Theoretically, 'one man rule' ought to have been impossible to achieve in the Roman Republic, built as it was on hostility to kings and founded on a revolution against the tyrannical King Tarquin the Proud. In practice, a system of representative government did persist over centuries, which slowly reformed over time to become more representative, creating offices like Tribune of the Plebs to be open to populist influence and establishing clear laws by which the rights of citizens could be recognized. But within the system of Rome was the culture and society of its people, and specifically its ruling class. Roman Patricians competed for power, for honors, titles, rewards, and triumphs. With every victory, the Roman patrician who attained success could earn honor for himself, and his family, and for those clients who depended on the patrician for patronage. The dependencies of clients to their patrons were one of the many social structures that was never exactly written down into the constitution and legal system but fell under the purview of the norms of society. As Rome expanded militarily from small Italian city-state to Peninsular hegemon, to Mediterranean super-power, to eventually claiming the Mediterranean as a Roman lake (Mare Nostrum), the stakes for competition was higher than before as was the honor.

Romans used words like auctoritas in a manner quite different from authority. Auctoritas meant the unspoken power an individual wielded by means of their achievement, their skills, their social capital, the influence they wielded in society. You did not claim auctoritas, if you had it then everyone knew it when you walked on to the field. This informal level of influence that a person of skill could achieve, by military and political means, meant that competition for victory and command (called imperium in Latin) was quite fierce. On the battlefield, the successful Roman general would earn the title Imperator from their legions. Not an official title, or a military rank, but a title of acclamation that one earned without competing or seeking it out. In practice, such command was often acquired by bribery, trickery, and fraud, but there would always be a pretense of fairness and a denial of impropriety. When Scipio Africanus defeated Hannibal, he took it upon himself to pay the legions under his command, under the table of the Senate. The latter caught wind of this and sought to marginalize Scipio from politics, in which they succeeded. But the damage was done. The Scipio family attained great power and favor, and prestige. Many soldiers and supporters became clients of the family as a result. When Scipio's grandsons Tiberius Gracchus and Gaius Gracchus took on the task of establishing a grain dole, distributing land to veterans, and launching other kinds of reforms, they drew fierce opposition from the Senate. Partly this was because of the way both had used the office of the Tribune; another reason was the nature of the policies which favored the poor over the rich. But more instinctively, the Senate feared that the power the Gracchi stood to gain from claiming clients of the vast citizenry who would depend on the grain dole and the land distribution.

In theory, a moderate and pragmatic approach among elites to attain a consensus to reform from above in a manner that distributed favors evenly could have solved the issue. Instead, violence became the tool and reformers were murdered time and time again, and their killers faced no justice or repercussions for their judicial killing. The civil wars of Marius and Sulla built on the lines drawn in the sand in the wake of these purges, but it quickly became subsumed with the personal ambition to be "the First Man in Rome" between Marius and Sulla, both of them being brilliant and ambitious generals who sought glory, favor, triumphs, consulships, governorships and so on. When Sulla triumphed by marching the army into Rome, illegally, he unleashed a wave of proscriptions (i.e. purges) that brutally killed and exiled many factions connected to Marius, including Marius' nephew Julius Caesar. Sulla reformed the state to nullify the power of the Tribunes and enlarged the power of the Senate. To do so, he attained the unprecedented title of dictator perpetuo and breached the continuity of tradition and norms that had been the hallmark of Roman government.

The Roman Constitution, such as it was, fell by the wayside as ambitious adventurers vied with each other to enlarge personal power. Pompey, Crassus, and Julius Caesar formed the First Triumvirate to triangulate and consolidate a common program. But their drive for ambition led Caesar to invade Gaul where he conquered and enlarged Roman territory. Crassus tried to invade Persia, ruled by the Parthian Kingdoms, but failed catastrophically, clearing the way for a clash between Pompey and Caesar, that ended with Caesar attaining victory and eventually, at the end of a 5-year dictatorship, the title of dictator perpetuo and in his will he would nominate his nephew Octavian as his heir. Caesar wielded immense influence as a military conqueror and as a citizen with great wealth, and as politician with a great deal of connections, he could and did virtually appoint clients to the Senate and the Tribune. Theoretically, it was not different from how it was done in even the Pre-Sullan period. The issue was that there was now a huge gap between Caesar and anyone else. Previously Pompey and Crassus might have provided a counter but with their death, there was one man and after him you had to go many rungs below the ladder to get to second place. His assassination was driven by a variety of factors. Many of the assassins were former friends and partisans of Caesar in addition to the pardoned Pompeyans who led the faction (Cassius and Brutus). For them it was about re-establishing conditions for patrician competition. By killing Caesar, they hoped to restart the game and reset the match, as it were. Instead, Caesar's will transfered his wealth, his name, and his long lists of clients and dependents to his nephew, Octavian. Octavian teamed up with Mark Antony to defeat Brutus and other assassin-turned-renegades, and then eventually fell into civil war between each other.

The young Octavian proved ruthless and insightful in understanding Roman society. He vied for power with Mark Antony, who gained the wealthy Eastern commands in the settlement of the Second Triumvirate, while Octavian had Italy. Both of them unleashed an extensive round of proscriptions, far greater than Sulla, to deepen the control of their faction. Through the wave of killings, property and wealth of elites concentrated in ever narrower hands. When Octavian attained victory over Antony, it was effectively the end of the Civil Wars and the arrival of peace. But this was not a peace attained as a moral end. Rather it came about through exhaustion of alternatives. There was nobody else remotely capable of challenging Octavian after he defeated Antony, claimed his spoils and his legions. The entire Roman army was now in the pocket of one man who had the greatest hoard of wealth in the Roman world. There was no rival to Octavian and no more alternative.

Octavian presented himself as a 'traditionalist' which meant reviving traditions that in his view had seemingly fallen dormant. In practice, it was likely he invented or created these traditions. He presented himself as a restorer of the Republic. He would avoid titles and honors that hinted at being a king. But given Octavian's vast wealth and influence, informally nobody else was allowed to rival him. The Roman triumph was denied to future successful commanders during his reign. The Consul and Tribune continued to exist nominally but only those selected by Octavian could become candidates and only Octavian's endorsement was large enough to gain clout and victory. In practice, without officially becoming King, Octavian informally lent titles like 'imperator' or 'princeps' (from which we get, respectively Emperor and Prince) with the weight of royalty. He also gave himself the name "Augustus". It roughly meant "venerable" but in practice had little to no precedent in usage and function. Other titles included Princeps Civitas and Princeps Senatus, meaning First Citizen and First in the Senate, the second originally was just the first person to speak in the senate. He was also given control of provinces with lots of soldiers, while traditional provincial administration stayed in place for most areas. In public, these powers were granted by the existing Roman government system, rather than Augustus giving himself them.

The effect was to appear on the surface that Rome was still a republic. An expert politician, Augustus took to make sure that he lived as an honored and revered private citizen who simply had the clout and influence, and the army. He did not live in any grand palace in the manner of his successors, and later Emperors. At the same time, Augustus sponsored statuary across the Empire, and commissioned public works, monuments, literary masterpieces in a manner very similar to a King. Anyone who crossed Augustus' will, whether his own daughter Julia or the poet Ovid, would be exiled. Anyone who tried to expose his authoritarianism, such as the lawyer Licinius Varro Murena (who defended his client Marcus Primus for defying the Senate by stating that he had followed the orders of Augustus, and theoretically they were legal if Augustus' authority to give said orders was legal) ended up executed without a trial. To the common Roman individual, i.e. the majority of slaves, women, and lower-class Roman proletarii, it can be argued that Augustus wasn't that different from the Republic. He was certainly generous with the grain dole, built by the Gracchi, enlarged and sustained within the Empire, even outlasting it in the West well into the early medieval period. To a modern audience, the fall of the Republic and the rise of the Empire is imagined as a coup d'état. The fact that the Romans both hated Kings and still called their leader the Emperor seems like delusional mental gymnastics. But to the Roman of that time, it might well have seemed normal. A fiction of course but Augustus was a master at selling everyone that this invisible coup d'état was something different from what it was. Previously a citizen attaining wealth and honor and titles did not overwhelm the system because there was an arena for competition. But now, there was total monopoly and the system and society could no longer generate a competitor to check and balance Augustus.

As early as Tacitus in the First Century of the Common Era, it was clear that the Republic was toast. There was no more representative government. It was an Empire. More important than his way of governing Rome, was the simple fact of Augustus' longevity. As Tacitus observed, when he died, there was nobody alive who remembered the Republic, and even if one went to other contemporaries of Octavian's youth, the Republic they had known was the period of civil wars. The pretense of Republican institutions would gradually fade in power over the empire, eventually disappearing until it became much like any other monarchy in the 4th century.

The first 200 years of the Roman Empire can be plausibly regarded as the height of Roman civilization. It was an age of peace, stability, order. There were settled borders, free movements of goods across the Mediterranean by sea, and over the famous Roman Roads by land. The empire was internally peaceful, and people enjoyed a prosperity not seen before in the Ancient Mediterranean. The stretch of land that included Western Europe, North Africa, Eastern Europe, Asia Minor, and the Levant had previously been subject to raids by Gallic tribesmen, conquests by Persians, Scythians, Athenians, Macedonians, Carthaginians, and then finally the Romans. Now there was no other rival to Rome inside these borders. Romans divided the Empire into provinces each administered by governors who were sourced from local families but raised in Rome itself to serve before being posted back in their land of origin. Through this Rome engaged in building projects such as the road system, acqueducts, large villas, and big building projects like the Colosseum, and the public baths.

