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Rome was a mess. And I mean that on every level. Living in Rome was messy, dealing with Rome was messy, and in our case, talking about Rome is messy. Admittedly, that’s like 80% of the fun with them – Because there is no single history of Rome. The perspective of every era, every province, every social class, and every outsider is completely different. Instead, my goal today is to tell a complete history of Rome as a Mediterranean Civilization-State.
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Not just looking at warfare, nor literature, nor politics, nor architecture – mmm, man I wish – and certainly not imperial tabloid scandal, but a history of the Idea Of Rome – the collective consciousness that defines the Senātus Populusque Rōmānus: The Senate and People of Rome. Those 4 letters “SPQR” weren’t just a moniker the Romans called themselves, it was a communal promise that remained true throughout centuries of evolution and change – and qualities like that make Rome
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feel really special. There's honestly nothing like it, and I think it's important to appreciate not just what Rome became, but how much slow, careful, calculated effort was put into its cultivation and preservation. As we’ll see in a minute, early Roman history is a notoriously slow burn, as generation after generation dedicated themselves to something they'd never see the end of. And I just think that's really cool, so: as we start from the very beginning of the Roman
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story and weave our way through two millennia of glory, triumph, and deeply hilarious disasters, Let's do… some History! Rome was not built in a day, but it was built, consciously and with intentionality. Roman civilization as we understand it is the product of millions of people: men and women, young and old, weak and powerful – working over millennia to make their culture something spectacular. We
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can see that they built and accomplished amazing things across three continents, but what’s less obvious is what they built on. Not literally, mind you, that’s usually just brick or stone; but what cultural foundation sustained so huge an idea as “Rome”? That’s the kind of question that takes us to the very beginnings of their history, as we’d try to figure out what inciting incident
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led to all of this. However, any records from the earliest Roman chronicles are agonizingly absent, as the city was sacked and burned in 390 by a tribe of Gauls, so we are instead left at the mercy of Roman Legend: completely ahistorical, and hella propaganda. But despite this rather considerable setback in understanding the earliest roots of Roman history, we can work with this – because later Romans also didn’t know where exactly they came from, and were voraciously
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curious to fix that. So, lacking a verifiable answer, they instead devised one, consciously and intentionally compiling a narrative out of half-remembered myths and historical foreshadowing of the later Rome they knew. This web of folktales, retold and refined by centuries of storytellers until their codification around the turn of the millennium, is our best source of cultural intent and ambition for the Rome that was to be. So, let’s untangle this Roman Creation Myth
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to better understand the underlying Roots of Rome. If we take the Romans at their word, their origins goeth thusly: 1100-something-or-other BC, Troy’s on fire and one lucky prince Aeneas escaped. He made his way to Italy, with interruptions, and won kingship of the plain of Latium, but it’s not Rome Time quite yet. His descendants ruled in Alba Longa a short ways south of the Tiber river for four centuries, until the Alban king Numitor got
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deposed by his brother Amulius, who made Numitor’s daughter Rhea Silvia a vestal virgin to ensure the bloodline ends with her. This was always a failing strategy when Olympians were afoot, and sure enough the war god Mars slid in to give her twin sons Romulus and Remus. Amulius demanded they be killed river-style, but they were saved at the banks of the Tiber by a she-wolf, who then nursed
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them through early childhood before they were taken in by shepherds – bringing the twins’ parent count to one dad, two moms, one god, and a wolf. They grew up and deposed that nasty awful Amulius, and later set about founding a new settlement along the Tiber. A brotherly quarrel escalated as they were plotting out the course of their new walls, and Romulus killed Remus in the first but
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distinctly not last Roman-on-Roman violence. That, kids, is why it’s called Rome and not Reme. With his kingship secure and the city founded in the year 753, Romulus got to populating his new town, so he welcomed bandits, exiles, and other such ruffians, and then captured the Sabine women en-masse to ensure Rome would have heirs. Unlike Rhea Silvia , we can’t all be slammed by the god of war, but the Romans sure learned from his example. Romulus also implemented several core
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features of Roman society: the tribes, Patrician and Plebeian classes, marriage laws, the patron-client system, even the Senate arose as if springing fully-formed from the head of Romulus. After him, six more kings ruled over Rome, the last three of whom were from the Etruscan Tarquinii clan, and the very last was Tarquinius Superbus, AKA Tarky-Tark Super-Bus, who was a total knob. His incessant assholery enraged the Romans into throwing their very first coup-d’état,
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very exciting, ousting Tarquin and establishing Rome as a republic in 509 BC. From there, the Italian peninsula was destined to one day fall under the stunning force of Rome’s military and kickass civic institutions, and the whole Mediterranean would undoubtably be next. This origin story is dignified, tidy, a little self-indulgent, but above all else, convenient. So let’s go through this and, you know, rip it
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apart. First off, Rome’s founding date of 753 is a guess, posited in the first century BC to roughly line up with the earliest Greek Olympics. As far as the story itself goes, the Italy-bound journey of Aeneas the perfect Roman OC Do Not Steal is suspiciously Odyssean enough as is, but it’s first attested by Greek sources during the Republic. Aeneas is also way back in the Bronze Age
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compared to 753; that hefty 4-century gap between Aeneas and Romulus went largely unexplained until Dionysius of Halicarnassus seemingly invented the entire concept of the Alban Kings in his “Roman Antiquities” from the first century BC. The Kings of Alba longa have very little characterization, and some can be mapped onto nearby Latium place-names, so it’s not a stretch to think Dionysius decided that hill over there is totally derived from this ancient king you guys I promise,
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don’t google it, I promise, please, please don’t investigate it. It’s only when we run into the twins’ backstory that the Alban kings Numitor and Amulius actually do anything. The boys’ story is overtly mythical, and even Livy questions Mars and the wolf, but what might be less believable than divine parentage is the idea that 7 kings ruled Rome for a combined 244 years, which requires an unbroken string of seven 35-year reigns on average. That is a royal runtime matched
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by only two emperors before the fall of Western Rome. And yes, that of all things is where I draw the realism line; because each segment of this story feels abundantly retrofitted to clean up a messy set of chronologies between key events: the well-known establishment of the republic in 509, the vaguely-understood foundation of the city in the mid 700s-ish, and the heavily mythologized Trojan origins of Aeneas back in the Bronze Age. Everything else is just narrative-scaffolding.
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Republican-era Romans wondered aloud how exactly their history could fit two founders in the same folk-tradition, and it took until the Augustan period to square all that by having Aeneas found the Roman dynasty and Romulus build the city itself. Other classical states didn’t struggle this much with contradicting narratives – Athens certainly didn’t mind having multiple founder heroes, and one of them was
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Theseus, eugh – but in the first century BC, Rome took an organic storytelling tradition and forced all those disparate threads to play by History’s rules: one continuous narrative. It didn’t need to be what we would call “Factual”, it just needed to fit. Of course the Alban kings were retconned into existence to tidy up the timeline, Aeneas and Romulus are the only two who narratively matter.
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Rome’s legendary origins only needed to make sense to The Romans, and in the absence of records from before Rome’s first sack in 390 BC, that’s the closest thing to a primary source we have. As pure history, it’s bound to leave us wanting anything more substantive – but as an artifact of their culture, this origin tells us everything the Romans needed to know about themselves and wanted anyone else to know: Their heroes are divine descendants of Venus and Mars, their lineage
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runs back as far as anywhere in Greece, they come from disparate places and backgrounds, civil war is in their blood, they 100% have a wolf kink, and they kill tyrants. That’s Rome – everything else is Livy’s filler arcs. Now, for a supposedly ancient story, two of Romulus’ deeds point decidedly forwards in Roman history, and reveal what later Romans thought must have been intrinsic to their identity.
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His first act as king was to welcome Italy’s dispossessed and outlaws as Rome’s citizens, which may seem rather unheroic on the face of it, but this reflects Rome’s most peculiar trait: its openness to cultures and people. Rome, of course, thought it was the best civilization ever, and made that known loudly and frequently, but Rome took good ideas wherever they found them, and was willing to let any barbarian become Roman so long as they took on Rome’s customs and learned
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Latin. Romans always started as outsiders, be they exiles from across Italy or refugees from far off Troy, supposedly. Rome was also remarkably comfortable with granting citizenship to freed slaves, a quality the Greeks absolutely did not share. This seemingly undignified story actually enshrines the idea that regardless of social class or cultural boundaries, it was possible to become a Roman – and that idea is the stuff that pan-Mediterranean civilizations are made of. But
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alongside Rome’s great aspirations, their deepest anxiety is also present in the Romulus story: as their ruinously blood-soaked hobby of civil wars finds its start in that fratricidal founder. Rather than being intended as justification to go out murdering (as if they needed that), this looks like the closest thing to Rome’s Original Sin, the foundational crime they will be doomed to repeat over and over and over and over and over for more than two thousand years.
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These stories take their most permanent forms seven centuries after the supposed founding of the city, in the pages of Livy’s History of Rome and Virgil’s Aeneid – and as we wait for potential discoveries in archaeology to illuminate the earliest settlements amid those hills beside the Tiber, that’s all we’ve got to go on. The image sharpens into historical focus as we depose king Tarquin, start the republic,
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and embark on the slow process of building Rome’s civic institutions and establishing a domain across central Italy, but the further we progress along the timeline, the more meaningful and relevant their origin story becomes. The roots of Rome ultimately tell us nothing about the earliest Romans – if they even called themselves Romans, even came from Troy, even had kings, even did any of the things their myths take for granted – but this narrative reveals so
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much about the civilization they would become and the kind of people the Romans would one day be: Crafty Bastards. As the next two thousand years will amply demonstrate, they were crafty bastards. What's important to keep in mind as we start laying down more and more red paint on this lovely marble map is that Rome did not begin with a grand plan of conquest. Rather, after shaking off Etruscan domineering and
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suffering their first major incursion of the Gauls in 390 by Brennus, the Romans needed to fortify their territory by pacifying threats at their frontier. Simply put, this process began, and never finished. Individuals had their social or political motives for participating, but at scale, this doctrine of Expanding Defense just kept on expanding. Rome did not have some 53-and-a-half step plan for Mediterranean domination imposed from the top, but a set of
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priorities which successive generations inherited and renewed. This defensively-expansionist military philosophy carved through Etruria, Samnium, Magna Graecia, Carthage, Macedonia, Gaul, Syria, Egypt, Germania, and Parthia – there would always be another enemy to fear. But we're getting ahead of ourselves; Rome handled its enemies one at a time, and so will we. A majority of Rome’s early
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history was simply a spearited back and forth between its neighbors the Etruscans to the north, the Samnites to the south, and later on the Greek colonies of Magna Graecia to the way further south. And by "spearited" I do literally mean they were stabbing each other with spears. While all of this neighborly murder-y business was going on, the city of Rome was building itself up both physically and institutionally, with walls, streets, a sewer system, stone temples
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and buildings, a governmental system reminiscent of the Greek Polis system, and a religious system reminiscent of the Greek pantheon. Man that Greek influence really got in there early. Institutionally speaking, by the time they kicked out Tarquin and swore never to have a king again, a lot of the mechanics of the republic were already in place, like the Senate, the Patrician nobility and the citizen assembly. The transition
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to a Republic was really more of a reorganization of authority than a political revolution or anything like that. Broadly speaking, the whole idea was to take their government and publicize the power so the people could participate, and the word Republic comes from the Latin "Res Publica" which just means "public thing". Structurally the government was controlled by two annually elected Consuls, the Praetors ran the justice system, and the Quaestors, the silliest
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roman name ever, managed state finances. The Aediles were responsible for the state of the city, so they handled food, games, infrastructure, and all that jazz. The Senate, though it didn't technically legislate anything, published opinions on policy that were often very quickly put in place by their respective officers down the chain. Almost all of these magistrates and Senators in the early republic were of the Patrician
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nobility. If you happened to be one of Rome's many Plebeians, you might have rightly felt a little left out of this supposed Res Publica. The Plebeians unsurprisingly wanted political and social rights and they were determined to acquire them, so on any given season of campaigning against Rome's bothersome neighbors, the Plebeians, who composed the majority of the army, simply went on strike. They'd just go sit on a hill and wait until the Senate granted them
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the right to marry Patricians or to have their own government positions in a special assembly, or to elect their own members of that special assembly, or to serve as consul! And then by 287 BC the Plebeians and the Patricians were equal in everything but name. Good for them! The government of the Roman Republic simultaneously had elements of a monarchy, an aristocracy, and a democracy. This mixed constitution and its flexibility in governance – according to the historian
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Polybius – was one of Rome's greatest strengths, and I'm inclined to agree. Rome's institutions were its backbone for over two thousand years and you need a backbone like that to hard-carry an entire civilization. Okay, enough of the politicky stuff, back to the stabby stuff. Now like I said, early Roman Republican history is a notoriously slow burn: the struggle for Plebeians’ rights took over two centuries, and conquering the Italian peninsula was similarly slow going. Rome was
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intent on being careful, taking small steps, and taking its time. Compare this to the aftermath of the Macedonian conquests happening just a short ways east: when you go too far too fast, things tend to fracture. Rome spent most of the fourth and early third centuries fighting with various neighbors and working its way down to only the bay of Naples. That's a pretty short way to go in so
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long a time – Call it careful, call it as fast as a small state like Rome could hope to go anyway, either way it worked. Key to Rome's military strategy was that aforementioned doctrine of "Expanding Defense". Essentially Rome would never be so brash as to go out and attack someone, Good heavens no! Rome had the good manners to only fight in self-defense, and they knew that their gods would only grant them victory if their war was a just and pious war. Buuuuut if Rome
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suspected that someone was going to attack them, Rome would absolutely shoot first –eh, defensively of course! A pre-emptive retaliatory strike, if you will. And that is how you go on to conquer the entire world, defensively. By 280 Rome had successfully yoinked all of Samnium and proceeded to set its sights at Magna Graecia in southern Italy. Magna Graecia, not being the biggest fans of the Romans, and
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wishing to keep their land thank you very much, sent for help from Greece proper, and they brought in the big guns. Specifically they imported the Hellenistic king Pyrrhus of Epirus. Pyrrhus fought two battles against the Romans, and even though he won both of them, his losses were so devastating that he bailed on the campaign. After a detour through Sicily, he fought the Romans again, lost,
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and went home for good. Pyrrhus's abilities to win battles coupled with his inability to not burn through a third of his army in the process is what gives us the term "Pyrrhic Victory". So uh, good on Pyrrhus for eternally tethering his name to the military equivalent of pulling five consecutive all-nighters to cram for a test. Yeah it's a win but was it worth it, ehhhhh? So with pretty much no one left to protect Magna Graecia, Rome proceeded to swoop in and colonize all over the
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place. And unlike those who employ the "Torch it and start over" method of conquest, the Romans had a political motive to be kind-ish toward conquered peoples, keeping existing systems in place and not rocking the boat too badly. Exceeeeeept for this next example, from a rather salty chapter in roman History, The Punic Wars against Carthage. The first war can be roughly attributed to a miscommunication with some Sicilian Pirates.
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While Carthage and Rome may have been destined to fight each other at some point or another, they ultimately came to blows on account of both being called into Sicily to settle a fight between the city of Syracuse and some rowdy pirates. Rome and Carthage kind of just tripped face-first into war, and spent most of the 23-year long war not actually fighting each other. The issue was Carthage had been a long-standing naval power in the Mediterranean but Rome had no
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navy to speak of. So Rome really needed a navy, and quick. This is another of many instances of Rome adapting to situations scarily well. Say what we will about Rome, and boy is there plenty, they were immensely clever, and had a great habit of taking good ideas, methods, technologies and techniques from other cultures and using them to great effect. In this case the Romans found a few beached and sunk Carthaginian Triremes and Quinqueremes and proceeded to reverse engineer an
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entire fleet of ships. You know, just casually, as you do. Rome's first aquatic outings weren't all that fruitful but at battles like Cape Ecnomus, which is arguably one of the Biggest naval battles in history, Rome pulled out wins. Ultimately Rome won the war, claiming Sicily for itself and forcing heavy reparations on Carthage. They also decided to take Corsica and Sardinia because "Screw you Carthage,
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these are mine now." In the decades following, the Carthaginians, led by the general Hamilcar Barca, colonized the seaside coast of Hispania or Spain, largely for the purposes of mining silver to pay their Roman reparations. Little did Rome know, Hamilcar, his son Hannibal, and the other Carthaginians in Spain, were furious over losing Sicily, Corsica, and Sardinia, and had been casually scheming to completely destroy Rome for almost two whole decades. In 219 BC
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Hannibal sacked the Roman allied Seguntum in Spain and Rome, defensively of course, declared war. Hannibal, the madman proceeded to rather famously Leroy Jenkins his way across the god-damn Alps with over 40,000 soldiers and 37 elephants. ELEPHANTS! And while Elephants aren't particularly scary to us – if you're an ancient Roman who's never seen an elephant before, that thing is a four-legged giant with two spears and a
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snake coming out of its face! Bottom line, they're monsters, the Romans thought they were Monsters. Granted most of Hannibal's elephants died while crossing the Alps, perhaps unsurprisingly, but it doesn't take a lot of elephants to have a scary amount of elephant on the battlefield. I genuinely can't convey how viscerally terrifying the mere mention of Hannibal's name would have been to a Roman. After arriving in Italy, Hannibal demonstrated his tactical brilliance
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by immediately winning two battles in northern Italy through guerrilla and ambush tactics. Hannibal and his armies would proceed to stay in Italy effectively behind enemy lines with next to no means of supply or reinforcement, for 16 years. The Carthaginians went up and down the peninsula setting fire to farms left and right hoping above all else for Rome to simply surrender. Two years into the campaign,
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Hannibal said “Alright screw this I'm gonna destroy the entire Roman army!” and proceeded to make plans for his next battle, at the roman supply depot at Cannae, in southern Italy. At the battle the Carthaginians advanced in a U-shape with 40,000 infantry forming the front line and 10,000 cavalry on the wings. The Romans however had almost twice as big an army, so they felt pretty good about their chances. The armies met and as the fighting progressed the center of the
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Carthaginian line fell back, and the Romans pushed forward hoping to break the retreating line. Except at that moment when they all rushed in, the Carthaginian's African infantry and famed Numidian cavalry advanced on the flanks and effectively enveloped the whole roman army. From there it was a bloodbath – estimates are all over the place but the gist is that most of the 80,000-strong
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Roman army was killed outright, and the rest were imprisoned. It was the single greatest defeat that Rome ever suffered in its history. And Hannibal hoped that a shattered and dismayed Rome, having lost 16 legions and the entire south of Italy, would surrender at once. Rome's response was, simply, “See ya next year”. And it spent the entire winter raising more armies to go out the following summer.
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For the next several years, the Roman army pursued the strategy of "Just bother him" and shadowed Hannibal around the Italian countryside. He was still being annoying and they obviously didn’t want him there, but he wasn't a direct threat to the City of Rome, so good enough for now. But jumping back, can we take a second to appreciate the sheer quintessential Roman badassery it takes to hear that you lost at least 50,000 soldiers, and then
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turn around and tell the guy who killed them to shove it and wait for round two! Because holy crap that takes some serious coleones, serious and massively suicidal coleones. And speaking of, in 211 the young Publius Cornelius Scipio took up a generalship for the Spanish campaign, which was widely considered to be a dead-man’s quest. To the surprise of basically everyone, He spent the next five years successfully de-Carthagifying Spain. Following his campaign he hatched a brilliant
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plan to take the fight back to Carthage. But the Senate, thinking this was another suicide mission, told him he could do it, but they wouldn't finance his armies. So Scipio raised a couple legions in Italy and Sicily and hopped over to north Africa. Why would anything else be what happened? Now while Hannibal is absolutely a brilliant general, in that he did impossibly crazy stuff like crossing the alps, campaigning in Italy for
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16 years, and wiping out an entire roman army – Scipio's brilliance came from his quintessentially Roman ability to adopt and adapt. The Romans above all else knew a good idea when they saw one, and they almost never made the same mistake twice. Scipio studied Cannae and he knew what he had to do to defeat Carthage. Since the Numidian cavalry was critical to the Carthaginian army, Scipio played into a Numidian civil war to get some of their cavalry for himself. In doing so
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he had massively weakened Carthage on their own soil and had nearly orchestrated their surrender when OH SNAP HANNIBAL'S BACK. And on that day, history nerds from all around the world and across time busted out the popcorn, because this was gonna be good! The night before the impending battle of Zama, Hannibal and Scipio actually, supposedly, had a meeting. It's detailed in Livy's "History of Rome" book 30, chapters 30
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and 31. Just read it okay, for me, read it it's incredible. First they're simply in awe of each other. Then Hannibal waxes philosophical about fortune, gives Scipio life advice, and asks for peace. Scipio respondes "Well I was going to make peace but then you brought an army here, I can't just leave now. Look Hannibal I respect you I really do, but you're leaving me no choice here man. I've just gotta kick your ass dude, I'm sorry, there's no other way,
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I have to kick your ass." And on the following day, some asses were certainly kicked. At the battle of Zama, Scipio's Numidian cavalry put the Carthaginian cavalry to flight. And fighting between the infantry lines was actually very close until the Roman cavalry returned from behind the Carthaginian line to ultimately win the day. It was a hard-fought and super tense battle, but with that, the second Punic War was won. Half a century later, and after lots of Cato the Elder
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ending all of his senate speeches with "Carthago Delenda Est", Rome returned to raze Carthage to the ground. Later accounts would embellish this victory with tales of salting the earth to ensure Carthage would never rise again. In literal terms, that’s demonstrably false given Rome later built its own Carthage on the site of the original, but it points to how thoroughly they destroyed
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the Carthaginian state. Further, that fable is an essential piece of the popular Roman tradition and a core trait of their character: There’s regular bitter, there’s 90% extreme dark chocolate bitter, and then there’s Rome hates you so much they wipe your empire off the face of the earth forever” bitter. Moral of the story is Rome does not screw around, so don't screw with Rome, and salt or not, that much is true.
