Transcript for:
Sejarah Roma: Asal, Ekspansi, & Kejatuhan

Rome was a mess. And I mean that on every level.  Living in Rome was messy, dealing with Rome was   messy, and in our case, talking about Rome  is messy. Admittedly, that’s like 80% of   the fun with them – Because there is no single  history of Rome. The perspective of every era,   every province, every social class, and every  outsider is completely different. Instead,   my goal today is to tell a complete history  of Rome as a Mediterranean Civilization-State.   Not just looking at warfare, nor literature, nor  politics, nor architecture – mmm, man I wish – and   certainly not imperial tabloid scandal, but a  history of the Idea Of Rome – the collective   consciousness that defines the Senātus Populusque  Rōmānus: The Senate and People of Rome. Those 4   letters “SPQR” weren’t just a moniker the Romans  called themselves, it was a communal promise that   remained true throughout centuries of evolution  and change – and qualities like that make Rome   feel really special. There's honestly nothing like  it, and I think it's important to appreciate not   just what Rome became, but how much slow, careful,  calculated effort was put into its cultivation and   preservation. As we’ll see in a minute, early  Roman history is a notoriously slow burn,   as generation after generation dedicated  themselves to something they'd never see the   end of. And I just think that's really cool, so:  as we start from the very beginning of the Roman   story and weave our way through two millennia of  glory, triumph, and deeply hilarious disasters,   Let's do…  some History!    Rome was not built in a day, but it was built,  consciously and with intentionality. Roman   civilization as we understand it is the product of  millions of people: men and women, young and old,   weak and powerful – working over millennia to  make their culture something spectacular. We   can see that they built and accomplished amazing  things across three continents, but what’s less   obvious is what they built on. Not literally,  mind you, that’s usually just brick or stone;   but what cultural foundation sustained so huge an  idea as “Rome”? That’s the kind of question that   takes us to the very beginnings of their history,  as we’d try to figure out what inciting incident   led to all of this. However, any records from the  earliest Roman chronicles are agonizingly absent,   as the city was sacked and burned in 390 by a  tribe of Gauls, so we are instead left at the   mercy of Roman Legend: completely ahistorical,  and hella propaganda. But despite this rather   considerable setback in understanding the  earliest roots of Roman history, we can work   with this – because later Romans also didn’t know  where exactly they came from, and were voraciously   curious to fix that. So, lacking a verifiable  answer, they instead devised one, consciously   and intentionally compiling a narrative  out of half-remembered myths and historical   foreshadowing of the later Rome they knew. This  web of folktales, retold and refined by centuries   of storytellers until their codification around  the turn of the millennium, is our best source of   cultural intent and ambition for the Rome that was  to be. So, let’s untangle this Roman Creation Myth   to better understand the underlying Roots of Rome.    If we take the Romans at their word, their origins  goeth thusly: 1100-something-or-other BC, Troy’s   on fire and one lucky prince Aeneas escaped. He  made his way to Italy, with interruptions, and   won kingship of the plain of Latium, but it’s not  Rome Time quite yet. His descendants ruled in Alba   Longa a short ways south of the Tiber river for  four centuries, until the Alban king Numitor got   deposed by his brother Amulius, who made Numitor’s  daughter Rhea Silvia a vestal virgin to ensure   the bloodline ends with her. This was always a  failing strategy when Olympians were afoot, and   sure enough the war god Mars slid in to give her  twin sons Romulus and Remus. Amulius demanded they   be killed river-style, but they were saved at the  banks of the Tiber by a she-wolf, who then nursed   them through early childhood before they were  taken in by shepherds – bringing the twins’ parent   count to one dad, two moms, one god, and a wolf.  