Ironically, while it bestowed us the Latinate name "Empire" to describe its model of statehood and government, and the name "imperialism" to describe the way it conquered and incorporated external territory into its imperium (literally command but also including the sense of the word 'hegemony', 'sphere of influence', 'sovereignty'), the reality is that the majority of conquests of territory happened during the Roman Republic. At the end of the Punic Wars, Romans acquired dominion over the entire Mediterranean Rim. Under Pompey, they extended to Judea and the Levant. Under Caesar, they incorporated Gaul. And Augustus officially brought Egypt into the Roman fold, although it had for the prior century, been a client-state of Rome. The Emperors coveted imperial conquest but they also feared it. Any commander who achieved honor in the field was a rival power center to one-man rule. The Emperor could take command themselves of course, but the price of defeat was often a sword through your belly, and sometimes even before defeat since fragging a CO to get out of unwinnable and unpopular wars is a tale as old as time. Especially if there are others who wish to warm your chair. The major additions to the Empire were England and Wales (under Claudius), some of the Balkans and Dacia in what's now Romania (under Trajan) and small enlargements of frontier areas (Marcus Aurelius). Mostly the Empire was a time of consolidation rather than expansion. Most of the storied military conflicts in the Empire were either putting down local rebellions or good old-fashioned civil war between rival Roman legions as would-be Emperors duked it out. In short, despite what Jupiter promised the Romans in The Aeneid, Rome was never an "empire without end" but a polity that governed with an awareness of limitations, and which would constantly be reminded of its limitations whenever it tried to conquer Persia only to fail repeatedly, or when they got their rear end handed to them in the Battle of Teutoburg Forest.

Revolts did occasionally occur with much violence on both sides but rarely broke out into sustained long wars during the Pax Romana. This includes the Germanic revolt led by Arminius, the Jewish Revolts, and the Iceni Revolt led by Queen Boudica which burned Roman London to the ground. While Rome triumphed, maintaining order could be quite violent and lead to harsh consequences for survivors. Sometimes, the Romans wowed former Iceni rebels as in Britain by sacking corrupt governors responsible for disorder and providing reforms that answered the problems that led to outbreak. Other times, as in Hadrian's crushing of the Bar Kochba Revolt, there was ethnic cleansing and large-scale population transfers to quell rebellious Jewish radicals. In the case of the Germanic revolt, after the defeat of Arminius, the Romans after a few successful punitive expeditions to performatively avenge Teutoberg, simply decided to never venture to Northern Germany ever again, marking an informal frontier that kept the North of Europe, from Scandinavia to Russia, entirely outside Rome though Roman trade, conducted through merchants and intermediaries, did transpire with the Proto-Norse forbears of the Vikings, evidenced by archaeological discoveries of Roman-era objects.

It is to that period of consolidation that we owe the most visible and enduring legacy of Rome, its immense achievements in architecture, engineering, sculpture, art, infrastructure, and trade. Under Pax Romana, one could trade across the Empire's domains. The oceans were free of pirate activity (at least to a large extent, it still happened but not enough to cause concern). The Roman road system expanded to cover all across Europe and aqueducts were built across the Empire as well. This was a time of high economic productivity and increased prosperity. Archaeologists today find lots of shipwrecks of ships full of goods. Cities grew large and prosperous. Many of Rome's famous structures come from this period, financed by plunder from conquests that did occur, or by general income. Sometimes Roman defeat also led to the creation of monuments. When the Persians defeated the Romans at the Battle of Edessa (which led to the capture of Emperor Valerian in battle, for the first time in its history), they claimed a large number of Roman legionaries as prisoners of war, ergo slaves. Enslaved legionaries were then put to work by their new masters to build the Band-E-Kaisar, a large Dam with a Bridge. It has the designation of being the easternmost Roman monument, and largest outside the Empire.

The rise of Empire did not put an end to faction and political violence, as Augustus proclaimed in his Res Gestae Augustae. Indeed after his death, violence returned to Rome with gusto thanks to periodic Succession Crisis. The Roman family system was built on client-patronage as much on direct blood relatives, so the Imperial Crown (metaphorically speaking, Roman Emperors did not wear crowns in classic antiquity) did not directly pass to the first-born son as in Medieval Europe. The Julio-Claudian Dynasty that followed Augustus became notorious for inter-family bloodshed. During succession crisis, brothers killed brothers, sons killed their mothers, and near friends often turned traitor to save their skin. The most common method of succession was adoption: the current emperor would chose a successful, well liked official as official heir. The practice started with Augustus, it is likely he wanted a son or grandson to inherit, but all potential heirs died. Choosing his stepson as heir, successful general called Tiberius, was a successful backup option, it put an experienced, proven leader in charge, who already had loyalty from the necessary power centers. Adoption was also used by Nerva through Antoninus Pious. However, the system never established itself as official, so Vespasian and many later emperors went to hereditary inheritance, like with Augustus, adoption was a backup option if the emperor had no sons to inherit. During this time, the Senate was still powerful, emperors drew officials from it, sought its approval, and senate involvement helped in a couple palace coups. Augustus established the Praetorian Guard to serve as a kind of internal security apparatus, charged with protecting the person of the Emperor and his family. In time, the Guard became prolific murderers of Emperors, starting with Caligula and continuing with gusto until Constantine the Great shut it down for good. Though largely they validated existing plots rather than actively choose leaders. Eventually it became a war for all against all when military generals openly used the army to force their will, a precedent that in the 3rd Century CE led to a series of civil wars as different sections of the Roman Army fought to put their commander on the throne based on which one could offer them the highest wages and best plunder. In one storied occassion in the Year of the Five Emperors, the Throne was put to auction to the highest bidder, Didius Julianus, an action that even in a time of infinite corruption appalled enough Romans to the straits they had been reduced, to immediately foment a coup. By the time of the end of the Western Roman Empire, at least 23 Roman Emperors were assassinated in office (not including Emperors killed in battle), an unusually large number of murdered heads of state for a 500-year-old polity ^note The number of Kings of England assassinated from 1066 to 1688 by contrast is precisely zero. Charles I was executed however, which might count for some but it's not exactly an assassination. In France, only one King, Henry IV was assassinated in the Ancien Regime.

At the same time, the violence and civil wars of the Empire, excluding the period of the Crisis, were generally speaking smaller and more limited in scope compared to the bloodshed of the era of Roman Conquest and the Late Republican Civil Wars. Claimants to the throne were careful about not destroying what they intended to rule for the most part. And while there were purges and bloodshed at the center of Imperial power, for the most part violence rarely extended beyond that with storied exceptions (Caracalla's massacre of the residents of Alexandria is a notorious case of the kind of tinpot malice that define imperial tyranny). Most of the Empire's provinces were run by governors, who are usually recorded to be highly scrupulous and well liked by the locals. There are of course exceptions as with everything but the Imperial periphery was generally at peace no matter the instability at the center of power. Over time the center, while calling itself Roman, moved its capital away from Rome. First it shifted to Constantinople, with Rome downgraded as merely the "Western Capital" (while Constantinople became THE capital). Later, even in the Western Half, the capital would shift to Mediolanum (Milan) and then to Ravenna.

City life would be familiar to modern city dwellers, if more dangerous. The Romans had citizens reside in apartments (called insulae), buy food from fast food or restaurant like businesses, and use public facilities for water, baths, and other services. Fires, crime, and corruption were however a concern and the higher population of Rome would lead in time to an increase in fires, leading to the development of an early example of a fire department and other public works of a kind unprecedented in that time. Richer city dwellers would have access to useful services in their larger houses. Life in the country was similar to many ancient societies, most people would live as peasants, farming their own property (often called latifundias, a name imported in Spanish to describe plantations in the New World) or someone else's. Rich aristocrats would own a lot of property and have slaves, tenant farmers, or hired labor to farm it. Archaeology suggests that common citizens were generally more prosperous during this time than normal in such societies. Yet the overwhelming majority of Romans were poor and struggling, most of the labor relied on slavery, and the standard of life for the majority of Roman subjects wasn't in any sense a great deal advanced from the life they had known pre-Roman, nor the life of their descendants post-Roman.

Archaeological evidence suggests that most Roman streets were tightly packed with narrow streets and alleys. This meant that moving and living in the city in the Ancient World was often congested. The concept of a 'public square' or 'boulevard', leave alone 'public park' did not exist in the Ancient World. Urban life was filled with poor hygiene, weak sanitation, and large crowds. The Romans collected human urine to keep clothes and other articles clean, and the collection of urine was valuable enough to be taxed by the Emperor. The ammonia in the urine in the ancient world, once fermented and stored, was used to bleach, clean, and dye clothes, mixed with other substances. Which meant that a good part of Ancient Rome stunk to high heaven. Mary Beard has argued that living experiences in Rome in this time, for the majority of the population, was closer to the slums from 19th Century to Early 20th Century Europe and America (such as in Gangs of New York) rather than the Crystal Spires and Togas familiar from the grand sets of Hollywood Epic Movie, and more or less not terribly different from urban life in Medieval Europe (the difference being that folks in the middle ages did find other ways to clean clothes without collecting pee jars). It can be plausibly argued that the standard of living for aristocrats and high-income earners declined substantially from Rome to Medieval Europe, at least in the West (the Byzantine Empire with its Hagia Sophia and other monuments maintained a high standard of elite opulence in the same period of Western decline). Roman villas and palaces had amenities like hypocausts (indoor heating), plumbing, plush fountains and gorgeous mosaics, displaying their wealth and opulence. These ruins have proven sturdier than many similar dwellings in the Early Medieval Era, prior to the age of castle-building and gothic cathedrals in Western Europe. However these villas are only a minority, if a highly visible one, of the vast number of Roman-era settlements and ruins that have been unearthed by archaeologists. The most common settlement that shows up in digs are peasant huts and other smaller settlements that, for the most part, look similar to such dwellings from the medieval era. The popular idea of Medieval Stasis, i.e. the decline in living standards from the Ancient to the Medieval era is simply not the case for the majority of the population, whose way of life was the same as it ever was. The major difference being that poverty was a subject that writers in the medieval era took an interest in documenting (thereby defining the medieval era as one of general poverty in the popular imagination), whereas Romans who had access to writing and education, largely only cared about their way of life and not about society at large (thereby defining the Roman era as one of general wealth).

