Roman Republic and Empire: History, Timeline & Map
Ancient Rome from the Republic (509 BCE) to 476 CE: conquest, slavery and citizenship, Augustus and the emperors, wars with Parthia and Sasanian Iran.
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The Republic: from city to Mediterranean power
Roman tradition dated the expulsion of the last king and the founding of the Republic to 509 BCE; the date comes from later writers and cannot be checked closely. The Republic was governed by annually elected magistrates, above all two consuls, guided by the Senate and voted on by citizen assemblies, and its early law was written down in the Twelve Tables around 450 BCE. Over three centuries Rome brought Italy under its control through war and a network of alliances, then defeated Carthage in the Punic Wars (264–146 BCE) and the Hellenistic kingdoms of the east.
Conquest brought wealth and huge numbers of enslaved captives; the revolt led by Spartacus (73–71 BCE) is the best-known uprising of enslaved people. Competition among generals with personal armies destroyed the Republic in civil wars. Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 BCE, and his heir Octavian, named Augustus in 27 BCE, founded a monarchy that kept republican forms.
The Empire: peace, frontiers and transformation
The first two centuries CE, often called the Pax Romana, saw roads, cities and Roman law spread around the Mediterranean, although peace inside the frontiers rested on armies and harsh suppression of revolts such as those in Judaea. The empire reached its largest extent under Trajan in 117 CE. In 212 CE Caracalla extended citizenship to almost all free inhabitants. In the east Rome faced an equal: Parthia defeated Crassus at Carrhae in 53 BCE, and the Sasanian king Shapur I captured the emperor Valerian in 260 CE.
After the crises of the third century, Diocletian and Constantine rebuilt the state. Constantine favoured Christianity and founded Constantinople in 330, and under Theodosius I Nicene Christianity became the official religion in 380. The empire was divided into eastern and western halves after 395; the western government ended when Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustulus in 476, while the eastern empire, which historians later called Byzantine, continued until 1453.
Timeline of events
509 BCE · Roman Republic Founded
Rome overthrows its monarchy and establishes the Roman Republic, creating a system of elected magistrates and the Senate. (Rome) View on map
449 BCE · Twelve Tables: Foundation of Roman Law
The Twelve Tables are created, the earliest codification of Roman law and foundation of the Roman legal tradition that shaped Western civilization. (Rome) View on map
218 BCE · Hannibal Crosses the Alps
Carthaginian general Hannibal famously crosses the Alps with war elephants to invade Italy during the Second Punic War. (Alps) View on map
146 BCE · Rome Conquers Greece
Rome defeats the Achaean League and destroys Corinth, bringing Greece under Roman control and absorbing Greek culture. (Corinth, Greece) View on map
63 BCE · Cicero: Master Orator and Philosopher
Marcus Tullius Cicero delivers his famous orations against Catiline and becomes Rome's greatest orator, shaping Latin prose and republican ideals. (Rome) View on map
53 BCE · Battle of Carrhae (Roman Defeat)
Roman general Crassus is decisively defeated by the Parthian army at Carrhae, one of Rome's worst military disasters. (Carrhae (Harran)) View on map
44 BCE · Assassination of Julius Caesar
Julius Caesar is assassinated on the Ides of March by Roman senators, plunging Rome into civil war and ending the Republic. (Rome) View on map
27 BCE · Augustus Becomes First Roman Emperor
Octavian takes the title Augustus and becomes the first Roman Emperor, beginning the Pax Romana and the Roman Empire era. (Rome) View on map
19 BCE · Virgil Writes the Aeneid
Virgil composes the Aeneid, the national epic of Rome tracing Roman origins to the Trojan hero Aeneas, a masterpiece of Latin literature. (Rome) View on map
33 CE · Crucifixion of Jesus Christ
Jesus of Nazareth is crucified in Jerusalem under Roman rule, around 30–33 CE. This event gives rise to Christianity, which becomes the world's largest religion. (Jerusalem) View on map
64 CE · Great Fire of Rome Under Nero
A devastating fire destroys much of Rome during Emperor Nero's reign. Nero famously rebuilds the city and persecutes Christians. (Rome) View on map
70 CE · Rome Destroys the Temple in Jerusalem
