The Romans | “All your land are belong to us.”

Very possibly the worst neighbors ever

If you were hoping to bewitch an entire civilization into fearful admiration, it is a relatively simple process. Just ceaselessly meddle in your neighbors’ affairs and insert yourself into their quarrels; pilfer bits of their property and then pick a fight; kill most of them, then throw a giant party to celebrate their deaths; and, finally, redecorate their house to your own tastes.

At least, that’s how the Romans did it. Their empire vanished from the map centuries ago, yet they continue to rule great swathes of the Western imagination. Whether you’re in Europe or a country full of European descendants, Roman history will be taught, Latin phrases will carry authority, and (if you don’t have Roman ruins of your own) you’ll mimic their architecture to signal power and greatness.[1]

This is more than just nostalgia or imitation by design—whether or not a territory once fell under Roman sway has had lasting effects. The lines that divide Europe today are most often legacies of Rome, be they linguistic, legal, religious, or cultural. Even Christianity, the faith that dominated Europe for two millennia and is Rome’s only rival in influence, was spread by the empire and drew its institutions from Roman models.

But the Roman legacy is a poisonous gift. If you want to understand Western history or thought, you’ve got to come to grips with all of Rome: its practical genius and its casual brutality alike. You should admire the aqueducts and marvel at their roads—but never forget these were built by masses of enslaved victims of Roman wars and Roman rule. 

So, let’s meet these troublesome former tenants of so much European real estate.

The Roman Empire and its world (sarcastic annotations are mine)

How an ancient Roman would view my trip (with modern names of Roman cities, settlements, and forts).

Breastfed by wolves: a bit on the nose, wouldn’t you say?

Like any self-respecting ancient society, the Romans had a preposterous origin story. Two abandoned infants, the twins Romulus and Remus, were suckled by a she-wolf [2] and, despite this unpromising childhood, went on to found the city of Rome. Identifying with wolves made sense since the Romans would go on to be opportunistic predators that hunted in packs.

Archeology has not been kind to this fairy tale origin story, suggesting a far more prosaic starting point. Rome began as a collection of wattle-and-daub villages atop seven hills surrounding a marsh. While other civilizations arose along the banks of mighty rivers (the Nile, the Euphrates, the Indus, the Yellow River, etc.), Rome had to make do with the Tiber—a respectable enough waterway but hardly anything to write home about.

These hamlets had two important things in common, one linguistic and the other spiritual. They all spoke Latin, one of several Italic languages in the region. But their reverence for their tongue ran particularly deep. They called their homeland “Latinum” and would forever see Latin fluency as the sine qua non of Roman identity. 

The Romans were also ancestor-worshippers. Sure, they had their own knock-off version of the Greek pantheon and were sometimes infatuated with foreign mystery cults (Cybele, Isis, Mithras, Jesus, etc.). But above all, the Romans cherished the lares, guardian spirits with ties to a family’s most celebrated forefathers. With their ancestors’ wax death masks literally looking over their shoulders (from a gruesome portrait gallery in every proper home), it was no wonder Roman society was deeply conservative and suspicious of innovation. The porous border between dead grandfather and god would also pave the way to deifying emperors…but I’m getting ahead of the story.

Around 750 B.C.E., these Latin-speaking villages got together and called themselves Rome. Unfortunately, the nascent city-state didn’t stay independent for long. It was absorbed by the Etruscan League, a more advanced society to Rome’s north, and was ruled by Etruscan kings for the next few centuries.

In Roman accounts, the Etruscans were a nasty bit of work, and their kings were especially so. (This is debatable—Romans loved nothing more than an over-the-top smear campaign.) After a high-profile sexual assault [3] in 509 B.C.E., the Latins threw out the kings and resolved never again to submit to a monarch. Not to keep you in suspense: this turned out to be a little more difficult than anticipated.

I’ve never been sure whether this is an example of child abuse, animal cruelty, or a worrisome combination of both. You have to imagine that no one portrayed in this statue was entirely happy with the state of affairs. (Image credit ⤾)

    1. Their name is memorialized in “Tuscany”—the region where you’ll find modern Florence, the incubator of the Renaissance and now a cliche setting for period films.

    2. No one has a clue where the Etruscans came from. Their language was unrelated to the surrounding Italic tongues and also unlike anything spoken elsewhere in Europe. Their mysterious origin has spawned countless theories, from the logical (they’d been living there all along, and the Italic speakers were the arrivistes) to the fanciful (refugees from the Lost Continent of Atlantis) and the insane (aliens, predictably).