They grew up and deposed that nasty awful Amulius,   and later set about founding a new settlement  along the Tiber. A brotherly quarrel escalated   as they were plotting out the course of their new  walls, and Romulus killed Remus in the first but   distinctly not last Roman-on-Roman violence. That,  kids, is why it’s called Rome and not Reme. With   his kingship secure and the city founded in the  year 753, Romulus got to populating his new town,   so he welcomed bandits, exiles, and other such  ruffians, and then captured the Sabine women   en-masse to ensure Rome would have heirs. Unlike  Rhea Silvia , we can’t all be slammed by the god   of war, but the Romans sure learned from his  example. Romulus also implemented several core   features of Roman society: the tribes, Patrician  and Plebeian classes, marriage laws, the   patron-client system, even the Senate arose as if  springing fully-formed from the head of Romulus.   After him, six more kings ruled over Rome,  the last three of whom were from the Etruscan   Tarquinii clan, and the very last was Tarquinius  Superbus, AKA Tarky-Tark Super-Bus, who was a   total knob. His incessant assholery enraged the  Romans into throwing their very first coup-d’état,   very exciting, ousting Tarquin and establishing  Rome as a republic in 509 BC. From there,   the Italian peninsula was destined to one  day fall under the stunning force of Rome’s   military and kickass civic institutions, and the  whole Mediterranean would undoubtably be next.    This origin story is dignified, tidy, a little   self-indulgent, but above all else, convenient.  So let’s go through this and, you know, rip it   apart. First off, Rome’s founding date of 753 is a  guess, posited in the first century BC to roughly   line up with the earliest Greek Olympics. As far  as the story itself goes, the Italy-bound journey   of Aeneas the perfect Roman OC Do Not Steal is  suspiciously Odyssean enough as is, but it’s first   attested by Greek sources during the Republic.  Aeneas is also way back in the Bronze Age   compared to 753; that hefty 4-century gap between  Aeneas and Romulus went largely unexplained until   Dionysius of Halicarnassus seemingly invented the  entire concept of the Alban Kings in his “Roman   Antiquities” from the first century BC. The Kings  of Alba longa have very little characterization,   and some can be mapped onto nearby Latium  place-names, so it’s not a stretch to think   Dionysius decided that hill over there is totally  derived from this ancient king you guys I promise,   don’t google it, I promise, please, please  don’t investigate it. It’s only when we run   into the twins’ backstory that the Alban kings  Numitor and Amulius actually do anything. The   boys’ story is overtly mythical, and even Livy  questions Mars and the wolf, but what might be   less believable than divine parentage is the idea  that 7 kings ruled Rome for a combined 244 years,   which requires an unbroken string of seven 35-year  reigns on average. That is a royal runtime matched   by only two emperors before the fall of Western  Rome. And yes, that of all things is where I draw   the realism line; because each segment of this  story feels abundantly retrofitted to clean up a   messy set of chronologies between key events: the  well-known establishment of the republic in 509,   the vaguely-understood foundation of the city in  the mid 700s-ish, and the heavily mythologized   Trojan origins of Aeneas back in the Bronze Age.  Everything else is just narrative-scaffolding.    Republican-era Romans wondered   aloud how exactly their history could fit two  founders in the same folk-tradition, and it took   until the Augustan period to square all that by  having Aeneas found the Roman dynasty and Romulus   build the city itself. Other classical states  didn’t struggle this much with contradicting   narratives – Athens certainly didn’t mind having  multiple founder heroes, and one of them was   Theseus, eugh – but in the first century BC, Rome  took an organic storytelling tradition and forced   all those disparate threads to play by History’s  rules: one continuous narrative. It didn’t need   to be what we would call “Factual”, it just needed  to fit. Of course the Alban kings were retconned   into existence to tidy up the timeline, Aeneas and  Romulus are the only two who narratively matter.   Rome’s legendary origins only needed to make sense  to The Romans, and in the absence of records from   before Rome’s first sack in 390 BC, that’s  the closest thing to a primary source we have.   As pure history, it’s bound to leave us wanting  anything more substantive – but as an artifact of   their culture, this origin tells us everything the  Romans needed to know about themselves and wanted   anyone else to know: Their heroes are divine  descendants of Venus and Mars, their lineage   runs back as far as anywhere in Greece, they come  from disparate places and backgrounds, civil war   is in their blood, they 100% have a wolf kink, and  they kill tyrants. That’s Rome – everything else   is Livy’s filler arcs.    