In August 70 CE Roman legions under Titus, son of the emperor Vespasian, stormed Jerusalem and burned the Second Temple, the climax of the First Jewish–Roman War (66–73/74); many of the city's people were killed or enslaved, though Josephus' figures of over a million dead and 97,000 captives are generally thought exaggerated. The main account is by Josephus, a Jewish commander captured by the Romans in 67 who later wrote under Flavian patronage, and the Arch of Titus in Rome still shows the Temple's spoils carried in triumph. Without the Temple, Judaism was gradually reorganised around rabbis, scripture and the synagogue, Jews still mourn its loss on the fast of Tisha B'Av, and the separation of Christianity from Judaism deepened. (Jerusalem) View on map
79 CE · Vesuvius Buries Pompeii and Herculaneum
In 79 CE Mount Vesuvius erupted and buried the Roman towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum, on the Bay of Naples, under ash, pumice and pyroclastic flows. Pliny the Younger described the eruption and the death of his uncle, Pliny the Elder, in two letters to the historian Tacitus; the traditional date of 24 August comes from those letters, but a charcoal inscription found at Pompeii in 2018 points to October. Excavations since the 18th century have uncovered houses, wall paintings, graffiti and casts of victims, a detailed record of everyday life in a Roman town. (Pompeii) View on map
80 CE · Colosseum Completed
The Flavian Amphitheatre (Colosseum) is completed in Rome, the largest amphitheatre ever built, seating 50,000 spectators. (Rome) View on map
100 CE · The Mithras Cult Spreads in the Roman Empire
From the late 1st century CE, underground temples (mithraea) of Mithras appear in Rome, on the Rhine and Danube frontiers and in port cities, with soldiers, freedmen and officials among the initiates. The god bears the name of the Iranian Mithra, the god wears eastern dress and one grade of initiation was called 'Persian', but the cult's central image of Mithras slaying a bull has no known Iranian precedent. Franz Cumont saw the cult as a Roman form of Mazdaism; since the 1970s, following critiques by John Hinnells and Richard Gordon, most scholars see it as largely a new creation of the Roman world drawing on an Iranian name and Persian prestige, and how much of it is Iranian remains debated. (Rome) View on map
117 CE · Roman Empire at Greatest Extent Under Trajan
Emperor Trajan expands the Roman Empire to its greatest territorial extent, conquering Dacia and briefly Mesopotamia, bordering the Parthian Empire. (Rome) View on map
122 CE · Hadrian's Wall Built
Emperor Hadrian orders construction of a wall across northern Britain, marking the frontier of the Roman Empire. (Northern England) View on map
126 CE · Hadrian's Pantheon Completed in Rome
The Pantheon, a temple to the gods of Rome, was rebuilt on the site of an earlier temple of Marcus Agrippa, whose name it still carries in its inscription; brick stamps suggest work began late in Trajan's reign, about 113–117, and Hadrian probably dedicated it around 125–128. Its unreinforced concrete dome, about 43 metres across and open to the sky through a central oculus, shows the Roman mastery of concrete construction. Consecrated as a church in 609, it has stayed in use and largely intact, and it became a model for domed buildings from the Renaissance onwards. (Pantheon, Rome) View on map
150 CE · Ptolemy Writes the Almagest
Claudius Ptolemy, an astronomer writing in Greek in Roman Alexandria, completed his Mathematical Syntaxis around 150 CE, shortly after his Canopus inscription of 147/148. It set out a geocentric model of the planets, with a star catalogue and tables for predicting their positions, building on Hipparchus and on Babylonian observations. Translated into Arabic in 9th-century Baghdad, where it gained the name al-Majisṭī (Almagest), and from Arabic into Latin in 12th-century Toledo, it remained the standard reference for astronomers in the Islamic world and Latin Europe, edited and criticised by scholars such as Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī, until the models of Copernicus and Kepler displaced it in the 16th and 17th centuries. (Alexandria, Egypt) View on map
161 CE · Marcus Aurelius: Philosopher Emperor
Marcus Aurelius becomes Roman Emperor and writes his Meditations, one of the greatest works of Stoic philosophy, while defending the empire's borders. (Rome) View on map
170 CE · Galen: Foundations of Medical Science