    3. The characters you’re reading right now are one of their legacies. The Etruscans borrowed their alphabet from the Greeks, significantly changed the shape and sound of the characters, and then passed it along to the Romans. They, in turn, further adapted it to their language, giving us what we still call the “Latin” alphabet.

    4. I have no idea why, but historians make an enormous fuss over the Etruscan practice of haruspicy — divining the future by examining the liver of a sacrificial animal. The Romans took it up, but little good it did them. They still couldn’t predict the weather tomorrow or when the next litter to Ostia would arrive.

Absolutely, positively republicans for the rest of time

In place of a monarchy, the Romans devised a complicated system of elected magistrates whose powers were checked and balanced by one another. At the top, you had two consuls elected for one year and jointly exercising power. If one got too high and mighty, his colleague could rein him in (at least in theory), and they, in turn, would share power with the Senate, a council of well-aged politicians drawn from the ruling classes.[4] They called their creation the “public thing”—res publica in Latin—giving us a word and a concept that would outlast Rome itself. The state's official name was “The Senate and People of Rome”—Senatus Populusque Romanus in Latin and abbreviated “SPQR” on government buildings and documents even after the Republic itself was just a memory.

Roman politics was always a full-contact sport, with rival factions and classes jockeying for power—yet this scheme worked for a while. Consuls were elected, lorded it over everyone for a year, and then peacefully retired to a profitable retirement fleecing some distant province.

There was a catch: the Republic relied on custom rather than precise rules to police its politics. As long as the major players agreed to honor the traditions that limited the power of any one individual, things went swimmingly.

Unfortunately, Rome acquired an empire and the profits of political office became ever more addictive—not particularly fertile soil for republicanism to thrive.

The laundry bill for this revered institution must have been something frightful (which I suspect is why the fellow in the lower right looks so despondent. (Image credit ⤾)

  • The Senate cornered the market on pompous self-imporance but still included the occasional fun-loving character. Take Cato the Elder, who hilariously ended every speech with a bracing “Ceterum autem censeo Carthaginem esse delendam!” ("Furthermore, Carthage must be destroyed"). He thought Rome had botched the job on earlier attempts, so nothing made him crankier than the thought of a single Carthaginian still drawing breath.

    Likely desperate to shut Cato the hell up, Rome razed Carthage (one of the Classical world’s greatest metropolises) in 146 B.C.E., murdering most of its citizens and enslaving the rest. The victors literally salted the earth where their rival once stood (if a job’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing as well)

    I know it’s petty to mention, but Cato’s nomen (clan name) was Porcius, drawn from porcus (pig). Sometimes, the universe has a subtle and super-catty sense of humor.

Does anyone really put “build an empire” on their bucket list?

The British, who fancied themselves modern Romans, entertained the conceit that they’d acquired their empire “in a fit of absent-mindedness.” It was as though expropriating a good part of the habitable world was akin to flooding the bathroom because you forgot you left the tap on.

Yet empires acquired through opportunism and a sense of entitlement are hardly better than those arising from carefully laid plans. Neither Britain in modern times nor Rome in the last centuries B.C.E. was executing some secret expansion plan. But once they started taking over other people’s lands, it was all too easy to succumb to insidious expansionist logic. Naturally, every acquisition must be secured, threats from adjoining territories must be confronted, and the gravy train of captured wealth needs to keep going.

So it’s true that the Romans didn’t set out to rule the entire Mediterranean basin, with northern Europe and beachfront Black Sea property thrown in for good measure. Nonetheless, they did just that by following their instincts: everyone around was either an existential threat to Roman safety, security, and honor, or a weak state in painful need of Rome’s steadying (and acquisitive) hand.

It didn’t hurt that, for centuries, the Romans were simply better at warfare than everyone they encountered. If they discovered a rival with some advantage, they’d adopt and improve on it. More than any other classical society, they understood that logistics, paperwork, and mass production of weapons and armor were the keys to success. No matter their failings, it’s hard not to be impressed by Rome’s undeniable competence.

You see, it just worked. From humble hilltop beginnings, the Romans—without a master plan but nonetheless advancing with single-minded ruthlessness—became the dominant power in the Mediterranean world. They didn’t call it an empire yet. They told themselves that this was just the old Republic with a bunch of foreign taxpayers tacked on for good measure. But whatever its name, it made some Romans wealthy beyond the dreams of either Romulus or Remus. [5] Gold, silver, and other plundered wealth poured into Rome, along with vast numbers of inexpensive human chattel (see sidebar). The austere Republic of self-hating daughters and cranky rural patricians gave way to something beyond what the old order could contain.