Although the Pax Romana specifically refers to a phenomenon in the Mediterranean world, it's been argued that this was a time of peace across a solid belt across the Eurasian civilized world from the Atlantic to the Pacific, controlled by four great empires: Rome in the west; with Persia to its east; and then to Persia's east the Kushan and Gupta empires in Afghanistan and northern India; and to the east of both of those the Han Dynasty held not only the Chinese heartland but also the Tarim Basin in modern Xinjiang. This is arguably the first period of "proto-globalization". The influence of the four large empires (Rome, Persia, India, and China) made regular cross-Eurasian trade not merely a reality, but big business. The majority of Rome's trade happened by Sea, and not by Land. The Conquest of Egypt led Romans to sustain and expand settlements at Berenike/Baranis on the Red Sea Coast where trade across the Indian Ocean can be traced back to the Pharaonic era. From the Red Sea, coast-hugging traders, largely Greek, travelled in sight of land along the Persian Gulf into the Arabian Sea, trading as far South as Muziris in modern day Southern India, described by Pliny the Elder as "the first emporium of India". Ancient India was Ancient Rome's greatest trading partner, and the majority of Roman coins outside the Empire are today housed in museums of South India. Pliny the Elder lamented that Rome had a trade deficit with India (it bought more from India than it sold to India, or in modern terms it had more imports from India and fewer exports to India) which he saw as a drain that sucked up Rome's treasury. India was the source for spices, specifically black peppercorn, which was called "Black Gold" by the Romans, and Indian pepper was a valued trading commodity, and traders who collected it and made wealth from it, made heaps of sestertii for rich merchants

India was also the source for Roman access to Chinese goods. Most of the Chinese trade happened through goods sold and accessed at Indian ports, this includes Chinese silk and other wares. The Chinese likewise developed an interest in Roman glassware and beadwork. According to one account, the Han sent an explorer to Rome, who didn't quite reach Rome at the insistence of the Parthians. The latter had the monopoly on international land trade with Rome and likewise monopoly on the Roman land trade with its Eastern neighbors in India and China, and they did not spend 700 years fighting a Forever War with Rome just to be cut out by a direct deal between Rome and China. In either case, the Han explorer left behind a fairly detailed report of the intel he gathered about Rome, albeit one coloured by Chinese mythological views of the West. The Han seemed to have greatly respected Rome, seeing it as a Western mirror to themselves and calling it Daqin: Great China. China's Western land trade came to be characterized in the early 20th Century as the "Silk Route" though said term was never used in antiquity. Contrary to popular beliefs (in both 21st Century China and the West), the land trade with Rome was never a significant part of the Ancient Roman and Ancient Chinese economies. The more common idea of the overland Silk Route, with its ancient caravan towns built for trade and so on, was largely developed and sustained during the Mongol Empire with little antique precedent. The Romans had a vague awareness of a larger nation beyond India but there is no record of direct contact between Rome and China to really speak of. Inheriting from Ptolemy's research acquired through merchants stopping at Alexandria, they designated the vast area of land to India's East as Serica, derived from Sericum (the Latin word for Silk), and that the people in this huge stretch of land (which included Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, Central Eurasian Steppe nations, along with Mainland China) were called "Seres" (i.e. silk people, but basically in context, those folks who create and sell us this cool smooth fabric).

In either case, this proto-globalization, i.e. stable trade between East and West ended around 200-300 AD, due to political crises across the board, from West to East. More importantly, in-between bouts of war, there was a long period where ideas travelled across land and sea. While politically, Christianity's rise to a global religion depends on its missionary work in the West of Jerusalem, they also conducted missionary work to their East and South. The first nations that converted to Christianity in Antiquity was Armenia, a buffer kingdom between Rome and Persia, followed by the Ethiopian Kingdom of Aksum, which they accessed through the Red Sea trade heading to India. Much later around 780 AD, Christian missionaries established a Church in Southern India, leading to the Saint Thomas Christians, the oldest Christian sect in India which was established by Syrian Christian missionaries. In addition to Christianity, other ideas flowed between East and West, and sometimes West to East. The Persian-origin Mithraism became a major Roman cult, finding purchase as far as Hadrian's Wall in Scotland. Another Persian-origin sect, Manicheanism also competed for favor with Christianity and enjoyed a period of prominence (one of the Church Fathers, Saint Augustine was a Manichean before his conversion to Christianity). Unusually, Manicheanism spread to China, with shrines and artwork surviving from 9th Century offshoots and continuing in practice long after its eradication in the West. This was an age of "religious revival" and there were many beliefs and ideas across the Roman World, and the Non-Roman World for that matter. One of these belief systems ultimately became Christianity, but for the first three hundred years or so, Christianity was merely one of many new cults, satirized and mocked by the Syrian-Roman satirist Lucian of Samosata and the writer Apuleius in The Golden Ass. Much later, in Arabia, you had the rise of Islam in a region that was a nexus of trade between Romans and Sassanians, greatly affected by the 700-year dance-off between the "Two Eyes of the World" (as the Iranians referred to themselves and Rome in one of their intermediate soon-to-be-broken peace treaties). Likewise in Sassanian Persia, there was a period of Zoroastrian revival as well as other cults.

The suggestion offered by some historians for this tendency is that the time of peace, and exclusion from political power, led many to turn to matters of faith as an outlet for personal expression and a desire for community outside the state. In the course of this time, this internal revolution in matters of spirit became of far greater and lasting consequence than any machinations of the Roman general on the battlefield in their quest for the Imperial Throne.

The Pax Romana didn't last forever, most commonly the ending is dated to the death of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. He was traditionally seen as "the last good emperor" (though modern historians give plaudits to some late Emperors as well). His son and successor Commodus was a terrible Emperor. He was deposed by a conspiracy involving the Senate, the Army, and the Praetorian Guard. The overthrow of Commodus led to the Year of the Five Emperors where in one year, you had five claimants to the throne. The winner at the end was Septimus Severus, who established a dynasty and restored stability for a time. An Emperor hadn't been violently deposed since Domitian, nearly a hundred years before the assassination of Commodus. The Romans weren't prepared for the disruption in the norm and the return of violent political succession. For a while it seemed to be a brief relapse, however. Emperor Severus was generally successful emperor and re-established order. But his successors were either ineffective (Geta), psychopathic (Caracalla), eccentric (Elagabalus), or just average (Alexander Severus). Important things were done by the Severans, such as when Caracalla passed a decree granting citizenship to the Empire to everyone in the imperium. While some historians suggest that this was done for cynical reasons, i.e. raising taxes, others suggest that the event is symbolic of the transformation of Rome into a single state, a single kingdom, rather than an Empire led by Rome surrounded by subordinate provinces. It also opened the pathway to the Imperial Crown for anyone outside the usual channels of power. Alexander Severus' assassination led to the Year of the Six Emperors, sparking the Crisis of the Third Century.

Republican institutions had lost power since Augustus had taken over, with the Senate the last holdout, The reign of Severus had greatly reduced its influence. Armies were now the main source of power, without strong civilian institutions or a standard succession system, ambitious generals used civil wars and coups to gain the throne The emperors who took power after the Severan family are called "barracks emperors" for this reason, during the 200s most emperors would die by being overthrown rather then from natural causes. to make things worse, an emperor was captured by Sassanid Persia, either killed or kept as a prisoner. The resulting political instability was so bad two breakaway territories formed, one, the Gallic Empire in what is now France and Spain, and another, the Palmyrene Empire, in what is now Syria to the south, at the eastern and western ends of the empire.

The Crisis nearly destroyed the Empire, yet it didn't. A series of soldier Emperors from Illyria and the Balkans, managed to patch things together with the metaphorical duct tape and bailing wire, an accomplishment many historians regard as about as unlikely and impressive as any of Rome's Golden Age achievements in building the empire in the first place. Aurelian would succeed in re-uniting the fractured empire by defeating the rival dynasties in Gaul and Syria, and his successor Diocletian would be in charge of repairing all of the damage. Diocletian repelled the invaders and began reforming the Empire to try and keep it from splintering again. He acted like a standard monarch, with titles to match, replacing Augustus's system of pretending to just be another Republican official. An expanded imperial administration was created, separate from the army. He decided that the Empire had become far too big for one ruler, and he split it in two. This was further expanded with "Co-Emperors", making the ruling of Rome a four-man job. Other economic and political changes were made as well. The empire had lost Dacia but otherwise kept the territory it had controlled when Marcus Aurelius had reigned.

Many of Diocletian's reforms didn't last after his reign, such as the tetrarchy, but the increased imperial bureaucracy and treatment as a full monarch were kept. The first and maybe the second likely helped keep the empire more politically stable, though the period still had many coups and civil wars. The split between Eastern and Western emperors was also kept. The empire became more prosperous again during the 300's AD, though not as much as during the Pax Romana period. Some economic changes contributed to this, more taxes were needed to pay for the imperial bureaucracy, and some Emperors interfered in the economy in ways that made administration easier, but hurt general productivity (such as restricting mobility to help with tax collection). the population was still reduced thanks to the plague at the end of the Pax Romana. A sign of increased danger is cities building walls, something they had largely avoided during the Pax Romana period.

The bigger problem of the Crisis was that it marked a decline in the Western half of the Empire. Economically the Western Empire was always poorer than the East, but during the Crisis it saw an even bigger decline than usual. Diocletian's split formalized the division creating the conditions of a political divide that had not been possible before. The creation of Constantinople as an Eastern capital, and more or less the Capital (owing to its greater population and economy compared to Rome which gradually lost ground), further shifted the Empire away from the West, putting more distance between them and the provinces of Britannia, Gaul, Hispania, Mauretania, among others. Upon recovery from the Crisis, the Western half of the Empire was subject to greater neglect and snobbism from the Eastern hegemons, seen as the poor relation and this led to many tensions in the West that started the fragmentation of Empire. The West gradually saw a decline in ability to maintain borders and withdrew its administrations and Roman governors from Great Britain in 410 AD leaving it open and undefended until the invasion of the Angles and Saxons during The Migration Period. Much of the task of peacekeeping was contracted to Germanic mercenaries, tribesmen seen as barbarians, who progressively became Romanized but were forever denied Roman citizenship. The invasion of Attila the Hun further destabilized the split, since the Huns were more or less allowed by the East to bypass them, with them given license to raid the Western Empire instead, and the West gradually came to understand that the East not only looked down on them but were willing to let them die simply for their comfort and security.