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With Spain and north Africa now happily Romanized, focus shifted eastward and Rome proceeded to clean up the squabbling and stagnating Hellenistic kingdoms from the aftermath of Alexander the Shortsighted's campaigns. The Macedonians had helped Carthage in the Punic wars, so Rome considered that sufficient grounds for bespearment. And bespearment of course is a word that I made up for the act of getting stabbed with a spear. Anywho, in that conflict
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the Seleucid Greeks helped the Macedonians, so the Romans saw that too as provocation. Not wanting to go too far too fast (and also because they didn't quite have a big enough army yet) Rome stopped at Greece for the better part of a century, and simply took to kneecapping the armies of the eastern Mediterranean so they didn't pose any direct threat. This marks a much more aggressive roman attitude
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towards conquest. It was super important that Italy be unified through diplomacy and generosity because that was Italy. But all of these new places were explicitly considered provinces under Rome. Even though Rome was still a Republic and didn't yet have an emperor, it absolutely possessed an empire by this point. After the conquest of Greece and the acquisition of the kingdom of Pergamum through a will of all things, Rome was clearly the dominant power in the
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Mediterranean. But there was one thing Expanding Defense could not protect against: itself. By the mid 100s BC, Rome had become rather adept at exporting violence. In 146, it capped the Punic War trilogy by burning the city of Carthage to the ground, meanwhile that very same year, the Roman Army plundered, ransacked, destroyed, murdered, and/or enslaved every Man, Woman, Child, and artefact in the city of Corinth to complete
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their conquest of Greece. This was a banger year for Rome’s cartographers who had the happy task of painting a beautiful shade of Red all across Greece and North Africa, but it was a mixed bag at best for the new subjects, not citizens, who lived there. Violence was a key ingredient of Roman statecraft abroad, and with such a thin line between the military and political establishments, we shouldn’t be surprised when someone applies that same thinking to local politics. … OH NO.
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With that foreboding preamble out of the way, let’s meet the Gracchi Brothers! Members of the lower Plebeian class, these boyos were the sons of a Consul and general, as well as the maternal grandsons of the great general Scipio Africanus himself. During his political career, the elder brother Tiberius set about reforming land rights to be more egalitarian. The plan was that no one could
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own more than half a square mile of the Public Lands acquired by the state during wars. Notably, a lot of Public Land was recently acquired by the state during wars. His idea was to partition all that out in small lots for the poorer citizens, so that everyone — well, actually not everyone — but all the citizens had a farm and a livelihood to call their own. The thing is, a version of this
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law had already been in place since 367 BC, but nobody enforced it, so wealthy romans and generals gobbled up loads of public land during the recent conquests. Naturally, the reason this law was ignored was the same reason Tiberius would have so much trouble getting it back on the books: Rome’s old-money-est citizens tended to be Senators, who had plenty to lose from a law that capped a considerable source of their family wealth.
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But Tiberius was not a Senator himself, rather, in 133 BC he held the office of Tribune. In centuries past, this was the only office available to the lower Plebeian class, but generations of reforms and good old fashioned bullying eroded the social, political, and financial barriers between Patricians and Plebeians. And as a result, the Tribune was no slouch, having the authority to veto many government actions and upper magistrates. Tiberius’ own father used this
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veto to save Scipio Africanus from a sham bribery trial back in the 180s BC, which is supposedly why Scipio’s daughter was swiftly betrothed into the Gracchi family. That particular sidebar will remain unexplored, but the relevant point is how Rome’s weaponized gridlock pressured the Senate to act in the interest of the Plebeians. Except this time, as Tiberius pushed his legislation through the Plebeian Assembly, the Senators pressured an aristocratic-leaning Tribune to veto it.
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This was legal, but had never been done before, and despite Tiberius’ requests, neither the Senate nor the other Tribune would budge. So Tiberius took a similarly unprecedented step and had the other guy deposed, voiding his veto, and then finally passing the reforms, with him and his family in charge of divvying up the plots to landless citizens. Now with all that done… even for the Romans who liked these reforms,
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that last bit was a little shifty. A frivolous veto is one thing, but deposing a Tribune and passing a law with blatant conflicts of interest made Tiberius look dangerous. And just like that, Rome’s Proto-Socialist fave became problematic. Honestly, the political machinations at play here are a fascinating showcase of how Romans began breaking constitutional customs before they got to outright Breaking the Republic. But, let’s not get off-track, I promised you a bodycount,
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so here is the fun part. Fearing prosecution once he left office, Tiberius took another unprecedented step of running for a consecutive second term as Tribune, which his opponents interpreted as a tyrannical power grab on top of his existential threat to their wealth. Unfortunately for them, the land reform was popular, and Tiberius' enemies in the Senate figured he would win his re-election for Tribune.
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So the Pontifex Maximus and several senators went over to the Assembly with the intent to cause a ruckus and stop the vote counting. But the ensuing scuffle got out of hand, and without any weapons, they grabbed what was available, and subsequently beat Tiberius to death, with clubs and chairs. As we will see later, stabbing Caesar with knives was one thing, but using chairs? Now that’s a
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full-body workout – that takes intent and a good deal of persistence. This was the first time the Roman instinct for violence had turned inward and spilled into republican politics, and with that blood-red line so spectacularly crossed, boy oh boy it would not be the last. Frankly, the senators were already in too deep to just go home and change, so they proceeded to kill another 300 of Gracchus' supporters, thus introducing the concept of political martyrdom and removing any
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prejudice against the expediency of assassination. Now with that point made, I mentioned Tiberius had a brother. That would be Gaius, and his story is… well, let’s see for ourselves. Gaius was unfazed by his brother’s grisly demise, and embarked on even more aggressive reforms when he became Tribune in 123. These new policies included: redoing the provincial tax system so income went back to Rome instead of the governors, then using
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that new revenue to offer low-price wheat for the Roman people. Elsewhere, he cut down on bribery in the courts and stopped the senate from playing favorites with Consuls. Gaius’ consistent strategy was to prevent Senatorial corruption by elevating the Equestrian class to advisory positions and oversight roles in the Republic. Far more daring than Tiberius’ little old land laws, this thicc-o
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slate of reforms touched nearly every level of government – from revenue to public programs and courts to consuls – so it could only be passed with big help. Gaius allied with the Equestrians, offering them new authority and prestige in exchange for passing those laws to help the poor and make the Republic run smoother. That all sounds good and noble, but let’s remember that Gaius’ brother was f*cking assassinated,
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so the man justifiably held a grudge. To that end, he limited the Senate’s power to prosecute without the Assembly’s consent, and forbade anyone deposed by the Assembly from holding any other office. On paper, that’s a power-grab for the Assembly, but those are also just reasonable laws. So despite all the reasons Senate hated him, he remained extremely popular with the Roman people, securing a second consecutive term as Tribune in 122.
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But it’s here that Gaius played himself by raising the question of citizenship. Essentially, Rome was Rome, and proper Romans were citizens, but outside of Rome, the Latin-speaking population weren’t citizens, and the other Italians in the peninsula had even fewer rights than the Latins. Gaius sensed widespread discontent among these allied non-citizens, and figured he could win them over by giving Latin Rights to free Italians, and making the Latins into full
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citizens. One could imagine how such a grateful new voting block would happily elect Gaius into everything forever. But while this solution was rather clever, it was intensely unpopular with every class of citizen in Rome, so the measure completely failed, his popularity plummeted across the board despite his astounding reforms, and he handily lost his next election for Tribune. Wait hold on, this isn’t an assassination,
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this is just realpolitik. Ugh, Dammiiiit. – Wait, wait, there’s another page – oh yeah, here we go. SO, one of Gaius’ pet policies was setting up new colonies of Roman citizens in Carthage and Italy, so that proper Romans had a place to live in these shiny new provinces they killed so many people to get. But the new Tribune proposed to dissolve the colonies, so Gaius triggered illegal
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protests against it, and in the ensuing scuffles, one of Gaius’ supporters was killed. The Senate, horrified at the uproar, feared a classic Gracchi Brothers Power Grab, so they passed the Senatus Consultum Ultimum, an ultimate decree branding Gaius and his allies as enemies of the state and granting themselves the authority to strategically unalive them. And thus, the senators partied like it’s 133 BC – Gaius and his gang fortified themselves atop the Aventine hill, so the
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Consul raised a mob and brought soldiers within the city walls to go slash their way up. Sources differ on the details, as is tradition, but Gaius had likely fallen on his own sword by the time the Senate found him. So technically, technically, He Specifically was not actually assassinated… However, 3,000 of his supporters were absolutely murdered to death during and after the riot, and that handy purge left a template for targeted political violence that later Romans would be all
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too eager to follow. In the years after, nearly all of Gaius’ laws were repealed, but the Republic could not escape him throughout its last century. His defining reforms remained highly contentious, and the political violence of his term became frighteningly commonplace – decades later, the issue of citizenship erupted into the Social War in 91 BC, ending with all Italians getting full citizenship, but nearly toppling the entire Roman state in the process. Meanwhile,
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the Equestrian class benefitted immensely from Gaius’ reforms, taking on vast new powers with none of the checks or customs that kept the Senate at least nominally in line. The Roman Republic didn’t collapse overnight, and the worst of its civil wars was yet to come, several times over, but the reforms, political battles, and violent deaths of the Gracchi brothers made it far easier to be Bad – and that was a temptation the Romans absolutely did not need – because nobody could
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kick Rome’s ass like Rome. Okay, Rome buddy hold up you had no political violence for 400 years, you got a really good thing going, please don't screw this up... Oh WOW yeah they really screw this one up don't they? Jeez, yikes where do we start? Well, crises like the Gracchi derived in part from the roman Patron-Client system, in which a wealthy and well-connected Roman provided for his clients, who in turn supported him politically.
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This worked fine on a small scale but things got problematic when people effectively tried to buy public support in large quantities. On top of that, there were three mass slave revolts in Sicily and Italy. Then there's the social war where most of Italy revolted against Rome, after which all Italians were granted full citizenship. And let's also not forget the Catiline conspiracy to overthrow the consulship of Cicero! All of those civil wars were reconciled but still,
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that's a lot of civil warring to happen in just the span of a half century. But by far the worst of the lot were the factional civil wars between the populist Populares and the aristocratic Optimates. Otherwise known as the two civil wars between Marius and Sulla. Gaius Marius, a seven-time Consul and general who conquered parts of north Africa and settled the Social War, headed the Populares. While the Optimates were led by Lucius Sulla, another successful general.
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The Optimates, for context, were the ones who assassinated the Gracchi brothers. And they clearly remained satisfied with their handiwork, because when Sulla came back from a campaign in Anatolia, he marched his army into Rome, established himself as dictator, and proceeded to massacre his rival Populares, Twice. He did all of that, TWICE. That's huge! In 50 years we went from not a single Roman being killed over politics to armies marching on Rome and carrying out
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prescribed hit lists of political enemies. Things were really really bad in the first century. For now though let's recap: Rome started as one tiny irrelevant city and grew itself very gradually through calculated means. First conquering Italy, then the islands, then Spain and soon after Greece north Africa and Anatolia. What astounds me is that a typical Roman would only ever see a small part of this unfold.
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Whether intentionally or not, the Romans were patient – and their combination of smarts, skills, and strategic restraint let them build towards something bigger than themselves. As Rome grew, it appeared to be creating a world far greater and more stable than the floundering conquests of a Greek kid on a horse, but as we’ll see, that only held true so long as Rome exercised restraint, and that was not a given.
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Ah the roman republic, perhaps the ancient world's most brilliant form of government. It's had a rough go in its later years, but with the right people in charge I bet that it could continue on for centuries to come – like this guy right here, Julius Caesar, who I'm sure will do everything in his power to preserve the Republic. We’ve seen so far that as Roman politics got increasingly factional and Roman territory got increasingly massive, things started getting increasingly
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civil war-y, as in they'd barely be able to go a decade between 135 and 30 BC without collapsing into some variety of a civil war. It's honestly a minor miracle that Rome didn't permanently tear itself in half before we even got to Caesar, so as we push forward through history and get to talking about our old buddy Julius I want to consider the question of whether the Roman Republic – not Rome as a whole but specifically the republican system of government – was doomed to fail,
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or whether it had any chance of survival. Because our answer to that question really matters when we look at people like Caesar and Augustus and ask ourselves what they did and whether or not they went too far, but since I'm impatient I'm going to give you my answer right now: To me, the republic had almost no chance of surviving on its own. Zero. You saw what happened in the first century, you know what kind of mess Rome was in. The motives for individuals were irrevocably
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misaligned from the good of the state. I love the Roman Republic, it's one of my favorite systems of government ever, But that poor thing was so screwed. So with our sickly looking republic on its last legs, let's meet the guy who took it out back and killed it dead: Julius Caesar. To establish what kind of guy Caesar really is, I'll spin you a yarn about some Cilician pirates. When Caesar was in his early 20s he managed to get
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himself captured by a band of pirates who wanted to ransom him off for 20 talents of silver. There's no agreed-upon conversion between talents and US dollars but for our purposes let's just say that one talent is about a million bucks. So when Caesar heard this sum, he straight up laughed at them and demanded that they ask for a much more respectable 50 talents instead. The pirates, charmed by Caesar's overwhelming diva-ness (and razor-sharp cheekbones I might add) Were
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all too happy to keep him around for the sheer entertainment factor. He played games with them, told stories, and even wrote poems and speeches for them. Sometimes they'd joke about how his speeches were bad, and Caesar would respond by saying that when he got free he'd come back and crucify every last one of them, which the pirates apparently thought was hilarious. Eventually the pirates did get their 50 talents so they let Caesar go, and then about five seconds later
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Caesar came back with a bunch of ships and arrested all of them, casually taking his 50 talents back. He brought the pirates to the provincial governor but since he didn't really seem to care all that much, Caesar took matters into his own hands and took the high road by keeping his promise and crucified all of them... Fun! Moral of the story is Caesar cares a lot about his image, he's amazingly charismatic, he's not afraid to take matters into his own hands if
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he needs to, and he does not screw around. On to more historically significant matters, our boy Gaius Julius Caesar was a well-to-do nobleman from a prestigious family that traced its ancestry back to the epic hero Aeneas and his mother Venus. However, Caesar had a chip on his shoulder because his dad was never Consul. You see in Roman culture, the concept of Nobilitas was rooted in the idea that you can inherit excellence,
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but you have to confirm it by doing excellent things in the present. So unlike in the middle ages and the renaissance and the enlightenment and the industrial revolution and the early modern period you couldn't just coast by on familial prestige, you actually had to, you know... DO something for it in ancient Rome. Caesar's dad not being Consul was a big deal so his primary goal in life was to confirm his Nobilitas by just being Consul. To do it he struck a deal with two
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other prominent Romans: Crassus the richest man in Rome and Pompey Rome's most accomplished general, and they created an informal alliance. In other words they made "The First Triumvirate". They were all good friends, Pompey married Caesar's daughter, Crassus bribed Caesar's way to the consulship in 59 BC, Caesar passed all the laws that Pompey & Crassus wanted. It was a good time! In the process of ramming through debt forgiveness
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and land redistribution legislation, Caesar maybe (definitely) broke several procedural norms and did things that were straight up illegal, but since Ceasar was Consul he had "Imperium" the gold Mario star of roman politics, which meant that he couldn't be prosecuted for his actions while he was in office. Regularly overriding the veto of your co-consul on the principle of "Because I
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said so" and filling the city with legionaries to dissuade your political opponents may be definite no-no's in the eyes of the Roman elite, but no one could really do anything about it. So for Caesar's year in power he was safe, but once that consulship and his Imperium expired, Caesar had a big target on his back, so he needed to find a way to keep his Imperium until he was allowed to run for consul again 10
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years later. Conveniently, Governors and Generals also have Imperium so Caesar's next move was to secure himself a governorship of a province and the command of a few legions so he could go around campaigning with all the Imperium in the world until he could stand for consul again. Some senators, fearing that Caesar would do literally exactly that, tried to swap his guarantee for governor of a province for essentially governor of the Italian woods, but Pompey and Crassus,
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again, had enough power to overturn that. Coins and stabby things tend to get you a lot in life! But here we see just how fragile the republic really was at this point: anyone with enough connections and resources could effectively cripple the normal flow of government and steer it in favorable directions for their own benefit. Speaking of, Caesar got himself four legions and a cushy governorship in southern Gaul
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along with a metric butt-load of military Imperium to keep him safe, and set about campaigning in Gaul for the next 10 years. It's astounding how much we know in detail about these campaigns, and it's because Caesar himself wrote extensive commentaries on them. This was critical, as he could justify his continued campaign in Gaul year after year by showing how cool he was and how great of a job he was doing, while also building up support among the Roman people by also
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showing how cool he was and how great of a job he was doing. Plus we got a history out of it, so win-win-win. Caesar’s work happens to be hideously boring to actually read, granted, but meh, quibbles. Alright, so in enough detail that I can still sleep at night but also in short enough form that we wont be here for hours, Caesar's campaign went roughly as follows: In 58 BC Caesar attacked the Helvetii tribe on the pretense that they were attacking an ally of Rome,
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because remember, Rome would never be so crass as to attack unprovoked. At the end of each year's campaigning season, Caesar left his armies in Gaul and spent the winters in northern Italy. The next year Caesar went north, won a battle and got ambushed one time. In 56 Caesar claimed that the Veneti tribe had, quote, "revolted from Rome" even though they were in god-damn Finisterre, so... he conquered it. Safe to say at this point that Caesar functionally considered all of Gaul
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as already his, uh I mean Rome's. The next year Caesar went really hard on the "Gaul is Roman" thing. He considered Britain and Germany as threats to Gaul and therefore as threats to Rome So in the same year he bridged the Rhine and attacked some Germans, and he sailed across the English channel. The invasion of Britain was honestly a total bust, so the next year, he went back with a huge fleet because the man can't leave well enough alone, and pushed as far north as the
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Thames. After his floundering humiliating scramble on the British beaches the year before, Caesar had to prove that Rome was no pushover — to his enemies, to himself, and to his Romans back home. Oh uh, also he lost an entire legion to an ambush in the dead of winter. so uh... Whoops! In 53 he went back to Germany and afterwards left half of his bridge still standing in a sort-of "Don't you make me come back there" kind of warning.
