The Roman Empire (began in 27 BCE)

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When Octavian succeeded in defeating Marc Antony, he removed the last obstacle to his own control of Rome’s vast territories.  While paying lip service to the idea that the Republic still survived, he in fact replaced the republican system with one in which a single sovereign ruled over the Roman state.  In doing so he founded the Roman Empire, a political entity that would survive for almost five centuries in the west and over a thousand years in the east.  

This system was called the Principate, rule by the “First.”  Likewise, although “Caesar” had originally simply been the family name of Julius Caesar’s line, “Caesar” came to be synonymous with the emperor himself by the end of the first century CE.  The Roman terms for rule would last into the twentieth century CE: the imperial titles of the rulers of both Russia and Germany – “Tsar” and “Kaiser” – meant “Caesar.”  In turn, the English word “emperor” derives from imperator, the title of a victorious Roman general in the field, which was adopted as yet another honorific by the Roman emperors.  The English word “prince” is another Romanism, from Princeps Civitatis, “First Citizen,” the term that Augustus invented for himself.  For the sake of clarity, this chapter will use the anglicized term “emperor” to refer to all of the leaders of the Roman imperial system.

The word emperor comes from the Latin imperare, meaning “to command.”

Augustus (ruled from 27 to 14 BCE)

The height of Roman power coincided with the first two hundred years of the Roman Empire, a period that was remembered as the Pax Romana: the Roman Peace.  It was possible during the period of the Roman Empire’s height, from about 1 CE to 200 CE, to travel from the Atlantic coast of Spain or Morocco all the way to Mesopotamia using good roads, speaking a common language, and enjoying official protection from banditry.  The Roman Empire was as rich, powerful, and glorious as any in history up to that point, but it also represented oppression and imperialism to slaves, poor commoners, and conquered peoples.

Octavian was unquestionably the architect of the Roman Empire.  Unlike his great-uncle, Julius Caesar, Octavian eliminated all political rivals and set up a permanent hereditary emperorship.  All the while, he claimed to be restoring not just peace and prosperity, but the Republic itself.  Since the term Rex (king) would have been odious to his fellow Romans, Augustus instead referred to himself as Princeps Civitatus, meaning “first citizen.”  He used the Senate to maintain a facade of republican rule, instructing senators on the actions they were to take; a good example is that the Senate “asked” him to remain consul for life, which he graciously accepted. 

By 23 BCE, he assumed the position of tribune for life, the position that allowed unlimited power in making or vetoing legislation.  All soldiers swore personal oaths of loyalty to him, and having conquered Egypt from his former ally Mark Antony, Augustus was worshiped there as the latest pharaoh. The Senate awarded Octavian the honorific Augustus: “illustrious” or “semi-divine.”  It is by that name, Augustus Caesar, that he is best remembered.

Augustus transformed the Senate and equestrian class into a real civil service to manage the enormous empire.  He eliminated tax farming and replaced it with taxation through salaried officials.  He instituted a regular messenger service.  His forces even attacked Ethiopia in retaliation for attacks on Egypt, and he received ambassadors from India and Scythia (present-day Ukraine).  In short, he supervised the consolidation of Roman power after the decades of civil war and struggle that preceded his takeover, and the large majority of Romans and Roman subjects alike were content with the demise of the Republic because of the improved stability Augustus’s reign represented. Only one major failure marred his rule: three legions (perhaps as many as 20,000 soldiers) were destroyed in a gigantic ambush in the forests of Germany in 9 CE, halting any attempt to expand Roman power past the Rhine and Danube rivers.  Despite that disaster, after Augustus’s death the senate voted to deify him: like his great-uncle Julius, he was now to be worshipped as a god.

The Imperial Dynasties

The period of the Pax Romana included three distinct dynasties:

1. The Julian dynasty: 14 – 68 CE – those emperors related (by blood or adoption) to Caesar’s line.
2. The Flavian dynasty: 69 – 96 CE – a father and his two sons who seized power after a brief civil war.
3. The “Five Good Emperors”: 96 – 180 CE – a “dynasty” of emperors who chose their successors, rather than power passing to their family members.

The Julian Dynasty (14 – 68 CE)

Jesus and the Beginnings of Christianity

Jesus was born around 4BCE in the reign of Augustus. Most Christians are familiar with the beginning of the Christmas story mentioned in the Bible that states:

“And it came to pass in those days that a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered.”

The major source of information on the life of Jesus are the four Gospels, accounts of his life and teachings composed after his death by three of his apostles (his closest followers and students), Matthew, Mark, and John, and another early Christian leader, Luke. The word gospel means “good news,” which is the message of forgiveness for sin through the atoning work of Jesus Christ. Christians believe it’s essentially God’s rescue plan of redemption for those who will trust in His divine Son (Jesus is believed to be God in human form and is referred to as “God’s son” by Christians) in order to be reconciled to a just and holy God. The essential content of this saving message is laid out in the Bible. (Note to secular families: This link goes to a Christian website and is not part of this curriculum.)