During the later part of this time, large numbers of Germanic tribes began entering the empire. Many were settled in frontier areas, to farm and help guard them, and many leaders of these tribes became powerful officials in the empire. However, some of these interactions led to conflict, the most famous battle involving such tribes was Adrianople in 378. This was a major loss for the Empire, defeating a major army and killing the Eastern Emperor. These tribes are the ones that would conquer much of the empire over the next century.

During this time, Christianity became the officially supported religion of the empire. During its first couple centuries it was a steadily expanding but very minor religion. Emperors and officials mention it here and there. Most famously, Nero blamed and prosecuted Christians for a major fire in Rome, but he otherwise didn't pay any attention to the religion. There have been many explanations for the Conversion of Rome to Christianity, a fact which seems remarkable when one considers that it originated as a minor Jewish sect whose founding prophet was crucified at Roman command. From the 18th to the 20th Century, the popular understanding defined by Edward Gibbon and Friedrich Nietzsche among many others, and accepted even by atheists and some critics of the Church; was that Christianity's message of charity (i.e. "the meek will inherit the earth") and the theme of compassion in the Life of Jesus, helped make the mass of lower-class Roman subjects and slaves into converts, and that the rise of Christianity was to an extent, a revolt from below. Gibbon and Nietzsche being aristocratic in cultural attitudes and sympathies, saw this egalitarianism as a bad thing, as a collective enforcement of uniform attitudes that in their view did not improve on the more pluralistic and intellectually diverse elite tolerance of many faiths in the Roman Empire. More liberal and radical critics of the Church would similarly affirm this view, but amend it by saying that the Church became Sell-Out and corrupted later but that the Early Christianity was a more egalitarian movement, with many radical possibilities that were snuffed out.

Subsequent historical research has severely complicated this interpretation however, on either side of the sociopolitical divide. Christianity's rise wasn't an inevitability nor was it at any time the only "new" belief system imported from the East. At various times, other cults like Manicheanism and Mithraism proved far more popular among lower classes and soldiers than Christianity did. What gave it an advantage was its capacity to play the long game, patiently building a flock over centuries, one convert at a time. Other cults had great spontaneous 'hot' periods of popularity and fervor, where it spent time as the great fad led by a few charismatic exponents, but it lacked the follow-through to build on the work after people's attention faltered and drifted away. Christianity had the skill of engaging with people both in times of fervor and times of sloth. They also proved skill at adapting practices, creating The Moral Substitute for some Roman-era practices, most notably adopting the culture of gift-giving and revelry from Saturnalia to the nascent version of Christmas. While the extent of Christian borrowings from pagan festivals has been overstated (other Roman belief systems likewise freely borrowed from each other the same way, and also borrowed from Christianity on a few occassions), it did in fact happen and it did help Christians persuade Romans into their belief system and their way of seeing the world. The real 'get' for Early Christianity was female conversion. Women, neglected and abandoned by most other Imperial-era cults, proved receptive to Christian missionaries, finding inclusion and participation in Church activities that they did not find in Mithraism and Manicheanism, or other similar belief systems in that era. Mothers on account of spending a great deal of time raising children, tended to do the job of raising generations of Christian converts far more effectively than roving missionaries preaching the Sermon of the Mount. The focus of Christianity on family life and community had a great deal of appeal in the period of instability in the 3rd Century, since with the state in turmoil, family was all people had to rely on.

Christianity's spread led in the 200s CE to a substantial following within the Empire. Constantine the Great, seeing the popularity of the faith among his troops, also patronized it and gave it support and on his deathbed converted to it. With imperial support, the official Church slowly came to be established, and Christianity became the dominant religion in the empire and nearby regions in the final century of the Western Empire. Christianity's spread happened entirely thanks to the Pax Romana, and the development of urban life across the Empire. It's rise to prominence was an urban phenomenon. When it attained hegemony, it called for the end to all other polytheistic beliefs it gave the name "pagan" which means countryside, or rural areas, where beliefs in classical Hellenism or polytheism continued for a longer time. A sign of the geographical and cultural divides. The conversion of Pagan Rome to Christian Rome wasn't done through a single co-ordinated violent campaign, even if there were indeed incidents featuring violent acts committed by Christian mobs to destroy pagan temples and buildings. Most of the conversion happened willingly. From below, among the lower classes, it occured through cultural shifts. From above, it used the systems of patronage where elite conversion was followed and mimicked by conversion across client-patronage networks to better connect with the new ideas and beliefs of the incoming Emperor. The Roman Empire upon converting to Christianity still remained Roman. Slavery continued undisturbed, and newly converted Christian aristocrats created the latinfundia system of tying peasant laborers to the land, setting the stage for the feudal system. Such facts completely overturn the sentimental idea of Christian conversion being any kind of lower-class movement on one hand, or being in any sense Non-Roman or culturally apart from the Empire, on the other hand. Even after the end of the Western Empire, slavery continued in Christian Europe well into 1066 in Western Europe, chronologically a greater period of time than the entirety of the United Roman Empire. In Central and Eastern Europe in the Eastern Roman Empire, slavery persisted even longer than in the West. Many Popes, such as Pope Gregory 'the Great' are documented to have owned over 100 slaves.

Nonetheless Christianity was revolutionary in its social and intellectual transformation, and more crucially developed an alternate notion of social identity outside of Romanitas (Roman-ness or Romanity in this specific context). The Romans distinguished between barbarians and Romans, and Roman identity superseded religious identity. To a Roman, a Roman Pagan and a Roman Christian were superior to a Barbarian Pagan and a Barbarian Christian. The Christian ethos though insisted that all Christians were Christians, be they Judean refugees and survivors, Armenians (chronologically the first kingdom to convert to Christianity), Ethiopia (which became Christian before Rome), the Romans and for that matter, even the Germanic tribesman who converted to Christianity. When King Alaric led the Goths to sack Rome kin 410 AD, he was swayed by the Christian officials in the city to go lightly on Christian buildings and relics, an appeal that swayed the King. The fact that a Christian minister had to negotiate with the barbarian King was itself a sign of institutional shifts away from Rome to an alternative modus vivendi, heralding, in retrospect, the transformation of Western Rome to Medieval Europe, where many post-Roman Kingdoms gained legitimacy from the Church for their power and political office. Identifying as a Christian became an alternative to identifying as a citizen of Rome, and that also meant that one could be a Christian and not be a Roman, and it wasn't long before people in the West adjusted to the idea of living outside and without Rome. This is not to say of course that Edward Gibbon scapegoating Christianity for causing the decline of the Empire is in way valid of course. Rather it posed a challenge and counter to Rome, ready to step in and fill in a vacuum, once the edifice cracked.

The western part of the empire, including Rome itself, fell apart in the late 400s. The eastern half survived until 1453, but lost much of its territory during the 600s and remained a contained, regional power after that time. Germanic tribes continued moving into and interacting with the empire during the 400's. Rome had incorporated outsiders throughout its history, but for various reasons these more recent groups were not integrated as well. One such conflict would lead to a famous sack of Rome by Goths in 410, the first time the city had been sacked by outsiders in about 800 years. Other groups were more integrated into the empire. Whole groups migrated into the empire under their own leaders and settled into a region, supplying soldiers in return for land. A driving force force for these migrations was a steppe nomad (think Turks, Mongols, and such) group called Huns (Not the same, but related to, what Mulan calls Huns). Under the famous Attila the Hun, they managed to take over large portions of northern Europe, and raided and threatened the empire a number of times. Atilla was paid off a few times, but after several raids an army chose to fight the Huns, winning the resulting battle in 451. The Huns would have continued further raids, but Atilla died shortly after and their empire broke up.

The destruction resulting from Hun movements had forced many northern European groups to move, many moving into the empire for protection, or to find new land. One such group, the Vandals, came into conflict similar to the Goths a few decades before, and sacked Rome for a second time shortly after the battle against the Huns. (This is where the modern meaning of Vandal comes from.)

In the battle against the Huns, Romans hadn't fought as a unified army, or as cluster of specific types of soldiers as they had in the past. Instead, large portions of the army fought separately as Celts, Goths, and other separate groups, part of the battle plan was to avoid political disputes and keep control of everyone. During internal turmoil in the Western Empire, these groups started becoming independent, taking over what had been Roman territory. Britain had been abandoned around 410, Franks and some goths, among others, settled in what is now France and Spain, Vandals after sacking Rome set up a kingdom in Western North Africa. Western emperors fought back with varying levels of success. However, the combination of loss of income from territory losses, political instability, and some poor quality emperors led to a trend of territory lost to Germanic tribes. The Eastern empire fared better, not losing any territory, but it could offer little help to the other half.

Rome's fall is conventionally dated to 476, when a chieftain named Odoacer overthrew the Western emperor. Its quite likely Odoacer wanted to be thought of as the new emperor, seeing his action as a coup rather then the end of an empire, he even sought recognition from the Eastern Empire. However, this recognition didn't come. A gothic kingdom was established instead in Italy. A rival Gothic chieftain Theodoric overthrew Odoacer in 493 with the permission of the Eastern Emperor Zeno, and while he also was not formally recognized, he was effectively the Western Roman Emperor in all but name.^note Theodoric never directly laid claim to the title, but he requested and received the return of the Western Imperial regalia that had been sent to Constantinople for safekeeping after the death of the last official Western Emperor. And the Roman Senate accorded him the normally-imperial title of princeps, essentially recognizing him as a subordinate co-emperor to Zeno. After this event, the Eastern empire fought directly with successor kingdoms, in the 500's under an emperor called Justinian, the Eastern empire reconquered much of the coastal Mediterranean. However, these conquests were costly,^note And also accelerated the loss of Roman identity in the West. After all, these were people who had considered themselves to be loyal Romans, and yet they were being invaded by the Roman Empire at the orders of the Roman Emperor. and some were lost after Justinian's reign. In the early 600s, after a major war with the Sassanian Persians exhausted both the Eastern Romans and the Persians, the newly risen Arab Empire conquered much of the Levantine and North African territory of the Eastern Empire. The rise of Islam in the Arab Lands, and the Arab Empire that followed in its wake, marks an end-point for Antiquity and the beginning of the Middle Ages or Medieval Era. The Eastern Empire had several periods of weakness and recovery, but stayed in what is now Greece, Turkey, and the Southern Balkans until conquered in 1453. It came to be known as the Byzantine Empire though it regarded itself as Roman, said identity was disputed and contested by the Catholic Church and the Kingdoms of the West.