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The following year was probably the biggest year of the campaign, because king Vercingetorix had unified the remaining Gallic tribes against Rome. After some battling back and forth, Vercingetorix camped out on the fortified hill city of Alesia. Now, Caesar needed to surround and wall off the city to starve it out, but there was also the distinct likelihood that he himself got attacked while investing the city. So Cesar needed to fortify both directions! His army built
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a 10 mile long wall on the inside, and a 14 mile long wall on the outside! That's 24 miles of WALL that Caesar threw down because he was determined to take this city. But uh oh boys, next thing you know a ton of Gauls come down to attack Caesar. So Caesar rolls a natural 20 on his deception check, sends out a cavalry detachment to attack them, but the Gauls think it's the first of an ENTIRE Roman Reinforcement force, so they panic and book it right the hell out of there, allowing
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Caesar to take the city, and just like that, all of Gaul basically belongs to Caesar. BOOM, that's how you do a campaign. The next two years were spent cleaning up the last pockets of resistance, because remember, Caesar still had a few years before he's allowed to buy his way to the consulship again. To complicate things Crassus died while on a campaign in Parthia, and Pompey, feeling his oats, got the
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senate to rescind Caesar's governorship of Gaul. So even the Triumvirate, which was supposed to be immune to the vices of factionalism, fell victim to the vices of factionalism... That's uh, that's not a good sign. So Caesar got Pompey's note, and astutely realizing that going back to Rome on his own was nearly a death sentence, Caesar – feeling his oats – said "screw it" or more accurately said
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"Alea Iacta Est" and brought the 13th legion over the Rubicon river and into Italy. Pompey and most of the Senate proceeded to nope right the hell out of town and go to Greece. Caesar, rousing the support of the people, was proclaimed temporary "Dictator" (Latin for speaker) with the goal of restoring peace, even though he technically was the one who started the civil war but, shhh, details. — Against all odds, he proceeded to absolutely demolish Pompey's army in Greece
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at the battle of Pharsalus. Then he chased poor old Pompey to the end of the earth, which in this case was Egypt. Pompey sought refuge with the boy king Ptolemy who owed him a favor and was likely very displeased to find himself beheaded instead. Terrible way to start a vacation. Caesar was absolutely horrified to see Pompey's head because, first of all, gross, but also because he was a fellow Roman
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citizen, and Caesar was planning on pardoning him afterwards, not killing him. See this is a lesson in how healthy communication saves lives. But yeah Caesar was super big on clemency, that was pretty much his thing (except for you know the pirates he crucified), but in addition to some small pardons during the Gallic campaign, Caesar pardoned pretty much Pompey's entire army and all of his supporters who fled to Greece with him. In my reading, that's one of the most important
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aspects of Caesar's character. He was certainly a controversial one, and arguably a full-on menace, but it's important that we weigh the Nice with the Yikes, because neither exists in a vacuum. He broke a ton of laws and sold his soul just to become Consul, but he made moderate reforms that benefited the people. He killed a terrible sum of Gauls and Romans in the wars following his consulship, but he granted clemency more than any other Roman would have even considered. And
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he basically fashioned himself a king after he was appointed dictator for life, but he was beloved by his people and he used his power to stabilize Rome. All in all, he did a lot of serious and lasting good for Rome's people, but that good was done through politically devious means for suspiciously power-hungry motivations. He's a thoroughly controversial character, then as now, and even his nobler accomplishments are drenched in blood and crime. My goal here is to give a full
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perspective, so you can get a feel for some of the questions people like Brutus asked themselves when they were making plans to assassinate him. But I' m getting behead of myself – Uh, "ahead" of myself... awkward. While Caesar was in Egypt deciding what to do with poor old Pompey's head, he was making moves both with and on the queen Cleopatra, supporting her in her civil war against her brother. The arrangement
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proved beneficial for both of them, as Cleopatra could count on Caesar's Rome supporting rather than annexing Egypt, and Caesar could count on Cleopatra's Egypt as a continuous source of food, which helped supply Caesar's generous public food programs. And for bonus points, by all accounts Cleopatra was utterly captivating to talk to, so win-win. Following Caesar's return to Rome, his position as dictator was extended to 10 years. During his time as Dictator,
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Caesar managed to instate even more reforms that promoted public welfare, government efficiency, and general stability. For one, he limited the political and military power of provincial governors, mostly to stop other people from doing to him what he did to Pompey and the senate. He reformed the monstrosity that was the old Roman calendar so well that we still use a version of it today. He also conducted a census, carried out several building projects, unified
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the roman provinces more closely with italy, and was just all around a really solid leader. Did he pull a lot of super mega illegal stunts to get himself to this point? Eheh, absolutely. But did he make substantially beneficial reforms that the people loved? Absolutely. Now, after a long career of breaking the system, Caesar’s first and final true mistake was assuming that nobody could do to him what he did
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the republic. In march of 44 BC Caesar was named Dictator for Life and this made a lot of senators really antsy, because at this point he was basically king and Rome still very specifically didn't like kings. So on the Ides of March, Brutus, Cassius, and about 60 other senators surrounded and killed Caesar in the theater of Pompey. (Ironic). Caesar's last moments are rather disputed, but my take on it is that when he saw Brutus, his friend, whom he had pardoned
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after Pharsalus, was a part of the conspiracy, he accepted his fate and fell to the ground, covering his face with his toga. I don't think Caesar even was eloquent enough to have fancy last words when there were 23 knives simultaneously stabbing him. No one is. The assassins may have fancied themselves liberators and restorers of the republic, but they didn't count on the fact that the Romans really liked Caesar because, oh gee I don't know, he was a generous and effective
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leader? While I disapprove of Caesar's motives and means, I abhor his assassins. He granted them clemency and they killed him! Dante puts Brutus and Cassius in the lowermost pit of hell for betraying their protector, and I'm with Dante on this one. So, that's Caesar. Stabbed 23 times and left bleeding out on the floor of the curia. Brutus and Cassius were able to read the mood in the room well enough to tell they weren't wanted, so they and a bunch of senators hightailed it to
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Greece to build up an army. In my mind, Caesar killed the republic long before he was even dictator. He proved how breakable the system was. I mean, let's count it: he bribed his way into office, illegally rammed legislation through the Senate, intimidated his political enemies with threats of force, escaped any and all consequences for his actions on a technicality, commandeered roman resources for his own prestige
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and enrichment, marched an entire legion into Rome, and declared war on a fellow Roman for his own political gain. The entirety of Caesar's main political career was either distinctly unrepublican in character or explicitly illegal. And remember that only after all of that did the senate name Caesar as dictator for the FIRST time. By the time Caesar was named Dictator Perpetuo and functionally had become a king, he had long since proven that the republic was fundamentally broken.
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For most of the republic's history, its success came from fantastic Roman teamwork, but here its downfall came primarily from the selfishness of powerful Romans. People realized how incredibly fragile and gameable the institutions of the Republic were when you stretched them across the entire Mediterranean. So basically one of two things could have happened to Rome: either civil wars continued on and eventually ripped Rome to bits, or something in Rome's
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government changed to make it less susceptible to all those civil wars in the first place. Barring a full overhaul of the republic’s deepest mechanisms, it was basically monarchy or bust at this point because nothing else could stop the chaos. While Augustus becoming emperor down the line was far from a guarantee, Rome's transition from a republic to a monarchy was inevitable if it was to survive. It's a little paradoxical but in a way Caesar saved Rome by destroying the then
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unstable and unworkable republic. He abused the hell out of its institutions, but in doing so, he showed how effective a strong and stable central government could be, and this was the basis of Rome's accomplishments for the centuries to follow. Today Caesar kills the republic, next time, Augustus starts an empire. Alright, Caesar’s dead, so uh… where do we go from here? Well, Let’s do some History and find
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out! If you were one of the handful of senators that had just forcibly perforated your dictator, your first move would be to get the Pluto out of town. See, the assassins thought that they were about to restore Rome to the full glory of the republic, but they didn’t count on Caesar’s massive popularity among the Roman people. Needless to say, they didn’t quite get the warm welcome and round of applause they were hoping for. So Brutus, Cassius, and some others pulled a
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Pompey and high-tailed to Greece to build an army. Back in Rome, Caesar’s corpse was still sitting there all squidgy-like on the floor of the Curia, part of the senate was gone, and most of what was still there didn’t really like Caesar. So we had a power vacuum on our hands. The current consul Marcus Antonius, Caesar’s trusted friend and ally, attempted to brand himself as Caesar’s avenger against the assassins in order to rally the
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people to his side and fill that power vacuum. As Consul, he was able to work out a compromise, so that the assassins would be granted a general amnesty so long as Caesar’s reforms stayed in place. The problem for him, like Caesar, was that even though the people liked him, the Senate, and Cicero in particular, very much did not. So after his consulship ended, Antony bailed to go be governor of Cisalpine Gaul.
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With Rome divided between dumpster fire and more overtly treasonous dumpster fire, let’s leave all manners of fire behind us and jump over to Augustus, who at this point was named the rather-less-august Gaius Octavianus, after his father. For clarity, historians refer to the pre-imperial Augustus as Octavian instead. Octavian was the great nephew of Julius Caesar, and they were decently close. At the time of the assassination, he was studying astronomy
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in Epirus, and after learning that Caesar had died, Octavian rushed back to Rome. Upon reaching Italy he read Caesar’s will, and promptly acquired the single most valuable thing that Caesar could possibly have given him: his name. From that day on Gaius Octavianus was known to everyone as Gaius Julius Caesar, the officially adopted heir to the big man himself. And that was huge. So now Gaius “Little Caesar’s”
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Octavian and Mark “I’ll bang anything that moves and drink whatever doesn’t” Antony were both in the race to become Caesar’s avenger against the assassins. This was important for both of them because that role would entail not only glory but a butt-load of power. The short of it is that Octavian was successful in this because he was a brilliantly crafty manipulator of iconography and cultural symbolism, and he even convinced all of Rome that Caesar had become a god.
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The next handful of political movements are honestly needlessly complicated, but the gist is that most people just wanted to be on the winning side, regardless of which side that was, so the alliances were almost constantly shifting. Octavian was probably the one encouraging Cicero to give all of those angry speeches against Antony, and then after Antony skipped town and went north, he had to wrestle
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the governorship from another one of Caesar’s assassins. The Senate, being markedly anti-Caesar, sided with the current governor and against Antony, and declared him an enemy of the state. The Senate wanted to send a legion or two to deal with Antony, but they didn’t have an army. Octavian, however, had promised Caesar’s veterans that he could pay them if they remained loyal to him. So Octavian, interestingly, buddied up with the Senate to go fight Antony. Which, on paper,
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makes no sense, because, you know, the whole “Caesar’s Avenger” business. In practice, however, Octavian was very pragmatic, and if helping the anti-Caesar Senate fight the pro-Caesar Antony seemed politically expedient for him, you bed he’d do it in a heartbeat. As such, Octavian and the two consuls that year marched up to Mutina against Antony. Octavian’s Senatorial army won, but both consuls were killed in the battle. When the Senate asked Octavian to give up his army,
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he said “hahahhh, eh, that’s a good one, NO” and allied with Mark Antony to march on Rome with eight legions and politely request that the Senate declare him Consul or else. And they did! With the Senate’s begrudging compliance, Mark Antony hopped over to Spain to meet up with his Caesarian political ally Marcus Lepidus. Meanwhile, anybody remember Pompey? Y’know, first triumvirate, fought a civil war with Caesar,
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decapitated on an Egyptian beach? Yeah, that guy. So the Senate granted Pompey’s son Sextus command of the Republic’s entire navy and Sicily to use as a base. Also Brutus and Cassius were happily serving as governors of Macedonia and Syria, respectively, just doing their thing, having fun, building up their armies, all that jazz. The Senate got a really great deal out of that amnesty agreement.
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Following the misunderstanding up at Mutina, Octavian buddied up with Mark Antony and his friend Lepidus to form the Triumviri Rei Publicae Constituendae, in English, the Triumvirate for the Reconstitution of the Republic, and in smaller words, the “three guys for making Rome not-have a civil war again”-team. Unlike the first triumvirate, which was an informal political alliance between Pompey Crassus and Caesar, this second triumvirate, created by plebiscite,
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was a legally-recognized entity that gave each triumvir full dictatorial power, so everything they said or did was law. Now, what exactly “reconstituting the republic” meant was up for debate, but as far as the Triumvirate was concerned, the most important matter was taking care of Brutus and Cassius in the east, and financing the armies necessary for that would have been quite expensive. The senate would likely have disagreed with this because, in their eyes, the
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formation of the Triumvirate was nothing more than the Plebeian assembly handing over Rome to a few Caesarinos playing dictator. So the Triumvirate had to contend not only with the remote threat of the assassins, but also with local hostility in the senate. To solve this conundrum, they split the difference and killed all of them. The Triumvirate pulled a page out of Sulla’s book and drafted up a hit list of Rome’s enemies, which conveniently contained about 300 wealthy
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anti-Caesarian senators and some two-thousand landowners in Rome. The kicker is that everyone’s funds were confiscated when they were killed, so the Triumvirate conveniently accumulated insane amounts of money in the process of killing off all of their political enemies. The proscriptions started with that initial 2000-some-odd people, but rapidly ballooned to double that. They gutted over a third of the senate. This was… *whooof* obviously pretty messed up. I mean, it worked, but
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jeez. They killed Cicero and hanged his head up in the Forum. There’s no way the Triumvirate comes out of this not looking like Murder Tyrants. Civil war is one thing, but this was domestic slaughter. The next big event on the docket for the Triumvirs was using their ill-gotten funds to finance a campaign against the assassins. Antony and Octavian led their armies into Greece and met Brutus and Cassius
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at Philippi. Antony defeated Cassius, who killed himself, and Brutus overran Octavian’s camp, but conveniently Octavian didn’t die because for some reason he wasn’t there. Suspicious. After that, Antony came back to Octavian’s camp and defeated Brutus, who then killed himself. So the Triumvirs win, but Antony did all of the hard work, and also Octavian had maybe possibly bailed from the battle altogether. Forget the proscriptions, in the eyes of the Romans,
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Philippi was the biggest disgrace in Octavian’s career, and you can see him trying to make up for it by representing himself through calculated military imagery for decades after the fact. After Philippi, the Republic was somewhat, slightly reconstituted, and in the wake of a reconquered East and gutted senate, the Triumvirs were the biggest players in the Roman world. So they carved it up into East, West, and South, with
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Octavian taking Italy, Spain, Gaul, and Illyria, Antony taking Greece, Anatolia, Cyrenaica, and Syria, and poor old Lepidus getting Carthage and a little bit of African coast (if you got the sense that Lepidus didn’t matter, it’s ok because you are correct. He did not… Poor Lepidus). On paper, things were peaceful and stable, but late republican Rome being late republican Rome, it really wasn’t. I mean, three people,
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two people, each controlling a third, half, of the Roman world, each of whom was looking to follow Caesar’s example of unilaterally ruling Rome, that’s fine, right? Yeah, I’m sure they’ll be just, totally perfectly fine. No stress! In the wake of Caesar’s assassination, Roman politics got even weirder than they were in the century beforehand, which, given the persistence and pervasiveness of civil wars, is really saying something. After
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the military success of the Triumvirate, the collective Roman citizenry hoped really really hard that it wouldn’t immediately explode into another war. Well bad news, boyos, the Roman Republic had been living on borrowed time for over a century by this point, so realistically we’re looking at four maybe five minutes tops before it all crashes down. Fun times, right? The period of peace
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after the defeat of the assassins and the gutting of the anti-cesarian members of the senate in the notorious Proscriptions was an uneasy one to say the least. Memories of several different battles fought, Italian fields burned and drenched in Roman blood, and family members killed were swirling in everybody’s minds, so a lot of people were unconvinced that they were looking at a long-term solution. In poetry, this period is known as the Great Fear, when everyone was really
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anxious about civil wars, Fearful you would say! And 100% certain that there would be more of them. Rome’s greatest poets of the time, Horace and Virgil, both acutely touch on the constant fear felt by the populace. And, as it happens, the poets were pretty much right about the big bad specter of civil war. In the east, Antony has been consolidating his power by striking up alliances with nearby monarchs in
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a bid to accumulate money and military power for his planned campaign to Parthia, but perhaps most importantly, he pulled a Caesar and sauntered over to Egypt to schmooze with Cleopatra. In the west, Octavian had a lot of problems. His land reforms got the sympathy of his legions, but proceeded to alienate the rest of Italy pretty handily. Because that’s kind of what happens when you confiscate people’s land and give it to your army instead. In 40 BC, Antony’s wife Fulvia led a
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revolt against Octavian and very briefly captured Rome. Octavian then pushed them out to Gaul and quashed the rebellion, after which he sacrificed 300 of the conspirators. Not imprisoned — not even executed — Sacrificed. Octavian performed human sacrifices on fellow Romans on the altar of the deified Julius Caesar. The ancient world was no stranger to animal sacrifices, but when it came to people, Romans did not do that. So uh, I’m just gonna jot this up next
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to “Mass Murder of Wealthy Romans” on the list of Octavian’s Deeply Distressing Personality Quirks. Now the golden rule of late Republican Rome is that anyone named Pompey is guaranteed to be a colossal pain in the butt for anyone named Caesar, and that’s definitely the case here. Sextus Pompey, son of Pompey the Headless, had been tooling around in the Mediterranean for the better part of 8 years following Caesar’s assassination,
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blockading ports and regularly cutting off Rome’s food. Octavian was understandably miffed about this, but couldn’t really do anything since Pompey had Senate-sanctioned control of Rome’s entire navy. Even though the Triumvirate was able to defeat the assassins a few years beforehand in a land battle, they were practically powerless against the only real navy in the Mediterranean. Technically Egypt had a pretty great navy too, but they don’t count because they’re… you know,
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not Roman and also Cleopatra was solidly in Mark Antony’s corner, so, not about to help. Anyway, after a treaty broke down and Pompey inflicted a humiliating defeat on Rome, Octavian’s general and all around badass right-hand-man Marcus Agrippa proceeded to take matters into his own hands by building up a navy of his own from scratch. The problem was that with Pompey controlling the seas,
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Agrippa’s forces couldn’t train how to sail in open waters without threat of being immediately murderized. So the madman DIGS A LAKE in the middle of Italy and uses it as a makeshift naval base to train up a fleet, which proceeded to demolish Pompey’s navy because Agrippa is a military GOD. My headcannon is that Agrippa, equipped with nothing but a bucket, a shovel, and a mission, dug the whole lake himself in a night, though archaeology has yet to corroborate
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my hypothesis. Yet. After Agrippa’s solo-carry against Pompey, Lepidus attempted to seize Sicily for himself, but Octavian said “woah woah woah who let you leave the house?” and immediately ejected him from the Triumvirate, confining him to the priesthood. Was this, by any chance, legal? Eh? So then there were two! Moving on. Now, on paper, they were cool, because Antony had married Octavian’s sister
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Octavia after his first wife Fulvia casually revolted against Rome, but in 32 BC he divorced her and officially married Cleopatra, confirming what everyone in Rome already knew was happening for the better part of a decade. Observant viewers will recognize that Not Being In-Laws Anymore is the same step in the process when hostilities first flared up between Caesar and Pompey. So uh, get ready. It’s around here that things start going downhill really fast. The Mediterranean
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was shaping up to end in a violent showdown between the muscular military man Antony and the super scrawny strategist Octavian. 32 BC started off with the year’s two new consuls delivering what was apparently a devastating verbal smackdown against Octavian. The next day, Octavian showed up in the senate with armed guards. This strong statement was also a gross violation of traditional rap-battle protocol, after which part of the senate bailed to go join
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up with Antony in the east. Hmm, you’ll have to forgive me, it’s a little hard to hear with this massive echo in the history. Unfortunately for the senators, they found that Antony’s half of the Republic was kind of suckish, so a few defected back to Octavian. But, in the confusion, Octavian sneakily got a hold of Antony’s will, which, among other things, included the neat little fact that Antony wanted to be buried in Egypt with Cleopatra, and he bequeathed entire
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Roman provinces to his children with her. Not only was this distinctly kingly behavior on his part, it was kingly behavior in service to a foreign state at Rome’s direct expense. Octavian of course pounced on this like a cat on an expensive-looking vase, and waged an intense propaganda war against Antony, branding him as having been bewitched by scary foreigner Cleopatra and forgetting
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how to be properly Roman. Octavian, by contrast, painted himself as the pinnacle of Roman-ness, as his family heritage traced back to the epic hero Aeneas and the settlement of Rome itself — You know, insofar as anyone could trace anything when it came to ancient genealogy. Coincidentally, just as soon as Antony’s will was exposed, Octavian also began construction of a giant mausoleum right on the banks of the Tiber river in Rome. Ahem. Bring on the propaganda fight:
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But perhaps the most important message that Octavian pushed was that Antony had become a slave to Cleopatra — by framing the problem as “Antony was corrupted by this evil foreign queen and her probably mind-control boobs,” he neatly avoided the touchy subject of civil war. Control over the narrative was key, and Octavian had it. When he entered into war with Antony in 32, all of Rome was convinced that the prime antagonist was Cleopatra, and didn’t think
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that Octavian was making a power play to seize the whole Republic for himself. But no time to worry about the complex political implications of large-scale conflict because off to war we go! And here, Octavian’s controversial land redistribution scheme from a decade earlier paid dividends now that he was able to take the loyalty of several entire legions to the bank. Once again, Agrippa,
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ma boy, comes in clutch. First he prevented Antony from sailing from his base in Greece to Italy, which would have been a very bad time for Octavian and friends because Rome was not a long march away. After that, Antony and Cleopatra’s armies set up camp at Actium in Northwest Greece, with his supply chain running down to the isthmus of Corinth and through to Egypt. Agrippa, because Awesome is his middle name, proceeded to intercept and cut off Antony’s supplies at
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Corinth and then blockaded him in at the bay of Actium, forcing a battle. While dozens if not hundreds of poems have been written to commemorate Actium, I’m not sure there has ever been a bigger anticlimax in all of Roman history. Cannae? Heartbreak! Zama! Drama! Everything Caesar did in Gaul? *mwah* Tactical Brilliance! Actium? … meh? For how consequential of a battle it is, it’s shockingly uninteresting. All the actual cool stuff happened before the battle. Agrippa
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laid on the moves to force the fight, and then after that Cleopatra and Mark Antony decided that leaving and losing was better than likely losing anyway plus being captured and probably killed, because honestly, fair, so they broke the blockade and bailed. After the battle, everyone just went home — Octavian went back to Rome to tidy up the state and deal with a bread famine, and Antony and Cleopatra went back to Egypt, navy-less but alive.
