Augustus imposed a new administrative order on Italy, dividing the peninsula into eleven numbered regions as recorded by Pliny the Elder in his Naturalis Historia. From Regio I, covering Latium and Campania in the south, to Regio XI, Transpadana in the far north, each region carried a distinct name tied to its geography and peoples. The arrangement replaced centuries of ad-hoc governance with a systematic map.

  Augustus also invested in Italy's physical infrastructure, overseeing the construction of a dense network of Roman roads across the peninsula. The economic effects were substantial: agriculture, handicraft, and industry all grew, enabling the export of goods to the provinces. The population appears to have grown as well, though the precise numbers remain debated. Augustus ordered three censuses in his role as Roman censor; the surviving totals were 4,063,000 in 28 BC, 4,233,000 in 8 BC, and 4,937,000 in AD 14. Scholars still argue over whether those figures counted all citizens, adult male citizens only, or citizens in a specific legal category called sui iuris. Estimates for the total population of mainland Italy, including Cisalpine Gaul, at the start of the 1st century range from 6,000,000 in Karl Julius Beloch's 1886 calculation to 14,000,000 in Elio Lo Cascio's 2009 study.

  Italy under Augustus and his heirs was not simply a province among provinces. It was the empire's homeland, and it carried that designation in law, in custom, and in the allocation of resources. The reign produced several emperors whose accomplishments became touchstones of Roman achievement: Claudius incorporated Britain into the empire; Vespasian ended the Great Revolt of Judea and reformed Rome's finances; Trajan conquered Dacia and defeated Parthia; Marcus Aurelius came to embody what later generations called the ideal of the philosopher king.

• 5. Erosion of Privilege

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  The Edict of Caracalla in 212 AD extended Roman citizenship to all free men within the empire's boundaries. That single decision dissolved the legal distinction that had set Italy apart for generations. If everyone was a Roman citizen, then Italy's claim to special treatment rested on sentiment and tradition, not statute.

  The Crisis of the Third Century then hit Italy with particular force. Invasions, military coups, civil wars, and hyperinflation combined to push the empire toward collapse. The city of Rome was increasingly far from the frontiers where the real military pressure fell. In 286 AD, Emperor Diocletian moved the imperial residence associated with the western territories from Rome to Mediolanum, the city now called Milan, which sat closer to the European frontiers. In 293 AD, Diocletian created the Tetrarchy, dividing imperial authority between two senior emperors called Augusti and two junior vice-emperors called Caesars. His colleague Maximian resided at Mediolanum; the Caesar Constantius Chlorus operated from Augusta Treverorum on the Rhine frontier; and the Caesar Galerius held Sirmium on the Danube.

  Diocletian also restructured Italy internally. He dissolved its special juridical privileges in 293 AD and reorganized it into a diocese called the Dioecesis Italiciana, subdivided into named provinces. Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily, and Malta were added to Italy under his reorganization. When Constantine later subdivided the empire into four praetorian prefectures, the Italian diocese became the Praetorian Prefecture of Italy, further split into two dioceses: Italia annonaria in the north, whose inhabitants were required to supply the court, administration, and troops with provisions, wine, and timber; and Italia suburbicaria in the south, meaning Italy under the governance of Rome itself.

• 6. The Long Decline

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  Constantinople was rebuilt by Constantine and formally inaugurated in 330 AD, though it did not receive an urban prefect, the administrative rank that confirmed its status as eastern capital, until 359 AD. After Theodosius I died in 395 AD and the empire split administratively, Italy became the base of the Western Roman Empire, with its capital at Mediolanum.

  Alaric, king of the Visigoths, invaded Italy in 402 AD and forced the western court to relocate again, this time from Mediolanum to Ravenna. Eight years later, in 410, Alaric sacked Rome itself, an event that had no precedent in nearly eight centuries. Attila's Huns struck northern Italy in 452 AD. Rome was sacked again in 455 AD by the Vandals under their king Genseric. A document called the Notitia Dignitatum, updated to the 420s, describes the administrative structure that still technically functioned: a praetorian prefect governing Italy along with the Diocese of Africa and the Diocese of Pannonia, assisted by regional officials called consulares, correctores, and praesides spread across the Italian provinces.

  By the late 5th century, the western emperors were effectively controlled by their barbarian generals. The coastlines of Italy suffered periodic raids. In 476 AD, Romulus Augustulus was deposed, and Odoacer took control. Julius Nepos, recognized by Constantinople as the legitimate western emperor, survived until his assassination in 480 AD and may also have been recognized by Odoacer. Italy then passed to Odoacer's Kingdom of Italy and subsequently to the Ostrogothic Kingdom under Theodoric the Great, both of which continued using the Roman administrative apparatus while acknowledging nominal allegiance to Constantinople.

  In 535 AD, the Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian launched an invasion to reclaim Italy. The resulting Gothic War lasted twenty years and left the peninsula devastated. In August 554, Justinian issued a Pragmatic Sanction that preserved most of Diocletian's administrative organization. The so-called Prefecture of Italy survived under Byzantine control, a ghost of the structure Diocletian had built nearly three centuries earlier. Then in 568 AD, the Lombards invaded from the north, and the Byzantines lost most of the peninsula. They held on to the Exarchate of Ravenna, a corridor stretching from Venice to Lazio through Perugia, along with footholds at Naples and the toe and heel of the peninsula. The fragmentation that followed the Lombard invasion would not end until 1861.