CivStory

Rome: From Republic to Empire

An aristocratic republic conquers the Mediterranean, becomes a monarchy in all but name, meets its limits on the Iranian frontier and loses its western half to new rulers.

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Part 1

According to Roman tradition, in 509 BCE the Romans expelled their last king, Tarquin the Proud, and replaced him with two consuls elected each year and advised by the Senate. The story was written down centuries later by historians such as Livy, and the early dates are uncertain. For generations power stayed with a few aristocratic families, while the plebeians struggled for access to office.

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Part 2

By the 3rd century BCE Rome controlled Italy through a network of allies and clashed with Carthage, the Phoenician city in North Africa. In 218 BCE the Carthaginian general Hannibal crossed the Alps with an army that included war elephants and crushed a Roman army at Cannae in 216, yet most of Rome's allies stayed loyal. Rome won that war in 202 and destroyed Carthage in 146.

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Part 3

In 146 BCE, the year Carthage was razed, a Roman army destroyed Corinth, killing its men and selling its women and children into slavery, and Greece came under Roman control. Greek art, literature and philosophy, already admired in Rome, now shaped the education of the Roman elite. The poet Horace later wrote that captive Greece took its fierce conqueror captive.

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Part 4

Conquest brought wealth, enslaved captives and large armies loyal to their generals. After winning a civil war, Julius Caesar was made dictator for life, and on the Ides of March, 15 March 44 BCE, senators led by Brutus and Cassius stabbed him to death. They claimed to be saving the Republic, but new civil wars followed.

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Part 5

Caesar's adopted heir Octavian defeated Mark Antony and Cleopatra at Actium in 31 BCE. In 27 BCE the Senate gave him the name Augustus; he said he had restored the Republic, while he kept command of the armies and the key provinces. His own account of his reign, the Res Gestae, survives in inscriptions, most completely at Ankara, and historians read it as a carefully built self-portrait.

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Part 6

The Pantheon was rebuilt on the site of an earlier temple of Agrippa, whose name it still carries; brick stamps suggest work began under Trajan, and Hadrian probably dedicated it around 125–128 CE. Its unreinforced concrete dome, about 43 metres across, opens to the sky through a central oculus. Consecrated as a church in 609, it has stayed in use, and Renaissance architects studied it closely.

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Part 7

Rome's eastern frontier faced Iran. In 260 CE the Sasanian king Shapur I took the emperor Valerian prisoner west of Edessa, and Valerian died in captivity. Shapur's inscription at the Kaʿba-ye Zardosht at Naqsh-e Rostam presents the capture as the outcome of a great battle, while some Roman writers say Valerian was seized during negotiations. The scene is carved in rock reliefs at Naqsh-e Rostam and Bishapur.

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Part 8

In the 5th century the western empire lost provinces to Gothic, Vandal and other armies, and in 410 Alaric's Goths sacked Rome itself. In 476 Odoacer, a commander of the Germanic federate troops in Italy, deposed the young emperor Romulus Augustulus at Ravenna and sent the imperial insignia to Constantinople. The eastern empire went on for nearly a thousand years, and many historians now describe a gradual transformation rather than a single fall.

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