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The next year, Octavian came to a defenseless Alexandria. Sources are all over the place but general gist is Antony killed himself, Octavian tried to get Cleopatra to come to Rome to be a set-piece in Octavian’s triple triumph, but Cleopatra pulled a Dido by giving Rome the finger through a dramatic suicide, which honestly is entirely valid. From Octavian’s, and, by extension, Rome’s side of the story, Cleopatra looks one-dimensional and evil, but that is a
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woefully inaccurate characterization. Historians have treated Cleopatra so, so poorly. Sigh. In any case, now that our boy Octavian cleaned up at Actium, he annexed the Duat out of Egypt, and did who knows what with the bodies of Antonius and Cleopatra, so the totally-not-a-civil-war-civil-war was won and Rome was finally at peace. Yay! Given the straight century of world-spanning turmoil that Rome had
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just gone through, it should be no surprise that people were really glad about this. In the years that followed, Octavian consolidated power under the guise of restoring the republic, even though most people knew and honestly didn’t care because they were either just glad the wars were over or were among the two thirds of the senate that Octavian himself installed. Also to mark his new position, he changed his name to Augustus, meaning, The Increased One or Majestic. He almost
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changed it to Romulus, presumably just to mess with historians, so let’s be very glad he didn’t. And that’s the near-immediate collapse of the Triumvirate and the final war of the Roman Republic. Bottom line is that while Mark Antony was a very dangerous adversary who could have won had he paid more attention to his wits instead of his wife’s … erm, let’s say eyes, Octavian had the board tilted in his favor from day one. Not only
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was Octavian a superior strategist, but he had an exquisite team, finding by far the best general of the day in bad-ass extraordinaire Marcus Agrippa, and winning a crucial propaganda war thanks to his friend Maecenas, Rome’s biggest patron of poetry and the arts. As underhanded and downright brutal as some of his tactics were, Octavian’s victory reassembled Rome into one piece, and, critically,
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demonstrated that perhaps the only way to keep it in one piece was to have one man in charge, and after coming this far there was no way Augustus would let it be anyone else. At barely 35 years old, Octavian Caesar, the great-nephew of one prematurely perforated Julius, was the most powerful man in Rome. In the span of a decade and a half, the “Impressive young man,” as Cicero called him, cleverly swayed the people to view him as the rightful heir to the
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legacy of his“father” Julius Caesar, and struck up an alliance with the prominent General Marcus Antonius to secure his revenge against the big C’s assassins. From there, he spent the next decade consolidating his power in the Western Republic, casting his co-triumvir Marcus Antonius as a turncoat slave to his mistress Cleopatra, because she was queen of the last Non-Roman corner of the
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Mediterranean and c’mon it wasn’t going to conquer itself. After waging and winning a war against the both of them, Egypt got annexed and the Roman republic was pacified by the might of Octavian, now known by the name Augustus. But there was still one issue: We’ve been here before, and if things were going to change, what needed to be done next? And how could the republic really be restored if there’s one man clearly more powerful than anyone else? Well, as we’ll see,
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even though the road to the Roman Empire wasn’t the most obvious, Augustus, ever the clever little son of a god, pulled it off. First things first, when he returned to Rome from yoinking Egypt he astutely dodged the subject of whether or not he was going to make like his old man and fashion himself a king. Instead he pulled a Bane and insisted that he was restoring the republic and returning it to you,
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the people. Indeed, I’m Bane. erm, anyway. And since Augustus had already offed the other two Triumvirs, he ditched the now awkward title and resigned most of his official power. BUT he did stay on as Consul, and remained the effective governor of Egypt, Spain, Gaul, Syria, and Illyria, so he had insane funds, lots of territory, and most of Rome’s legions in his pocket. And that would make for some large pockets… It’s like Pokemon,
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but instead it’s just lots of humans, land, and coins in a giant burlap sack. He also took on the generally ceremonial role of Princeps Senatus, but since Octavian had stacked the Senate in his favor over the past few years, it effectively meant that he dictated legislation. That was basically his trick — he never changed any core institutions… he just happened to hold several different key positions of extreme power all at once. The Totalitarianism was a total accident.
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Whereas the big C rolled into Rome like “waddup I’m dictator for life” and got immediately murdered because he his plot armor wasn’t as strong as he thought, Augustus was much more aware of feelings on the ground, and played himself up as a peace-bringer above everything else. So, at this point, no one had the reason and especially not the means to start another civil war. Half a decade into his not-quite
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rule over the not-quite empire, the Senate gave its official thumbs up to his peace-bringing, republic-restoring, Pax Romana-securing ways, and after that there were statues of Augustus going up everywhere and coins bearing his face and a shield on the senate house with an inscription about how full of justice and piety he is. … Ok nuts, point taken he’s definitely a king. But now, Romans saw
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a good king in practice but not in name as vastly preferable to the stabby alternative. 100 years of civil war will do that to you. The closest brush with rebellion happened a few years into the empire, where a prefect of Egypt named Cornelius Gallus won a small campaign and erected a monument to his victory. Augustus, visibly shaken by the wave of flashbacks to Antony-and-Cleopatra, mailed Gallus a letter of
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stern reprimand and then also a dagger for which to impale himself. Gallus, guilty of little more than pride and Governing-While-Alexandrian, went down without a fight. After that, Rome collectively kept its mouth shut, and Augustus kept a very keen eye on Egypt. On the foreign front, Augustus expanded Rome’s borders to more or less what they’d be for the next few centuries. He also secured a peace deal with the Parthians, who had been a particularly troublesome thorn in
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Rome’s side for almost a century, as I’m sure Crassus would tell you if he didn’t have gold poured down his throat. On the domestic side, the princeps selected senators, magistrates, and generals to keep everything running smoothly. On the literary front, Augustus had his poets working in high-gear to crank out some of Rome’s best literature. Given what came before that was a low bar to clear, but this new stuff was pretty sweet. It probably goes without saying that the
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most famous Augustan-era work is Virgil’s Aeneid, a masterful epic poem glorifying Rome’s ancient Trojan history. And while Virgil slides in a non-negligible number of digs at his boss, the Aeneid was still a key component of the so-called Augustan Program in the arts, literature, and architecture: the celebration of just how dang glorious Rome was, and the coolness of Augustus for making Rome its best self. – and nowhere was that more visible than in architecture.
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Of all the things Augustus did, his most widely celebrated accomplishment was having found Rome as a city of bricks and leaving it as a city of marble. After the historian Suetonius put that quote in the first emperor’s mouth, nothing else in his impressive and winding career emblazoned itself so thoroughly into the popular historical conscience: not avenging his great uncle's assassination, not winning Rome's last*-ish civil war, not even conquering Egypt from the formidable
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Cleopatra, and it also wasn't transforming the Roman Republic into an empire or founding a royal dynasty (despite their massive long-term implications). Augustus himself would like us to remember him for "Restoring the Republic" and bringing peace to the Mediterranean, as he made a very big deal about those two – but those may well have been the groundwork for his lasting and most tangible achievement of giving Rome its identity. Now it's not as if the Roman people didn't have a
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district character to them already – the previous five centuries had shown them to be calculating, devoted, opulent, fiercely pragmatic, more fiercely militaristic, and mayhaps a tad narcissistic - but these traits were understood conceptually, through old fables of great Romans demonstrating virtue in the face of peril. These ideas of Roman-ness or "Romanitas" had yet to take real physical form. While Rome had its temples and one especially spiffy theater, Augustus saw
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an opportunity to make the city itself into a monument to Roman excellence. Now, there's a word for this, and that word is "Propaganda", but all his life Augustus was really really freaking good at it, and his building program was a natural extension of that weaselly talent. But without a doubt, the centerpiece crowning his city of marble, his greatest accomplishment, was a strikingly-humble building called the Ara Pacis Augustae: the Altar of Augustan Peace.
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So if we consider the city as Augustus would have – namely: a canvas for imperial propaganda, we should appreciate just how blank it was in the first century BC. The city was situated among seven hills on the east bank of the Tiber river, it was protected by the pre-republican-era Servian wall, and the legal scope of the city was defined by a boundary called the Pomerium, supposedly the original course Romulus had plowed when founding
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his city. Everything inside the Pomerium was the true Rome, while everything outside the Pomerium was just stuff that belonged to Rome. But with trinkets like Athens, Ephesus, and Alexandria, Rome’s belongings were rather more impressive than itself, because Rome in the Republican era was fully lacking in the big-ticket megaworks that later came to define it: no Colosseum, no Pantheon, no palaces, no massive baths, and only very recently had Caesar spent his
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dictatorial winnings on a major Forum and upgrades to the Circus Maximus, which even still was an open racetrack with wooden bleachers. Pompey had earlier spent his campaign spoils on a new stone theater and meeting house for the senate, and that was the single nicest building in Rome. Which IS cool, but when Alexandria had temples with vending machines that gave out holy water and the most magnificent library in the ancient world, it was time Rome stepped up its game.
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So, what to build, and where? Well, first things first: libraries. Augustus built a library for Greek and Roman literature in a new temple to Apollo on the Palatine hill, and another one in the Portico of his sister Octavia just outside the Pomerium. At the same time, he built another structure further outside the Pomerium: an ornate mausoleum for him and his family that signified his commitment to Rome by his intent to
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die there. It’s a grand tholos-shaped tomb covered with trees, and it was also a giant middle-finger to his rival Marcus Antonius, who allegedly wished to be buried in Alexandria rather than Rome. Scandale! Now one bit of land between the hills and the Tiber river has some special significance due to both geography and complex ancient legalese. See, one of the Pomerium’s quirks is that armies were
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forbidden to cross it and enter the city. History informs us that they did, with distressingly high frequency, but the point is they weren’t supposed to. So in the republican period, the military needed an easily-accessible place to train and drill, and they dedicated this handy floodplain by the river to their god of war and made it into the Field of Mars, or Campus Martius. Various
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generals over the centuries had built a handful of temples with the spoils of successful campaigns, but by the time of Augustus it was still pretty sparse, so it would make the perfect place to commemorate his victories – not just because it was free real estate, but also great symbolism. Mars was the father of the twins Romulus and Remus and, by extension, the ancestor of Rome. Augustus, meanwhile, traced his ancestry up to the hero Aeneas and his mother Venus,
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who was notably a consort of Mars. So this pairing of Mars and Venus is echoed down the generations by the match of their descendants, Rome and Augustus. Mythologically this is fun and cool, but the practical outcome was our favorite Princeps making himself inextricable from the very concept of Rome. That meant restoring dozens of temples and finishing political buildings like the Saepta Julia, a vote-counting hall first commissioned by Caesar, so that way,
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even while he made a big show of restoring the institutions of the republic, the very machinery of government was associated with the patronage of Augustus. Clever – Bastard – But clever. Another structure was more cosmic in scope, as Augustus put an Egyptian obelisk in the Campus Martius to work as a sundial meridian, casting a shadow on a marble grid to track the days of the year according to Caesar’s Julian Calendar. This Solarium Augusti not only celebrated the subjugation
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of Egypt by flaunting an obelisk, but it was dedicated 35 years after the Calendar reform, conveying the message that the Julio-Augustan imperial family literally controls time. And that’s not the only time he pulled this nonsense. Back to the patronage thing, Augustus spent over a decade on a whole new forum, complete with a temple to Mars Ultor, the Avenger, in celebration of his victory against Caesar’s assassins. This forum was not only another place
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where public business was conducted under the auspices of the Princeps, but it had two statue galleries on either side: one of famous men from the Republican era, and one tracing the lineage of the Julian family back up to Aeneas, both of which culminated in our favorite boy. And then he also built a new Theater to honor his dead nephew Marcellus, but he specifically made it bigger than
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Pompey’s theater. There’s a whole dynastic angle to this, but frankly I just find this one petty, which, granted, is less obnoxious than proclaiming yourself the ruler of time. Luckily, he wasn’t quite so pompous as to take all the credit, and was happy to let his badass right-hand man Marcus Agrippa show off as well. Most famously, he made the first draft of the as-of-yet tragically-domeless Pantheon, but
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he also built the first major public baths in the city of Rome, supplied by water from his new Aqua Virgo – one of two aqueducts overseen by Agrippa out of three built during the reign of Augustus, the third of which was used to fill the Naumachia, an arena across the river that staged whole-ass naval battles. The Romans are among the rare few who could make something so basic as water into something so immensely hardcore.
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So with all that built, we come to 13 BC, when Augustus returned from campaigns in the west and the Senate voted to build an Altar of Augustan Peace on the Campus Martius, finished and consecrated a few years later in 9 BC. Unlike, say, the temple of Mars Ultor, this wasn’t a temple, it’s a sacrificial altar. It’s raised on a podium with one staircase leading in and walls on all 4 sides, but there’s no roof! Roman state religion was a public affair,
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and many sacrifices were done outdoors. But since this was part of the Augustan program, it was another vehicle for, of course, Propaganda! And even by the standards of what he did so far, the Ara Pacis was thick with symbolism, much of it self-serving. The inside walls are decorated with bountiful fruit garlands and ox skulls in the traditional style, and the bottom of the outside walls have ornate floral patterns of Acanthus leaves and some 50 other species of plants and
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animals. And as with all classical sculpture-work, it would have been painted, so every leaf, vine, & figure were brightly-colored and gilded to really sell the natural beauty and the idea of a new Golden Age that Augustus had created for Rome. Looking upwards now toward the business portion of the frieze, we find a selection of four panels depicting mythological scenes. The figures are a smidge dubious to identify, as some panels are
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quite thoroughly trashed, but we can make some educated guesses. On the front-left of the altar is the scene of baby Romulus and Remus with their wolf-mom and probably Mars looking over them; While on the right side is a scene of sacrifices made by probably Rome’s Second King Numa Pompilius, who has strong associations with peace and piety, but people used to say he’s Aeneas, so ehhhh? The back right panel has the goddess Roma armored up and sitting on a pile of either
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her own weapons or ones she confiscated. unclear. And finally, there’s the real splash panel of anyone from Pax to Roma again to Mother Earth to maybe Venus Genetrix, holding two children that likely symbolize the people of Rome, surrounded by the bounty of the lands on one side and the sea on the other. Exact figures notwithstanding, the combined effect is pretty clear: front panels show “here’s what we came from” & the back panels say “look at us, we did it, Golden Age ahoy”.
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And lastly, the long ends of the altar have paired processional friezes, possibly in reference to the ones on the Parthenon, but here depicting a religious procession from around 13 BC when the altar was commissioned. One side shows politicians and the senatorial elite, while the other shows the extended imperial family, as a representation of The Senate and People of Rome, except here the People is Augustus’ people,
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rendered so specifically that we can actually pick out individuals like the Princeps and his wife Livia, Agrippa and Julia, and even some royal kiddos – One kid is shown being visibly bored and pulling on Agrippa’s toga so that he can see better, which is pretty adorable, especially by the standards of, again, vigorous propaganda. The intermingled imagery of deities and royals, celebrations of a plentiful Golden Age, and the triumph of peace are all supporting Augustan
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political power and pushing this concept of the Princeps as a divine patron of Rome’s success. And by putting all this on the Field of Mars, it creates a causal chain between Roman power, the Pax Romana, and natural prosperity, of which our boy the Time King guarantees all three. The design of the Ara Pacis is so elegant, and the sculpture-work is absolutely exquisite; it’s in no small part because of powerful iconography like this that Romans were willing to put up with
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monarchs again, because the results spoke for themselves and it all just seemed to fit. Perhaps the symbolism is too powerful, as the Ara Pacis was the focal-point of the most consequential moment of Classical reception in the 1900s: Fascism. But whatever subtlety was possessed by the Divine Son of the Deified Julius Caesar, the lord of time, Imperator Caesar Augustus, that subtlety was fully lacking in Il Duce Mussolini, so the already fiercely propagandistic iconography
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of Augustan Rome was flipped on Turbo and used by Italian and German fascists as an excuse for, y’know, atrocities. So it’s rather important that historians and audiences alike be careful to not blindly glorify any civilization. We should celebrate the Nice and criticize the Yikes, because neither exists in a vacuum. Augustus was endlessly clever – he was also a lying, weaselly rascal and I f***ing hate him. The Ara Pacis is spectacular,
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Augustan Rome is magnificent, the empire’s new identity was glorious, but what did it cost them? So as we might imagine, it wasn’t all smiles in Augustan Rome, as the poet Ovid needs to be absolutely certain you are aware. The short of it is that Augustus tried to impose new laws on marriage, so our boy Ovid decided to write a giant poem about where and how to seduce any man or woman in Rome. As it happens, the How often involved seducing the maid first (which I don’t
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quite follow but Rome was a different place so who knows), and the Where was pretty much every monument Augustus built. Unsurprisingly, the new emperor was less than pleased at the thought of those wild youths using his carefully crafted high-brow iconography as set dressing for casual hookups, and Ovid got exiled to the Black sea for the rest of his life. Coincidentally, Augustus also exiled his own daughter at the same time. One and two may or may
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not have gone together, but it would have been completely in character for that salacious Ovid. One successful empire later, Augustus died in 14 AD at the age of 75. By the time he died, almost no one could remember what the Old Republic was like, either because they were too young or too murdered. Although Augustus was one of Rome’s longest-serving emperors, he suffered from a recurring sickness that almost
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killed him every other year. Yeah, throughout this whole process, not only did he have to contend with Brutus, Cassius, and Antony trying to kill him, but he also had to, you know, not die to RNG. And speaking of dying, his heirs weren’t so lucky. See, being emperor and all, Augustus wanted to choose a successor. So he groomed his nephew Marcellus to become emperor, but then he died (23 BC). Oh well, that’s Roman medicine for
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you. So then he started preparing his stepson Drusus and nope he’s dead too (9 BC). Oookay, how about his two grandkids Gaius and Lucius and are you kidding me (4, 2 AD). So with options A-through-D exhausted, succession went to his wife Livia’s first son Tiberius. With the benefit of hindsight, a terrible choice, but options were slim so what’ll’ya do. While historians have written about Augustus
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up and down the timeline, he made their jobs a bit easier by writing not quite an autobiography, but a pretty thorough resume. Upon his death, he published the Res Gestae Divi Augusti, basically “The Awesome Stuff I Did”. Some of it is embellished, some of it is straight up lies, but it shows what he thinks mattered most about himself: and it was the stability he brought to Rome. At the end of the day, that’s why this whole emperor thing worked. Between the
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senator murdering and the human sacrificing it’s fair to say Augustus is a little problematic, and the moderate amount of deception underpinning his entire career is also a bit distressing, but the Romans weren’t about to argue with results. Through a long career of carefully strategized political maneuvering, military operations and cultural production, Augustus laid the groundwork for over one thousand more years of Rome,
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and that’s a feat. His ascent to power was far from guaranteed, but this 19-year-old kid outplayed all of Rome, and one metric History-Summarized later, this kid was a 75-year old man who is also dead. So… with the Age of Augustus finished, onward to Empire! Aah, the Roman Empire. Established by the eternally baby-faced Augustus in 27 BC, this innovation in governance placed one emperor in charge of the entire Roman state,
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which in turn ruled over the whole Mediterranean world for the next half millennium. As the earlier history of the Republic has shown, Rome is a dense topic, but the ironic difficulty with Imperial Roman history is that the great Senatus Populusque Romanus had already won. At the death of Augustus, Rome stretched from Iberia to Africa, the long way – and while emperors did add a few more provinces in the following centuries, this new age was not defined by conquests,
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but the victorious quiet of the Pax Romana. Likewise, the poets and artists of the Augustan era had codified a new imperial identity for Rome, stepping out of Greece’s shadow to set the standard for Roman culture. With so much groundwork diligently laid in the centuries BC, Imperial Rome in these first 200 years AD was at the top of its game, with nothing left to do but make the most lavishly glorious civilization they could. This rather uncharacteristically-calm state
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of affairs gives us an opportunity to look at the structure and breathtaking scale of the Roman world, before, of course, everything starts to go wrong. Don’t worry, we’ll get there. SO, to see how Mediterranean society reached its peak under the rule of the Caesars, Let’s do some History. To begin with we have... [Tiberius and Caligula crash into frame] Sigh, okay we might need to get through
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some shenanigans first. Because what the empire lacks in grand conflicts between civilizations it makes up for in an absolute carousel of royal wackos. These monarchs generally lack the charm of Caesar or the cleverness of Augustus, and are instead best known for the nonsense they got up to in their abundant time away from their One Job. This all makes for excellent gossip, but the trainwreck fascination runs thin by the time a fifth locomotive careens off the
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rails and crashes into the nearest chaos-orgy. And frankly, enough of these stories come to us from historians and senators with axes to grind, in a culture that already loves exaggerating, that it’s just best not to dwell on them: which is why I invite your imagination to run wild as I treat the emperors as glorified timestamps. So, the distressingly-low survival rate of Augustus’ heirs led to Tiberius’ landing on the throne, whereupon he holed up in his palace on the scenic
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island of Capri to enjoy the aforementioned carnival of orgies. His successor Caligula, whose nickname means “Little Boots”, is remembered for antics like nominating his horse for Consul to insult the Senate and sending an army to collect seashells off the coast of Gaul – but he started a few notable trends: more building projects, for one, but also concentrating more power on himself, and critically, being assassinated by his own guards in 41 AD.
