A short history of the Roman Empire

What you'll learn: Why the Roman Republic, which had governed itself for centuries, broke down in civil war and opened the way for one man to rule.

Meet the city we will follow

This course tells the story of the Roman Empire through one place: Carthage, on the coast of what is now Tunisia, today a suburb of Tunis. Its life tracks the empire's own: destroyed by the Republic, rebuilt by the first emperor, rich in the golden age, Christian in the late empire, lost to invaders, recovered by the Eastern empire and finally lost for good.

When our story opens, though, Carthage is not a city at all. It is a ruin.

Phoenician settlers from Tyre founded Carthage (traditionally in 814 BCE), and it grew into the greatest trading power of the western Mediterranean. Rome fought it in three Punic Wars between 264 and 146 BCE. At the end of the third, a Roman army under Scipio Aemilianus stormed the city and destroyed it. You may have heard that the Romans sowed the ground with salt. No ancient source says so, and historians treat the story as a modern invention. What is true is that the site was left empty, and for about a century Rome governed the surrounding land, the province of Africa, from the nearby town of Utica.

How the Republic worked

Rome had expelled its kings, by tradition in 509 BCE, and governed itself as a republic (res publica, "the public thing"). Power was deliberately split:

• Two consuls, elected every year, led the armies and the government. Each could block the other.
• The Senate, a council of former officials, advised the magistrates and in practice steered finance and foreign policy.
• Popular assemblies of citizens voted on laws and elected officials.
• Tribunes of the plebs could veto acts that harmed ordinary citizens.

The system rested on short terms, shared offices and ambitious men competing within the rules. For a city-state it worked remarkably well.

Why success broke it

Winning an empire created strains the system was never built for. Picture a village council that suddenly finds itself running a business spread across a dozen countries. The meetings and polite customs are still there, but the money and the stakes have outgrown them. Whoever controls the real resources stops needing the council's permission.

That is roughly what happened to Rome. Four pressures stand out:

1. Inequality. Conquest brought slaves and wealth to the elite, while many small farmers who served on long campaigns lost their land. The brothers Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus tried to redistribute public land in 133 and 123 to 122 BCE. Both were killed in political violence. Gaius had even proposed a colony of Roman citizens on the site of Carthage, to be called Junonia; it was abandoned after his death.
2. Soldiers loyal to their generals. Armies increasingly came from the poor, who looked to their commander rather than the Senate for land when they retired.
3. Commanders willing to use force. In 88 BCE Sulla marched his army on Rome itself, which no Roman general had done before. Once it had been done, it could be done again.
4. Rules that could not keep up. Provinces were run by officials on one-year terms, many of whom used them to get rich, and the Senate had no permanent machinery for managing an empire.

Caesar and the civil war

In the 50s BCE three men, Pompey, Crassus and Julius Caesar, made an informal alliance that let them dominate politics. Caesar used a long command in Gaul (roughly modern France and Belgium) to build a loyal, battle-hardened army and an enormous fortune. When the Senate ordered him to give up that command in 49 BCE, he crossed the Rubicon, the small river marking the edge of his province, with his troops. That meant civil war.

Caesar won. He made himself dictator, eventually for life, and began a run of reforms, including the calendar of 365 days with a leap year every fourth year that we still use in modified form. Among his plans was a new Roman colony at Carthage, to settle veterans and poor citizens. On 15 March 44 BCE (the Ides of March) a group of senators stabbed him to death in the name of the Republic.

The killing did not bring the Republic back; it started another round of wars.

From Octavian to Actium

Caesar's will adopted his 18-year-old great-nephew Gaius Octavius, known as Octavian. He joined Caesar's lieutenant Mark Antony and the politician Lepidus to defeat Caesar's assassins at Philippi in 42 BCE, and the three divided the Roman world between them. Antony took the East, allied himself with Cleopatra VII of Egypt, and drifted into rivalry with Octavian, who held Italy and the West.

The final clash came at sea off Actium, in western Greece, on 2 September 31 BCE. Octavian's fleet, commanded by his friend Agrippa, won. Antony and Cleopatra took their own lives in Alexandria the next year, and Egypt became a Roman province. After a century of strife, one man controlled every army Rome had.

What to take from this

The Republic did not fall because Romans stopped caring about it. It fell because a political system designed for a city was running an empire, and its rules no longer matched where power really lay. Octavian's task was to rule as a monarch without ever calling himself one.

At Carthage, the empty ruins were about to get new residents.

Recap

• Carthage, destroyed by Rome in 146 BCE, is the place we follow through the course; the "salted earth" story is a later myth.
• The Republic split power between consuls, Senate, assemblies and tribunes, and relied on short terms and shared office.
• Empire brought inequality, soldiers loyal to their generals and commanders willing to march on Rome.
• Caesar won a civil war, planned to resettle Carthage and was murdered in 44 BCE.
• Octavian's victory at Actium in 31 BCE left one man in control of all of Rome's armies.