Jesus was crucified during the reign of Tiberius, who is also mentioned in the Bible when it talks about John the Baptist:

“Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip tetrarch of Iturea and the region of Trachonitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene, while Annas and Caiaphas were high priests, the word of God came to John the son of Zacharias in the wilderness.”

Tiberius is also mentioned by the tile of Caesar (instead of directly by name) when Pilate, an officer of the Roman Empire and governor of the Roman province of Judea, held a trial for Jesus:

“From then on Pilate sought to release Him, but the Jews cried out, saying, “If you let this Man go, you are not Caesar’s friend. Whoever makes himself a king speaks against Caesar.”

The Jewish Sanhedrin (their version of a supreme court and legislative body) had accused Jesus of blasphemy because he claimed to be the Messiah (among other things). After finding him guilty and deserving a death sentence, Jesus had to be brought to Pilate because only the Romans could impose the death penalty and the area Pilate governed encompassed Jerusalem (where Jesus was arrested by the Jews).

Jesus ended up being crucified. Crucifixion is a method of punishment or capital punishment in which the victim is tied or nailed to a large wooden beam and left to hang perhaps for several days, until eventual death from exhaustion and asphyxiation. It was used as a punishment by the Romans. According to the Bible, Jesus was resurrected from the dead, his sealed tomb was found opened and empty, and he appeared to hundreds of people before ascending back to heaven forty days later.

Jesus’s followers, led by the twelve apostles, began to teach his message to others, and the new religion of Christianity was born.  His followers began to refer to Jesus as “the Christ,” meaning “the anointed one” in Greek, a reference to the idea that Jesus was anointed to provide salvation for humanity.

The word Christ comes from the Greek word khristos meaning “the annointed” from the word khriein, meaning “to rub or annoint.”

In the Bible, anointing was used in the inauguration of Jewish kings.

Early Christians recognized no social distinctions, which was fundamentally at odds with the entire Roman system, reliant as it was on formal legal separations between social classes and a stark system of social hierarchy.  Likewise, one unequivocal requirement placed on Christians was to love their neighbors, meaning in practice showing kindness and compassion to others regardless of their social rank.  Few concepts could have been more alien to Roman sensibilities.

Christianity thus at least potentially threatened the hierarchical nature of Roman society.  Likewise, it inherited from Judaism a strict monotheism that refused to accept the worship of the Roman emperors.  What made it even more threatening than Judaism, however, was that Christianity actively sought out new converts (i.e. Christianity was inherently evangelical, in stark contrast to Judaism which did not seek new members). 

Tiberius was probably not aware of this new group of people, and even if he was, probably didn’t think much of them, as they were considered by Romans at first to just be another sect of Judaism (which was a legal religion). It wasn’t until the reign of Nero that Christians would be singled out for persecution, and Christianity would become illegal for 300 years.

Tiberius (ruled from 14 to 37 CE)

When Augustus died in 14 CE, his stepson Tiberius became emperor.  While it was possible that the Senate might have tried to reassert its power, there was no political will to do so.  Only idealistic or embittered senators really dreamed of restoring the Republic, and a coup would have been rejected by the vast majority of Roman citizens.  Under the Caesars, after all, the empire had never been more powerful or wealthy.  Genuine concessions had been made to the common people, especially soldiers, and the only people who really lost out in the short term were the old elite families of patricians, who no longer had political power independent of the emperor (although they certainly retained their wealth and status). 

Tiberius began his rule as a cautious leader who put on a show of only reluctantly following in Augustus’s footsteps as emperor.  He was a reasonably competent emperor for over a decade, delegating decisions to the Senate and ensuring that the empire remained secure and financially solvent.  In addition, he oversaw a momentous change to the priorities of the Roman state: the Roman Empire no longer embarked on a sustained campaign of expansion as it had done ever since the early decades of the Republic half a millennium earlier.  This does not appear to have been a conscious policy choice on the part of Tiberius, but instead a shift in priorities: the Senate was now staffed by land-owning elites who did not predicate their identities on warfare, and Tiberius himself saw little benefit in warring against Persia or invading Germany (he also feared that successful generals might threaten his power, at one point ordering one to call off a war in Germany).  The Roman Empire would continue to expand at times in the following centuries, but never to the degree or at the pace that it had under the Republic.