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Now this may have been useful in the short term, but it doesn’t bode great for future emperors, so we’ll have plenty of time to discuss that later. At the moment, the Augustan reforms ensured that Roman armies didn’t serve factions in the Senate or the personal whims of their generals, but the emperor. And after the chaos of the Late Republic, this setup lessened the threat of civil wars and let the army maintain the hard-won peace. By this
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point, the Roman military had reached peak form, or at least peak aesthetic, and the 30-odd Legions were permanently stationed at the frontiers of the empire to project power beyond Rome’s borders. On paper, there’s quite a contrast between this smooth operating in the provinces and the hijinks of the royal palace, but by concentrating all of the Crazy into one guy, the rest of the empire
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could function without obstructions or conflict. I doubt that was the plan, but it seemed to work. And it’s here in the imperial era that the Roman world transformed from "Italy’s Pile of Provinces” into an integrated Mediterranean system. Centered on the sea they called Mare Nostrum, the low cost and high speed of seaborne transportation allowed goods, resources, and plenty of food to flow between port cities. Grain from North Africa,
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metals from Iberia, wines from Gaul, and scholars from Ephesus could be found in every corner of the empire, and even far beyond. As was often the case with Rome: commerce followed conquest, as new provinces made for new and exciting sources of wealth, and overland trade operated along the robust network of roads that was built to transport armies. This roadmap is one of the single most beautiful sights I’ve ever laid eyes on, and my wife Cyan is really pretty. And
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the marblework doesn’t stop there, because lest we forget, the Romans were engineering maniacs. Concrete, domes, arches, water-highways that ferry delicious H2O from the mountains down into cities, HEATED FLOORS, the Romans literally had no chill when it came to construction. And this marks a distinction between the quiet vibrance of private art and the big public works, where they never built a thing for the sake of its beauty, but rather for the sake of their
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glory. The true Roman artists were the engineers who built not only temples and theaters but roads, bridges, aqueducts and baths. It's a practical, functional artistry where the beauty lies in the accomplishment and its usefulness to the empire, and the fact that they are also beautiful is a flourish. A really big one. To illustrate a few converging themes, let’s look at the single greatest monument to Roman
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extravagance: the Colosseum. This neighborhood of the city had burned down in 64 AD, swiftly to be replaced with a palace for the exceptionally crazed emperor Nero, and then replaced again by the new emperor Vespasian – the victor in a brief but fierce four-way civil war after Nero’s death. Vespasian’s plan to legitimize his new Flavian dynasty was essentially to bribe the Roman people with a grand public project and the promise of splendid games in said arena once
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it was done. This herculean accomplishment relied not just on Rome’s wealth, talents, and technologies like concrete, but on an imperial system specifically designed to make these projects possible. State-owned stone quarries and brickyards produced standardized building materials which could be used for whatever the emperor needed. And as far as Rome was concerned, Slavery was just as vital to Rome’s growth, development, and success, as every stage of
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buildings like the Colosseum relied in part on slave labor: first in the mines, quarries, and brickyards, then in working alongside freedmen and day laborers to actually build these megaworks, and once the Colosseum was finished, slaves fought in the arena to the delight of tens of thousands. Somewhere around a quarter of the empire’s population was enslaved and treated like property; from the fields to the cities, the institution of slavery permeated every aspect of Roman society.
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The potential Cognitive Dissonance between Rome’s accomplishments and the cruelty of its methods was of distressingly-minimal concern to the Roman people, as the Colosseum itself shows how casually Romans went to a magnificent theater for the sole purpose of watching people get f*cking bodied. Gladiatorial matches were the most notorious of festivities, but there were also beast hunts, chariot races,
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and, when they were feeling bold, entire naval battles – all of which could be themed and choreographed to represent famous stories from history and myth. Even when celebrating peace, the Romans loved a violent spectacle. Zooming back out, let’s jump northwest to Britannia, where emperor Claudius’ first foray onto the isle was later consolidated by Agricola, the governor who conquered Wales and northern
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England during the reign of Vespasian. Britannia was one of a few provinces added during the imperial era, and while its capital of Londinium was not a major metropolis of the Roman world, it does show us how fast Rome could plop down roots and establish a fully-functioning city out of what seems like thin air. And while the city of Rome looks like an urban planner’s nightmare, their later additions are planned so well it’s insulting to the rest of us. Ah, the grids,
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its beautiful! And Roman Britain is surprisingly well-documented because Agricola’s son-in-law was the historian Tacitus. His account of Britannia gives a good look at how the Romans saw conquered peoples: not treating them with any particular warmth, but very inclined to keep things running smoothly. A common strategy was to designate Client Kingdoms to preserve the local order within the broader aegis of Rome’s authority. This could be done on its own, or made as a first step
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before direct Roman administration, or instead done to pacify a frontier with the light touch of diplomacy rather than throwing legions at it. Most cultural transmission between the Romans and their new subjects involved the “Barbaric” party taking on Roman customs to become more “Civilized”, but the diversity of cultures within the empire produced a wide variety in what it meant to be Roman – as Rome was in turn influenced by local language, art, dress, and,
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most crucially, religion. Having more or less copy-pasted their entire pantheon, Rome had no trouble seeing opportunities for crossover between cultures and doing DBZ-fusions on similar deities. This is… not how Rome treated Judaism. For one, Judaism was pointedly non-polytheistic, but it also didn’t help that Rome and the province of Judea had a frequently-adversarial relationship. After a
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bloody conquest by Pompey, a string of oppressive governors tightened the screws on Judea until a revolt broke out in 66 AD, whereupon Vespasian delegated the war to his son (and soon-to-be emperor) Titus. Jerusalem was ultimately sacked and looted, as the commemorative Arch of Titus shows legionaries carting off a giant menorah, and the Jews went into diaspora after the destruction of the second temple. There are faint echoes of this in how Rome treated Christianity, another
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monotheistic religion considered subversive to the empire, but for these first two centuries, persecution of Christians was only a sporadic and localized concern. Now, whether it was karma for Jerusalem or just bad luck, Titus got hit by twin crises during his brief two years as emperor. In addition to another fire in Rome, he had to pick up the soot-covered pieces after Mount Vesuvius went kaplooie on the entire Bay of Naples. After he died his brother became emperor,
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continuing some trends and resuming others from earlier: like more big building projects after the fire, more power stripped away from the senate, and more getting assassinated. This time, the Praetorian Guard further bullied the new emperor Nerva to adopt the general Trajan as his heir. And for all the inherent corruption that led us to this point, this is where things start really getting shiny. Trajan was a military master who pushed Roman territory to its fullest extent,
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and built a triumphal column to commemorate how dope his conquest of Dacia was. The spoils of this newly-subjugated province paid for yet more public works, including the last and grandest forum in Rome, complete with two libraries. And this is a pleasant running theme this century: anyone can spend money on their own palaces, but only a real G gives it back to his people. Trajan’s conquest of Mesopotamia
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was impressively-flashy but completely untenable, and his successor Hadrian had no interest in more outward expansion, instead focusing on fortifying Britannia and Germania and otherwise splashing money on monuments across the empire. Rome hadn’t completely given up hope of walloping its enemies, as even the Philosopher-Emperor Marcus Aurelius spent 14 long years begrudgingly waging war against the increasingly-pesky Germans, but I think this is about when the practical
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reality finally set in: all the rich or easy borderland territories had already been taken, so the strategy of conquer everything that looks at you funny was no longer viable, and this is where Rome topped out. That’s far from terrible, as these last three of the so-called “Good Emperors” presided over a Rome at the absolute height of its power and prosperity, and there’s plenty to respect in several decades of pleasantly-quiet history characterized by
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wise rulers and a steady empire – But… and remember now, we’re talking about Rome here, it won’t be long until the Romans’ legendary discipline starts to lapse and things go ouch, because the great SPQR always maintained the potential for a remarkably-precipitous drop. But for now, there wasn’t a better time to inhabit beautiful cities, to enjoy brilliant engineering, to prosper from expansive trade, and to live in a secure society. It wasn’t always the best,
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but it was Roman Civilization at its best. And honestly, doing our best is all we should ask. When discussing the history of Rome, it’s only natural to come across a handful of points at which things seem to go very wrong. War here, plague there, civil war over here, another general marches his army on Rome — and after a certain point it doesn’t even register. But these are all fairly momentary crises; a bad time, to be sure, but ultimately a self-contained
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catastrophe. Yet there is one truly abysmal chapter in Roman history that takes the cake: A quintuple-barrel calamity for the ages — and no, I’m not talking about the Byzantines because I’m not looking to cry today — I’m talking about the Crisis of the Third Century, which, by every reasonable prediction, should have destroyed everything. Fully everything. Yet, in a classic twist of Roman irony, the causes of this crisis and even a few of its symptoms would
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become the strategies used by Roman emperors to end the crisis and even keep Rome going for centuries to come. So let’s take a look to find out how on earth that is possible. The Roman Empire entered the 200s AD in an iffy state. The golden age of the last century was losing some of its shine thanks to a succession of truly garbage emperors, starting with Commodus the gladiator tyrant and not getting much better:
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But beyond the scandalous hedonism of emperors with more concubines than sense lay far more dangerous habits, like how emperor Alexander Severus bought the loyalty of larger and larger armies by ballooning their pay. To afford this, he debased the currency by mixing the gold and silver with plebby dork metals, which tanked their value. And far from actually protecting Rome, this dynamic just gave the army leverage. In the old Augustan days, legions served at the pleasure
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of the emperor, but now, the emperor was just some guy who wore purple, and if Commodus could get strangled to death in a bath by his wrestling buddy, the bar for intimidating, puppeting, or just replacing an emperor was, like, 5 praetorian guards. But then whomst to replace him with? Why, one of the generals of course! And this was the same basic trick that Sulla and Caesar had pulled, but it saved the legwork of marching an army on Rome. E-fficiency! So in the 50 years since
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the first guy got axed, over 20 such “Barracks Emperors” took their brief turn at the top. These guys weren’t the most legitimate since they conspicuously weren’t the children or legal heirs of the previous emperor, but heyyyy, you’re the emperor! Nevermind that another general two provinces over is taking notes on how you got to that point, you’ll be fine… for a few months. All it took was some general beating up some goths for their soldiers to say “great job, you should be
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the emperor!” and then they get ideas and suddenly there’s a mini civil war to sort out. And all this squabbling left the door wide open for Rome’s rivals beyond the frontier to come right on in. Which frontier, you may ask? Good question! All of them. In the good old days, Germania was the primary Ouch-Zone, but now the entire North was subject to incursions, from the Rhine all the way across the Danube, with fun new friends like
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Franks, Marcomanni, Goths, and plenty others. Some of these migrations were simply people looking for new lands to settle, while others were significantly more forceful. Terrifyingly, they also sailed down the Atlantic coast and into the Eastern seas, striking as far as Athens in 267. The Roman army was good, but it wasn’t that good. When an emperor focused on one area, another was left wide open, but when the emperor tried to delegate, he might find his trusty
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general scheming for that big promotion. Meanwhile, the Eastern frontier was also a nightmare. The Parthians has been a sore spot for Rome since moneybags Crassus was defeated and supposedly Taxidermied with Gold back in 53 BC. But Parthia rarely went on the offensive, they we just hard to conquer, so all of Rome’s failed campaigns were essentially self-inflicted. However, the newly-formed Sassanid
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Persian Empire which took their place in the 220s was far better organized, and much more of an outward threat. In the 250s, King Shapur I pushed into Armenia, Roman Mesopotamia, and briefly into the Levant. The Sassanid menace would become a running theme for the next few centuries, but it came out of the gate real fast in the mid 200s. In 260, they captured emperor Valerian in battle, wherafter the King used him as a footstool. As if being the emperor wasn’t bad enough already.
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But let’s not limit our sample-size, it was miserable to be any kind of Roman nowadays. We’ve got coins getting debased throughout the century to bribe the army, trade routes constantly disrupted by war, and entire regions being destroyed by invasions and counterattacks. Plus, a plague in the 250s killed thousands a day in Rome and whittled cities like Alexandria down to half, which in turn
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drastically reduced the labor force available to farm and fight, resulting in widespread food and soldier shortages. As if the actual wars weren’t enough of a problem, piracy within the empire was rampant, so cities and provinces spent what little resources they had on defensive walls and small forts along major roads. All of this made clear that the society enjoyed during the Pax Romana was
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long gone, as it required the stability of strong government and a strong military, both of which were fully absent here in the 200s. Functions of government were carried out primarily by the army, who were only accountable to their very stab-ably general. Luckily, when Rome worked, it worked, so if those political and military foundations could be patched up, at least on a local level, things could be alright.
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Now, believe it or not, the first three decades of the crisis were actually rather straightforward (and even a bit tame) compared to what went down after 260. Valerian being captured by Persia left Rome to his son and Co-Emperor Gallienus. Faced with the problem of everything everywhere all of the time, he was happy to delegate the Rhineland frontier to Postumus, a general and Governor of
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Roman Germania. Naturally, it took all of five minutes for Postumus to be acclaimed as emperor, but not for all of Rome, just the western provinces. Gallienus couldn’t really do anything about this, so Postumus had free reign to form a quasi-intendent state in the West that stretched from Britannia through Gaul and Germania and down into Hispania. He created parallel Roman institutions like the Senate and Consuls, and had no intention of causing
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trouble with the rest of Rome, he just wanted his slice, and he was able to defend it fairly well. Meanwhile, a strikingly similar story plays out on the other end of the empire, where prince Odaenathus of Palmyra fought back against King Shapur and began acting independently of the new emperor Gallienus. Rome entrusted Odaenathus with defense of the east and granted him governorship of the provinces of Cilicia and Syria down to
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Arabia. With only the Eastern front to worry about, Odaenathus held off the Sassanids until his assassination in 267, when his widow Zenobia became the de-facto ruler of Palmyra and governor of all those provinces. Like in the west, this Palmyrene territory was essentially an independent state allied to Rome rather than provinces within it. And Rome was too occupied to really complain, until 270, when Zenobia took advantage of a couple quick emperor deaths to annex Egypt and
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Galatia and proclaim her son as Imperator Caesar Augustus, which we can now fairly categorize as open revolt. Even then, the new emperor only cared that Egyptian grain exports stayed on schedule. And it’s painfully telling that he could see part of his empire in a state of active rebellion and think “ehh, I’ll double back to that one later, I have more immediate problems.” Plus, half of Egypt
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was in favor of their annexation. It seems weird, but you can see why: the Palmyrene Empire and the Gallic Empire were smaller, more nimble, more stable, and (slightly) less susceptible to upstart barracks emperors. It just felt good to know that the person in charge was only one province over, rather than halfway across the sea and probably in the process of getting murdered by his own guards. Really, the actions of Postumus and
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Zenobia show that they did work in the interest of Rome, just, their corner of Rome, independently, and with the power of an emperor. Both states paid consistent homage to Rome, and, despite how bad it looks on a map, were far less of a problem for the emperor than his own usurping generals, and even, arguably, a help, as they each removed an entire front from the emperor’s To-Do list. And this,
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wildly, set the stage for their later reconquest, as the emperor Aurelian was free to focus the first few years of his reign squarely on fighting rival usurpers and barbarians along the Danube and, uh oh, in Italy. In 271 he drove the Alemanni tribe off the peninsula and built a new system of walls around Rome. He also organized a retreat from the always-slightly-untenable province of Dacia, making the much-more-defensible Danube River the consistent imperial border. With the
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northern front temporarily settled, he turned East, defeating Zenobia and reconquering the Palmyrene territories by the end of 273, and then the next year he schlepped west to reincorporate the Gallic state. To the empire’s collective astonishment, Aurelian had reunified Rome under the singular authority of the emperor in just a few years, and was granted the title of Restitutor Orbis, no small praise! With the World Restored, he turned his focus to reform of the state. But,
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we’re not out of the woods yet, because Aurelian got murdered by his own troops. In the decade following, things were definitely better but still kinda crap, with uncomfortably squishy emperors, a nonfunctioning economy, and more Frankish invasions in the 270s. But more people presented a new opportunity, and Rome essentially employed them in the reconstruction of devastated cities and farmland in exchange for letting them stay. This practice becomes quite a big deal in later
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centuries. So in the 250s and ‘60s the empire spiraled out of control, and the 270s saw big progress, but the 280s and ‘90s are where Roman authority finally came back, during the reign and reforms of Diocletian. After his acclamation as emperor in 284, he issued more stable currency, firmly separated military and civil leadership to stop the army muscling in on the state, and moved the Western seat of government up to Mediolanum to better oversee the front while he took up
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residence in the Eastern city of Nicomedia. Further, he delegated regional authority to his most capable officers and made his general Maximian co-emperor in 286. Two Emperors wasn’t a new idea, but by placing Maximian in charge of the West and Diocletian taking the East, this arrangement looked awful similar to the business with Gaul and Palmyra, except this time it was intentional, and formalized by intermarrying the families, which also created a
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line of legitimate succession. In 293 he expanded this setup by adding two junior co-emperors known as Caesars to support the two senior Augusti. This Tetrarchy kept Diocletian firmly at the top, but each emperor had regional autonomy. By recognizing that Rome tended to split along geographic fault lines, Diocletian’s Diet-Federalism turned a perennial problem into a stabilizing strength. He
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also snuffed the threat of civil wars by cutting all the provinces in half, so each of the hundred governors had a clearer responsibility and less power to stand up against his local Tetrarch. He also also grouped these new small provinces into 12 regional Dioceses to really layer the strata onto government. So in an insanely trolly twist of fate, the Gallic and Palmyrene breakaway empires were a trial-run of what Diocletian would make official policy: Rome was too fragile for
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one emperor, so, take it in parts. It was no Pax Romana, and even the Tetrarchy would be temporary, but it was enough! Diocletian’s reforms made a difference where they counted, and brought Rome out of the crisis on a much more stable footing than they ever could have hoped for two decades earlier. I think people get excited about Rome for the wrong reasons. “Rome conquered this,
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Oh they conquered that!” those are all whatever — what’s impressive are the moments when Rome stares into the pale face of death and tells him to wait his goddamn turn. No civilization could veto their own demise quite like Rome, and there’s no greater refusal than the Crisis of the Third Century: to suffer five chaotic decades, but then learn from chaos itself to adapt the empire and come out on top. Rome would die, but not yet.
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The beautiful city of Rome is great to visit year-round because you can see all four seasons, winter, spring, summer, fall—ohno *beep, cut to pain* There’s a lot to unpack with “The Fall of Rome”. Going from one of the greatest civilizations in human history to not existing at all is quite a long ways to drop. So questions of why it happened, when, and even if are hotly debated, and the academic discourse starts to sound like a game
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of Clue – It was the Vandals with the sack in 455! No, stupid, it was Constantine with the Christianity in 312! Mmmm, clearly it was the Ottomans with the cannons in 1453! – So instead of trying to pinpoint specific answers to a frankly-impossible question, let’s run through late imperial history to understand The Fall as a process rather than any singular moment. Just a century after the
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death of Rome’s favorite philosopher-emperor, the sullen-stoic Marcus Aurelius, the Pax Romana was shattered and the fall looked like it was coming any minute now. You could say that it was a lot of damage – but in came Diocletian to Flex-Tape the empire back together with a slate of reforms, and at the turn of the 300s things were looking solid! After 21 years and a whole lot of tape, Diocletian
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retired from being emperor, taking a well-earned rest at his Adriatic palace in direct emulation of the Republican hero Cincinnatus, who’d saved Rome from crisis and then relinquished all his power to go home and farm. In the face of all the chaos from the past century, Diocletian’s retirement was a monumental gesture, not only declaring that the empire was saved, but celebrating how Roman Virtues had likewise survived.
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One thing Diocletian really didn’t count on was that, in his absence, the Augusti and Caesares would immediately start fighting civil wars with each other. I mean, you know what they say: “When in Rome… sack it”. In this somewhat refreshing return to form where Rome’s biggest enemy is just itself, a Western Augustus by the name of Constantine got to conquering his rival tetrarchs. In the fight for control of Italy and North Africa, he received a vision from an angel
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telling him to paint the symbol of Christ onto his army’s shields. And let’s be real here, if it’s the fate of the empire, you’re not in the business of saying No to angels, so he got doodling and won the Battle at the Milvian bridge in 312. It’s unclear whether Constantine fully converted, but whatever the case, he was convinced enough that he legalized Christianity throughout the empire in 313 with the Edict of Milan, ending its sporadic persecution. Now toleration is different
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from incorporation, as Christians had their One And Only God who remained firmly separate from the pagan pantheon, but as far as the state was concerned, they were both chill. Constantine’s big hoist was to paint Christianity as compatible with a concept called Pax Deorum: where Rome gets divine favor if it’s good and pious. So whereas Christianity had earlier been seen as subversive, it could now be a team player. But the Eastern empire was still controlled by a Tetrarch who made
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the mistake of not being Constantine, so our boy got to fixing that by conquering the rest of the empire in 324 and founding an eastern capital named Nova Roma, soon to be Constantinople. Constantine was more successful at economic reform than Diocletian, but he continued to rely on foreign mercenaries for much of Rome’s defense, and this will have unintended, albeit predictable, consequences over the next century.
