Roman History
Roman history begins in a small village in central Italy; this unassuming village would grow into a small metropolis, conquer and control all of Italy, southern Europe, the Middle East, and Egypt, and find itself, by the start of AD time, the most powerful and largest empire in the world. They managed what no other people had managed before: the ruled the entire world under a single administration for a considerable amount of time. This imperial rule, which extended from Great Britain to Egypt, from Spain to Mesopotamia, was a period of remarkable peace. The Romans would look to their empire as the instrument that brought law and justice to the rest of the world; in some sense, the relative peace and stability they brought to the world did support this view.
They were, however, a military state, and they ruled over this vast territory by maintaining a strong military presence in subject countries. An immensely practical people, the Romans devoted much of their brilliance to military strategy and technology, administration, and law, all in support of the vast world government that they built.
Rome, however, was responsible for more than just military and administrative genius. Culturally, the Romans had a slight inferiority complex in regards to the Greeks, who had begun their city-states only a few centuries before the rise of the Roman republic. The Romans, however, derived much of their culture from the Greeks: art, architecture, philosophy, and even religion. However, the Romans changed much of this culture, adapting it to their own particular world view and practical needs. It is this changed Greek culture, which we call Graeco-Roman culture, that was handed down to the European civilizations in late antiquity and the Renaissance.
Our journey through this remarkable history begins with the land itself and the various peoples that inhabited it. Unlike most of the regions we've dealt with, Italy was a multicultural landscape that came to be dominated by this small village, Rome. Each chapter in this history is followed by the title of the next chapter; you can proceed from chapter to chapter in this history by clicking the title that concludes each chapter. Alternatively, you can use the navigation menus in the frames to the left to go back to the contents page and navigate the chapters as you please.
The Land and The People
Italy is a peninsula jutting out into the Mediterranean west of Greece. Unlike Greece, Italy is poor in mineral resources and surprisingly devoid of useful harbors. However, the most stunning difference between Greece and Italy is the exponentially larger amount of fertile land. While Greece is poor in fertile land, Italy is wealthy in both land and precipitation. So the two peoples developed very differently; the Italians began and remained largely an agrarian people. Even in its latest stages, Roman culture would identify its values and ideals as agrarian.
Italy had one other significant difference from Greece: it was easily accessible from Europe to the north. The Greeks lived behind a formidable mountain range; the Alps to the north of Italy were not quite as invulnerable. The Greeks also had a warlike Greek population to the north, the Macedonians, to serve as a buffer between themselves and other Europeans. The Romans had no such buffer civilization. As a result, conflict was a fairly constant affair on the Italian peninsula and the Romans, along with other peoples on the Italian peninsula, developed a military society fairly early in their history.
We know almost nothing about the earliest peoples in Italy. The earliest people in Italy were Cro-Magnons, but by the Neolithic stage, they seem to be displaced by waves of migrations from Africa, Spain, and France. These peoples were themselves displaced by a new set of migrations in the Bronze Age, which began in Italy around 1500 BC, which violently displaced many of the populations already there. These new peoples came from across the Alps and across the Adriatic Sea to the east of the Italian peninsula. They were a nomadic people who were primarily herdsmen; they were also technologically superior. They worked bronze, used horses, and had wheeled carts. They were a war-like people and began to settle the mountainous areas of the Italian peninsula. We call these people Italic , and they include several ethnic groups: the Sabines, the Umbrians, and the Latins, with an infinity of others.
Somewhere between 800 and 700 BC, two new groups of people began to settle the Italian peninsula. Unlike the earlier immigrants, these new colonists brought with them civilization: the Greeks and the Etruscans.