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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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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,
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
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
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,
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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,
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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,
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
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.
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
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
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,
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
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
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
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,
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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,
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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.
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
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.
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,
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,
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.
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
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
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
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
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,
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.
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
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,
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
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
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
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,
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
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.
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,
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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,
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
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
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
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
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
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,
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
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
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
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
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,
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
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
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,
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
"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
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
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
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
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
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
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,
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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”
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.
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
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,
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,
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,
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.
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,
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
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
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
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
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,
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
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,
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
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
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
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
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
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
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,
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,
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,
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
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
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
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
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
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
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:
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
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,
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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,
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
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
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,
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,
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,
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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,
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,
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
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
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
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
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.
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,
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
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
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
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”.
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,
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
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
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
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,
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
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
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
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
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
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
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,
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,
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,
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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,
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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,
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
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,
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
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,
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
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
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,
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,
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
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
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
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,
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
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
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:
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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,
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
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,
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
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
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
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
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
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,
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.
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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.
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
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,
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,
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,
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
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
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
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
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!
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
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,
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
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
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
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
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
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,
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
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
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
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,
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.
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”,
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
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
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
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
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
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,
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,
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,
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,
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
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,
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
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
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.
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
“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,
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
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
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
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
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
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,
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.
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,
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,
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
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,
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.
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,
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.
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,
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
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
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
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,
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
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
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.
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.
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,
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
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
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
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,
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.
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
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
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.
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
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,
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,
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
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
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.
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,
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.
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
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
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,
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,
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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,
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,
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.
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
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,
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
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,
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
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
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
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
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.
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,
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.
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,
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
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.
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
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.
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:
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
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
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,
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
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
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!
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
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
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
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
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,
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
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
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,
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,
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,
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
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.
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
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
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.
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
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.
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,
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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,
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
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,
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,
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
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,
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.
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
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
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
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,
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
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
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
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
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,
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
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,
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,
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
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,
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
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
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
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,
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
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
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
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
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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