Peter Haugen - World History For Dummies

Caesar’s victories in the Gallic Wars (58–50 BC) pushed the empire’s borders all the way to Europe’s Atlantic seaboard. He also led Rome’s first incursion into Britain in 55 BC. (The Iron Age tribes he encountered there are remembered as Britons, ancestors of today’s Welsh, Scottish and Irish.) While Caesar was away, Crassus died, and the First Triumvirate fell apart. Pompey sought to consolidate his own power, standing as Caesar’s rival instead of his ally.

Returning home in 49 BC, Caesar started another civil war by defying a law that said Roman troops had to stay north of the Rubicon River, in today’s northern Italy. The law was intended to prevent a military leader from taking over the republic by force. Caesar led his troops across the stream and fought other Roman leaders for the prize of absolute power in battles that continued until 45 BC. (Rubicon has meant point of no return ever since.) His rivals defeated, Caesar took the title Dictator for Life.

Caesar wasn’t technically an emperor, but his reign marked the end of the Roman Republic and the beginning of the age of emperors. Rome’s ruling families didn’t take this change lightly. The dictator liked elaborate compliments and formal tributes, making his enemies think he was aiming for not just regal status, but also a kind of imperial divinity. Many Romans were upset by what Caesar was doing to their republic, and they still talked about how the Roman Senate had kicked out Tarquinius Superbus, the last Roman king. Two senators, Brutus and Cassius, plotted Caesar’s assassination and carried it out successfully.

England’s William Shakespeare wrote a terrific play on the subject of Caesar’s downfall 1,600 years after it happened. If you’ve ever said “Beware the Ides of March” or “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears,” you’ve quoted Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar . Director Joseph L. Mankiewicz made a movie version of the play in 1953, starring 1950s screen sensation Marlon Brando holding his own alongside Shakespearean heavyweight John Gielgud. It’s not as much fun as a top-flight stage production of the play, but the movie could be a lot worse.

Many more years of civil war followed Caesar’s assassination. Caesar’s cousin and general, Marcus Antonius (Mark Antony), was in position to emerge with supreme power. But Antony’s formidable rival, Caesar’s great-nephew and adopted son, Octavian, came out on top in 31 BC with a win over the combined forces of Antony and his partner (romantic and political), the Egyptian Queen Cleopatra, at Actium off the coast of Greece.

Like his predecessor, Octavian didn’t call himself a king or emperor, although that’s what he was — the undisputed ruler of the Roman world. Instead, he took the relatively modest title principate (first citizen). His modesty would have seemed sincere if he hadn’t also gotten the Senate to rename him Augustus, which means exalted. Augustus already bore the family name Caesar. Both Augustus and Caesar became titles handed down to successive Roman emperors.

Augustus cut back the unbridled expansionism of late-republican days and set territorial limits: the Rhine and Danube rivers in Europe and the Euphrates River in Asia. The empire was stable. It annexed no territory until it conquered Britain in 44 AD. Then, in 106 AD, Emperor Trajan took Dacia (modern Romania) and Arabia. Figure 5-1 shows the expanse of the Roman Empire under Emperor Trajan.

Tataryn / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY SA 3.0

FIGURE 5-1:The Roman Empire at its height under the Emperor Trajan. 117 AD.

Emperors ran Rome for hundreds of years more as dynasties and factions rose and fell, and as pressure along the far-flung borders demanded vigilance. (For more on Roman defensive strategies, see Chapter 16.) Successive Roman emperors concentrated resources along the eastern frontier formed by the Danube River, which flows from today’s Germany to the Black Sea.

In the third century AD, the Emperor Diocletian, a soldier from Croatia who was trying to restore order after a period of internal revolt, tried splitting the empire in two:

East: He took the wealthy, relatively healthy eastern lands, which he ruled from a new capital where Izmit, Turkey, is today.

West: He tapped the general in charge of Gaul, Maximian, to rule the western half of the Roman Empire from the city of Rome.

Both Diocletian and Maximian had the title Augustus, and two more co-rulers, Constantius and Galerius, received the lesser title Caesar.

When Constantius died, his son, Constantine, later called Constantine the Great, succeeded him and eventually won control of the whole empire. The reunification couldn’t last, though, especially considering that Constantine based himself in the east too. He built what he called New Rome at the site of the old seaport of Byzantium on the Bosporus, the channel that connects the Black Sea with the Sea of Marmara and in turn the Mediterranean. Completed in 330 AD, New Rome was renamed Constantinople that year. Today, the city is called Istanbul.

One result of the power shift away from Rome was that the Roman Senate was sometimes relegated to the status of a city council. True, Rome was quite a city for a council to oversee, but the power was where the emperor was (or the emperors were). Rome’s western half became less and less an empire and therefore grew more and more vulnerable to invasion by the barbarian tribes from the north: Huns, Vandals, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, and more.

By 400 AD, Theodosius had a senate in Constantinople and a staff of 2,000 bureaucrats. Also around this time, Roman tax collectors could no longer move about Europe without military escorts. The Visigoths sacked Rome in 410 AD.

With its western territory overrun by barbarians and pirates, the Roman Empire was no longer anything like its former self. In 439 AD, Vandals advanced to Roman North Africa, capturing Carthage, the former Phoenician capital that had become one of the major cities of the Western Roman Empire. The once-mighty Western empire was unable to defend this valuable trade center.

While the Western empire declined, the imperial government in Constantinople signaled the changing times by declaring Greek, rather than Latin, to be the official language. Latin was the language of the West, of Rome. Greek was the language of the eastern Mediterranean, the new center of Roman ascendancy. Remembered as the Byzantine Empire, this eastern branch of the Roman Empire would persist for another 1,000 years.

Roman administration in the West struggled on until 476 AD, but without authority. When barbarian leaders closed in on the last emperor to sit on the Roman throne, a poor youngster named Romulus Augustus, a name recalling his great predecessors, they didn’t bother to kill him. This emperor (also known by the diminutive Augustulus) wasn’t considered to be important enough.

Rome’s legacy pervades the Mediterranean, the Middle East, Europe, the Americas, and other far-flung places culturally affected by Europeans — a broad swath that takes in the Philippines, South Africa (and most of the rest of the African continent), Australia, and arguably the whole world.

After Rome was no longer an imperial capital, its name loomed so large and for so long in people’s minds that it continued to invoke power and an aura of legitimacy, in part because the Roman Catholic Church remained headquartered there. If you think of Romans as feeding Christians to the lions in the Coliseum, don’t forget that the empire later converted to Christianity. The Emperor Constantine, who built his capital in western Turkey, helped bring about a new Roman tolerance toward Christians and became the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity, in 312 AD. Starting in 331 AD, Constantine also made the Roman Catholic Church rich by