The Fall of the Roman Empire has been a parlor game for intellectuals, historians, and artists for a greater length of time than the Roman Empire was actually around. Indeed, as Adrian Goldsworthy noted, the most famous fact about the Romans was that they fell. The "Fall of the Romans" is generally treated with a special level of seriousness that is rarely extended to say, the Fall of the Macedonians, the Athenians, the Persians, and Egyptians, or any other great kingdom and empire that followed. Those other states are discussed neutrally, with the belief that their fall was somewhat understandable and in some cases necessary. While the Fall of Rome is seen as neither necessary nor deserved by comparison. It's often discussed as something akin to an apocalyptic event or even a 'civilization collapse' on par with the Bronze Age Collapse. The idea of history that prevailed in the 19th Century was that of a halcyon Roman Empire, followed by the Dark Ages, followed by the Renaissance, Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, which finally allowed Europe to catch up and exceed to where they would have been had the Romans still been around. Partly it's because the Roman Empire's decline lacked any of the narrative grandeur of a Last Stand, Final Battle, or conquest by a superior force. It collapsed with a "whimper" and not with a "bang". The academic reasons for its collapse: institutional inertia, fractures into multiple economically unequal halves and sections (with Western Rome being poorer and more backward than Eastern Rome by the end), social disintegration of relations between Latins and Gothic mercenaries, just don't provide any satisfying lessons or reasons. There were neither great heroes nor great villains at the end of the Empire, as compared to the great number of larger-than-life figures that existed at the period of its beginning and its expansion.

Trying to explain the Fall of the Roman Empire to make it fit some kind of easy lesson for posterity is likewise quite difficult. Earlier interpretations tell a story of a decadent, rotten empire that was destined to fall apart, even if said destiny took about 400 years to get there, a prediction more akin to a stopped clock being right once every day. Later historians have provided a few more possible explanations. Climate change is a plausible contributor. The time of the Pax Romana was a more welcoming time, and this led to a wealthier and higher population that could sustain an empire for a longer time. Institutional problems may simply have built up over time, as coups and civil wars show. Rome had efficiently incorporated outsiders throughout its history, but became less effective at doing so by the end. Immediate successor kingdoms to the Western empire tried to maintain Roman institutions, but lacked the size and resources to do so. These kingdoms were forced to leave a lot of administration to prominent local families, which eventually led to the feudal system Medieval Europe is known for. Still others resist such explanations and argue that the message of the Fall of Rome is simply that no society or culture is forever safe or built to last, even if they achieve total mastery over their immediate enemies as the Romans did. The Roman unity of Europe arguably led to stagnation in social values and thinking, rather than engaging with newer forms of thinking, and newer ideas and values. Italy in the far greater and longer-lasting period of disintegrated city states provided more regional and cultural dynamism than the final centuries of the Empire, with many tiny settlements in the Roman era becoming large major European powers like the City of Florence and the City of Venice.

More recent historians in the 21st Century have actually disputed the notion of a Fall, or at the very least a fall on the Scale of a 'civilizational collapse' remotely like the Bronze Age Collapse (where entire languages, writing systems, and civilizations disappeared from the record). Partly this is because of a resurgence in scholarship in the Middle Ages. The old idea of the medieval period as a 'dark ages' has been conclusively demolished academically. The Late Roman era, dubbed Late Antiquity by Peter Brown, is now seen as a time of cultural flourishing that developed many institutions that continued into the Middle Ages, such as the early feudal system of serfs tied to latifundia and local lords. Others insist that 'The Fall' is a concept that had no currency in the period in question. Nobody saw Odoacer deposing Romulus Augustulus as the 'Fall of Rome' at that time, least of all the Romans. It was a non-event that lacked any gravitas and was only recorded as 'The Fall' decades after the fact, by Eastern Romans who refused to grant the Goths any legitimacy. Still others take this further and argue, that given the influence of the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Churches, and even the Ottoman Empire that claimed the title Kayser-i-Rum, on the Kingdoms and Empires of England, France, Germany, and Turkey, one could argue that a Roman Empire existed in some form until World War I and so Rome never really fell to start with. Others reject this as an extreme revisionism (polite framing) and post-modern mumbo jumbo (less than polite framing).

Adrian Goldsworthy in Why Rome Fell pushed back against this trend, by insisting that the Fall of Western Rome was in fact the Fall of Rome. While he agreed that there was indeed a slow and gradual tradition from the world of Antiquity to the Medieval Era rather than a major collapse (which today is completely demolished academically), Goldsworthy pointed out that both the post-Roman remnant of the Byzantine Empire, and the Kingdoms of the Middle Ages were economically weaker than the unified Roman Empire with the two halves. The collapse of the Crisis plunged Western Europe into a kind of backwardness that it slowly and gradually broke out of during the Middle Ages and then definitely in the Early Modern Era, while the Eastern Roman Empire largely became a regional power in Eastern Europe. It claimed more wealth, power, and stability than many of the states surrounding it, but after Justinian, it was never able to extend itself remotely close to its ambitions and claims and was mostly in a state of permanent siege until the Fourth Crusade ended its regional supremacy, and then the Ottomans ended it altogether in 1453.

Depending on the estimate and on how broad one chooses to make a start or an end, Rome as "civilization" can be said to have lasted from the founding of Rome to the Fall of Constantinople, a span of 2200 years. The traditional understanding of the Fall of Rome, i.e. the Fall of Western Rome, marks it to about 1000 years, making it one of the longest lasting polities in recorded history. In a more narrow view of course, one can point out that Rome existed as a city-state Republic for a much shorter period, ending with the Punic Wars (after which it gained imperium over the Mediterranean), and then ended as a Republic altogether some 150 years after the last Punic War. Its status as a Classical Polytheistic/Pagan society ended about three hundred years later, and then later it stopped housing its capital as Rome in its final century, shifting to Milan/Mediolanum in Italy for the West, and Constantinople overall for the Empire, which became a much larger and richer city by the end. Even in the case of the Byzantine Empire, it more or less ended with the Fourth Crusade of 1202, an event it never recovered from. It spent the remaining final 250-odd years as a Vestigial Empire that was put out of its misery by the Ottomans, albeit with a more spectacular Last Stand than the end of Western Rome.

Even after the empire fell apart, various successors claimed to be heirs of Rome, most importantly the Ottomans, Holy Roman empire, and Russian Czars. The names "Emperor" and "Empire" were imported into the Romance and Germanic languages and applied by means of translations to realms outside the Empire. In European languages, words like "Czar," "Kaiser," "Prince" and similar words for ruler come from Caesar and the title of Principe used originally by Augustus to mean First Citizen, and later appropriated to mean "Son of King" or member of "Royal Family".Most of Western Europe was a collection of small tribal areas and chiefdoms before Roman conquest. Latin itself remained the language of the church and the educated classes (Ominous Latin Chanting comes from here), and was a spoken language until the late Medieval era during which time it developed and modified like all languages until the Renaissance backlash for Classical Latin over Medieval Latin, ended its history as a "living language". Thereafter Latin became an 'intellectual language' prominently featured as a source for nomenclature in science and law. Meanwhile, the Romance languages had already diverged into early forms of what we now call Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Romanian (along with a few others) centuries earlier, though it took a while for those people to admit they were no longer speaking a local dialect of Latin.

Numerous moderns cities, most famously London and Paris, started as Roman settlements, and the Roman Empire is often seen as a precursor to the European Union, a common pool of heritage for Western Civilization and European greatness. Modern views have pushed back on this idea, with many noting that the later history of Europe was prominently shaped and guided by nations in Northern Europe (the Scandinavian Nations) and Russia, which were never conquered by the Romans. Even in the UK, the Romans never conquered Scotland and Ireland, and both states played a major part in European history. Likewise, the Roman Empire was as much a North African, and a Middle Eastern Empire, as it was an European Empire. Some of the best preserved ruins of Roman civilizations, such as Tipaza in Algeria or Balbec in Lebanon, are outside Europe and certainly the most decisive cultural revolution of the Roman era, the birth of Christianity was an outgrowth from the East to the West rather than the other way around. Roman Emperors were a wide-ethnicity but most of them were either Mediterranean (mostly Roman/Italian, Hispanic, Arab, Berber) and Adriatic/Dalmatian (Emperors of Slavic Descent such as in the Late Crisis period), rather than Western European (there is no British, French or Germanic Emperor, though Berber/Slavic/Latin soldiers stationed in those provinces became Emperors), a signal that Western Europe was fairly marginal from the center of power in an Empire that it now came to venerate as their precursor.

Internationally, Rome's greatest trading partner was actually India, or specifically cities and states on the South-West Coast of India. Where Alexander the Great reached India within his short lifetime, the Romans never expanded as far, with the Parthians and Sassanians serving in-effect as bouncers who defended China and India (and of course themselves) from Roman encroachment. Roman shipbuilding, and the coast-hugging travel of antiquity, prevented the kind of naval deployments and settlements that made colonialism in the Age of Sail a possibility. Economically, China and the various Kingdoms of India were perhaps more prosperous than Rome. As great as Rome was inside Europe, it was perhaps not quite as dominant in global trade as Europe would later come to be during the Age of Colonialism.