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Through the 300s, Rome held on. Administration was split between Rome and Constantinople, sometimes there was one emperor, other times the job was shared – that one guy tried and failed to re-outlaw Christianity, big mess – but in the wake of Constantine, things were loosely good, if a little uneasy. So as long as nobody comes to rock the bo– [BARBARIANS]. AAH, ahem, right. There’s a lot we could unpack about the false dichotomy between Civilized and Savage, but the simple fact
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is that the term “Barbarian” was coopted from Greek to describe all non-Romans. In centuries past they were often allied with Rome to defend imperial territory, but the trouble started with the Huns to the northeast. When these aggressors pushed into new land, they forced the current residents, Ostrogoths, Visigoths, lots of goths, to move somewhere else. The easiest and best option was usually into allied Roman territory, and just as back in the Third Century Crisis,
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emperors often negotiated these relocations. So the image of “Barbarian Invasions” obscures what’s more of an awkward and bloody but managed domino effect. This explains why the push was so gradual, and why these people became increasingly integrated into the military and political framework of Rome as vassal Foederati. Even in the most extreme examples when they started carving their own entire kingdoms out of the provinces, it was done by treaty, under the auspices of Rome,
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in a remarkably-similar arrangement to the Gallic and Palmyrene empires during the big Crisis. So now that we have all these barbarians at the edge of and even inside the Roman world, I think it’s time that we talk about ahem, Sacks Baby [Careless whisper sting]. And this, like the rest, was a process: as some Goths out east wanted to run away from the Huns and get themselves some farmland,
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so per the terms of their treaty, they asked and received permission from Constantinople to cross the Danube into the Balkans. They were joined by some other Goths, who were denied permission but crossed anyway, and the provincial generals treated them all so harshly they rose in revolt, meeting the Eastern Roman army outside Adrianople in 378 and utterly thrashing them. Yet after some
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more battles and negotiations, the result of all this was more foederati. Perhaps not surprising, because what choice did Rome have? Once again, the military had started to eclipse the power of the state, but instead of the legions & Roman generals of the late Republic, here the leverage belonged to the Foederati and their kings. And what do armies do when they want something from the state? They march on Rome! See, Roman traditions alive and well! So in 410, the Visigoths made
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their request for more land and better treatment by means of rolling up to the city and promptly sacking it. The damage was honestly minimal, but the notion that the ancient capital is now in striking distance was a real Oh Sh*t moment. Elsewhere in the early 400s, more western territory slowly fell away as huge populations of Goths, Franks, and Vandals flowed in past the Rhine & Danube and converted Roman provinces into
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their own kingdoms. By far the scariest of these were the Huns, who first arrived to torment the empire around the turn of the century and landed on the city of Rome’s doorstep in 452. In comes Pope Leo I, who rode out to meet their leader Attila and persuade him with either words, the well-timed apparition of a couple angels or the simple jingling of gold coins to kindly not destroy our empire thank you very much. To literally everyone’s surprise, Attila was
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convinced, and withdrew from his campaign to get married and then immediately die. Man, timing. The city’s respite from invasion was brief, as soon came the Vandals in 455 to give Rome a proper sacking, like, Vandalized. Pope Leo had less diplomatic success this time around, persuading the Vandals not to kill people or destroy stuff on the condition that they could plunder anything or anyone they wanted. Still pretty bad!
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With all the Foederati getting out of hand in the Western part of the Roman empire, what about the east? Well, back in the 390s, Emperor Theodosius ran with two trends that Constantine had started: first was mandating Nicene Christianity as Rome’s official religion, which sounds pretty extreme but in practice was one step in a long and steady process of Christianization, starting from big urban power-centers and spreading out to the countrysides over the course of centuries. His
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other move was having his two sons each inherit half of the empire. Now we’ve seen this happen before, and even since the Tetrarchy the East & West had separate imperial courts, but this division would prove to be permanent. The timing was unfortunate, because things swiftly got rough for the west, but this alone didn’t doom them. Rather, it highlights some core issues that started to stack up: the west was poorer and less urbanized, had a far longer border to defend,
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and was almost fully reliant on Foederati for their armies. So when strained legions had to prioritize the defense of Italy, Britannia and Gaul quickly fell away, and soon went Hispania and North Africa along with them, leading to the kind of death-spiral that would make even Aurelian terrified. Gang, I don’t think this Orbis can be Restitutor’d, because in less than a century the Roman empire had gone from this (395) to thiiis (475), so how ‘bout we call it? The armies
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of king Odoacer conquered Italy and deposed the 16 year old emperor Romulus Augustulus, sending word to the Eastern Roman emperor Zeno that he “had assumed control of the Western empire on your behalf”, to which Constantinople said “I didn’t ask you to do that but, thank you?”, to which Odoacer responded “You’re welcome!” And with that, the Western Roman Empire had transformed into a series of Frankish and Gothic kingdoms, and Italy was ruled by non-Romans for the first time
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in 700 years. Unfortunately for our ability to easily categorize history into Rome and Not Rome, 476 is less solid of an endpoint than we might expect – the entity that was the Roman Empire had collapsed like the Republic before it, and a millennium-spanning state based in the Italian peninsula did indeed go poof, but the concept of a singular empire had already been dead for two centuries, and Romans across the Mediterranean were already learning how to have Roman Culture
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without a Roman State – even so, that culture had shifted as Rome transformed from Pagan to Christian. Meanwhile, the Foederati had thoroughly blurred the line between barbarian and Roman, and were often more than happy to preserve Roman institutions in their new kingdoms – Like Gothic kings of Italy retaining and even empowering the Senate. Looking ahead, the Mediterranean world would remain fundamentally Roman in character until the arrival of Islam in the
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600s. So just as Rome had created an empire long before Augustus became its first proper monarch, the death of the Roman Empire lands both earlier and later than the last emperor’s overthrow. Late antiquity is absolutely fascinating, but it sure as hell is not easy to categorize. So we have kind-of a when and a few whys for the fall of Rome, but it’s a testament to Rome’s strength and flexibility
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that it survived this long at all. It should have been conquered by Hannibal during the Punic Wars, it should have fractured in the Late Republic with the carousel of military dictatorships, and it should have collapsed during the five-pronged Crisis of the Third Century. And while on one level any civilization founded on continuous conquest will run into extreme difficulty when that expansion stops, we should recognize that much as the Republic had faltered,
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the unified empire was similarly no longer cutting it. So Rome did what it does best, and adapted. While the empire died, parts of Rome very much lived on, via the Byzantine empire in the East, the Christian Church and the Pope in Rome, the Romance Languages, and intangibles like literature, the culture of laws, and the Platonic ideal of what it means to be an empire. There’s a reason the question of why and how
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Rome fell fascinates and even haunts us. It’s this megalithic, world-conquering, seemingly-immortal civilization, totally thrashed by a confluence of factors, and any society can see a little bit of themselves in the Fall of Rome. Now, permit me to get philosophical here: but the fall isn’t the sad ending to an otherwise-pristine civilization, rather a constant process that began the instant
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Romulus gave his city a name. And their frequent failures remained inextricable from their great successes, as they overcame unrelenting crises throughout their history by learning from their weaknesses, thinking practically, and adapting: from kingdom to republic to empire to papacy. The fall was always there, but so was Rome. When the western Roman empire fell in 476 AD, the average citizen could be forgiven for not
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noticing. The Roman senate still convened, the new king Odoacer was a Christian like his predecessor, and he ruled over Italy with the full approval of the emperor in Constantinople. Compared with the sacking Rome suffered 21 years earlier at the hands of the Vandals, the arrival of Odoacer, “Barbarian” though he may be, was painless. Any citizen old enough to remember the city at the start of the century could say what monuments were smashed or which provinces had been lost,
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but even they had only known Rome since it became Christian, and could never imagine a time when their battered city was the singular master of the world’s grandest empire. By 475, Rome’s capital, its culture, and its state were already unrecognizable from the time of Constantine – let alone the glory days of Hadrian or Marcus Aurelius three centuries earlier – so as consequential as it was to depose the last Roman emperor in 476, the Fall had already been happening for a while.
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Yet, as we will learn, there was a long way still to drop. But despite its many, many hardships, the next half-millennium also saw Rome renew itself, changing with circumstance to take on a vital role in the new Medieval world as the seat of the Popes. So, let’s trace how this city of ruins became a city of cathedrals. In answering what’s essentially the question of “How did Ancient Rome become Medieval Italy”,
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we should start with Demographics, because it’s around the end of the empire that several new groups began making themselves at home. For your convenience and my sanity, let’s start with our boy Odoacer, who came to Rome with a Germanic army on one side and an entire population of Germanic agriculturalist families on the other. These were the most recent of several client kingdoms whose people resettled in the empire over the last century, and their unfamiliarity
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with Latin didn’t stop them from fitting in with Roman customs or Christian religion, and they even played ball with the Roman aristocracy. Sure as hell beats a sacking. But while the eastern emperor Zeno had given Odoacer tacit approval to take hold of Italy, he then gave the Ostrogothic king Theodoric explicit approval to take it from Odoacer. So Theodoric beat him in battle and then killed the man during their truce dinner, and proceeded to rule Italy and Illyria for the next
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three decades as viceroy of the Byzantine emperor, during which time he re-instituted the food-dole, paid to host games, restored temples, imperial monuments & public infrastructure, and even gave the Senate a boost with coins inscribed “Senatus Consulto”, By the Decree of the Senate. This Goth was more effective and arguably more Roman than most late Roman emperors. But also more imperial, as Theodoric pulled some crafty diplomacy to gain direct control of the Visigothic
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Kingdom in Iberia, and also leveraged marriage alliances to make the Burgundian and Vandal Kingdoms into his vassal states. This was brief, but damn was it impressive. Theodoric’s badassery aside, Italy was once again a singular kingdom, lacking the centralized networks of trade and power that made the empire thrive, but it fared better than most western provinces in the wake of the Fall. The
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cultural incentives and financial means to indulge in any new public megaworks were long gone, and likewise the population decline of Late Antiquity cut Rome’s residents to a tenth as people increasingly opted for the countryside; but life carried on, empire be damned. That is, until 535, when Theodoric’s daughter Queen Amalasuintha was killed by Gothic usurpers at the same time the Byzantine empire was conquering its way up into Italy on the orders of Emperor Justinian. In the
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ensuing conflict between the new Gothic kings and the incoming Byzantines, the winner was neither, but the undeniable loser was Rome. To simplify an embarrassingly-convoluted back-&-forth, the Byzantine general Belisarius recaptured Naples through an aqueduct and soon retook Rome itself without a fight. Recovering the ancient capital for the emperor in Constantinople was almost as impressive as it was short-lived,
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because the new-new Gothic king came down to lay siege the following year. Rome held strong, but Belisarius was recalled to defend the East against Persia, during which time, plague hit, and the peninsula fell right back under Gothic control, this time with a new-new-new king who plundered everything left in Rome that wasn’t bolted to the floors. He wanted to burn the whole city and turn it into a pasture, but relented only after Belisarius implored the man not to,
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on the basis that Rome stood as a monument to the vast possibility of human achievement across generations. Profound words, and broadly accurate, but also rather generous given the state of the city in the mid 500s. Even before the wars, Rome was a shell of itself, with only tens of thousands of residents living in a city built for a million, and a steadily dwindling catalogue of intact monuments. Aqueducts ran dry, temples and palaces were stripped bare,
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residents occupied the ruins of ancient monuments, and centuries without repairs became apparent when buildings large and small toppled from earthquakes, floods, or a particularly stuff breeze. And frequent floods by the Tiber covered the city in layers of silt, burying old ruins and turning piles of scavenged rubble into grass-topped hills. Rome’s destruction wasn’t the work of sack-bois alone, but of systemic disrepair; it decayed, slowly,
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consistently, over centuries, beyond what even the most well-meaning kings could maintain – until one day in 546 when the Goths had the city forcibly abandoned and Rome was utterly, totally, empty. Now… I know this looks bad… And it IS, because the hollow city flipped between Goths and Byzantines three more times before the Byzantines finally held it for good in 552 and helped some Italians resettle – yet, with an
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astoundingly-prompt incursion by the new Germanic Lombards, things continued to get worse for Italy in the 500s. But consider: Rome cannot die. It is too important and too stubborn for something so trivial as death to claim it for long. Because just as steadily as it had first been built, so too could it be rebuilt, and that began with the Church. Now, Christianity had been The New Normal for a few centuries, but it was here, as a frontier province of the Byzantine empire,
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that the institution of the Papacy had free reign to change from a purely-religious authority in European Christianity to also become something approximating a monarch for its corner of Byzantine Italy. With the regional Exarch governing all the way over in Ravenna, Rome paid lip service to the emperor through the 5 & 600s as the Popes became more confident and capable leaders, leveraging their position as the biggest landowner in Italy to be the de-facto
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governors of the province. This evolved gradually and then all at once, as the Byzantines embroiled themselves in controversy about religious artwork in the 720s, then the Lombards conquered Ravenna and killed the Exarch in 751, but in 756 the Frankish King Pepin donated that territory back to the Popes for them to govern directly. This special relationship with the Franks developed under Pepin’s son Charlemagne, who confirmed Papal authority in central Italy and
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was later crowned by Pope Leo III as Emperor of the Romans in 800 AD. Whoof, busy century. So by the turn of the 800s, Rome had grown its religious power over Europe, took direct control over their Papal States, and now had an entire empire in their pocket. This would remain, despite some growing pains in the coming centuries, the status quo of European geopolitics for the next one-thousand years.
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Charlemagne’s ascension also set the role of Latin in the medieval world. The language of Rome always had regional variations, and spoken Latin was rarely as formal as oratory or literature; but without an empire there to enforce linguistic consistency, colloquial Latin began evolving into the Romance Languages, sooner than you might expect. Latin speakers across Europe were softening consonants and merging vowel sounds even before the fall of the West. It was all still
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“Latin”, but it had diverged from the classical model, and was already resembling Italian, French, and Spanish. So Charlemagne’s big swerve was to dictate that all Latin used in church should fit a standard, classic-style pronunciation. But since this new Church Latin sounded so different from everyday speech, Europeans began writing their vernacular languages phonetically to distinguish the sounds from Latin. So it’s here that Latin fossilized into a uniform standard,
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while allowing these early vernaculars to freely grow & evolve into the Romance Languages. While the Idea of Rome was completely reinventing itself over these centuries, so too was the actual city. This started back in the 3 & 400s with Rome’s first purpose-built Churches: like Saint John in the Lateran, Santa Maria Maggiore, and Old St Peter’s, all classically-styled but forgoing the cramped layout of pagan temples to instead
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emulate the roomier Basilica structure used in Law courts; and soon enough this would become THE standard design for European churches. Basilicas kept popping up through the Fall of the West, but the next few centuries were a little thin on construction on account of those Gothic Wars and the sacks therein causing the most concentrated damage the city of Rome had ever suffered. So despite the Popes’ growing power and influence, this didn’t immediately correlate with imperial
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splendor, as even this first batch of churches was proving very costly to maintain. However, this constraint provided an opportunity, as in 609 AD the Pope made a brand new church by reconsecrating the old Roman Pantheon as Saint Mary of the Martyrs. Cheap, effective, and great for preservation! The city’s ruins proved to be remarkably useful through the medieval period, as old buildings could be retrofitted into housing, marble cladding could be plied off
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and reused in churches, bronze statues could be melted for new metal, and even marble statues could be broken down into lime for mortar. It’s painfully unsentimental, and I try not to think about it too hard or I’ll cry about it, but it was extremely practical. And some old structures like the Aurelian walls were still perfectly fit for purpose, persuading some 50,000 Italians to move back into Rome after the Lombard conquests. Finally, true to Belisarius’ word, Rome’s greatest
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asset was ancient prestige, because when the Muslim Conquests locked the Holy Land out of the Christian pilgrimage circuit, that left Rome as the premier destination for Christian pilgrims, and that meant business. For the average pilgrim arriving in Rome at the turn of the millennium, they might be surprised to encounter not one city, but seemingly three. The old core among the hills had become largely
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uninhabited, as the population clustered by the Campus Martius around the Pantheon, while the Papal government operated in the Lateran to the southeast, and pilgrims stayed in Leonine city up by St Peters, which was enclosed by a newly-added Leonine wall. Despite its shrunken stature, Rome was still the largest city in Christian Europe after Constantinople, and centuries of income from tolls, taxes, pilgrim lodgings, souvenirs, gifts from royal Christian patrons,
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and the occasional bribe all paid for shiny new cathedrals in the city, allowed the Popes to renovate some aqueducts and infrastructure, as well as re-implementing the food dole for the city’s poor. Pilgrimage was such big business even dead visitors could be profitable, as the church confiscated the possessions of pilgrims who died in the city. If Rome could no longer collect its payout by imperial right, they were more than happy to become a tourist trap.
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The reigns of Rome didn’t belong exclusively to the Papacy, as there were still a dozen big noble families who built personal fortresses in the ruins of the city, but that’s a far cry from the thousands of aristocrats in the classical period; and this political climate left zero room for Rome’s oldest institution: the Senate. Justinian tried to save it by lowering the property qualifications to join, but its power, prestige,
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and headcount steadily eroded over the decades until, on some unknown day, it ended. In the 570s it was still sending embassies to the East, and they greeted the emperor when he visited in 603, but by 628 Pope Honorius had them disbanded, and converted the senate house into a church. All the more striking than deposing the child emperor in 476: the most fundamental and persistent institution of the Roman state had died with so little fanfare we don’t even know when. Yet,
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the ancient aristocratic tradition of causing trouble for the state was alive and well, as those powerful families vied for influence over the Papacy in the 10th and 11th centuries to wildly chaotic and extraordinarily debauched results – and that is all I have the PG-clearance to say. Finally, Rome’s earlier political break with Constantinople was cemented by a religious schism, dividing the Pope’s Catholic church from the
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eastern Orthodox church. And three decades later, Rome got sacked by the Normans in 1084. Aah, after all these centuries, the Gauls return to sack Rome… nature is healing. So – what on earth have we just witnessed transpire? Frankly, a lot of contradictions: the empire fell, but a version of Roman society endured; the city shrank, but it didn’t die; provinces were reconquered by the Byzantines, but became more independent; and still, old ruins were used for new purposes,
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religious diplomacy created an entire empire, Latin simultaneously took on new life and became immortal, and, once again, a millennium of European geopolitics sprung out from Rome. Even Belisarius couldn’t have realized just how right he was about the meaning and unending significance of Rome - as these five transformative centuries established its identity not just as an ancient capital, but as The Eternal City.
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You ever lie awake at night thinking wistfully about the Roman Empire, or is that just a me thing? Sigh, this is so sad, Alexa, play Roman Empire 2. *byzantine chanting* Oh HELL yeah, this is my jam. See, the big plot twist of the Fall of Rome is that it didn’t. While the West was off transforming into medieval Europe, the East continued being The Roman Empire for another thousand years. First question, HOW? And two, a millennium is a long time,
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what traits stuck to the classical roots, and what innovations came in during the medieval period? To see how we got from point R(ome) to point B(yzantines), let’s do some history. Our story begins in the early 300s AD, with a barely-standing Roman empire now split into 4 administrative regions in the hopes of easing the govern—ohhh no they’re already fighting each other. Look away kids, this is real messy.
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Flash forward 2 decades, Constantine reconquers everything, picks up Christianity along the way, and decides that the empire really needs a new capital. So he chose the ancient site of Byzantium at the northeast corner of the Aegean sea, as it stood at the crossroads of the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, and was closer to the rich and well-urbanized provinces of the east, so it would be the perfect spot for a new imperial city. After 6 years of whirlwind construction,
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Constantine consecrated the city in 330 as New Rome, much to the annoyance of the Romans back in, you know, the first Rome. But reunifying an empire and introducing an entirely new religion comes with challenges, and Constantine soon found Christians fiercely debating the nuances of trinitarian theology. Academic discussion about church doctrine is all well and good until the Alexandrians
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started rioting about it, so Constantine exerted some imperial authority to keep Christianity under control. Instead of the vivid but ultimately-ahistorical method of lions, he held the church-wide Council of Nicaea, for bishops to negotiate a universal, legally binding orthodoxy of the empire. Now, this being the Roman empire we’re talking about, nothing can stop these people from finding an excuse to throttle each other, but broadly speaking, the
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Council of Nicaea did the trick by establishing a consistent theological and political framework for Roman Christianity. In doing so, they coopted an intrinsically disruptive social force into Roman power structures. Slick move. These two changes marked the start of the East’s geographical and religious divergence from the Old empire, but things really accelerated in the century after. After Constantine’s
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3 sons got into a civil war with each other, the world’s most tragic introvert Julian got dragged kicking and screaming into being the Roman emperor, whereupon he spent two years trying and failing to reconvert the empire to paganism before being speared to death while on a poorly-organized campaign in Persia. Then a series of unremarkable emperors took turns doing absolutely nothing to solve the serious problems the Empire still faced after Constantine: wars,
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weak administration, and a wimpier army than Rome was used to having. Sure, Constantine pulled the hard-carry to give the empire another century of life, but things were still looking mighty grim. In came Theodosius, an emperor who had the wildcard idea (not actually all that wildcard) to permanently split the empire into an independent Eastern and Western half. Other Emperors cut their administration in halves or quarters, but
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it always came back together one way or another; only Theodosius made it stick. So it’s here in 395 that the Byzantine empire officially gets going, but that’s somewhat of a misnomer, as the Eastern Empire wasn’t widely called “Byzantine” until the 1500s. Confusingly enough, that name was used as early as the 500s, but in specific cases and usually for poetic effect. But for the empire’s
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whole runtime, as far as its inhabitants were concerned, they were Rhomaīoi living in Rhomāniā. No ambiguity. Still Rome! Back to the western imperial collapse at hand, this bisection went pretty poorly for them, but it put the East in a position to stay strong, productive, and cohesive. So if Theodosius indirectly sentenced Western Rome to death, then his successors plunged the knives by responding to the perilous threat of Goths by bribing them to go bother the west instead.