Now, for a supposedly ancient story, two of  Romulus’ deeds point decidedly forwards in Roman   history, and reveal what later Romans thought  must have been intrinsic to their identity.   His first act as king was to welcome Italy’s  dispossessed and outlaws as Rome’s citizens,   which may seem rather unheroic on the face of  it, but this reflects Rome’s most peculiar trait:   its openness to cultures and people. Rome, of  course, thought it was the best civilization ever,   and made that known loudly and frequently, but  Rome took good ideas wherever they found them,   and was willing to let any barbarian become Roman  so long as they took on Rome’s customs and learned   Latin. Romans always started as outsiders, be  they exiles from across Italy or refugees from   far off Troy, supposedly. Rome was also remarkably  comfortable with granting citizenship to freed   slaves, a quality the Greeks absolutely did not  share. This seemingly undignified story actually   enshrines the idea that regardless of social  class or cultural boundaries, it was possible to   become a Roman – and that idea is the stuff that  pan-Mediterranean civilizations are made of. But   alongside Rome’s great aspirations, their deepest  anxiety is also present in the Romulus story:   as their ruinously blood-soaked hobby of civil  wars finds its start in that fratricidal founder.   Rather than being intended as justification  to go out murdering (as if they needed that),   this looks like the closest thing to Rome’s  Original Sin, the foundational crime they will   be doomed to repeat over and over and over and  over and over for more than two thousand years.    These stories take their most   permanent forms seven centuries after the supposed  founding of the city, in the pages of Livy’s   History of Rome and Virgil’s Aeneid – and as we  wait for potential discoveries in archaeology to   illuminate the earliest settlements amid those  hills beside the Tiber, that’s all we’ve got to   go on. The image sharpens into historical focus  as we depose king Tarquin, start the republic,   and embark on the slow process of building  Rome’s civic institutions and establishing   a domain across central Italy, but the further we  progress along the timeline, the more meaningful   and relevant their origin story becomes. The  roots of Rome ultimately tell us nothing about the   earliest Romans – if they even called themselves  Romans, even came from Troy, even had kings,   even did any of the things their myths take  for granted – but this narrative reveals so   much about the civilization they would become and  the kind of people the Romans would one day be:   Crafty Bastards. As the next two thousand years  will amply demonstrate, they were crafty bastards.    What's important   to keep in mind as we start laying down more and  more red paint on this lovely marble map is that   Rome did not begin with a grand plan of conquest.  Rather, after shaking off Etruscan domineering and   suffering their first major incursion of the  Gauls in 390 by Brennus, the Romans needed to   fortify their territory by pacifying threats at  their frontier. Simply put, this process began,   and never finished. Individuals had their  social or political motives for participating,   but at scale, this doctrine of Expanding Defense  just kept on expanding. Rome did not have some   53-and-a-half step plan for Mediterranean  domination imposed from the top, but a set of   priorities which successive generations inherited  and renewed. This defensively-expansionist   military philosophy carved through Etruria,  Samnium, Magna Graecia, Carthage, Macedonia,   Gaul, Syria, Egypt, Germania, and Parthia – there  would always be another enemy to fear. But we're   getting ahead of ourselves; Rome handled  its enemies one at a time, and so will we.    A majority of Rome’s early   history was simply a spearited back and forth  between its neighbors the Etruscans to the north,   the Samnites to the south, and later on the  Greek colonies of Magna Graecia to the way   further south. And by "spearited" I do literally  mean they were stabbing each other with spears.   While all of this neighborly murder-y business  was going on, the city of Rome was building itself   up both physically and institutionally, with  walls, streets, a sewer system, stone temples   and buildings, a governmental system reminiscent  of the Greek Polis system, and a religious system   reminiscent of the Greek pantheon. Man that  Greek influence really got in there early.    