Tiberius eventually became embittered and suspicious, ordering the murders of various would-be claimants to his throne back in Rome, and sometimes ignoring affairs of state.  When he died, much to the relief of the Roman populace, great hopes were pinned on his heir.  

Gaius also known as Caligula (ruled from 37 to 41 CE)

That heir was Gaius, much better known as “Caligula,” literally meaning “little boots” but which translates best as “bootsie.”  As a boy of just two or three years old, Caligula accompanied his father, Germanicus, on campaigns in the north of Germania. While he did so he liked to dress up in miniature legionnaire combat boots; hence, he was affectionately dubbed “Bootsie” by the troops (one notable translation of the work of Suetonius by Robert Graves translates Caligula as “Bootikins” instead).  

Gaius, reportedly grew to dislike this nickname.

Caligae would have been cooler on the march than enclosed boots. In warm, Mediterranean climates, this may have been an advantage. In northern Britain’s cold, wet climate, additional woven socks or raw wool wadding in winter may have helped insulate the feet; but caligae seemed to have been abandoned there by the end of the second century AD, in favor of civilian-style “closed boots.”

Caligula was a disastrous emperor.  According to the biographers, Caligula quickly earned a reputation for cruelty and megalomania (an obsession with power at the domination of others). 

He was described by contemporaries as an insane emperor who was self-absorbed, short-tempered, killed on a whim, and indulged in too much spending. He was accused of sleeping with other men’s wives and bragging about it, killing for mere amusement, deliberately wasting money on his bridge, causing starvation, and wanting a statue of himself in the Temple of Jerusalem for his worship. Once, at some games at which he was presiding, he was said to have ordered his guards to throw an entire section of the audience into the arena during the intermission to be eaten by the wild beasts because there were no prisoners to be used, and he was bored. He also supposedly abused his sisters and turned the palace into a brothel.

Convinced of his own godhood, Caligula had the heads of statues of the gods removed and replaced with his own head.  He liked to appear in public dressed as various gods or goddesses; one of his high priests was his horse, Incitatus, whom he supposedly appointed as a Roman consul. He staged an invasion of northern Gaul of no tactical significance which culminated in a Triumph (military parade, traditionally one of the greatest demonstrations of power and glory of a victorious general) back in Rome.  

Much of the scandalous gossip about him, historically, is because he was unquestionably the enemy of the Senate, seeing potential traitors everywhere and inflicting waves of executions against former supporters.  He used trials for treason to enrich himself after squandering the treasury on buildings and public games.  He also made senators wait on him dressed as slaves, and demanded that he be addressed as “dominus et deus,” meaning “master and god.” 

The situation had escalated when, in 40, Caligula announced to the Senate that he planned to leave Rome permanently and to move to Alexandria in Egypt, where he hoped to be worshiped as a living god. The prospect of Rome losing its emperor and thus its political power was the final straw for many. Caligula was then assassinated by a group of senators.

The following video has mentions of sexual conduct and violence. Don’t watch it if little ones are around or if this type of content disturbs you.

Claudius (ruled from 41 to 54 CE)

The next emperor was Claudius, the one truly competent emperor of the Julian line after Augustus.  Claudius had survived palace intrigues because he walked with a limp and spoke with a pronounced stutter; he was widely considered to be a simpleton, whereas he was actually highly intelligent.  Once in power Claudius proved himself a competent and refreshingly sane emperor, ending the waves of terror Caligula had unleashed.  He went on to oversee the conquest of England, first begun by Julius Caesar decades earlier. He was also a scholar, mastering the Etruscan and Punic languages and writing histories of those two civilizations (the histories are now lost, unfortunately).  He restored the imperial treasury, depleted by Tiberius and Caligula, and maintained the Roman borders.

He also established a true bureaucracy to manage the vast empire and began the process of formally distinguishing between the personal wealth of the emperor and the official budget of the Roman state.

 According to Roman historians, Claudius was eventually betrayed and poisoned by his wife, who sought to have her son from another marriage become emperor.  That son was Nero.

Nero (ruled from 54 to 68 CE)

Nero was another Julian who acquired a terrible historical reputation; while he was fairly popular during his first few years as emperor, he eventually succumbed to a Caligula-like tendency of having elite Romans (including his domineering mother) killed.  In 64 CE, a huge fire nearly destroyed the city, which was largely built out of wood.  This led to the legend of Nero “playing his fiddle while Rome burned” – in fact, in the fire’s aftermath Nero had shelters built for the homeless and set about rebuilding the roughly half of the city that had been destroyed, using concrete buildings and grid-based streets. That said, he did use space cleared by the fire to begin the construction of a gigantic new palace in the middle of Rome called the “golden house,” into which he poured state revenues. 