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Classy. Meanwhile the Western emperors were too feckless to stop very simple problems from boiling over into Rome getting sacked… twice. But the Byzantine defense strategy was more than just making everything Italy’s problem. At the turn of the 5th century, Constantinople outgrew its first fortifications and began building the Theodosian walls, a massive set of three-tiered ramparts that defended the city for the next thousand years.
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But even the strongest walls couldn’t save the empire from its greatest danger: Sports. See, Romans loved their chariot races, and aligned themselves with either the blue or the green team. Ah yes, I see no way in which this rabid tribalism could ever go wrong. But this rapidly spun out of control as the blues and greens evolved into entire social clans and began butting heads on politics and religion and started throwing hands about it in the middle of church. But by far,
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the worst riots broke out during the reign of emperor Justinian. For context, him and his uncle and adoptive-father Justin came from humble beginnings and rose through the military ranks to rule the empire in one of history’s rare-few reverse regencies, where the younger Justinian was the power behind his father’s throne. While he wasn’t pulling the imperial strings, Justinian was falling in love with the famed actress Theodora, and they together would become
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the ultimate power-couple of the 6th century. But back to the riots, Emperor Justinian tried to curb the influence of the Blues and Greens in politics, and succeeded only in irritating both of them so badly that they teamed up in open revolt. These wiley sportsfans shouted victory chants (Νίκα) and poured out of the chariot stadium to light Constantinople on fire for five straight days. This might seem excessive, but it was a standard
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mode of political demonstration. The races were one of a few spots where the citizens of Constantinople would regularly see their emperor, and this proximity meant that mass demonstration was an effective and ultimately common way of expressing political discontent and demanding that the emperor step down. Just as Roman armies often acclaimed a new emperor while on campaign, the centralization of power in Constantinople meant that citizens could de-acclaim them! Even
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in a monarchy, the citizens held considerable sway, and the old idea of the SPQR wasn’t truly dead. That’s bad news for Justinian, who was ready to hop on a ship and bail the hell out of there, but Empress Theodora told him to face his fate with honor and live, or die, as an emperor. Quote: “May I never see the day when those who meet me do not call me Empress. If you wish to save yourself,
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my lord, there is no difficulty. We are rich; over there is the sea, and yonder are the ships. Yet reflect for a moment whether, when you have once escaped to a place of security, you would not gladly exchange such safety for death. As for me, I agree with the adage, that Royal Purple is the noblest shroud.” YES Basilissa, SLAYYYY. That is only part of why she is the biggest Hellenic badass this side of Cleopatra.
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Ahem, it’s good, I’m good, we’re good. The Nika Riots ultimately fell to the blade during a bloody massacre in the stadium, and Justinian was left to pick up the charred pieces of his ruined city, having earned the brutal honor of being the only roman emperor to violently oppose de-acclamation and succeed. So he made up for it by giving the people a win, immediately setting about rebuilding
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Constantinople even shinier than before, and that meant a new centerpiece church: the Hagia Sophia. In an evolution from your standard Roman Temples, this one’s got a dome. And in a doubly brilliant move, the dome is ringed with windows, which cast an ever-changing light onto the gold mosaics, and the halo-effect makes the dome look like it’s damn-near floating. When Justinian first entered
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the completed church, he exclaimed “Solomon, I have surpassed thee”. We’re extremely lucky to still have this masterpiece of a church around today, and you can see the influence of its design all throughout the eastern Mediterranean and well beyond the empire’s lifetime. Good. Dome. Meanwhile, Justinian was also hard at work codifying hundreds of years of Roman laws into one standard law book. The Corpus Juris Civilis remains the basis of most European law codes to this day.
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Justinian liked big ideas: one law, one church, and one empire. But this last one was a sticking point, because the Roman Empire had been missing its Rome for over 50 years. Now, you likely wouldn’t have seen the Italians complaining, because the Ostrogothic kings were decidedly much better at their jobs than the latter Western emperors, and Italy still saw itself as Romans living in a Roman state with Roman institutions – Heck, these
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Gothic Kings still consulted with the Senate! However, this was of no concern to Justinian, who simply wanted to paint the map purple, so he put Belisarius in charge of retaking the West. And retake he did, because Belisarius, is a boss. For his first act, he reclaimed Carthage and the north-African coast from the Vandals of all people, with minimal casualties, in just under a year. To celebrate his spectacular victory, Justinian awarded Belisarius with a triumph,
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an honor exclusively reserved for Emperors ever since Augustus. With this foothold in the west, Belisarius launched his reconquest of Italy. This would prove trickier, but with careful progression up the peninsula and inventive tactics like storming Naples by aqueduct, Belisarius pushed all the way into Rome and made Hannibal look like a chump. Marching on Rome is a right reserved only to Roman generals, thank you very much. The Ostrogoths put up a fierce counterattack,
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and surrounded the city of Rome for nearly a year, but Belisarius held out, and continued up to Milan and the political capital of Ravenna. But the problem with investing manpower into the strategically-dubious west is that the much-more-consequential East lay severely exposed. The Sasanian Persian King Khosrau was well aware of this, as he even joked with Justinian that he was just as much to thank for the victory
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as Belisarius, because he had the good manners to not invade the east while they were busy. Justinian obligingly paid Khosrau a share of the spoils for his “help”. This is par for the course with that scamp Khosrau, because 6 years later he did invade, sacked the city of Antioch, and then built a city he literally named Khosrau’s Better Antioch. What a champion. This dynamic was no mere joke, but after an entire millennium of Roman-Persian history, the two rivals were so
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deeply familiar they couldn’t help but respect each other, and many of their rulers maintained genuine friendships even in the middle of great power conflict. In Khosrau II’s words, Rome and Persia were the Two Eyes of the world, chosen by God to illuminate human civilization. Sure they fought, business is business, but as such, they were professionals. That said… Khosrau did proceed to invade Mesopotamia in 540.
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So now Justinian found himself split between two distant fronts, with the Ostrogoths still carving out pockets of resistance in Italy. And all of this was made worse by the sudden guest appearance of the Black Death, which ravaged Byzantines and Persians alike. The empire would have surely collapsed if not for the herculean efforts of Theodora, who kept it all in one piece while Justinian was actively in a plague-coma. In the middle of all this battling back-and-forth,
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Ostrogoths sacked and destroyed Rome, leaving the city a complete ghost town, and forcing Belisarius to re-reconquer Italy from the boot to the alps. The one bright spot amid all this is the city of Ravenna, which soon became home to some splendid and miraculously preserved feats of Byzantine art and architecture. As early as the 500s, Byzantines had already gotten their golden aesthetic and talent for mosaics to near perfection.
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Over the course of his four decades in power, Justinian survived de-acclamation, rebuilt Constantinople, codified the laws, standardized the church hierarchy, survived a plague, and reconquered the west, or at least what was left of it. For better and definitely worse, Justinian’s reign was a massive step in the evolution of the Byzantine empire. And for all his (arguably-misguided) efforts to reclaim Rome, Justinian’s lasting legacy proved the
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empire no longer needed it. And it’s just as well, because 3 years after Justinian died, the Lombards came across the alps, and by the end of the century they’d swiped 2/3 of Italy. Oops. Meanwhile, back in Constantinople, things were going somewhere between eh and oof. Emperor Maurice was deposed by the army in favor of the completely incompetent Phocas, so the Persian king Khosrau II, who really liked Maurice
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and was personally indebted to him for his help in an earlier civil war – vowed revenge, declared war, and pushed all the way into Anatolia, before diverting south to capture the levant and Egypt. This is really bad, and would have probably been a total game-over if not for the miraculous arrival of Heraclius, the son of North Africa’s governor. He showed up, booted Phocas right on out of there,
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and assumed control of the Empire. By combining civil and military authority, his government was flexible and better able to repel the Persian threat. Earlier Roman armies just threw legions at a problem until it went away, knowing they could always raise more, but Heraclius the army he had, and that was it. Byzantine armies from here out needed to be reserved and efficient in their use of force. So after a long and hard-fought campaign that nearly bankrupted the empire,
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Heraclius impressively pushed into the heart of Persia and brokered a peace. Everything reverted to pre-war status, and both empires stood battered to within an inch of their life. But the long-term consequences of this would become all-too clear all-too soon, as the newfound Muslim caliphate soon began expanding out of Arabia, and neither Persia nor Byzantium had the means to stop them. In 8 short years, the
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Rashidun caliphate conquered the entire levant, and within another 10 they had Egypt and Persia as well. Constantinople itself was threatened by an Arab siege, but they held out thanks to a little trick called Basically Napalm. This was a colossal break from the status quo that Rome and Persia had held for a millennium, to the point where the Byzantines even sent help to the Sasanians against
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the Caliphate. But by the end of the century, the Byzantine empire found itself shut out of the entire southern Mediterranean for good. Meanwhile, the other front wasn’t looking much better; What other front, you ask? Well, Slavic forces had pushed down into the Peloponnese, splitting Greece in half and leaving the empire looking like a checkerboard. It’s at least good to see that the time-honored Roman tradition of spectacular territorial implosion is alive and well. Let’s
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take solace in at least that. It’s no coincidence that this chapter in Byzantine history is considered the beginning of the so-called “Dark Ages”, hereafter exclusively referred to as the “Ouch Times”, but we’ve still got over 700 years left on the clock, so as we’ll see, the empire’s best years still lay ahead of them. Amid all the land getting yoinked, it’s easy to miss what else has changed and to easy forget
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what continuity is still there. The empire in 300 was Pagan, bilingual in Greek-and-Latin, and spread out over the whole Mediterranean. The empire now maintained the same core laws and form of government that Rome’s had for several centuries, but geographically and culturally, this newly-Christianized empire was becoming far more Greek. They’d still call themselves Romans, and they were, but we can associate them with distinctly Greek traits. Its borders much more
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closely reflected the classical Greek world, Greek became the main language, and the empire’s strongest literary legacy was in its preservation and continuation of ancient scholarship. Some 2/3 of all the ancient Greek texts we have today came to us from the Byzantines. Forget the library of Alexandria, it’s the Library of Constantinople that did the Hard Carry. On the one hand, all this Greekness and newfangled Christianity lets historians take pot shots saying the Byzantine
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empire isn’t really the authentic Roman empire nyehhhh, but we’ll see how the Byzantines maintain that fundamentally Roman capacity to adapt and evolve to survive in changing circumstances. Both literally and figuratively, the Byzantine golden age was just over the horizon. My god, like, so much gold mosaic, it’s honestly kind of insane. The Byzantine Empire has long maintained a delicate balance of simultaneously doing fantastic and also being constantly in peril. Normally this
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would be a contradiction, but the Byzantines made “Golden Disaster Empire” their entire damn brand. As we’ll see over the next 500 years, the Ouch Times brought genuinely brilliant reforms while the Golden Age endured some catastrophic failures – But just like the Romans of old, the Byzantines kept on keeping on despite the odds, and earned their place as one of the longest-lasting empires in history. SO, let’s see how the Byzantines survived the middle ages and
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gained their golden reputation. When last we left our purple-robéd friends, the entire southern half of the empire had been swiftly yoinked by the shiny new Muslim Caliphate, and within a century these new neighbors had landed on Constantinople’s doorstep on two separate occasions, only to be repelled by the very fires of Hell itself. See, the Byzantines had a little trick called Greek Fire,
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a secret substance that could be shot from a siphon at an incoming navy, burning everything from the mast down to the surface of the water. But that’s not all the Byzantines had learned from the Fall of Rome — In addition to their functionally-impenetrable Theodosian walls, they maintained hundreds of underground cisterns to fortify their water supply. No city on Earth was better defended than Constantinople, but the same couldn’t be said for the Byzantine provinces,
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as the Muslim armies were having their run of the place all the way up into Anatolia. It was only in 740 that Emperor Leo III finally held the Eastern line, and his son Constantine V fortified the other troublesome frontier by pushing back against the Slavic peoples in the west. Hey, it took a century and a half, but solid recovery. However, there’s a more literal reason that some historians have described this age as “Dark”, and it has to do with Icons.
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The Byzantines were a rather artistic bunch, and they loved to have images of Jesus, Mary and friends in their churches and in their homes. But in the eyes of people like Emperor Leo, this was beginning to look a lot like Idolatry, where images are worshipped more piously than even God. His response, simple enough, was to smash every last image he could get his hands on. So starting in 726 he and his fellow Iconoclasts
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destroyed every mosaic, fresco, statue, and doodle in sight. Constantine V, for his part, doubled down, and began persecuting the clergy for spurring this apparent idolatry. Meanwhile, across the Adriatic, the Pope in Rome was justifiably horrified, and the Byzantine province of Ravenna took the occasion to declare independence, which is why their mosaics are among the few to actually survive this mess. After Constantine died, his wife Irene called a council to outlaw Iconoclasm,
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but Emperor Leo V reinstated it, and then eventually empress Theodora re-outlawed it for good in 843. The final rules were that statues are No-Bueno, but all 2D art was chill, so the Byzantines got back to work with gorgeous frescos and mosaics. Greek art would proceed to snub visual realism in favor of stylized figures with enough gold to give a protestant a seizure, and that style governs eastern orthodox art to this day. So while I weep on a weekly basis for
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how pathetically few pieces of original art survived Iconoclasm and the Ottomans — the dreaded double-whammy — I can take comfort knowing that the Byzantine style has well over 1500 years of continuity. For all the well-meaning damage the Iconoclasts did to art, they made some crucial reforms to the Byzantine military and government by, as it happens, making them the same thing. See,
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back in the classical days, Roman Provinces had no innate defenses, and had to wait for stationed Legions to show up from Jupiter-Knows-Where. Clearly that model didn’t work anymore, so the Byzantines reconfigured their armies and their provinces to fit. In the 6 and 700s, the provinces were gradually redrawn as Themata, with the governor taking on the additional role of Strategos, overseeing both the civic and military care of his Thema. And in place of old-fashioned
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imperial legions, Byzantine Themata each had their own army, staffed with citizens from that Thema, and funded by land grants within that Thema, so every soldier had a tangible stake in the wellbeing of the state. Though the empire shrank to half its size between 6 and 800, the extremely perilous eastern front went from an unmitigated disaster-zone to a fortress — the Byzantines were stronger and safer than ever thanks to the Thema reforms. Meanwhile, the boys in the libraries
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were also hard at work protecting the empire, as scholars and historians were writing and revising military manuals. Books like the Strategikon laid out grand strategy and pinpoint tactics to help generals in the field. The empire was well past the expansionist glory days where they could slog it out in big decisive battles and raise a fresh army the next year. With potential enemies on each
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frontier waiting to pounce at the first sign of frailty, every victory was a pyrrhic victory. So campaigns were won by carefully calculated strategy and good intelligence operations. It was all a game of restraint and flexibility, so the empire kept on top of trends by voraciously adopting outside ideas. Those are the big picture swerves, but the tactics and composition of the Byzantine army also got an
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upgrade, trading raw manpower for peak efficiency. While infantry remained a staple, the Byzantines stayed in fashion by remodeling the old Roman Legionary into the fancy new Skutatoi. Namely, they ditched the Scutum for the hotness that is the Kite Shield, which explains why the name Skutatoi literally means “Shield Boys”. There to support our favorite Shieldy Bois were the Toxotai archers, but the biggest and baddest unit in the Byzantine army was the Kataphraktos.
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They were basically hoplites on horses, with the steed and rider decked out head to hoof in scale armor. Their name technically means “Fully Armored,” but I like to translate it as “Full-Metal Cavalry”. Kataphrakts traced their origins to the Parthian wars of the late Republic, but came to prominence here as a counter to the Arabic cavalry – At first the Arabs ran circles around the poor Skutatoi, but eventually the Kataphrakts became the core of the Byzantine army,
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and a byword for Byzantine power. Infantry and archers would weaken an enemy line, and then the Kataphraktoi would hammer through the weak points and shatter the enemy formations. GG. And like, saying it in English – Karaphracts – it’s cool enough, but when you get real the Greek into it you get Kataphraktos, and then you really feel the Byzantine power, y’know? … What, just me? Ah fine whatever.
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So as an empire that’s about 75% coast, the Byzantines also had ports to protect on all sides: in the Aegean, along the Mediterranean, and on the Black Sea – so they maintained a pretty beefy navy. In the world’s best case of “If It isn’t broke, don’t fix it” the Byzantines still used a version of the Trireme, some 2,000 years later, as their primary ship. The Dromon, as it became known, had been upgraded with a Lateen sail and got absolutely loaded with catapults, ballistae,
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and of course, Greek fire siphons. Plus, instead of simply ramming into enemy ships like some ancient Athenian doof, the Dromoi were equipped with spurs to smash enemy oars and immobilize them, for ease of boarding and/or burning. Slick upgrade. Unfortunately, the Navy wasn’t enough to stop repeated Muslim incursions into Crete, Sicily, and Sardinia, but they dutifully protected the mainland coasts, the islands of the Aegean, and the many trade routes that passed through
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Constantinople via the Bosphorus river. With Iconoclasm over and the empire no longer teetering on the edge of total collapse, the Byzantines entered two centuries of prosperity and relative peace. Starting with Basil I, who I can’t help but picture as a leaf, a line of Macedonian emperors guided the Byzantine empire through its Golden Age, the peak of imperial prestige and of its cultural influence abroad.
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With the Muslim armies to the east & south at least somewhat handled, the Byzantines turned their attention to the Bulgarians, and used a clever mix of religious diplomacy to pacify them via conversion to Christianity. They did the same with Prince Volodymyr of the Kyivan Rus’, which set Eastern Europe with their quasi-Greek Cyrillic alphabet and their Byzantine-leaning brand of Orthodox Christianity. In return, Volodymyr hooked the Byzantines up with the
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Varangian guard, a legendary band of Scandinavian mercenaries who served as the emperor’s royal guard for centuries. Now this was no Pax Romana – the Byzantines still had to fight on all fronts, and the Bulgarians even swiped northern Greece in the 900s, later recovered by the efforts of Basil II a century later – but compared to the way things were, the Byzantines were doing great. Meanwhile, Constantinople had never been better.
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By the year 1,000 it held half-a-million people, and remained the largest, best-defended, and most magnificent city in the world. Hagia Sophia was one of countless churches to get gorgeous new decorations after iconoclasm. Times clearly changed, but Constantinoupoli remained a gorgeous window into the classical world, with Roman-style churches, a cartoonishly huge chariot stadium, and marble and porphyry as far as the eye could see. But Constantinople wasn’t just a Roman capital:
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it was the keystone city of the Mediterranean, a Cosmopolis where people from all over could come, trade, work, and live – Just as there were Catholic churches in the Italian quarters of the city, so too was there a Mosque for the city’s Muslim population and diplomatic guests. The Romans never missed an opportunity to commemorate culture through architecture! And all across the empire, Byzantine architects were hard at work building gorgeous urban cathedrals and cliffside
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monasteries. But funnily enough, our best looks at peak Byzantine art come not just from outside the empire, but from its rivals. To the west, Venice and the Normans made for some of Constantinople’s oddest frenemies, because as much as they used spears and ships to snag some Byzantine power and prosperity for themselves, they were the most enthusiastic adopters of the Byzantine style. Seriously, between Saint Mark’s Basilica and the Palatine Chapel, Italy is the best place to see
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golden-age art. Then to the north is Saint Sophia cathedral in Kyiv, still to this day the pride of Ukraine’s Byzantine Orthodox legacy. Culturally, things had never been better, but politically, the cracks in the proverbial mosaic were starting to show. The Byzantines had been steadily reaching back out to the Balkans and out of Anatolia, but the empire was more comfortable being on the defensive than the offensive,
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and the carefully-constructed Themata system began suffering from bloat. Strategoi got complacent and ignored their civic duties to play Monopoly-Men within their Thema, and between Theodosian walls and gold-covered domes, cushy bureaucrats in Constantinople barely raised their heads from their books. So each camp blamed the other for the empire’s problems, and both did exactly nothing to fix it. The emperor didn’t help matters by ignoring the Themata to rely more and more
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on the Tagma, a standing army meant primarily for campaigning. This put the Byzantines in an extremely precarious position, spread too thin and poorly prepared to face new threats, like trying to stab your enemies with a limp spaghetti. To the west, the Normans swooped into southern Italy to conquer the last Byzantine pockets, and to the east, the Seljuk Turks dunked on the Byzantines so hard that Anatolia just disappeared. And they didn’t even have to try that hard! Half the
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Byzantine army deserted en-route to the battle of Manzikert in 1071, and the generals made a series of miscalculations on their way to an entirely avoidable outcome. It was hardly even the battle that doomed them, after Manzikert, the Byzantines kind of shrugged and let them have the rest. By 1075, the empire had never been smaller or weaker. You’d think the Greeks would know a thing or two about Hubris, but apparently not!