Though Rome at first persecuted Christianity, and Crucifixion was a Roman punishment, Roman trade networks and peace helped the religion spread and proselytize. Once the emperors converted, it gained official backing and today almost all adherents of the religion today follow a type that originates from official Roman churches (Catholic and Eastern Orthodox are direct descendants of the Roman church, split in 1054, protestant religions are an offshoot of Catholic Christianity). Only the Ethiopian Church, the Armenian Christians, the Santhome Christians of South India, and some other small groups around the Middle East have a different history. It's often common among historians to argue that the Catholic Church could be considered the main inheritor and successor to the empire itself, with its leader in Rome exerting influence over similar territory while using Latin. Roman architecture is its most visible legacy: The Colosseum, the Roads, the Aqueducts, the Pantheon, the ruins of Pompeii, and the many other villas and temples across Europe, Africa, and Middle East have outlasted the Empire that built it and stand today as the embodiment of a lost world. These structures could be built thanks to a strong central government to organize needed resources and good solid building techniques, including the use of concrete, the use of which would be forgotten until new kinds were created in the industrial period. Roman roads and settlement patterns influenced where cities were built, which have lasted to this day.

While Rome was unusually successful, prosperous, and long lasting, this has often been exaggerated by people living after, particularly in Europe. Medieval Europe wasn't as unified politically, but a few centuries after Rome's fall was likely about as productive and technologically advanced as Rome had been, the exact time this happened depends what you look at. Christianity would expand further after the empire fell, and new civilizations arose that reached areas beyond Rome. Vikings would sail farther, and make inroads into Ireland and Russia, and likewise be the first Europeans to reach the North Atlantic Coast of the future landmass of North America, specifically Newfoundland in Canada. Furthermore innovations in the Arab World, who conquered and settled in Spain, likewise started a scientific revolution that among other things introduced numbers from India, as well as technological advances such as the watermill and the astrolabe. More importantly, by the late Middle Ages, you had the beginning of the end of slavery in Europe. While it continued for centuries after the fall of Rome, and in some places a millennium later, slavery of Europeans by Europeans, and Christians by Christians ended first in France, and then slowly in England after the Norman Conquest. Slavery continued in Eastern Europe in the Byzantine Empire, then the Ottoman Empire, and in Renaissance Italy for much longer, but eventually was phased out there.

The city of Rome itself shrunk a lot after the end of the Western Empire. Successor kingdoms such as the Eastern Romans, Lombards, Franks, and others fought over the city, further depopulating it. Though the Catholic church was based there, it shrunk to about 25,000 people at one point, with city dwellers living in houses built amongst and often upon the ruins. The original purposes of many such ruins were forgotten. Rome wouldn't revive until the Renaissance, where after playing catch-up to new cities like Florence and Venice which became major players in Europe, it revived under Pope Alexander VI (a.k.a. the Borgia Pope) and then Pope Julius II (who sponsored Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel). It would become a major cultural and scientific center, and like all of Italy, what it lost in political and military power, it would renew with gusto in the realm of culture and knowledge.

The empire was rife with symbolism and iconography that has truly stood the test of time. Unfortunately, some are virtually never used because, almost without exception, Fascists such as Mussolini or Hitler co-opted them, tainting them perhaps beyond redemption. Roman symbols include:

• Eagles in general, coming with several distinct flavors — As they are associated with Jupiter/Zeus and are a symbol of strength. Their status as "King of the Birds", combined with the special Roman relationship with birds in general (avian activity was the primary form of state omen-reading), gave them particular importance to the Romans.
  • The Aquila — An eagle with wings outstretched, a rallying standard for the armies. Also found on a great deal of stonework and on heraldry of everything from the Egyptian Air Force to the modern US.
  • The double-headed eagle — Dating to the splitting of the empire, though the symbol is much older. It went on to become one of the most popular symbols of imperial or royal power in both West and East. Ironically, this one was going out of fashion in the West even before Fascism rose and finished just around the time of Mussolini's emergence, in large part for the same reason: World War One saw the collapse of most of Eurasia's Neo-Absolutist monarchies, including two of the last remaining major users of them in Tsarist Russia and the Habsburg Dynasty in the form of the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy (the latter of whom had been on a punctuated decline since the Thirty Years' War and saw their German primacy overtaken by single-headed-eagle Prussia). It did see a resurgence in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union, returning as a national icon.
• The laurels and S.P.Q.R. — As seen at the top of the page, it stands for Senatus Populusque Romanus, the Senate and People of Rome. Still used as the municipal logo by the modern city of Rome.
• The fasces — An axe, handle thrust through a bundle of reeds or sticks, the fasces was a symbol of authority. Originally a republican symbol of strength in unity (one reed or stick breaks, a bundle doesn't). It was resurrected by the fascists, specifically Benito Mussolini. So not everything was ruined by Hitler.
  • Not even Mussolini could ruin this one: the French and American republics, which intentionally attempted to recall Rome, used the fasces in their symbolism long before Mussolini. The French Fifth Republic still uses the fasces with an axe in its semi-official emblem,👁 Image
    and the fasces are still found in many American symbols: the Seal of the Senate👁 Image
    has crossed fasces with axes, the flag👁 Image
    of the Borough of Brooklyn, while the Mace of the House👁 Image
    and the armrests in the Lincoln Memorial👁 Image
    are axeless fasces.
    • The fasces is also found in the symbol for the Swedish police👁 Image
      ◊ and related agencies, as well as in many other nations.
• The swastika — The symbol most indelibly associated with the Nazis (in the West), it is very ancient, going back to the neolithic, and global, having been found throughout Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas, and it was occasionally used in Roman artwork. It is related to the sun, as are most cross symbols. Outside of the Nazi co-opting of the symbol, the swastika is now (as it has always been in these regions) most associated with Buddhism and is commonly seen in and around Buddhist temples across Asia, from India to Japan.
• Roman Salute — Likely a Dead Unicorn Trope as there is little evidence that actual Romans actually saluted each other by raising their right hands above their heads, palm facing downward, but the image was associated with Roman Republicanism (via paintings by J-L David, among others) and became popularized during the French Revolution and thereafter (like many things Roman or supposedly so) by modern imitators who thought the Romans did it. It was adopted by many Americans (as Bellamy Salute), by Fascist Italy (the Roman Salute), Nazi Germany (the Nazi salute), and many other political movements, although, after World War 2, its popularity receded drastically for highly predictable reasons.
• The Cross and the Christogram: It is frequently forgotten that, after Constantine, the Roman Empire was more or less a Christian state and symbols of Christianity were increasingly incorporated into emblems of the state, such as military flags and coinage. Particularly important was the Chi-Rho christogram, with superimposed Greek letters chi and rho, the first two letters of Greek word "Christos," i.e. Christ. Eusebius claims that this was the vision that Constantine saw before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, where he defeated his rival Maxentius for the imperial title, and supposedly convinced him to legalize Christianity. While other accounts differ on what exactly he saw, the Chi-Rho christogram was widely seen in both the last century of the Roman Empire in the West and for most of the Eastern Empire's history.

The Crucifixion

Rome wasn't the only culture to perform crucifixions, but it is the most well known. The most famous person that this happened to was of course Jesus Christ, but it happened to quite a lot of other people too. Another well-known example would be Spartacus. Everyone in his army that was taken prisoner after finally being defeated (about 6,000 people) were crucified at the same time, spread over about 200 km of the Via Appia (the Appian Way). Kinda similar to Jesus, there are claims that Spartacus either escaped, survived, or had a son that survived.

In terms of sheer nastiness, little matches crucifixion in the capital punishment field. It was designed to be as painful and humiliating as possible. The Romans themselves considered it so barbaric that Roman citizens usually couldn't be sentenced to crucifixion.

To go into further detail about crucifixion: five- to-seven-inch-long nails were driven into the wrists and ankles. How the nails were driven in depended on the shape of the cross, which was I, T, X, Y or the traditional cross shape. Then ropes are tied, so the Romans can pull up the cross. The ropes cut into the skin as the cross is raised. Then the person is essentially left to die. Time passes and the person literally gets baked by the sun. Crows start to come and peck on the eyes on the hung, if that person had no family or friends to fend them off. The hung man must struggle with all of his might to get one tiny breath in, as his lungs are constricted. If he's lucky, he'll get a bitter tasting wine as a painkiller. In terms of waste removal, there was none. This further adds to the humiliation and infects any wounds below the waist. After that, there's not much left as the prisoner gets no food nor drink. Jesus lasted the good part of a day before passing on, but there are cases of men who lasted three days of this. It's also where we get the word "excruciating", literally "from the cross."

Quite where the nails went (or if they were even used) and what the person was supposed to die of are debated by historians (The Bible isn't too clear on the subject either, due to translation issues from the original Greek). The usual theory has been suffocation, but some experiments concluded otherwise- certainly exhaustion and dehydration would have occurred too. Jesus' seven traditional sayings on the cross i.e. "Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?" ("My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?" in Aramaic) would have been very hard, though not impossible, to get out in these circumstances. In order to speed things up, the legs of the condemned might be broken. How long it took to die varied widely and there are cases of people surviving due to a reprieve. Victims were crucified completely naked to add to the humiliation factor. Though it is perfectly understandable that religious art wouldn't depict it visually (especially given that it was done to disgrace the victims), there is no reason to believe Jesus was spared this token of humiliation. What's more you had to carry it there yourself and you were flogged with a rather nasty whip (with iron balls or sharpened sheep bones in) beforehand. There were cases of the flogging alone killing people. In fact as well as a punishment the flogging acted as a kind of mercy — the worse you were beaten before crucifixion, the sooner you would die on the cross.

This incidentally only makes Christianity's ultimate triumph as the faith of the Empire more remarkable. To the educated elite, Jesus' shameful death would have disqualified him as a source of divine wisdom. Crucifixion was not a "noble suicide" like Socrates. To the eyes of Rome a man who was crucified was an outlaw, the lowest scum of the earth, and a cult seemingly glorifying such a death was regarded with a mixture of fear and utter bewilderment. For this reason in the early centuries many Romans considered Christianity highly perverse, and deprecated it as a religion for slaves, criminals, and antisocial deviants.