Institutionally speaking, by the time they   kicked out Tarquin and swore never to have a king  again, a lot of the mechanics of the republic were   already in place, like the Senate, the Patrician  nobility and the citizen assembly. The transition   to a Republic was really more of a reorganization  of authority than a political revolution or   anything like that. Broadly speaking, the whole  idea was to take their government and publicize   the power so the people could participate,  and the word Republic comes from the Latin   "Res Publica" which just means "public thing".  Structurally the government was controlled by   two annually elected Consuls, the Praetors ran the  justice system, and the Quaestors, the silliest   roman name ever, managed state finances. The  Aediles were responsible for the state of the   city, so they handled food, games, infrastructure,  and all that jazz. The Senate, though it didn't   technically legislate anything, published opinions  on policy that were often very quickly put in   place by their respective officers down the chain.    Almost all of these magistrates and Senators  in the early republic were of the Patrician   nobility. If you happened to be one of Rome's  many Plebeians, you might have rightly felt a   little left out of this supposed Res Publica.  The Plebeians unsurprisingly wanted political   and social rights and they were determined  to acquire them, so on any given season of   campaigning against Rome's bothersome neighbors,  the Plebeians, who composed the majority of the   army, simply went on strike. They'd just go sit  on a hill and wait until the Senate granted them   the right to marry Patricians or to have their  own government positions in a special assembly,   or to elect their own members of that special  assembly, or to serve as consul! And then by   287 BC the Plebeians and the Patricians were  equal in everything but name. Good for them!    The government   of the Roman Republic simultaneously had elements  of a monarchy, an aristocracy, and a democracy.   This mixed constitution and its flexibility  in governance – according to the historian   Polybius – was one of Rome's greatest strengths,  and I'm inclined to agree. Rome's institutions   were its backbone for over two thousand years and  you need a backbone like that to hard-carry an   entire civilization. Okay, enough of the politicky  stuff, back to the stabby stuff. Now like I said,   early Roman Republican history is a notoriously  slow burn: the struggle for Plebeians’ rights took   over two centuries, and conquering the Italian  peninsula was similarly slow going. Rome was   intent on being careful, taking small steps, and  taking its time. Compare this to the aftermath of   the Macedonian conquests happening just a short  ways east: when you go too far too fast, things   tend to fracture. Rome spent most of the fourth  and early third centuries fighting with various   neighbors and working its way down to only the bay  of Naples. That's a pretty short way to go in so   long a time – Call it careful, call it as fast as  a small state like Rome could hope to go anyway,   either way it worked. Key to Rome's military  strategy was that aforementioned doctrine of   "Expanding Defense". Essentially Rome would never  be so brash as to go out and attack someone,   Good heavens no! Rome had the good manners to  only fight in self-defense, and they knew that   their gods would only grant them victory if their  war was a just and pious war. Buuuuut if Rome   suspected that someone was going to attack them,  Rome would absolutely shoot first –eh, defensively   of course! A pre-emptive retaliatory strike, if  you will. And that is how you go on to conquer the   entire world, defensively.    By 280 Rome had successfully yoinked all of  Samnium and proceeded to set its sights at   Magna Graecia in southern Italy. Magna Graecia,  not being the biggest fans of the Romans, and   wishing to keep their land thank you very much,  sent for help from Greece proper, and they brought   in the big guns. Specifically they imported the  Hellenistic king Pyrrhus of Epirus. Pyrrhus fought   two battles against the Romans, and even though he  won both of them, his losses were so devastating   that he bailed on the campaign. After a detour  through Sicily, he fought the Romans again, lost,   and went home for good. Pyrrhus's abilities to  win battles coupled with his inability to not burn   through a third of his army in the process is what  gives us the term "Pyrrhic Victory". So uh, good   on Pyrrhus for eternally tethering his name to the  military equivalent of pulling five consecutive   all-nighters to cram for a test. Yeah it's a  win but was it worth it, ehhhhh? So with pretty   much no one left to protect Magna Graecia, Rome  proceeded to swoop in and colonize all over the   place. And unlike those who employ the "Torch it  and start over" method of conquest, the Romans had   a political motive to be kind-ish toward conquered  peoples, keeping existing systems in place and not   rocking the boat too badly. Exceeeeeept for this  next example, from a rather salty chapter in roman   History, The Punic Wars against Carthage.      