Galen of Pergamon (129–c. 216), a Greek physician who treated gladiators in his home city before settling in Rome around 162 and serving Marcus Aurelius and later emperors, wrote extensively in Greek on anatomy, physiology, pharmacology and therapy. He combined Hippocratic humoral theory with experiments and dissections on animals, since human dissection was not practised in his day, so parts of his anatomy were later corrected, notably by Vesalius in 1543. Translated into Syriac and Arabic by Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq and his circle in 9th-century Baghdad, his works shaped medicine in the Islamic world, where al-Rāzī questioned them in his Doubts about Galen and Ibn Sīnā built on them in the Canon, and in Latin Europe into the 17th century. (Pergamon) View on map
260 CE · Shapur I Captures Roman Emperor Valerian
Sasanian King Shapur I defeats and captures Roman Emperor Valerian at the Battle of Edessa, a humiliation for Rome immortalized in rock reliefs. (Edessa (Urfa)) View on map
325 CE · Council of Nicaea
In 325 the emperor Constantine, sole ruler of the empire since the previous year, summoned bishops to Nicaea in Bithynia; modern estimates put their number at about 250–300, while later tradition says 318. The council condemned the teaching of the Alexandrian priest Arius that the Son was created, adopted a creed declaring the Son 'of one substance' (homoousios) with the Father, issued canons on church discipline and agreed that all churches should keep Easter on the same Sunday. Disputes over the creed continued for decades, and its expanded form of 381, known as the Nicene Creed, is still recited in most Christian churches. (Nicaea (İznik)) View on map
380 CE · Christianity Becomes Roman State Religion
Emperor Theodosius I makes Christianity the official state religion of the Roman Empire, banning pagan practices. (Rome) View on map
410 CE · Visigoths under Alaric Sack Rome
On 24 August 410 Gothic forces led by Alaric, the people later known as the Visigoths, entered Rome and plundered it for three days, killing some of its people and carrying off captives, among them the emperor's half-sister Galla Placidia; the city had not fallen to a foreign army since the Gallic sack of about 390 BCE. Alaric, who had held a Roman military command, had besieged the city twice before while seeking land, pay and office for his followers from the western emperor Honorius, who stayed in Ravenna. The physical damage was smaller than the shock: followers of the old Roman cults blamed the abandonment of the gods, and Augustine answered them in The City of God. (Rome) View on map
415 CE · Hypatia: Philosopher and Mathematician of Alexandria
Hypatia, daughter of the mathematician Theon, taught Neoplatonist philosophy, mathematics and astronomy in Alexandria and is credited with commentaries on Diophantus, Apollonius and Ptolemy, though which surviving texts are hers is uncertain. In March 415 a Christian mob killed her during a power struggle between the bishop Cyril and the imperial prefect Orestes, whom she advised; the Christian historian Socrates Scholasticus condemned the murder. Modern retellings made her 'the last pagan scientist' and linked her death to the end of the Library of Alexandria, but philosophy and mathematics went on being taught in the city for generations. (Alexandria, Egypt) View on map
476 CE · Fall of the Western Roman Empire
The last Western Roman Emperor, Romulus Augustulus, is deposed by the Germanic chieftain Odoacer, marking the traditional end of ancient Rome. (Ravenna, Italy) View on map
Frequently asked questions
When did the Roman Republic become an empire?
Rome already ruled an empire of provinces under the Republic. The change of government is usually dated to 27 BCE, when the Senate gave Octavian the name Augustus and he became, in practice, the first emperor, after his victory in the civil wars.
How did Rome and Persia relate?
As neighbouring great powers for about seven centuries. Rome fought Parthian and then Sasanian Iran over Armenia and Mesopotamia, but the two also traded, exchanged embassies and made treaties; neither conquered the other. See the Persia vs Rome comparison for the full story.
Key events on the map
- 509 BCE · Roman Republic Founded
- 449 BCE · Twelve Tables: Foundation of Roman Law
- 218 BCE · Hannibal Crosses the Alps
- 44 BCE · Assassination of Julius Caesar
- 27 BCE · Augustus Becomes First Roman Emperor
- 117 CE · Roman Empire at Greatest Extent Under Trajan
- 260 CE · Shapur I Captures Roman Emperor Valerian
- 476 CE · Fall of the Western Roman Empire
Guided storylines
- Roman Republic — Encyclopaedia Britannica
- ancient Rome — Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Augustus — Encyclopaedia Britannica