Nero’s terrible reputation arose from the fact that he unquestionably hounded and persecuted elite Romans, using a law called the Maiestas that made it illegal to slander the emperor to extract huge amounts of money from senators and equestrians.  He also ordered imagined rivals and former advisors to kill themselves, probably out of mere jealousy.  Besides Roman elites, his other major target was the early Christian movement, whom he blamed for the fire in Rome and whom he relentlessly persecuted (thousands were killed in the gladiatorial arena, ripped apart by wild animals).  Thus, the two groups in the position to write Nero’s history – elite Romans and early Christians – had every reason to hate him.  In addition, Nero took great pride in being an actor and musician, two professions that were considered by Roman elites to be akin to prostitution.  His artistic indulgences were thus scandalous violations of elite sensibilities.  After completely losing the support of both the army and the Senate, Nero committed suicide in 68 CE.  

Another note on the sources: what the “bad” emperors of the Julian line (Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero) had in common is that they violated the old traditions of Romanitas, squandering wealth and glorifying themselves in various ways, thus inspiring hostility from many elite Romans.  Since it was other elite Romans (albeit many years later) who became their biographers, we in the present cannot help but have a skewed view of their conduct.  Historians have rehabilitated much of the rule of Tiberius and (to a lesser extent) Nero in particular, arguing that even if they were at loggerheads with the Senate at various times and probably did unfairly prosecute at least some senators, they did a decent job of running the empire as well.

Jewish Uprising (66 CE) and the Siege of Masada (73-74 CE)

In 66 CE there was a huge uprising against Rome. It took four years for imperial forces to crush the uprising, resulting in the greatest disaster in ancient Jewish history: the permanent destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in 70 CE. 

In the first century CE, Jewish society, especially its leadership, was divided between rival groups.  Some powerful priests, the Sadducees, claimed that all Jews should follow the 10 Commandments, but only the priests of the Temple needed to follow the 613 laws and injunctions laid down by Moses.  They were opposed by the Pharisees, who insisted that all Jews had to abide by all of the laws of Moses, and they also preached that a messiah – a savior – would soon come to bring about a day of judgment and bring about the fulfillment of the Biblical Covenant.  In the deserts outside the major cities, a group called the Essenes emphasized a life of asceticism and mysticism, while across Palestine anti-Roman revolutionaries known as the Zealots advocated for armed revolt against the Roman occupier.

The Roman territory of Palestine was a thorn in Rome’s side thanks to the unshakable opposition of the Jews. Palestine suffered from heavy taxation and deeply-felt resentment toward the Romans.  One key point of contention was that the Jews refused to pay lip service to the divinity of the emperors.  The Romans insisted that their subjects participate in symbolic rituals acknowledging the primacy of the emperors, but since the Jews were strict monotheists, they would not do so.  

The Jewish uprising that occurred against the Romans in 66 CE happened a generation after the death of Jesus. One of the last Jewish strongholds was a fortification called Masada at the edge of the Judaean Desert overlooking the Dead Sea. The siege by the Romans ended with the mass suicide of over 960 Jews belonging to a splinter group called the Sicarii (meaning “dagger-wielder”).

The Sicarii carried sicae, or small daggers, concealed in their cloaks. At public gatherings, they pulled out these daggers to attack Romans and Roman sympathizers alike, blending into the crowd after the deed to escape detection. To this day “sicario” is a salaried assassin in Spanish and a commissioned murderer in Italian and in Portuguese.

Masada was originally built by Herod the Great between 37 and 31 BCE as a refuge in case of revolt. The top is about 1800 ft (550 m) high.

In the aftermath of the uprising, the Romans enslaved or deported much of the Jewish population, which contributed to the phenomenon of the Jewish diaspora, the people without a homeland united only by the Hebrew Bible, the teaching of the rabbis, and Jewish cultural traditions. 

Another uprising decades later (between 132 – 136 CE) resulted in the almost complete dispersal of the Jews, to the point that the Jewish homeland was truly lost to them until the foundation of the modern state of Israel in 1948 CE.

The Flavian Dynasty (69 – 96 CE)

Vespasian (ruled from 69 to 79 CE)

In the aftermath of Nero’s death, a brief civil war broke out.  Four generals competed for the emperorship, supported by their armies.  In the end, a general named Vespasian seized power and founded a fairly short-lived dynasty consisting of himself and his two sons, known to history as the Flavians. The importance of Vespasian’s takeover was that it reinforced the idea that real power in Rome was no longer that of the old power-broking families, but instead the armies; Vespasian had no legal claim to the throne, but his emperorship was ratified by the Senate nevertheless.  The emperor’s major concern had to be maintaining the loyalty of the armies above all else, because they could and would openly fight to put their man on the throne in a time of crisis – this occurred numerous times in the centuries to come.