The first war can be roughly attributed to a  miscommunication with some Sicilian Pirates.   While Carthage and Rome may have been destined  to fight each other at some point or another,   they ultimately came to blows on account of both  being called into Sicily to settle a fight between   the city of Syracuse and some rowdy pirates. Rome  and Carthage kind of just tripped face-first into   war, and spent most of the 23-year long war  not actually fighting each other. The issue   was Carthage had been a long-standing naval  power in the Mediterranean but Rome had no   navy to speak of. So Rome really needed a navy,  and quick. This is another of many instances   of Rome adapting to situations scarily well. Say  what we will about Rome, and boy is there plenty,   they were immensely clever, and had a great habit  of taking good ideas, methods, technologies and   techniques from other cultures and using them  to great effect. In this case the Romans found   a few beached and sunk Carthaginian Triremes and  Quinqueremes and proceeded to reverse engineer an   entire fleet of ships. You know, just casually, as  you do. Rome's first aquatic outings weren't all   that fruitful but at battles like Cape Ecnomus,  which is arguably one of the Biggest naval battles   in history, Rome pulled out wins.    Ultimately Rome won the war, claiming Sicily  for itself and forcing heavy reparations on   Carthage. They also decided to take Corsica  and Sardinia because "Screw you Carthage,   these are mine now." In the decades following, the  Carthaginians, led by the general Hamilcar Barca,   colonized the seaside coast of Hispania or  Spain, largely for the purposes of mining   silver to pay their Roman reparations. Little  did Rome know, Hamilcar, his son Hannibal,   and the other Carthaginians in Spain, were furious  over losing Sicily, Corsica, and Sardinia, and had   been casually scheming to completely destroy  Rome for almost two whole decades. In 219 BC   Hannibal sacked the Roman allied Seguntum in Spain  and Rome, defensively of course, declared war.    Hannibal, the madman proceeded   to rather famously Leroy Jenkins his way across  the god-damn Alps with over 40,000 soldiers and 37   elephants. ELEPHANTS! And while Elephants aren't  particularly scary to us – if you're an ancient   Roman who's never seen an elephant before, that  thing is a four-legged giant with two spears and a   snake coming out of its face! Bottom line, they're  monsters, the Romans thought they were Monsters.   Granted most of Hannibal's elephants died while  crossing the Alps, perhaps unsurprisingly,   but it doesn't take a lot of elephants to have  a scary amount of elephant on the battlefield. I   genuinely can't convey how viscerally terrifying  the mere mention of Hannibal's name would have   been to a Roman. After arriving in Italy,  Hannibal demonstrated his tactical brilliance   by immediately winning two battles in northern  Italy through guerrilla and ambush tactics.   Hannibal and his armies would proceed to stay in  Italy effectively behind enemy lines with next to   no means of supply or reinforcement, for 16 years.  The Carthaginians went up and down the peninsula   setting fire to farms left and right hoping  above all else for Rome to simply surrender.    Two years into the campaign,   Hannibal said “Alright screw this I'm gonna  destroy the entire Roman army!” and proceeded   to make plans for his next battle, at the roman  supply depot at Cannae, in southern Italy. At the   battle the Carthaginians advanced in a U-shape  with 40,000 infantry forming the front line and   10,000 cavalry on the wings. The Romans however  had almost twice as big an army, so they felt   pretty good about their chances. The armies met  and as the fighting progressed the center of the   Carthaginian line fell back, and the Romans pushed  forward hoping to break the retreating line.   