Rome

Roman legend says the city was founded in 753 BC by Romulus, raised by a she-wolf. Archaeology shows villages of huts on the Palatine hill around that time.

Rome sat at a river crossing in central Italy, between Etruscan cities to the north and Greek colonies to the south. For centuries it was just one small power among many.

According to tradition, in 509 BC the Romans expelled their last king and created a republic. Two consuls, elected every year, led the state, advised by the Senate.

Ordinary citizens, the plebeians, struggled for centuries with the noble patricians for a share of power, and won their own officials, the tribunes.

Through wars and alliances, by 264 BC Rome controlled most of the Italian peninsula.

Carthage, a trading city in today’s Tunisia, ruled the sea lanes of the west. Rome fought it in three Punic Wars.

In 218 BC the Carthaginian general Hannibal marched from Spain over the Alps with elephants, and in 216 BC destroyed a Roman army at Cannae.

Rome refused to make peace, attacked Africa, and defeated Hannibal at Zama in 202 BC. In 146 BC Rome destroyed Carthage, and the Greek city of Corinth too.

Conquest made Roman generals rich and their soldiers loyal to them, not to the state. In the 80s BC Romans fought Romans in civil wars.

Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, today’s France, between 58 and 50 BC. In 49 BC he led his army across the Rubicon river into Italy, starting a new civil war.

He won and was named dictator for life. In 44 BC, on the Ides of March, a group of senators stabbed him to death.

Caesar’s adopted heir Octavian defeated Mark Antony and Cleopatra at Actium in 31 BC. Egypt, the last of the Hellenistic kingdoms, became Roman.

In 27 BC the Senate gave Octavian the name Augustus. He kept the old republican offices, but real power was his. Historians date the Roman Empire from here.

He ruled for over forty years, and began two centuries of relative peace inside the empire, the Pax Romana.

Under the emperor Trajan, in AD 117, the empire reached its largest size, from Britain to Mesopotamia, around the whole Mediterranean, which Romans called “our sea”.

Paved roads, more than 80,000 kilometres of them, linked the provinces. Cities across the empire had baths, theatres, aqueducts and Latin or Greek inscriptions.

Perhaps 60 million people or more lived under Roman rule, about the same as in Han China at the other end of the Silk Road.

Trajan’s successor Hadrian gave up some eastern conquests and fortified the borders. In Britain, from AD 122, his soldiers built a stone wall 117 kilometres long.

In the east, Rome fought the Parthian Empire of Iran for centuries, without either side winning for good.

In AD 212, the emperor Caracalla gave Roman citizenship to almost all free people in the empire.

From 235 the empire fell into crisis. In fifty years there were more than twenty emperors, most killed by their own soldiers. Plague, inflation and invasions followed.

In 260 the Sasanian Persians even captured a Roman emperor, Valerian.

Diocletian restored order. From 293 he shared power among four rulers, the Tetrarchy, each with his own capital closer to the frontiers.

Constantine fought his way to sole rule. In 313 he and his co-emperor granted toleration to Christians, who had been persecuted not long before.

In 330 he dedicated a new capital on the Bosporus, at the old Greek city of Byzantium. It was called Constantinople, today’s Istanbul.

In 380, under Theodosius, Christianity became the empire’s official religion.

After 395 the empire was permanently divided into a western half and an eastern half, each with its own emperor.

Germanic peoples, many pushed west by the Huns, settled inside the western borders. The Visigoths sacked Rome in 410, and the Vandals in 455.

In 476 the general Odoacer deposed the last western emperor, a boy named Romulus Augustulus. Historians debate whether this was a sudden fall or a slow transformation.

The eastern empire, which modern historians call Byzantine but which always called itself Roman, was richer and survived. It spoke mostly Greek.

The emperor Justinian reconquered North Africa, Italy and part of Spain, and collected Roman law into one great code.

In Constantinople he built the Hagia Sophia, finished in 537, for nearly a thousand years the largest cathedral in the world.

In the 600s, the eastern empire lost Syria, Egypt and North Africa to the Arab caliphates, the subject of Episode 07. It survived, smaller, for eight more centuries.

Crusaders sacked Constantinople in 1204. Slowly, the Ottoman Turks surrounded what was left.

On 29 May 1453 the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II took Constantinople. The Roman Empire, in its last form, was over.

Rome’s languages became Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian. Its law shaped legal systems across Europe and Latin America. Its calendar is still ours.

Later rulers wanted its title: “Caesar” became the German “Kaiser” and the Russian “Tsar”.

Next: the Islamic caliphates, which in a single century spread from Arabia to Spain and Central Asia.