 Vespasian was one of the great emperors of the early empire.  He pulled state finances back from the terrible state they had been left in by Nero and restored the relationship between the emperor and the Roman elite; it certainly did not hurt his reputation that he was a successful general, one of the traditional sources of status among Roman leaders.  He was also renowned for his openness and his grounded outlook.  Reputably, he did not keep a guard and let people speak to him directly in public audiences.  In an act of classic Romanitas, he started work on the famous Colosseum (known at the time as the Flavian Amphitheater) in Rome in order to provide a grand setting for public games and performances.  All of this happened in just a decade; he died of natural causes in 79 CE.

Titus (ruled from 79-81 CE) and Domitian (ruled from 81 to 96 CE)

Vespasian’s older son Titus (r. 79 – 81 CE) had been groomed to follow his father and began as a promising and competent emperor.  Unfortunately, almost as soon as he took the throne a volcano in southern Italy, Mt. Vesuvius, erupted, followed shortly by another huge fire as well as an epidemic in Rome. Titus struggled to aid victims of all three disasters, but was then struck by fever and died in 81 CE.

Vespasian’s second son, Domitian (r. 81 – 96 CE), who was not “supposed” to take the throne, proved to be a terrible ruler.  He created an atmosphere of terror in elite Roman circles in an effort to watch out for potential rebels, murdering senators and elites he suspected.  He adopted a Caligula-like concern for glorifying himself. Domitian became increasingly paranoid and violent between 89 and 96 CE, until he was finally killed by assassins in the palace.

The “Five Good Emperors” and the Severans (98-235 CE)

Following the work of the great eighteenth-century English historian Edward Gibbon, historians frequently refer to the rulers of the Roman Empire who followed the death of Domitian as the “Five Good Emperors,” those who successfully managed the Empire at its height.  For almost a century, emperors appointed their own successors from the most competent members of the younger generation of Roman elites.  Not least because none of them (except the last, to disastrous consequences) had surviving direct heirs of their own, each emperor would adopt a younger man as his son, thereby ensuring his succession.  Rome prospered during this period under this relatively meritocratic system of political succession.   It was under one of these emperors, Trajan (who ruled from 98 to 117 CE), that the empire achieved its greatest territorial expanse.

One of the important aspects of the behavior of the “good emperors” is that they fit the model of a “philosopher-king” first described by Plato centuries earlier.  Even though monarchy had been repugnant to earlier Romans, during the period of the Republic, the good emperors tried to live and act according to traditional Roman Romanitas, undertaking actions not only for their own glorification but for the good of the Roman state.  The borders were maintained (or, as under Trajan, expanded), public works and infrastructure built, and infighting among elites kept to a minimum.  

Trajan’s accomplishments deserve special mention, not only because of his success in expanding the Empire, but in how he governed it.  He was a fastidious and straightforward administrator, focusing his considerable energies on the practical business of rule.  He personally responded to requests and correspondence, he instituted a program of inexpensive loans to farmers and used the interest to pay for food for poor children, and he worked closely and successfully with the Senate to maintain stability and imperial solvency.  The fact that personally led the legions on major military campaigns capped his reign in the military glory expected of an emperor following the rule of the Flavians, but he was remembered at least as well for his skill as a leader in peacetime.

The next two emperors, Hadrian and Antoninus Pius, did not win comparable military glory, but they did defend the borders (Hadrian gave up Trajan’s conquests in Mesopotamia to do so, recognizing that they were unsustainable), oversaw major building projects, and maintained Roman stability. 

This period of successful rule eventually broke down when the practice of choosing a competent follower ended – the emperor Marcus Aurelius, a brilliant leader and Stoic philosopher (161 – 180 CE) named his arrogant and foolish son Commodus (r. 177 – 192 CE) his co-emperor three years before Aurelius’s death.  Storm clouds had already been gathering under Aurelius, who found himself obliged to lead military campaigns against incursions of Germanic tribes in the north despite his own lack of a military background (or, really, temperament).  He had, however, been a scrupulously efficient and focused political leader. 

His decision to make Commodus his heir was due to a simple fact: Aurelius was the first of the Five Good Emperors to have a biological son who survived to adulthood.  As emperor, Commodus indulged his taste for debauchery and ignored affairs of state, finally being assassinated after twelve years of incompetence.

One last dynasty emerged in the aftermath of Commodus’s death, that of the Severans who ruled from 192 – 235 CE.  They faced growing threats on the Roman borders, as Germanic tribes staged repeated (and often at least temporarily successful) incursions to the north and a new Persian dynasty known as the Sasanians pressed against Roman territory to the east.  The last Severan emperor, Severus Alexander, died in 235 CE, ushering in a terrible period of military defeat and instability.