Except at that moment when they all rushed in, the  Carthaginian's African infantry and famed Numidian   cavalry advanced on the flanks and effectively  enveloped the whole roman army. From there it was   a bloodbath – estimates are all over the place  but the gist is that most of the 80,000-strong   Roman army was killed outright, and the rest were  imprisoned. It was the single greatest defeat that   Rome ever suffered in its history. And Hannibal  hoped that a shattered and dismayed Rome, having   lost 16 legions and the entire south of Italy,  would surrender at once. Rome's response was,   simply, “See ya next year”. And it spent the  entire winter raising more armies to go out   the following summer.    For the next several years, the Roman army  pursued the strategy of "Just bother him"   and shadowed Hannibal around the Italian  countryside. He was still being annoying   and they obviously didn’t want him there, but  he wasn't a direct threat to the City of Rome,   so good enough for now. But jumping back,  can we take a second to appreciate the sheer   quintessential Roman badassery it takes to hear  that you lost at least 50,000 soldiers, and then   turn around and tell the guy who killed them to  shove it and wait for round two! Because holy crap   that takes some serious coleones, serious and  massively suicidal coleones. And speaking of,   in 211 the young Publius Cornelius Scipio took up  a generalship for the Spanish campaign, which was   widely considered to be a dead-man’s quest. To the  surprise of basically everyone, He spent the next   five years successfully de-Carthagifying Spain.  Following his campaign he hatched a brilliant   plan to take the fight back to Carthage. But the  Senate, thinking this was another suicide mission,   told him he could do it, but they wouldn't finance  his armies. So Scipio raised a couple legions   in Italy and Sicily and hopped over to north  Africa. Why would anything else be what happened?    Now while Hannibal is absolutely a brilliant   general, in that he did impossibly crazy stuff  like crossing the alps, campaigning in Italy for   16 years, and wiping out an entire roman army –  Scipio's brilliance came from his quintessentially   Roman ability to adopt and adapt. The Romans  above all else knew a good idea when they saw one,   and they almost never made the same mistake  twice. Scipio studied Cannae and he knew what he   had to do to defeat Carthage. Since the Numidian  cavalry was critical to the Carthaginian army,   Scipio played into a Numidian civil war to get  some of their cavalry for himself. In doing so   he had massively weakened Carthage on their own  soil and had nearly orchestrated their surrender   when OH SNAP HANNIBAL'S BACK.    And on that day, history nerds from all around  the world and across time busted out the popcorn,   because this was gonna be good! The night before  the impending battle of Zama, Hannibal and Scipio   actually, supposedly, had a meeting. It's detailed  in Livy's "History of Rome" book 30, chapters 30   and 31. Just read it okay, for me, read it it's  incredible. First they're simply in awe of each   other. Then Hannibal waxes philosophical  about fortune, gives Scipio life advice,   and asks for peace. Scipio respondes "Well I was  going to make peace but then you brought an army   here, I can't just leave now. Look Hannibal I  respect you I really do, but you're leaving me   no choice here man. I've just gotta kick your  ass dude, I'm sorry, there's no other way,   I have to kick your ass."    And on the following day, some asses were  certainly kicked. At the battle of Zama,   Scipio's Numidian cavalry put the Carthaginian  cavalry to flight. And fighting between the   infantry lines was actually very close until  the Roman cavalry returned from behind the   Carthaginian line to ultimately win the day.  It was a hard-fought and super tense battle,   but with that, the second Punic War was won. Half  a century later, and after lots of Cato the Elder   ending all of his senate speeches with "Carthago  Delenda Est", Rome returned to raze Carthage to   the ground. Later accounts would embellish this  victory with tales of salting the earth to ensure   Carthage would never rise again. In literal terms,  that’s demonstrably false given Rome later built   its own Carthage on the site of the original,  but it points to how thoroughly they destroyed   the Carthaginian state. Further, that fable is an  essential piece of the popular Roman tradition and   a core trait of their character: There’s regular  bitter, there’s 90% extreme dark chocolate bitter,   and then there’s Rome hates you so much they wipe  your empire off the face of the earth forever”   bitter. Moral of the story is Rome does not screw  around, so don't screw with Rome, and salt or not,   that much is true.    