Roman emperor? No, just King James II of England, Scotland, and Ireland indulging in ridiculous cosplay twelve hundred years later. (Look below for his inspiration.) (Image credit ⤾)

  • Roman expansion meant an unending supply of enslaved people. If you and your neighbors managed to survive the Latin conquest and its immediate aftermath, you were likely grabbed and sold in one of the Empire's many slave markets. Slavery permeated the Roman world to a degree that even the Antebellum South couldn’t match. Enslaved people did practically everything worth doing: digging ore out of mountains or pulling oars on a galley; planting fields and cultivating vineyards; running shops or even entire estates; and tutoring the next generation of Roman grandees.

    The rise of the latifundae (what we’d call corporate farms today) allowed wealthy absentee landlords to dominate Roman agriculture, forcing small families and tenants out and replacing them with masses of enslaved laborers. The number of landless and prospectless Roman citizens grew unchecked—ever resenting the foreigners who “took” their jobs and finding solace in bread and circuses.

    It’s impossible and disrespectful to rank different slavery-based regimes: whichever one you’re currently examining always seems to be the worst of the lot. Instead, I’ll offer the grimmest features of Rome’s version for your appraisal:

    1. A Roman had unlimited power over his enslaved dependents. It was considered “bad form, old boy” to air one’s brutal laundry in public. But in private, one might maim, rape, and murder to one’s heart’s content. (This power extended to disobedient children, but that’s a whole other can of worms.)

    2. If an enslaved person witnessed an event or a crime (even merely as a disinterested bystander), their testimony was only admissible if they’d first been tortured. Even when their story supported the official line, their words carried no meaning until repeated after an afternoon with an inquisitive sadist.

    3. Roman elites made a habit of dying under suspiciously violent circumstances. Their captive laborers were automatically suspected (because everyone knew they had an embarrassment of rich motives). If the culprit couldn’t be identified or were politically untouchable, every last enslaved person on the estate (infants to elders) suffered a messy and painful death pour encourager les autres.

When is a king, not a king? When he’s an imperator, obviously.

Romans liked to imagine themselves as stoic and simple people, indifferent to grand trappings and displays of wealth and dedicated to honest work with their own hands (preferably guiding a plow or executing their errant children). They clung to this belief, even as they drowned in money and captive fellow humans.

It’s a tale as old as wolves giving milk to children: the rich got richer, the poor got poorer, and society depended on the forced labor of “immigrants.” For an elite Roman, leading a conquering or score-settling army became an essential rung on the ladder of aristocratic manhood. It burnished a man’s reputation, showcased his devotion to old-fashioned Roman callous brutality, and made him filthy rich along the way.

At the same time, the army evolved from a militia of volunteers to a paid gig with a professional officer class. Serving in the army was one of fews ways dispossessed and landless citizens could improve their lot. The same vast underclass was courted by gift-bearing aristocrats (see sidebar), who wanted their votes in elections and their boots on the ground in orchestrated riots. These unlikely allies threw the door open to new levels of casual, communal violence that kept the Republic on the brink of chaos for years.

Since many others have told the sad story of the Republic’s last decades, I won’t dive into its particulars here. I’ll just say that, after several internecine wars, purges that put Stalin to shame, and endless male posturing, [6] it was clear the Republic no longer worked. As a result, a third of Rome’s best and brightest slaughtered the rest, the last pharaoh of Egypt was driven to suicide [7], and when the dust settled, a charmless man with nothing but useful family ties and a profound sense of entitlement ended up on top. [8]

Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus was that lucky winner. He (and most of his successors) maintained the fiction that the Republic was still a going concern. He styled himself the “First Citizen” (princeps civitatis) and claimed to have “restored” the Republic after years of civil war. He even kept the Senate around as a kind of performative political menagerie: their antics were fun to watch but ultimately meaningless. [9]

We know him today by another title: imperator. This time-honored Latin word initially meant “commander”and whatever that person commanded was his imperium. Similar to one of the U.S. presidents' auxiliary titles “Commander-in-Chief,” it became shorthand for referring to the guy currently sitting on the throne of the “Republic.” It’s the origin of the words empire, emperor, and imperial—although “Caesar” proved to be an equal hit with posterity, getting a second wind as the German Kaiser and the Russian czar.