Beyond The Empire

As noted above, by the year 117 CE under Trajan the Empire reached its greatest size.  It encompassed most of England across to Germany and Romania, all of North Africa from present-day Morocco, and extended to the borders of the Persian Empire.  Beyond these borders were “barbarians” of various kinds; as far as the Romans were concerned there were no civilized people outside of their borders except the Persians.  Trajan’s successor, the emperor Hadrian, built an enormous series of fortifications to consolidate power on the frontiers – these were eventually (by the third century CE) known as the limes, permanent garrisons and fortresses that were meant to serve as barriers to prevent “barbarian” incursions.  Some of these survive to the present, including Hadrian’s Wall in northern England.  While fleets patrolled the rivers and oceans, these garrisons controlled access to the empire.

As far as the Romans were concerned, there were only two things beyond those borders: to the north and northeast, endless tracts of inhospitable land and semi-human barbarians like the Germanic tribes, and to the east, the only other civilization Rome was prepared to recognize: the Persians, ruled first by the Parthians and then the Sasanians.  For the rest of the Roman Imperial period, Rome and Persia periodically engaged in both raiding and full-scale warfare, with neither side proving capable of conclusively defeating the other.

Persia Under the Parthians (247 BCE to 224 CE)

Parthian history is difficult to establish because almost no sources survive besides Roman and Greek accounts of battle against the Parthians.  What is clear is that the Parthians deliberately built on the achievements of the earlier Achaemenid and Seleucid periods, adopting the title of king of kings, basing their empire (as of the 120s BCE) out of Ctesiphon, a city near Babylon in Mesopotamia, and ruling over a shifting confederation of both the settled peoples of Mesopotamia and Persia itself and of nomadic tribal confederations. 

Importantly, the Parthians were able to clinch control of major Silk Road trade routes, even receiving the first ever formal diplomatic contact with China in the West in the process, and thus had a solid economic foundation for their military and political control of the region.

Persia had long stood as the only adversary Rome was unable to defeat.  In a stark contrast to Roman tactics, Persia relied on cavalry instead of infantry, including both heavy, armored lancers and highly mobile mounted bowmen.  Persian forces refused to engage in hand combat with Roman soldiers whenever possible and simply rained arrows on them from horseback instead (using compound bows capable of penetrating Roman armor).  Probably the most notorious Roman defeat was that of the forces led by Crassus, Julius Caesar’s ally in the First Triumvirate.  In 53 BCE at a site known as Carrhae, the Persians slew 20,000 Roman troops, took 10,000 prisoners, and killed Crassus to boot.  That battle led to a grudging admiration on the part of the Romans, who were forced to acknowledge that they had finally met their match.

The closest Rome came to defeating the Persians was under Trajan when he managed to conquer Armenia and parts of Mesopotamia, but after his death Rome swiftly abandoned those territories.  Even as they fought, however, Persia and Rome still traded, and Rome also adopted various Persian technologies and military tactics (for example, Rome adopted irrigation techniques from Persia, and Persia adopted engineering techniques from Rome).  Out of necessity, Rome learned to add heavy cavalry units to its legions by the fourth century CE.

Little else is known about Persia during the Parthian period.  The Roman sources would have it that the power of the ruling dynasty was limited by both court intrigue and the frequency of invasions from the steppes (the usual problem for the settled dynasties of Mesopotamia and Persia going back to the very origins of civilization).  Both war and trade came and went between Rome and Persia, with the Euphrates River existing as the usual boundary between the two empires and the nearby kingdom of Armenia as a buffer state dominated by one power and then the other over time.  In 224 CE the last Parthian ruler was overthrown by Ardashir I, the leader of the Sasanian clan, and Persian history moved into a new phase under Sasanian rule.

Farther East and North

Far beyond Persia was the Chinese Empire, already thousands of years old.  China and Rome never established formal diplomatic ties, although the leaders of both empires knew of one another.  During the entire period of Roman Imperial power, only China could produce silk, which was highly coveted in Rome.  Shipments of silk moved along the aptly-named Silk Road across Central Asia, directly linking the two most powerful empires in the world at the time (via, as mentioned above, Persia, which derived huge profits in the process).    

In addition, a major navigational breakthrough occurred during the time of Augustus, when the Romans learned to navigate the Indian Ocean using the Monsoon winds to reach western India.  There, they could trade for Chinese silk at much better prices.  This journey was hugely risky, but if a Roman merchant could pull it off and return to Rome with a cargo hold full of silk, he would earn fully 100 times his investment as profit.  Along with spices (especially pepper), the trade for silk eventually drained enormous amounts of gold from Rome, something that added up to a serious economic liability over the hundreds of years of exchange.