With Spain and north Africa now happily Romanized,  focus shifted eastward and Rome proceeded to clean   up the squabbling and stagnating Hellenistic  kingdoms from the aftermath of Alexander the   Shortsighted's campaigns. The Macedonians  had helped Carthage in the Punic wars,   so Rome considered that sufficient grounds  for bespearment. And bespearment of course   is a word that I made up for the act of getting  stabbed with a spear. Anywho, in that conflict   the Seleucid Greeks helped the Macedonians,  so the Romans saw that too as provocation.   Not wanting to go too far too fast (and also  because they didn't quite have a big enough   army yet) Rome stopped at Greece for the better  part of a century, and simply took to kneecapping   the armies of the eastern Mediterranean  so they didn't pose any direct threat.    This marks a much more aggressive roman attitude   towards conquest. It was super important that  Italy be unified through diplomacy and generosity   because that was Italy. But all of these new  places were explicitly considered provinces   under Rome. Even though Rome was still a  Republic and didn't yet have an emperor,   it absolutely possessed an empire by this point.  After the conquest of Greece and the acquisition   of the kingdom of Pergamum through a will of all  things, Rome was clearly the dominant power in the   Mediterranean. But there was one thing Expanding  Defense could not protect against: itself.    By the mid 100s BC, Rome had become rather   adept at exporting violence. In 146, it capped the  Punic War trilogy by burning the city of Carthage   to the ground, meanwhile that very same year,  the Roman Army plundered, ransacked, destroyed,   murdered, and/or enslaved every Man, Woman, Child,  and artefact in the city of Corinth to complete   their conquest of Greece. This was a banger year  for Rome’s cartographers who had the happy task   of painting a beautiful shade of Red all across  Greece and North Africa, but it was a mixed bag   at best for the new subjects, not citizens, who  lived there. Violence was a key ingredient of   Roman statecraft abroad, and with such a thin line  between the military and political establishments,   we shouldn’t be surprised when someone applies  that same thinking to local politics. … OH NO.    With that foreboding   preamble out of the way, let’s meet the Gracchi  Brothers! Members of the lower Plebeian class,   these boyos were the sons of a Consul and  general, as well as the maternal grandsons   of the great general Scipio Africanus himself.  During his political career, the elder brother   Tiberius set about reforming land rights to be  more egalitarian. The plan was that no one could   own more than half a square mile of the Public  Lands acquired by the state during wars. Notably,   a lot of Public Land was recently acquired by the  state during wars. His idea was to partition all   that out in small lots for the poorer citizens, so  that everyone — well, actually not everyone — but   all the citizens had a farm and a livelihood to  call their own. The thing is, a version of this   law had already been in place since 367 BC, but  nobody enforced it, so wealthy romans and generals   gobbled up loads of public land during the recent  conquests. Naturally, the reason this law was   ignored was the same reason Tiberius would have so  much trouble getting it back on the books: Rome’s   old-money-est citizens tended to be Senators,  who had plenty to lose from a law that capped a   considerable source of their family wealth.    But Tiberius was not a Senator himself, rather, in  133 BC he held the office of Tribune. In centuries   past, this was the only office available to  the lower Plebeian class, but generations of   reforms and good old fashioned bullying eroded  the social, political, and financial barriers   between Patricians and Plebeians. And as a  result, the Tribune was no slouch, having   the authority to veto many government actions and  upper magistrates. Tiberius’ own father used this   veto to save Scipio Africanus from a sham bribery  trial back in the 180s BC, which is supposedly   why Scipio’s daughter was swiftly betrothed into  the Gracchi family. That particular sidebar will   remain unexplored, but the relevant point is how  Rome’s weaponized gridlock pressured the Senate to   act in the interest of the Plebeians. Except this  time, as Tiberius pushed his legislation through   the Plebeian Assembly, the Senators pressured  an aristocratic-leaning Tribune to veto it.    