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And unfortunately for our Grekbois here, the 1000s only frayed the already dodgy relationship between the churches in Constantinople and Rome. Justinian’s big idea of One Church and One Empire went kaput as soon as the southern Mediterranean went poof, and Byzantine authority in Rome remained nominal at best. When the Papal States officially split in 754 it was only a formality. Communication between east and west was already tricky because of how few Byzantines spoke
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Latin and how few Italians spoke Greek. And tiffs like Iconoclasm exacerbated disagreements about whether the Pope had supreme spiritual authority or whether Byzantines had the right to mind their own business. These views were… fundamentally incompatible, and this multicentury spat came to a head when a Roman delegate excommunicated the entire Byzantine church in the middle of Hagia
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Sophia in the middle of service, daaaaaaamn (but like literalllyyyyy), so the Greeks responded with excommunications of their own, and just like that we’ve got a Schism. While nobody at the time quite realized the implications, this marked the final split of ties between the Catholic church in Rome and the Eastern Orthodox church. But one Byzantine emperor saw this as a rare opportunity. Alexios I ended nearly a decade
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of civil war to assume the throne in 1081, and his Komninos dynasty oversaw a remarkable revival of Byzantine fortunes throughout the 1100s. He held the empire steady for nearly 4 decades, made new trade agreements with the Venetians, and hatched a clever plan to regain Anatolia. He went to Pope Urban with the offer to recognize Papal supremacy in exchange for a dispatch of soldiers to help with the Byzantine reconquest. But Urban’s hearing was a little selective, because he ended
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up sending along several armies’-worth of European bandits who wanted to, lemme make sure im hearing this right: Retake The Holy Land? That wasn’t the plan at all! *sigh, Well I guess this is our life now, so now Alexios had to wrangle this box of Oops All Crusaders and point them towards Jerusalem so they didn’t Deus Vult all over his empire instead. Ultimately, the Crusaders were much more excited to conquer their own new lands than restore lost Byzantine territories,
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and subsequent crusades would only entangle the Byzantines further into the mess that is medieval European politics, earning nothing but antagonism from their western neighbors. Meanwhile the Normans were constantly poking and prodding into Greece, and soon enough the Venetians would have a monopoly on Byzantine trade. But despite all that, the Komninoi left the empire a lot better than they first got it, having reclaimed coastal Anatolia, modernized the economy by Venetian
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supervision, and continued to make churchloads of gold-covered art. Also during this time, princess Anna Komnene composed an epic poem about the reign of her father Alexios, and in so doing became the first woman historian and absolute literary badass! Honestly, I feel like that’s kinda the Byzantine motto at this point — definitely precarious, but hey, it could’ve been a lot worse! When we picked up this chapter
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of Byzantine history, the empire was in a really bad way, what with the hemorrhaging provinces and smashing all of their art — but it’s no accident that they went on to steady their empire and revitalize their culture. The Byzantines survived, and then dug themselves out of the Ouch Times by being clever and never giving up — The Thema System is a genius innovation in statecraft, and it bought the Byzantines an entire Golden Age to work with — And of course,
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as time went on they got a little careless, but then when things got dire, they persevered and turned things around, again! I don’t just like Byzantine history in spite of their setbacks, I love Byzantine history because they’re a Golden Disaster Empire dammit. Remember, in life, it doesn’t matter how you get knocked down, or how you lose all of North Africa, or all of Greece, or Anatolia too, wow they’ve really been through it haven’t they? What matters – What matters,
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is that you keep on trying no matter what, because golden ages can dawn when you least expect it. It’s easy to lose track of just how long-running the Byzantines are. While the Roman Empire in the west was getting Goth-smacked into oblivion in 476 AD, the eastern half of the empire, with its capital of Constantinople, was, by comparison, doing pretty great. For one, they existed, so that’s a plus,
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and the Byzantine Empire evolved into a gorgeous gold-coated hybrid of classical Greco-Roman and medieval Christian culture. But unfortunately for our Byz-Bois, shiny mosaics and ginormous domes couldn’t prevent the infinite abyss of disasters that lay in wait over the millennium to come. Between Persians, Goths, Arabs, Turks, Normans, and the more-than-occasional civil war, it’s safe to say the Byzantines could not catch a break. And the latter medieval period continued
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this distinctly Promethean trend, where they suffer a constant and arduous Evisceration by Eagle without ever actually dying from it. As we will indeed see in just a moment, our favorite Golden Disaster Empire managed to keep on thriving and defying the specter of death despite even the most Garbâge of circumstances. So, let’s see how the Byzantine Empire procrastinated its own death and even then, kinda slipped past the deadline. I tell ya, those Romans are crafty bastards.
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Now, we begin, contradictorily, with the fall of the Empire – about two centuries ahead of the typical 1453. I know, we’re making great time. Because long before the Ottomans ever enter the picture, the Byzantines were struggling to coexist with the Italian merchant empires they were growing so reliant on. Venetian and Genoese traders tussled in the Latin neighborhoods of Constantinople like they
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were street gangs in Shakespearean Verona, but the Byzantines poured the proverbial Greek Fire on the problem by arresting and then murdering tens of thousands of Latin citizens in the city. Bad look. This Giant Yikes was compounded by the baffling ineptitude of the ruling Angelos dynasty, whose constant infighting left the empire woefully mismanaged. This got… infinitely worse when the
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powers of Europe launched Crusade Numero 4 on the promise of: “This Time It Might Actually Work”. To the ensuing surprise of precisely nobody, it got off to a rocky start, with their understaffed army getting excommunicated by the Pope before they even left the Adriatic sea. But the light at the end of the Crusaders’ tunnel was prince Alexios Angelos, who offered Byzantine money and military support in exchange for reinstating his deposed father. Money he distinctly did not have.
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So here we see Mr Angelos ignoring the key rules from Alexios Komnenos’ Declassified Crusading Survival Guide: Rule #1: Under Any Circumstances, Do Not Ask Crusaders for Help. We’ve been through this before, it is not worth it. Rule #2: If the Crusaders arrive anyway, transport your Crusaders across your empire as fast as humanly possible. Do Not let them get any ideas. Rule #3: While
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your Crusaders are inside your empire, never for any reason provoke your Crusaders. They are armed, violent, and prone to fits of disproportionate holy rage. Yet, in 1204, the Angeloi failed spectacularly on every point – And, spying an opportunity to quit while they were ahead, the Crusaders simply sacked Constantinople. Venice deliberately instigated the pillaging, but by this point the Byzantines Really Should Have Known Better than to Tee Them Up.
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So, The Sack. Beyond being a rough approximation of Literal Hell On Earth for the Byzantines unfortunate to be on the receiving end, the Crusaders desolated the art and architecture of the city. Venetians had the good sense to steal the priceless relics of Constantinople for The Glory Of The Republic instead of mindlessly burning and/or murdering everything and/or one — but whether trashed or taken,
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Constantinople still ended up ruined, and the rest of the Empire was next on the To-Thieve list. Venice, the crafty little devils, chose to swipe up the islands of the Aegean, while the Franks installed a Latin emperor on the Byzantine throne and carved up the Greek mainland. On paper, the Byzantine Empire breaks right here: the capital was now kaput, and the Aegean Basin which so long preserved the Greco-Roman world went poof. But even The End Of The Empire couldn’t
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shake that damn Hellenic persistence, as Byzantine nobles in Survival-Mode quickly carved out states in the wake of the Crusade, in Trebizond, Nicaea, and Epirus. Each became a haven for Greeks fleeing their new Frankish overlords in Mainland Greece, whose Latin Empire proved to be little more than a post-crusade money-pot. But the Franks quickly got bored by the prospect of actually governing and
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soon became weaker than the assorted Byzantines they had so recently stomped. Are we actually surprised? The three Hellenic states started out on the defensive, to put it mildly, but some shifty strategy and good old-fashioned luck gave Nicaea a leg up. The man in charge Michael Palaiologos was an old-fashioned Big Ideas guy, and he retooled his army away from pure defense to be more nimble
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and aggressive, allowing him to campaign on four fronts at once, spread out over the Western Anatolian coast and gain a foothold in Thrace and Macedonia. And then the Nicaeans reconquered Constantinople kind of by accident. While a small army scouted around the city to suss out its defenses, they learned that the Frankish army was out on campaign, so the Byzantines snuck through a small break in the wall, opened a gate, and then took the city. For all the disasters to befall
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the Byzantines, it’s only fair that the RNG Just This Once works out in their favor. That said, Emperor Mikey-mike Pabbity-labbity soon found his work cut out for him, as the city had hardly been cleaned since the crusade half a century earlier, and sliding so close to death’s door prevented the Byzantines from cutting quite as Imperial a figure as they used to. Still, it was better than the alternative.
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As we’ve seen, it was hard enough to defend the Byzantine dominion back in the good old days, but with the emperor now presiding over a kingdom and a capital that were both hollow shells of their former selves, the more impressive achievement was not in retaking Constantinople, but in keeping it. Tricky, but not impossible, as Romans in every era adapted their military to the needs of the moment, and a weakened empire on the backfoot had to win harder fights with
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inconsistent resources. So they got clever: their solution was to update a taxation system called the Pronoia by applying it to the military – essentially staffing your heavy cavalry by giving them local taxation rights rather than paying and equipping them yourself. The Emperor was still in charge of all the contracts and could revoke or transfer them at will, so weirdly enough, this functions like a militarized version of the tax-farming Publicani system from
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way back in the Republic! And according to contemporary sources, the army’s infantry manpower seems to have just… shown up whenever there was a battle?? So the late Byzantine army retained the iconic heavy cavalry, paid for by a medieval innovation on a Republic-era system, and all supported by a throwback to Polis-era farmers-turned-soldiers – A patchy system to be sure, and the implied desperation is apparent, but it did the trick, and it’s one hell of an
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illustration for how old Greek and Roman ideas were still at play in the Byzantine world. Otherwise clever diplomacy was the sharpest weapon in the Byzantine arsenal; and as ever, the rivalry between Venice and Genoa made this difficult, as their schoolyard slapfight had a conspicuous habit of always going down in Constantinople. And of course, there were a few strategic flubs, such as when the Byzantines
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hired a band of Catalan mercenaries who went rogue at the slightest provocation and claimed the Duchy of Athens for the next 7 decades. But even this wasn’t the worst mercenary customer experience the Byzantines would endure. As, in 1343, the royal treasury was too thin to pay for Venetian help, so the former-empress Anna pawned what she had, which was the empire’s crown jewels. Despite selling Constantinople’s royal honor for some warships, Anna lost her war, which,
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I should say, was a civil war, against the empire. This one really illuminates what kind of fuster-clucks the Byzantines regularly threw themselves into, because the death of the last emperor Andronikos left a beeby 9 year old John Palaiologos in charge. His mother Anna sought to rule as regent, but Andronikos’ second-in-command John Kantakouzenos wanted to be co-emperors until the kiddo was old enough. That civil war split Byzantine society across
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class lines and featured its very own religious controversy. So when John Kantakouzenos and his wife Irene were officially coronated in 1347, the original crown jewels were off in Venice, like every other Byzantine artifact, so their crowns were copies made of tinted glass – augh God that’s so sad it Hurts; forget the crusade, that’s what kills me. Naturally, Johnny P turned 20 a few years later and threw another civil war to kick out his co-emperor,
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so this whole tragedy was a giant waste. Yet, somehow, despite all of that, hardly the worst thing to happen in the 1340s, because, fun surprise: Plague. Man, it does not let up. Population is ravaged, economy in ruins, let us not dally here, friends, we all know the drill, and this would provide a golden opportunity for the Ottomans over in Anatolia. See, back while our Byz-bois were busy reconstituting their empire,
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several tiny principalities sprung up in the east after the collapse of the Sultanate of Rum. No, not the drink, that’s the Arabic and Turkish word for Rome. But where had the Rum gone? Well, each individual Beylik was eager to carve out its own space, and the state of Osman Bey was the most adept and dynamic of the bunch. From their starting spot on Nicaea’s doorstep, they leveraged their own military skill, a diplomatic talent for playing rival Byzantine factions against each
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other, and the convenient apparition of Plague to recast the entire Eastern Roman world in only a century. Of course, the Ottomans were not Roman in the way the Byzantines were Roman – they were a Sunni Muslim state with unique institutions and culture – but they were one of many, many societies who found themselves in the Roman orbit and slowly began to scoot themselves toward the center. This wasn’t a rivalry between the Two Eyes of the World like back with Persia,
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and this wasn’t a surprise arrival of a brand-new society like the early Caliphate, this was, in the grand scheme of Roman history, the last in a long line of a very familiar situation. The Roman world was a lush and expansive grove, and a lot of societies fancied themselves enjoying that fruit. The Ottomans’ rise would not be immediate, but they quickly made it clear they were the next big Muslim power, at the direct expense of the last big Roman one.
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So, about a century after the reconquest of Constantinople, there were four fundamental and unavoidable problems to the empire’s long-term health: The Ottomans were gaining strength and pushing west, Venice and Genoa turned the Aegean into their personal battlefield, and the complete lack of a Byzantine economy meant they were fully dependent on those two for trade, then, to cap it off we’ve got the endless internal power struggles
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and succession crises — let’s not kid ourselves, this is still the Romans we’re talking about here. With worries like that, fully rebuilding the empire was a no-go, so the Byzantines were picking their battles and biding their time, which meant putting themselves under the protection of the Ottomans. But, ever defiant in the face of peril, giving up was never an option. While The Empire was shrinking down to Just Constantinople, things looked shockingly different on the other
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side of the Aegean. Back when Michael Palaiologos was tripping ass-first into retaking Constantinople in 1261, he also had the good fortune of capturing the Latin Prince of Achaea in a battle, and ransomed him back in exchange for a few castles down in the Peloponnese. They weren’t much, but they were well-fortified among the mountains, much like the ancient Spartans had been way back when. Over
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the next two centuries, this distant Byzantine outpost in Lakonia became a prosperous corner of the Hellenic world, as Greeks from the Morea and beyond flocked into the city of Mystras to try and pick up where the empire left off. So in the 13 and 1400s, Mystras became a haven of Byzantine culture and scholarship. And, I mean, look, I’m not going to pretend like one decently well-off corner of the Greek world is on par with the empire pre-crusade, because of course it’s not,
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but I will come to bat for the Morea as a paragon of that Romano-Hellenic perseverance, to keep on trying even after everything seemed lost. No I’m not getting sentimental, that’s just marble dust in my eye, shut up. *Ahem. Anyway, like with Constantinople, keeping this territory safe required a gentle diplomatic touch, but the game was a hell of a lot easier with water on 3 sides and mountains on the 4th. And with Constantinople sweating javelins at the sight of incoming
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Ottomans, it became clear that the Morea could handle itself, so it gained autonomy in 1349. By the early 1400s they expanded outside Lakonia onto almost the entire Peloponnese, and briefly had authority over Attica. The Byzantine Morea also had a practical benefit to Constantinople, as emperors-in-waiting got their political training as governors down in the Peloponnese, to the point
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where the last emperor Constantine XI was actually crowned in Mystras rather than up in the capital. Uh oh, did I say last? Yeah, about that. The thing with the Ottomans is they didn’t… stop. Despite the empire’s best efforts and the too-little-too-late help of European Crusader armies that disintegrated on impact, it was clear the show was wrapping up. By 1453, Sultan Mehmet finally had the means to take the
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city of Constantinople, and by means I mean cannons the size of a house. After blockading the Bosphorus and cutting off the city’s line of supply, the Ottomans blasted open the Theodosian walls and poured in. Emperor Constantine is said to have given a rousing speech to his countrymen before charging into where the fighting was fiercest, never to be seen again. After the battle, the Sultan toured the city and was so awed by the beauty of Hagia Sophia that
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he preserved it and converted it into a mosque, rather than blasting it and starting from scratch, as was more often the move. But even after this (he said, moving the goalpost back for dramatic effect), it wasn’t The End for the Byzantines. For one, the Ottomans continued the time-honored love of ultra-domed architecture, and ethnic Rhomaioi would play a meaningful role in Ottoman history and culture as artists,
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administrators, artisans, sailors, soldiers, and people. After all, Kostantiniyye remained the keystone city of the Mediterranean, more prosperous and secure than it had been in centuries. It’s disingenuous to pretend that nothing was lost when Mehmet breached the Theodosian walls in 1453, that blood was not spilled and a state did not end, but when the man declares himself Kaysar-I Rum, he's declaring in Rome’s own terms that, as its
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new Caesar, he is both conqueror and builder – That civilization was now his responsibility; he took it, yes, but he did not destroy it. It's a similar case in other corners of the once-Greek world, where Hellenic culture persevered and prospered for centuries despite being part of Other People’s Empires. There’s an old saying that “Rome conquered Greece but Greece conquered Rome” describing how Hellenic culture always pervades whatever state it becomes part of,
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and that has never stopped being true, be it Rome, the Ottomans, or anyone else. The Venetian Republic’s outlying territories in the Aegean and Ionian seas were also majority-Greek, and here they played an outsized role in bringing classical ideas to a Catholic European audience. Venetian Greece contributed mightily to the budding Renaissance, and Crete especially became a beacon for art and scholarship that mixed traditional Hellenism with Renaissance innovations. So,
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despite the earth-shattering treachery of Crusading Venetians centuries prior, the painfully ironic end-result is that Venice played a vital part in the long-term preservation of Byzantine culture — Man that is uncomfortable to say out loud. But as we enter the 15 and 1600s, the days of Greeks in Constantinople ruling their ancient empire are long, long gone – so let’s wrap up. The standard question
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of the Byzantine Empire is essentially “Why didn't they die way the hell sooner when everything was always on fire?” Because, on one level, yeah, the Byzantine story is over 1,000 straight years of the map getting smaller, but that time-lapse would have been swift if they didn’t persevere. Let’s not forget they had over 1,000 years. By some metrics, that’s The Longest Empire. And it got that far because at no point in Byzantine history was it too late to care, or too late to try,
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because they believed that they had something about their state, their people, their faith, and their identity that was worth dying for and worth living for. And even when the last mini-golden-age was a distant memory, that tireless determination to Do Their Best kept them going in even the most dire circumstances to create the next mini-golden-age. So when we look back at the empire to ask why the Byzantines endured after Rome falls in 476, it’s for the same
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reason as when Constantinople fell in 1204, but the Byzantines, the greeks, the Rhomaioi, endured. And here we are – that's it. That's the history of Rome – from the first origins of that city by the Tiber to the fall of the Basileia Rhomaion and the end of the last true Roman State. Of course, that's not quite the entire story, as I easily could have gone on gushing about architecture, or followed the progression of Roman literature across that multi-millennium span, but that was
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never the goal here – This was, as concise as I could hope to get it, a clean, singular narrative of Roman civilization across more than 2000 years – a comprehensive and unifying history, but certainly not a definitive one. Notably, my history of Roman statehood ends right at the dawn of the Italian Renaissance, where classical art and scholarship would spring to the front of European consciousness
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and continue to influence Western culture up through our present day. And in the meantime, Germany sat at the helm of a Roman-inspired Empire for its own thousand-year run. In that regard, the Roman legacy left a massive impact on European society long after the original Roman state was gone. Because although the old empire “Fell” in 476 AD, by the year 1000 Rome remained the cultural center-point for all of Europe: in religion,
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language, art & architecture, literature, and politics. Likewise in the East, the civilization cultivated by the Byzantines endured long after Kostantiniyye came under the reign of the Sultan. Even when those states died, the ideas they stood for and the people who called them home carried on regardless. Rome always adapts, and these were its final transformations. And that’s just as
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true outside their Mediterranean heartland as it was within it. Roman Christianity spread further afield in the Medieval period than any legion had dared to march. Across the sea, the new Muslim empires made classical Greco-Roman scholarship a key ingredient in the Islamic civilization they created. Then far away in a once-unknown continent, descendants of Roman Britannia looked to the ancient Republic as a model for their new nation. And farthest-reaching yet subtlest of all
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is their language of Latin, which lives on through the Romance languages as well as their goofball hybrid cousins like English. If you can understand this video in the language I’m speaking it, odds are pretty damn good that you live in a world substantially shaped by Roman civilization. Even in death, Rome is ever-present: it’s not the first layer of European or Christian culture, it’s not the most important layer, it’s
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not even the most obvious layer sometimes, but it is always there: influencing the ways we interact with the world, how we understand our societies, and the things & ideas we value. Rome is a mess, but it earned its place as our mess too. Thank you all so much – truly, so so much, for watching. This is the culmination of years and years and years of work on this channel, and it’s so fulfilling to bring all those 10-minute intervals of biweekly history into one
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comprehensive documentary’s-worth of storytelling. A tremendous thanks to our longtime viewers and our lovely patrons for making a project this colossal into a reality. Now pardon me as I take the absolute thickest nap imaginable, and I’ll see you in the next, much shorter, video.
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