The common image of Rome, with its large entertainment structures, high population, grain distribution, aqueducts and other public buildings, is from imperial times, and was funded by money coming in for conquered provinces. For most of the republican period, Rome did not have so many provinces conquered, and Italian conquests paid no taxes, sending troops instead, so Rome wasn't nearly as built up or populated. It would have been a well populated city, but not out of the range of other Italian, Phoenician, or Greek city states. Structures included temples, some simple entertainment areas, and gathering places like the forum. In most city states, these were built from taxes on city dwellers, loot from conquests, or rich people paying for them as a required contribution to the community, or to boost their reputation, Rome was no different. As time went on, and Rome conquered more territory, the city would grow and come to resemble the pop culture image we know, though many of its iconic buildings come from imperial times. The famous Roman Roads really did lead to Rome. The purpose was to make army movement faster, very useful in the mountainous areas of Italy, and Rome took their construction elsewhere after conquering territory outside of Italy. Overseas trade was originally a mix of merchants from different regions: Phoenicians and Greeks were the most well known seafarers but others could be involved.

Gladiator Games as it happens were not popular entertainment at the time, instead restricted to funerals. Julius Caesar would help make these more popular, by putting on mass games in honor of his father, who had been dead for a few decades. Later in imperial times they would take the form we are familiar with. The Gladiator Games were not as was commonly imagined, a 'red meat' spectacle for the masses, or an exploitative event catering to the prurient desires of the idiotic masses (i.e. the "Are you not entertained?" bit from Gladiator). It was in fact a fairly solemn and somber event, approached with the gravity of say, an Olympic sport. What really got the public pumped up were chariot races. To the Roman Public, the hippodrome at the Circus Maximus (Latin for "largest circle") was where it was at. The Circus Maximus at its height could house 100,000 people, comparable to large size modern stadiums, far exceeding the Colosseum. Furthermore, it was open to lower classes and even women, whereas the Gladiator Games were largely somber and exclusive affairs by comparison. The chariot races of the hippodrome would invite betting, touting, fixing, and the kind of fan rivalry that would revive itself in the sports fandoms of the 20th Century commercial sport. Because of the fortunes of history, it was the Colosseum that was better preserved while the hippodrome left behind nought but an empty field that barely conveys the dimensions of the structure that once stood in its place. Chariot racing fandom would of course be a bigger deal in the Byzantine Empire (during the Nika Riots).

Roman religion was similar to other polytheistic religions in the area. You probably know the names of some major gods from planets: Mars the war god, Venus the beauty and sex god, Jupiter the ruling god. Astronomers in the 1500s and after were familiar with Greek and Roman myths, and continued this naming pattern, including the bodies Neptune (Sea god), Vesta (Home and hearth), and Ceres (farming) among others. Often forgotten or de-emphasized in modern times, most polytheistic religions have an array of less powerful gods, household spirits, and other supernatural creatures to worship, Rome had these as well. Romans also consulted books of prophecies, i.e. the Sibylline Books, to consult in times of crisis. Historians of Rome describe a lot of divination performed before making major decisions, auguries (fortune telling based on flights of birds) were used before most major political decisions. Responding to a bad omen, or finding clever ways to interpret a seeming bad omen as just fine, show up a lot. Romans also incorporated belief systems from neighboring places. The worship of the goddess Cybele, whose priests castrated themselves, was prominent enough to merit a Temple on the Capitoline Hill. Later they incorporated Egyptian gods into the local pantheon. Later there was Mithras, and Manichaeanism and Sol Invictus. Eventually, one minor Judean offshoot called Christianity became the leading religion of the Empire in its final century.

Often, Greek and Roman religion is described as the same thing just with different names: this is an example of Ancient Grome and isn't really accurate. Polytheistic religions at the time would borrow gods and rituals from each other, and would recognize similarities between gods of similar things, sometimes seeing them as different facets/versions of the same being, Romans did this with some Greek gods. However, the myths, rituals, core of the religion were as different from each other as most nearby ancient religions were. Still, the Roman mythology did not appear to center on distinct narrative material as the Greeks did, and to the extent any such narratives existed they have not survived, nor valued by the Romans enough to separate them from Greek Mythology.

The experience in conquered territory depends on where one was. In core Italian areas, you would be a citizen of your own city, which likely had broadly similar institutions to Rome with somewhat less time spent in the military. You would also have varying levels of citizenship in Rome, which might include being under the same laws, having the ability to do business using Roman law, get married to a Roman citizen and have citizen children, participate somewhat in Roman politics, etc. The exact conditions depended on the relationship Rome chose with your city. After the Social War, all Italians were Roman citizens with all that implied. After Caracalla, everyone inside the Empire became a citizen. Provinces outside Italy were controlled by governors, most likely people lived mostly under whatever local rule was familiar, but at higher levels governance would be adjusted by Rome to suit its needs. You would have to send some sort of taxes or tribute, which might be collected by tax farmers, who had a bad reputation. This system persisted in the Empire. Despite the image of the Emperor as an all-powerful dictator, in practical terms the governors of Roman states had a great deal of autonomy. They were subject to imperial review and investigations of course but the fact is that the Emperor could not see or hear everything that happened in the provinces and wouldn't intervene until a problem arose that required the Emperor to handle. The famous example of Queen Boudica's revolt is one instance of a corrupt governor creating the conditions of a revolt that was later resolved, after the crushing of the rebels of course, by the Emperor reforming the province and addressing the demands that led to the revolt breaking out. In many cases, Roman governors were highly valued for their government service and considered to be, for the most part, beyond reproach.

While credited as a forerunner to Modern Europe, Rome was as much a North African Empire and a West Asian/Middle-Eastern Empire. Ancient Rome was diverse, filled with communities from across the Mediterranean, drawn by trade and conquest. The Roman army was likewise quite diverse and there is evidence of black soldiers in the Roman Legions stationed in Roman Britain. In addition to that writers such as Apuleius and Lucian of Samosata, as well as the Roman Christian theological, Augustine of Hippo, were of Syriac Arab or Berber stock respectively. Roman Emperors such as the Severan dynasty were likewise Berber and Syriac, and another Emperor, Philip the Arab, was, well, an Arab.

Roman art reached its height of craftsmanship and beauty in the Roman era. Combining and drawing from influences from across the era. This includes beautiful mosaics that still survive today, with Hadrian's Villa in particular boasting a rich collection of mosaics. In addition there is the large amount of sculptures from the Roman era that has survived, many of them copies of Greek originals and indeed the richness of Greek sculpture is largely preserved thanks to Roman documentation and scholarship. Roman statues and Greek statues are now known to have been painted extensively. Not all of them of course, but several of them are documented to have had pigments, looking very similar to temple statues in Hindu temples, which well into 21st Century India are often painted in bright colors. Roman architecture includes masterpieces such as the Pantheon, which has one of the world's oldest survival concrete domes. Hadrian's Tomb, converted to the Papal Palace of Castel Sant'Angelo, was once the tallest building in Europe, several other old churches built on top of Mithras temples and Jupiter temples have likewise survived into the 21st Century.

• See Roman Emperors.

The works written in Latin and Greek during the Empire by a range of authors have long inspired later authors (in fiction and non-fiction about the era) and serve as both primary sources as well as excellently readable works for edification.

• The Aeneid by Virgil was the epic poem about the Empire, and more or less propaganda commissioned by Augustus himself to supplant Romus and Remulus, the popular founder of the Republican City-State with Aeneas, daughter of Venus, and do you know which Roman family at that time claimed descent from Aeneas and Venus (yep, Augustus' Julio-Claudian family). Much of the epic is Futureshadowing with Dido of Carthage representing an origin for the Punic Wars, as well as the Socii War, and likewise the career of Caesar.
• The Golden Ass by Apuleius is considered a precursor to the novel, though it's mostly a collection of stories spun around the picaresque misadventures of its unlucky hero who gets transformed into a donkey. Generally seen as one of the best glimpses of how the Roman provincial society was, as well as a truly amazing look at the cults and belief systems of the time. Its author Apuleius was in fact a Numidian born in what is now Algeria. Translated by Robert Graves who also used it as a source for his studies of classical myth.
• Heroides: A collection of epistolary love poems about fifteen Grecorroman mythological female characters who've been scorned, mistreated, neglected, or abandoned by their love interests (often, the heroes of the story
• Satires by Horace, Juvenal, and Lucian of Samosata are incredible glimpses of the morals, political, social, and religious life of the Empire. Bread and Circuses was coined by Juvenal to describe and criticize the Roman view of politics. Lucian of Samosata's satires espouse Epicureanism and mostly spend much time attacking and mocking all cults in the Roman era whether it's belief systems by charlatans like Alexander of Abonoteichus, old pagans who still pine for Zeus and of course Christians.
• The Satyricon credited to Petronius, is one of two novels from the Empire, and even in fragmentary form, it's admired for its resolute realism in showing the urban life of Rome as well as characters from the lower classes such as newly freed slave turned Nouveau Riche Trimalchio.
• The Twelve Caesars by Suetonius, which is seen as part history and part gossip, but is entertaining enough to be read for its own pleasure, with its style of writing greatly influencing the later genres of biography and fictional essays. Robert Graves, naturally, translated this (as well as The Golden Ass by Apuleius). It chronicles the famous Julio-Claudian dynasty but was written during the reign of its successors, so historiographically, it's a lot of fun to read.

• Greco-Roman mythology, as the name implies, is at least half Roman. Some of it is a reinterpretation of Greek mythology (and name-changing), but there's also a fair share of Roman additions (which tend to be lesser known than the Greek stuff).

• Thermae Romae, set in the reign of the emperor Hadrian (and in 21st century Japan).
• Highlander: The Search for Vengeance has the back story of Marcus being a general of Rome who while conquering England destroys the hero's village. Later on we see the sacking of Rome.
• Hetalia: Axis Powers has the character of Grandpa Rome, dressed as a Roman general.