What you'll learn: How Octavian turned victory in civil war into a lasting system of one-man rule, and why he took such care to make it look like the old Republic.

The problem after Actium

By 30 BCE Octavian had won. He commanded every legion, held the treasure of Egypt and had no rival left standing. But Caesar's fate was a warning: Romans had killed a man for looking too much like a king. Octavian needed a form of power that the senatorial class could live with, and that would outlast him.

His answer, worked out over many years, is what historians call the Principate, from princeps, "first citizen". It was a monarchy in practice and a republic in appearance.

The settlement of 27 BCE

In January 27 BCE Octavian made a dramatic announcement in the Senate: he was handing the state back to the Senate and people of Rome. The senators, as he surely expected, pressed him to keep a large share of responsibility. The deal they reached looked modest on paper:

• He took charge, for ten years at first, of a group of provinces that included most of the frontier regions, and so most of the legions.
• The Senate kept the settled, peaceful provinces, governed as before by proconsuls chosen from among its members.
• He received the name Augustus, "the revered one", on 16 January 27 BCE. Historians date the empire from this year.

In 23 BCE he adjusted the arrangement. He stopped holding the consulship every year, which had blocked other men's careers, and took instead the powers of a tribune (including the veto and the right to call the Senate) plus an authority that overrode other governors. He no longer needed any single office, because he held the powers of several at once.

Think of it like a new owner who buys a famous old shop and keeps the old sign above the door. Regular customers see the same name and the same counters, and feel nothing has changed. Behind the scenes, every decision now goes through one person, and the old partners keep their titles but not their power. The sign mattered to Augustus: the Senate still met, consuls were still elected and Roman law still ran in the courts. But the legions, the money and the final word were his.

What Augustus built

Augustus ruled until his death in 14 CE, more than four decades, long enough that by the end few Romans could remember the Republic working normally. In that time he laid foundations that lasted centuries:

1. A professional standing army. Instead of armies raised for each war and loyal to their commander, soldiers now served for set terms (eventually 20 years plus a period in reserve) and retired with a payout from a special military treasury he founded in 6 CE. Their loyalty ran to the emperor.
2. The Praetorian Guard. A bodyguard of several thousand soldiers stationed near Rome. It protected the emperor and, as later lessons show, sometimes chose or killed him.
3. Peace inside the empire. After a century of civil war, Romans valued order above almost anything. The long calm that followed is known as the Pax Romana, the Roman peace.
4. A rebuilt Rome. The biographer Suetonius records his boast that he found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble.
5. His own account. His record of his achievements, the Res Gestae, was inscribed on bronze in Rome, and copies were set up across the provinces. The best surviving one is in Ankara, Turkey. It is self-presentation, and valuable evidence of how he wanted to be seen.

He also failed at things. Three legions were wiped out in the Teutoburg Forest in Germany in 9 CE, and Rome never permanently pushed its border to the river Elbe. And several heirs he chose died before him, so he ended up adopting his stepson Tiberius.

Carthage rises again

Augustus carried out Caesar's plan for Carthage. Around 29 BCE a new Roman colony was founded on the old site, named Colonia Julia Concordia Carthago in honour of the Julian family. The historian Appian, writing in the second century CE, says it began with 3,000 colonists alongside settlers from the surrounding area.

The Romans did not rebuild the Punic city. They flattened the top of the Byrsa hill, where the old citadel had stood, into a huge terrace for a new forum and temples, and laid out a grid of streets across the slopes below. Carthage replaced Utica as the seat of the governor of Africa Proconsularis. That governor was a senator, since Africa was one of the Senate's provinces, but unusually he also commanded a legion, the Third Augusta, to guard the frontier against the peoples of the interior.

Within a few years of Actium, the ruin we met in lesson 1 had become a planned Roman city.

Historians still argue

Was Augustus a statesman who rescued Rome from chaos, or a ruthless warlord who dressed up dictatorship? Ancient writers already disagreed. The historian Tacitus, writing about a century later, was sharply sceptical about the "restored Republic". Most modern historians see both sides: a man who rose by violence, including the proscriptions of 43 BCE when his side published lists of enemies to be killed, and who then built a stable system that many Romans genuinely welcomed.

Recap

• After Actium, Octavian needed power that looked legal and did not resemble kingship.
• The settlements of 27 and 23 BCE gave him control of most legions and the key powers of several offices; he became Augustus in 27 BCE.
• The Republic's forms survived like an old shop sign, while real power sat with one man.
• He created a standing army loyal to the emperor, the Praetorian Guard and a long internal peace.
• Carthage was refounded as a Roman colony around 29 BCE and became the capital of Africa Proconsularis.