The Roman elite were happy to pretend the imperium was still republican so long as they kept their wealth; they, in turn, half-heartedly maintained the pretense that they were still a nation of rugged and reticent plowmen. Roman citizenship was granted ever more widely; all those citizens came to expect protection from enemies foreign and domestic within the borders of the Pax Romana. This was the storied “Peace of Rome,” kind of like the European Union if it were run by the Mafia, based its economy on enslaved labor, and occasionally handed absolute power to a sociopath. If you were beaten and robbed by marauders, at least they were Roman, not some Parthian or Germanic riff-raff from beyond the borders. This, the Romans assured themselves, was real progress

Just another matinée at the Colosseum (Hey, patres familiae, bring the kiddies for half price every kalends or ides!) (Image credit ⤾)

  • The city of Rome proper ballooned into a megalopolis, with around 1 million inhabitants in the early centuries C.E. The lion’s share of those people were either unemployed or underemployed, so they formed a resentful and bored proletariat with a lot of time on their hands.

    To keep those easily triggered people quiet, the Roman state bought them off with panem et circenses (bread and circuses), as the satirist Juvenal famously sneered.

    The bread came in the form of the grain dole, a handout of free wheat or barley to every citizen of Rome. (Much of this hand-out was sourced from Egypt, the breadbasket of the ancient world. It’s hardly a coincidence that Rome annexed the Kingdom of the Nile in 27 B.C.E.)

    The circuses were elaborate games, varying in format but with a single theme: watching something or someone kill anyone or anything will make you forget your cares. Romans had long enjoyed a good death match as a sacrifice to their ancestors. What was new was the scale: More enslaved gladiators! More condemned prisoners! All the animals—who cares if we leave any in the wild! And the crowds ate it up.

    This, right here, is the heart of my beef with ancient Rome. Don’t get me wrong—their slave-holding, murderous soldiers, and rapacious greed were awful. Nor do they get a pass because most every other empire also had those things.

    But these “games” really stick in my craw. They fill me with disgust: the delight in gawking at terrible death, the gamification of suffering, the sheer waste of human and animal lives, and the “what the actual fuck?” of it all.

    We’re not supposed to diagnose or psychoanalyze figures or peoples of history. I’m more historian than analyst, so forgive me if my mind inexorably whispers words like “sociopathy” and “malignant narcissism.”

Hail Caesar! This is how an actual Roman emperor looked. Augustus (“Octavian” to his amis intimes) models a fashionable wrap over a couture cuirass and reminds us he’s still “just folks” with casually bare feet. Ignore the tiny cherub trying to look up the First Citizen’s skirts—it appears to be a sculptural easter egg of obscure and possibly indecent meaning. (Image credit ⤾)

Let’s give imperial polyamory a shot…

Unfortunately, things didn’t go to plan. Returning to the theme of “ill-gotten gains yield naught but sorrow,” this purported Pax Romana soon began to crack under its own weight. The Empire was simply too extensive and too populous to effectively rule. How could such a colossus be governed from one city by one man? (And, yes, it was always a man since Roman misogyny burned bright throughout their entire run.)

It could take weeks (or even months) for a message to travel from Rome to one of its provinces, making oversight and effective administration nearly impossible. To make matters worse, no clear rule explained how the imperial title should pass from one imperator to the next. This encouraged everyone with ambition to vie for the throne when it was vacant and to have few scruples about seeking to unseat an incumbent.

After three centuries of political instability and worrying signs that the Roman border was more beaded curtain [10] than impregnable barrier, one emperor thought he found the solution. Diocletian was born on the Dalmatian coast to humble parents, rose through military service to command legions, and became imperator in 283 B.C.E. After a promising start (allowing his former rival claimants and their families to survive his victory) , he began working on his half-brilliant, half-harebrained idea: the Tetrarchy.

The brilliant bit was splitting the Empire in two. The Latin-speaking western half would be ruled by an emperor based in Mediolanum (a city far more conveniently located than Rome), while the Greek-speaking eastern part would look to another sitting in Nicomedia (in today’s Türkiye). This division, promulgated in 295 C.E., would endure (despite some brief interludes of reunification) and is Diocletian’s greatest legacy.

But he couldn’t leave well enough alone, so now we come to the foolish piece. Diocletian worried that the two new empires were still too large for practical purposes. So, he subdivided each empire, yielding four dioceses (hence the name “Tetrarchy”), each run by a different man . The senior leaders would be styled “Augustus,” while their junior colleagues had to be satisfied with a mere “Caesar." Each would be responsible for keeping their quarter of the Pax Romana pax-full and bellum-lite.