The most important, and threatening, border for Rome was to its north, on the eastern and northern banks of the Rhine and Danube rivers.  The region the Romans called Germania was an enormous stretch of heavily forested land, which was cold, wet, and uninviting from the Roman perspective. 

In Latin, the name Germania means “lands where people called Germani live.”

The “Germans” were a hugely diverse group of tribes practicing feudal law, the system of law in which offenses were met with clan-based violent retribution or blood payments.  For hundreds of years there were complex relationships between various tribes and the Roman empire in which the Romans both fought with and, increasingly, hired German tribes to serve as mercenaries.  Eventually, some of the Germanic tribes were allowed to settle along the Roman borders in return for payments of tribute to Rome. The two major rivers, the Rhine and the Danube, were the key dividing lines to the north of Rome, with Roman legions manning permanent fortifications there.

  As far as the Romans were concerned, even if they were able to militarily they did not want to conquer German territory.  The Romans tended to regard the Germans as being semi-human at best, incapable of understanding true civilization.  Some Romans did admire their bravery and codes of honor – the same Tacitus who provides much of the information on the early emperors contrasted the supposed weakness and dissolution of his contemporary Romans with the rough virtue of the Germans.  That being noted, most Romans believed that the Celts, conquered by Caesar centuries earlier, were able to learn and assimilate to Roman culture, but the Germans, supposedly, were not.  Likewise, Germania was assumed to be too cold, too wet, and too infertile to support organized farming and settlement.  Thus, the role of the limes was to hold the Germans back rather than to stage new wars of conquest.  For about three hundred years, they did just that, until the borders started breaking down by the third century CE.

Roman Society

Rome itself was opulent during this period.  The city of Rome boasted eleven aqueducts, enormous structures that brought fresh water into the city from miles away.  The houses of the rich had indoor plumbing with drains that led to public sewers.  There were enormous libraries and temples, along with numerous public sites for recreation, including public baths, race tracks, and the famous Colosseum, used primarily for displays of lethal gladiatorial combat.

The empire as a whole enjoyed levels of commercial and agricultural productivity not seen again until the seventeenth century CE. Specialized craftsmen made high-quality goods to be sold on an empire-wide market, with better-off citizens enjoying access to quality tools, dishware, linens, and so on, much of which had been manufactured hundreds of miles away. 

While the long-term economic pattern was that the wealthier parts of society tended to become even richer at the expense of the common people, there was still a substantial “middle class” that enjoyed a relatively high standard of living.

We should note that, while the Romans are not famous as scientists, they are famous as architects and engineers.  The Romans used concrete extensively in building projects.  They mastered the art of building arches and domes to hold up ceilings without interior supports.  Using only gravity, they could transport water dozens of miles, not just in Rome but in other major cities across the Empire. 

Roman roads were so well-built that some survive to the present, now used by cars rather than the horse-drawn carts they were originally built for.

Each city built by the Romans in their conquered territory was laid out according to careful plans, with streets built in grids and centered on a public forum with public buildings.  One of the reasons that the Romans were so effective in assimilating conquered peoples into Roman society was that they built a great deal of infrastructure; being conquered by Rome seemed less like a burden when an aqueduct, public baths, and street system appeared within a generation of the Roman conquest (the relative cultural and religious tolerance of Roman culture was also key).  All of these cities were linked by the 40,000 miles of roads that stretched across the empire. 

The primary purpose of these administrative capitals was extracting taxes and other wealth from the local areas and funneling them back to Rome, but they also served as genuine cultural centers.  Likewise, even though the roads were often built with troop movement in mind, people everywhere could take advantage of them for trade.

Social Classes

That all being said, there were vast social distances that separated elites and commoners.  Even in the city of Rome, most of the citizens lived in squalor, packed into apartment buildings many stories high, made out of flammable wood, looming over open sewers.  The rich lived in a state of luxury that probably would not be equaled until the Renaissance, but the majority of Romans lived in squalid conditions.

Most people in the empire were, of course, poor farmers; only a minority of the imperial population lived in cities.  Peasants sometimes joined the army, but most were simply poor folk struggling to get by.  They were seasonal laborers, they rented from wealthy landowners, or they owned farms but were perpetually threatened by the predatory rich.

 Over the centuries, poor farmers found it more and more difficult to hold on to their land, both because they could not compete with the enormous, slave-tilled plantations of the rich and because of outright extortion.  There are numerous accounts of rich landowners simply forcing small farmers off of land and seizing it; the peasants could not afford to battle the rich in court and the rich had few scruples about hiring thugs to terrify the peasants into submission.  Once in a great while, a poorer Roman citizen could petition an emperor personally for redress and succeed, as could the occasional provincial to a governor, but the immense majority of the time the poor (citizen and non-citizen alike) were simply at the mercy of elite landowners.