• Alix is one of the two comic book series (the other being, of course, Asterix) translated to Latin. The sequel series Alix Senator is set in a now well-established Roman Empire.
• Aquila is set in a Historical Fantasy version of the Roman Empire during the reign of Nero.
• Asterix: The series is set in a kind of flat era between the Republic and the Empire but with several anachronistic elements, such as depicting Julius Caesar as an emperor, when he was in fact Dictator, or the Colosseum in Rome itself long before it was built.
• The Eagles of Rome
• Murena
• Nero Fox (the "Jive-Jumping Emperor of Ancient Rome"), a Golden Age DC Comics Funny Animal character who was emperor of ancient Rome.
• The Sandman: In issue #20, "August", an old Augustus spends an afternoon disguised as a beggar in the streets of Rome
• A recent Abrafaxe arc, which ran from Mosaik No. 459 to 482, is set during the reign of Emperor Trajan. The Abrafaxe have to help bring two Germanic children (the son and the daughter of two chiefs who want to have good relations with Rome) from the Rhine to Rome. Which brought them to Carthage, where they found a statue of Bella (the Abrafaxe's distaff counterparts, Anna, Bella and Caramella had passed through the place in an adventure in 25 B.C., during the reign of Augustus).

• Agora, takes place in Roman Egypt during the early fifth century during the reign of Theodosius I and shows the end of The Remnant of paganism.
• Adaptations of Ben-Hur — 1907, 1925, 1959 and 2016. The story takes place under the reign of Tiberius.
• Centurion, set among the Ninth Legion in Scotland, right when Hadrian pulled back.
• Cleopatra by Joseph L. Mankiewicz depicts the end of the Republic and the conquest of Egypt by Augustus after victory at the Battle of Actium.
• Demetrius and the Gladiators, sequel to The Robe.
• Anthony Mann's The Fall of the Roman Empire, which inspired Gladiator, likewise is set during the reign of Marcus Aurelius (played by Alec Guinness) and his son Commodus (played by Christopher Plummer). A lot closer to the historical record than its more famous epigone.
• Ridley Scott's Gladiator is set in the reigns of Marcus Aurelius and Commodus, but with much Artistic License – History.
  • Gladiator II is set a few decades later, under Emperors Caracalla and Geta.
• King Arthur is set in Britain during the barbarian invasions of the late Roman Empire and reinterprets King Arthur himself and the Knights of the Round Table respectively as a Roman Legion officer and Sarmatian riders under his orders.
• Monty Python's Life of Brian parodies the life of Jesus Christ in Roman Judea.
• The second segment of History of the World Part I, the Mel Brooks movie.
• The Last Legion, set during the last days of the Empire and the reign of Romulus Augustus, who the protagonists must smuggle to safety in Britain after he is overthrown, tying the last Roman emperor into Arthurian Legend.
• Fellini's Fellini Satyricon, loosely based on a work by the Ancient Roman author Petronius.
• Pompeii, about the Vesuvius eruption that obliterated the eponymous Roman city in 79 AD.
• Quo Vadis
• Risen
• The Robe (based on a novel by Lloyd C. Douglas)
• The Sign of the Cross, based on a play by Wilson Barrett

• Cambridge Latin Course, the UK's counterpart to Ecce Romani.
• The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1789) by Edward Gibbon was one of the most popular and influential histories of Rome, and one of the first to return itself to serious re-reading of primary sources from a secular perspective, and famous in its time for its controversial thesis that Christianity was the main cause for the titular decline and fall. Historians coming after Gibbon, from both a religious and secular perspective, have deprecated Gibbon's thesis, as well as his aristocratic biases and his contemptuous dismissal of the Byzantine Empire, but nonetheless its still a classic work for its literary value, its sardonic writing style and genuinely interesting ideas, that if nothing else gives a sense of the historiography of the Empire in the age of The Enlightenment.
• The Death of Virgil by Herrmann Broch is an experimental book that explores the final days of Virgil, him asking his friends to burn his work, his regret and guilt about serving a corrupt society and evil man, and even his final failure to resist Augustus. Written by the author in exile in America from Nazi Germany.
• Detectives in Togas (1953) by Henry Winterfeld, set in the reign of Emperor Tiberius.
• The Eagle of the Ninth (1954), The Mark of the Horse Lord (1965), Frontier Wolf (1980) and various other novels by Rosemary Sutcliff set in the Empire times in Britain.
• Ecce Romani, the Latin textbook. First published in 1971.
• Give Me Back My Legions! by Harry Turtledove is a straight historical novel of Quintillus Varus' doomed attempt to Romanize Germany during the reign of Augustus Caesar, ending with the massacre of the three legions under his command at Teutoburg Forest.
• Robert Graves was both a classicist and a novelist, writing historical fiction: I, Claudius, Claudius the God and King Jesus.
• Julian by Gore Vidal documents the life and adventures of Julian the Apostate, being one of the most well-researched works of historical fiction in the latter half of the 20th Century.
• The Last Days of Pompeii'' (1834) by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Adapted to film many times.
• The Silver Chalice (1952) by Thomas B. Costain. Made into an infamously bad movie in 1954.
• The Marcus Didius Falco series of detective novels. Started in 1989.
• Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar is a fictitious exploration of Emperor Hadrian, dealing with his fascination for all things Greek, his homosexuality, his crushing of the Bar Kochba revolt, and his exile of the Jews. Most of the novel is about how the Empire was stagnating, not building on the works of the past, and more or less living decadently contemplating works and ideas that were already classical to Hadrian.
• The Last Legion depicts the fall of the Western Empire in 476 AD. The protagonist and other soldiers of a destitute legion (the last, it seems) go on a suicide mission to save the deposed emperor Romulus Augustus and smuggle him to safety... in a war-torn continent.
• The Kingdom and the Crown
• Quo Vadis? (1896) by Henryk Sienkiewicz.
• The Roman Mysteries by Caroline Lawrence. Started in 2001.
• The Wolf Den Trilogy depicts the life of a sex worker in Pompeii shortly before the town is buried in the eruption of Vesuvius.
• In Sidewise In Time by Murray Leinster, one of the alternate realities intersecting with the main one is one where the Roman Empire never fell and controls America.
• My Story & spinoffs:
  • "Pompeii" by Sue Reid
  • "Roman Invasion" by Jim Eldridge
  • "Les cendres de Pompéi" ("The Ashes of Pompeii") and "Au temps des martyrs chrétiens" (At the Time of Christian Martyrs") from the French Mon histoire series

• I, Claudius, based on the novel by Robert Graves.
• The miniseries Masada about the siege of the titular fortress at the end of the Jewish Revolts under Vespasian.
• The Roman Mysteries: The TV adaptation of the book series.
• The Doctor Who episodes "The Romans", "The Fires of Pompeii" and "The Pandorica Opens".
• The BBC series of Horrible Histories has a 'Rotten Romans' segment every episode, sometimes focusing on Rome itself and other times on Roman Britain.
• The HBO/BBC series Rome is all about the founding days of the empire.
• Kaamelott, a medieval fantasy comedy series based off the Arthurian Legend, shows King Arthur's youth in Rome as Arturus in its final seasons (a number of sets of Rome were used, besides). There are also flashbacks to this era in The Movie, Kaamelott: First Installment.
• Chelmsford 123 is a Britcom about the Roman occupation of Britain.
• Plebs, an ITV sitcom set early in the reign of Augustus.
• Attila is a miniseries that depicts the Hunnic king's wars against Rome and his rivalry with Flavius Aetius.
• Britannia, about the Roman invasion of what is now Great Britain in the first century AD.
• Barbarians, about the rebellion of the Germanic tribes led by Arminius, culminating in the major defeat of the Roman Empire's forces at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD.
• Those About to Die, about Gladiator Games and intrigues under Vespasian.

• The New Testament was written entirely in the 1st-century Roman Empire and records the lives of people who lived in Rome, most notably Jesus who died by Rome's signature execution.
• The original context of the Arthurian legends were set in post-Roman Britain after the Western Roman Empire had left in 410 AD. This is often forgotten in most adaptations of the story, aside from a few exceptions.

• Mike Duncan's The History of Rome details the history of Rome from the legendary founding by Romulus to the deposition of Romulus Augustulus by Odoacer in 476. Even though Duncan is partial to the middle Republican period, the bulk of the work is spent on the Imperial period, in part because it is more complex and in part because more sources are available for a longer period of time.

• Augusta Universalis: Thanks to early alien contact, a technologically advanced Roman Empire controls Earth and by 2018 has established numerous colonies across the Solar System and beyond.
• Call of Cthulhu historical setting Cthulhu Invictus takes place in the first century AD.
• Broken Legions: The Roman Army is sending out detachments to find mythical artefacts in a secret war.
• Vampire: The Requiem: The Requiem for Rome/Fall of the Camarilla duology are set in a stylised fourth century Rome. Requiem for Rome is a setting book, with the default year being 360; Fall of the Camarilla is a campaign covering the period from 320 to 410.

• A few plays by William Shakespeare:
  • Cymbeline: Set in Britain, but during the reign of Emperor Augustus.
  • Titus Andronicus: Set in a fictional Late Roman era.
• A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum is a musical comedy inspired by the works of Plautus.

• Age of Empires I — Rise of Rome details Rome's transformation from Republic to Empire, and touches on the Fall. Also includes a Perspective Flip, Enemies of Rome, in which you play as Rome's enemies.
• Age of Empires II:
  • The Conquerors has a campaign on Attila the Hun and details his exploits against the late Roman Empire.
  • The Forgotten has a campaign of Aleric I, culminating in the Sack of Rome.
  • Return to Rome is essentially a remake of the first game, introducing the Roman Empire as a separate civilization (previously it was depicted by other civilizations such as the Byzantine Empire and Medieval Italy).
• Caesar
• Expeditions: Rome
• The Europa Universalis spin-off Europa Universalis: Rome.
• Imperator: Rome, the Spiritual Successor to the aforementioned Europa Universalis: Rome. Despite the name, it has a lot of focus on the Classical Antiquity in general, with the map stretching from Britain to India and Rome starts only controlling the area around the Latium.
• Rome: Total War
• Total War: Rome II
• Total War: Attila has the Empire split into the Western Roman Empire, and Eastern Roman Empire.
• Spartan: Total Warrior

• A Courtesan of Rome

• The Unbiased History of Rome, which for comedic purposes skews heavily pro-Roman.

• Roman City
• The Roman Holidays by Hanna-Barbera