Three Voices from Rome: Polybius, Pliny and Jerome

From Republic to Empire to Fall

1In about 509 BCE the Romans drove out their last king and set up a republic. Each year citizens elected two consuls to lead the government and the army, while the Senate, a council of leading men, advised them and controlled public money. Over the next centuries Rome's armies conquered Italy and then lands around the Mediterranean Sea.

2Conquest brought new problems. Wealthy families bought up huge farms worked by enslaved captives, and many small farmers lost their land. In 133 BCE a tribune named Tiberius Gracchus proposed giving public land to poor citizens. A crowd led by senators killed him, and violence became part of Roman politics.

3Armies changed too. Generals began to recruit poor citizens who served for many years and looked to their general, not the Senate, for pay and land when they retired. In 49 BCE Julius Caesar led his army across the Rubicon River into Italy against the Senate's orders, and civil war followed. In 27 BCE his heir Octavian took the name Augustus and became the first emperor.

4Under the emperors, the empire reached its largest size in 117 CE. Cities across it built roads, bridges, aqueducts and public baths, often paid for by the cities themselves and by wealthy citizens. Roman law spread with Roman rule. In the early 100s CE, a legal expert named Celsus wrote that law is "the art of the good and the fair," an idea later collected in Justinian's law books.

5In the 200s and 300s CE the empire suffered civil wars, rising prices and attacks along its long borders. In 410 CE the Visigoths, led by Alaric, captured and looted the city of Rome. No foreign army had taken the city in about 800 years. In 476 a Germanic general removed the last emperor in the West, while the eastern half of the empire, ruled from Constantinople, lasted until 1453.