One percent of the population of the empire were members of the aristocracy, those men who were allowed to participate as officials in the imperial government and their families.  In turn, access to political power was explicitly linked to wealth, a system first introduced by Augustus himself.  To serve in the imperial senate required an annual income of 1,000,000 sesterces (the basic coin of the empire).  To serve on the governing council of a small city or town required an annual income of 100,000 sesterces.  Meanwhile, a typical soldier earned about 1,200 a year, and poor farmers much less. 

Land ownership was by far the major determinant of wealth, and with the prevalence of slavery, economies of scale dictated that the more land a given family controlled, the more wealth they could generate.

The overall pattern in the Roman Imperial period is that the wealthy were highly successful in becoming richer from generation to generation, at the expense of the rest of Roman society: the wealth of elite landowners grew approximately eight times from 1 CE to 400 CE, with almost no new wealth coming into the Roman economy during that period.  Thus, as a whole, social mobility was so limited as to be almost nonexistent (to cite a single example, a member of the equestrian class in the Empire might have about 17,000 times the annual income of a poor laborer).  Roman elites kept taxes on their own property low, but the provinces were often ruthlessly exploited and overall tax levels were high.  The immense majority of Roman citizens and subjects were born into the social class they would stay in for their entire lives regardless of their own intelligence and competence.

Still, while they might prey on poor farmers, elite Romans were well aware of the threat posed by destitute city-dwellers.  Thus, one striking characteristic of the Imperial period was “bread and circus government.”  Building on a precedent originally established by the Gracchi during the Republic, the imperial state distributed free grain (and, later, wine and olive oil) to the male citizens of the city of Rome.  Eventually, other Roman cities adopted the practice as well.  In addition, public games and theater performances were free, subsidized by the state or by elites showing off their wealth (the most popular were circuses: horse races around a track). 

Thus, a Roman citizen in one of the large cities could enjoy free bread – although it was not enough to sustain an entire family, necessitating at least some source of supplemental income –  and free entertainment.  This policy was both a cynical move on the part of the state to keep down urban unrest and a legal right of urban citizens.  Free bread or not, the average life expectancy was 45 years for men and 34 for women, the latter because of the horrible conditions of bearing children.

Meanwhile, fully 40% of the population of Italy were slaves when Augustus took power.  Not only were slaves captured in war, but children born to slave mothers were automatically slaves as well. 

Some slaves did domestic labor, but most were part of the massive labor force on huge plantations and in mines.  The conditions of life for slaves were often atrocious, and strict oversight and use of violent discipline ensured that no slave revolt ever succeeded (despite the best efforts of leaders of revolts, like Spartacus in the first century BCE). 

Relatively large numbers of slaves did earn their freedom, and the “freedmen” as a class tended to be innovative commercial entrepreneurs, but many slaves had little hope of freedom.  Slavery declined by about 200 CE because supplies started drying up and prices rose; without the constant expansion of the empire, there were far fewer slaves available.  By that time, however, the legal and social conditions of farmers had degenerated to the point that they were essentially serfs (known as coloni): unfree rural laborers, barely better than slaves themselves.

Law

For the republican period and the first few hundred years of the Empire, Roman jurisprudence was split in the provinces.  Provincial people were accountable to their own legal systems so long as they were loyal to Rome and paid their taxes on schedule.  The most famous historical example of the overlapping legal systems of the Empire was the biblical trial of Jesus before the Roman governor Pontius Pilate. 

Pilate tried to hand the case off to the local Jewish puppet king, Herod, who in turn refused it and handed Jesus back over to Pilate.  In the end, Jesus was executed by the Roman government for inciting rebellion, using the traditional Roman punishment of crucifixion. 

Some of the concepts and practices of Roman law were to outlive the empire itself.   Rome initiated the tradition of using precedent to shape legal decisions, as well as the idea that there is a spirit to laws that is sometimes more important than a literal interpretation.  The Romans were the first to codify the idea that someone accused of a crime was innocent until proven guilty; this was a totally radical idea in the area of justice, which in the rest of the ancient world normally held the accused guilty unless guilt could be conclusively disproved.

Conclusion

For the first two centuries of its existence, Rome was overwhelmingly powerful, and its political institutions were strong enough to survive even prolonged periods of incompetent rule.  Trouble was afoot on Rome’s borders, however, as barbarian groups became more populous and better-organized, and as the meritocratic system of the “Five Good Emperors” gave way to infighting, assassination, and civil war.  At the same time, what began as a religion born in the Roman territory of Palestine was making significant inroads, especially in the eastern half of the Empire: Christianity.

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