Roman Empire
| ! | Apologies This page is undergoing massive reconstruction. You can help, if you have specialized knowledge of the subject matter. Please discuss modifications on the Talk Page. |
|
An empire started by the Romans that stretched from British Isles 44AD to Northern Africa 146 B.C., to Armenia 42 B.C. The Roman Empire was the direct successor to the Roman Republic.
Rome may be credited with creating the virtue of civic republicanism: that a citizen should give his life in battle or in work to the glory of the Republic.
Its greatest ruler was Caius Iulius Caesar Octavianus, or Augustus, although many others parallel his life in depth.
Rome contributed a great deal to the mythology of early Christianity. For example, the prophecy that "a savior would come out of Judea" was popular in the Roman Empire, so popular that the biographer Suetonious saw fit to include it in his De Vitae Caesarium. However, Suetonious identified the savior as Vespasian in his "Life of Vespasian," since Vespasian did, as it was said, "save the State."
The Roman Empire is known for its construction of Roads that stretched throughout the Empire and through other trade routes even connected as far as the Silk Road and China.
The Fall of the Roman Empire
The causes of the decline of the Roman Empire are controversial. Many posit that immorality and homosexuality so weakened spirit of the Empire that it was unable to stand firm against the Barbarians. Certainly poets such as Catullus and Juvenal describe many unnatural practises that may well have contributed to the final collapse just four hundred years later. However, this theory was sensationalized by the (at the time) popular British writer Edward Gibbon, who wrote the influential Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbons, though, was highly biased, in his attempt to analogize between the fall of Rome and what he saw as a lessening of moral strength in his own England. This theory is widely discounted by modern historians.
One influential writer theorized that the reasons for the fall of the Roman Empire are simple - it never was strong. Rather, it simply had no strong enemy prior to 300 A.D.[1] Prior to this time, a complicated system of "buffer states" and sedentary provincial legions could hold such a vast territory - however, with the advent of the first comparable military unit, the Visigoths, led by Alaric.
After "the Fall"
Accounts of the Roman world's immediate descent into poverty have been greatly exaggerated. Rather, rulers such as Theoderic the Ostrogoth and his followers (the Amal clan) ruled from Ravenna in the Roman style, maintaining much of Roman life and infrastructure.[2] Theoderic even employed Romans to ensure this continuity and sense of Roman stability. One example was Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator (or just Cassiodorus), who, writing as Theoderic, famously urged all Romans to "clothe themselves with the morals of the toga" - i.e., retain your Roman ways, in spite of the "barbarian" rule.
This twilight period was finally cut short by the reconquest campaign planned by the Byzantine emperor Justinian I, led by the general Belisarius. In a bloody war, both sides reduced the Italian countryside to nothing, with the Byzantines finally inheriting a ravaged husk.[3] Many Romans - Eastern and Western - blamed Justinian for this devastation.[4]