Diocletian also thought he could fix that nagging succession problem though a clever “gentlemen’s agreement.” Each Augustus would select a Caesar to be his partner and heir. When the time was right (to be determined in some unspecified manner), the Augusti would simultaneously abdicate, allowing the Caesare to assume the top jobs and, in turn, pick new Caesare of their own. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, everything (as anyone familiar with human nature might have predicted). Diocletian duly resigned as Emperor of the East in 305 C.E., handing power to his Caesar, Constantius, and retiring to his Dalmatian homeland. The Western Augustus, Maximian, grudgingly abdicated as well—then had second thoughts and tried to get back into the game. His return was not greeted with much enthusiasm. The Tetrarchs (official and self-proclaimed alike) decided to settle this with swords and soon Diocletian’s carefully crafted scheme fell to pieces. Everyone fought everybody else in a spectacular display of petty arrogance until eventually, just one emperor (Constantine) remained. The Tetrarchy went in the dustbin and there was no more nonsense about self-sacrificing abdications thereafter. If you wanted the job of emperor, you’d just have to kill your way to the top in time-honored Roman fashion.

Too big: The Roman Empire when Diocletian took the reins.

Too small: The four dioceses of the Tetrarchy.

Just right: The Goldilocks solution of two separate empires

Two Romes, twice the declines, and double the falls

Constantine built his reunified empire a splendid new capital atop the ancient Greek city Byzantion. The eponymous Constantinople sat conveniently astride the Bosporus Strait linking Europe and Asia and soon outshone its increasingly ramshackle Italian predecessor. Inspired by some mixture of revelation and realpolitik, Constantine also embraced Christianity, paving the way for an obscure and despised Judaean splinter sect to become the official faith of all the Romes.

The East-West fissure was restored in 395 C.E., dividing the empire once and for all. The two halves, by now as much rivals as allies, went their separate ways and any sense of a unitary Roman state was lost forever.

The Western Empire slid into an inexorable death spiral—Westerners mean this empire when talking about declining and falling. (see sidebar) The Latin empire struggled more than its Greek counterpart to resist the masses of Germanic, Slavic, and Central Asian tribes pushing on the imperial borders. Some of these peoples were settled (reluctantly) in Roman lands as buffers against the rest, while most just forced their way in. By 476 C.E., Rome itself had been sacked repeatedly, and the Western empire had been shorn of most of its provinces. The ironically named Romulus Augustus was at last deposed by a Germanic general, Odoacer, who styled himself King of Italy rather than Imperator. The Western imperial franchise fell into abeyance until a surprising reboot in 800 C.E. (see HRE)

The Greek-speaking East was wealthier, more urban, and better defended than its Latin brother. Although equally troubled by barbarian incursions, it managed to hold its own for much longer, even briefly retaking some lost imperial lands in the West. Its decline and fall was postponed a thousand years, allowing a vibrant and autochthonous Byzantine culture and Christianity to flourish. 

But this remaining Rome met its match another faith-based civilization, one that exploded out of Arabia in 632 C.E. and took the Middle East by storm. Blindsided by a threat from a region they’d never given much thought, the Byzantines were doomed to watch their territory dwindle to insignificance over seven increasingly grim centuries. Mehmed II did the decent thing in 1453 C.E., putting the feeble remnant out of its misery—and inspiring a wonderfully catchy song (more on this later).

This painting is pure fantasy—Rome was nowhere near the coast, so it could neither be drowned in a tsunami nor overrun by boatloads of soldiers. Yet it’s a pretty accurate picture of how Western Civilization has imagined Rome’s fall.

The truth was far less dramatic: a long, slow slide into senescence, an infrastructure crumbling or co-opted by the Church, and a culture and language embraced by so-called barbarians, who would take them in entirely new directions.

I won’t say the Empire went out with a whimper (even at their lowest, the Romans would never go peacefully into any imaginable good night). Yet the the Fall was likely a creeping, erratic, half-perceptible dimming of the lights rather than a sudden loss of power. No wonder the Latin sayings tempus fugit and sic transit gloria mundi have enjoyed such a long shelf-life. (Image credit ⤾)

  • Header image: Kretschmer, Albert and Carl Rohrbach. “Ancient Times, Roman” (detail). Costumes of All Nations. 1882. [ Public domain /  Wikimedia Commons ]