The Roman Empire
The Roman Empire
The Roman Empire (ca. 30 B.C.E.– 476 C.E.), was founded by Caesar’s adopted son, who renamed himself Caesar Augustus, revived Rome’s strength and wealth, and created the position of emperor. Although the Senate continued to function, Rome’s emperors became more despotic over time, with some using their power more wisely than others. Despite occasional episodes of political violence, Rome, between the reign of Augustus and the early 200s C.E., experienced an age of peak power and prosperity known as the pax Romana (“Roman peace”). Its economic and military might increased, and its huge territory extended from Spain in the west to Asia Minor in the east, from northern Africa in the south to the British Isles in the north.
The Romans masterfully administered a huge bureaucracy, dividing the empire into provinces governed by regional officials called proconsuls, and building a tremendous network of roads, sea lanes, aqueducts (to carry water over long distances), and fortifications, including city walls and frontier defense barriers such as Hadrian’s Wall in Scotland. The distribution of grain throughout the empire, and especially the doling-out of cheap or free bread to the poorer classes in Rome and other large cities, was a key state priority.
After the early 200s C.E., Rome found itself in crisis. Many emperors proved incompetent. Also, already during the late 100s C.E., the epidemic spread of what was probably smallpox (brought back by soldiers returning from wars in the Middle East) had severely depleted the empire’s population and economic production—and measles and bubonic plague would do the same in later years. During the 300s C.E., the eastern half of the empire split from the western half, becoming the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire, headquartered in the city of Constantinople. Deprived of the east’s wealth and suffering from military and political overreach, the western half of the empire found it difficult to govern itself and to pay the ever-larger amounts of money it owed its army. Military uprisings became depressingly common, and migrating waves of Germanic and Asiatic nomads, whom the Romans called barbarians, attacked from the east and north in growing numbers. Although some barbarians settled in Rome and adopted its civilized ways, others did not, and the empire’s heartland lay open to them by the 400s C.E. Germanic Goths sacked the city of Rome in 410 C.E., and another wave of Goths took it over completely in 476 C.E.—the year Rome’s western empire is considered to have fallen.
Roman society was sharply divided into citizens and noncitizens, with the latter possessing no civil rights. Among citizens, the primary distinction was between upper-class patrician and lower-class plebeian. Slavery was widely practiced—approximately a third of Rome’s population was enslaved—and occasional slave revolts disturbed the order of things. Imperial Rome was patriarchal, giving the paterfamilias (male family head) power over his wife and children. However, by the early empire, women gained more economic rights and greater freedom to divorce. They still had no vote.
Together with the Greeks, whose philosophy, art, and gods they absorbed, the Romans bestowed to the Western world an immense cultural heritage: Greco-Roman classicism. The Romans were master architects and engineers, and many of their roads, aqueducts, cities, and fortifications proved useful for centuries to come. They were the first to use large arches and domes on a regular basis. Politically, the monarchs of medieval Europe would long attempt to live up to the Roman ideal of unified and centralized rule.
Roman law remains a keystone of Western legal thought. The concept of “innocent until proven guilty” stems from republican Roman law as codified in the Justinian law code, compiled in Byzantium during the 500s C.E., served as the chief model for later law codes throughout Europe. Latin remained the common language of Europe’s educated classes for hundreds of years.
Finally, it was on the Roman Empire’s eastern edge that the religion of Christianity was born. By legalizing Christianity in the 300s C.E., and then adopting it as their official faith, the Romans ensured the new religion’s survival as a major intellectual and cultural force long after the empire itself had disappeared.
Questions for experts
1. What were the most significant features of the Roman Empire’s society?
2. What were the most important factors which influenced the Roman Empire’s society?
3. What are the main legacies of the considered society?
4. Which of the below given factors caused the decline of the Roman Empire? Explain your choices in detail.
· Unwise or corrupt political leadership
· Rebellions and social tensions caused by overtaxation or injustice on the part of the elite
· Civil wars
· Conquest of more territory than one could effectively govern
· Economic downturns and disruptions of regional trade patterns
· Neglect of infrastructure, such as roads
· War with one or more advanced states or the sudden appearance of a powerful enemy
· Constant, long-term harassment by raiding or migrating nomads
· External environmental factors, such as climate change, natural disasters, or the appearance of new diseases (such as smallpox, measles, or bubonic plague)
· Self-inflicted environmental problems, such as overpopulation, overuse of wood (deforestation), overuse of water (desertification), or the silting of rivers and erosion of soil caused by overfarming or large construction projects.
Questions for mixed groups
1. What was common between the societies?
2. What was different between the societies?
3. What legacy did the considered societies leave?
4. Compared to the previous period (5.500 – 1000 BCE) what changed and what remained the same in the world?