This was legal, but had never been done before,   and despite Tiberius’ requests, neither the  Senate nor the other Tribune would budge.   So Tiberius took a similarly unprecedented step  and had the other guy deposed, voiding his veto,   and then finally passing the reforms, with him  and his family in charge of divvying up the plots   to landless citizens. Now with all that done…  even for the Romans who liked these reforms,   that last bit was a little shifty. A frivolous  veto is one thing, but deposing a Tribune and   passing a law with blatant conflicts of interest  made Tiberius look dangerous. And just like that,   Rome’s Proto-Socialist fave became problematic.  Honestly, the political machinations at play here   are a fascinating showcase of how Romans began  breaking constitutional customs before they got   to outright Breaking the Republic. But, let’s  not get off-track, I promised you a bodycount,   so here is the fun part.    Fearing prosecution once he left office, Tiberius  took another unprecedented step of running for a   consecutive second term as Tribune, which his  opponents interpreted as a tyrannical power   grab on top of his existential threat to their  wealth. Unfortunately for them, the land reform   was popular, and Tiberius' enemies in the Senate  figured he would win his re-election for Tribune.   So the Pontifex Maximus and several senators went  over to the Assembly with the intent to cause a   ruckus and stop the vote counting. But the ensuing  scuffle got out of hand, and without any weapons,   they grabbed what was available, and subsequently  beat Tiberius to death, with clubs and chairs. As   we will see later, stabbing Caesar with knives  was one thing, but using chairs? Now that’s a   full-body workout – that takes intent and a good  deal of persistence. This was the first time the   Roman instinct for violence had turned inward  and spilled into republican politics, and with   that blood-red line so spectacularly crossed,  boy oh boy it would not be the last. Frankly,   the senators were already in too deep to just go  home and change, so they proceeded to kill another   300 of Gracchus' supporters, thus introducing the  concept of political martyrdom and removing any   prejudice against the expediency of assassination.    Now with that point made, I mentioned Tiberius had  a brother. That would be Gaius, and his story is…   well, let’s see for ourselves. Gaius was unfazed  by his brother’s grisly demise, and embarked on   even more aggressive reforms when he became  Tribune in 123. These new policies included:   redoing the provincial tax system so income went  back to Rome instead of the governors, then using   that new revenue to offer low-price wheat for the  Roman people. Elsewhere, he cut down on bribery   in the courts and stopped the senate from playing  favorites with Consuls. Gaius’ consistent strategy   was to prevent Senatorial corruption by elevating  the Equestrian class to advisory positions and   oversight roles in the Republic. Far more daring  than Tiberius’ little old land laws, this thicc-o   slate of reforms touched nearly every level of  government – from revenue to public programs   and courts to consuls – so it could only be passed  with big help. Gaius allied with the Equestrians,   offering them new authority and prestige in  exchange for passing those laws to help the poor   and make the Republic run smoother.    That all sounds good and noble, but let’s remember  that Gaius’ brother was f*cking assassinated,   so the man justifiably held a grudge. To that end,  he limited the Senate’s power to prosecute without   the Assembly’s consent, and forbade anyone deposed  by the Assembly from holding any other office. On   paper, that’s a power-grab for the Assembly, but  those are also just reasonable laws. So despite   all the reasons Senate hated him, he remained  extremely popular with the Roman people, securing   a second consecutive term as Tribune in 122.    But it’s here that Gaius played himself by  raising the question of citizenship. Essentially,   Rome was Rome, and proper Romans were citizens,  but outside of Rome, the Latin-speaking population   weren’t citizens, and the other Italians in  the peninsula had even fewer rights than the   Latins. Gaius sensed widespread discontent  among these allied non-citizens, and figured   he could win them over by giving Latin Rights to  free Italians, and making the Latins into full   citizens. One could imagine how such a grateful  new voting block would happily elect Gaius into   everything forever. But while this solution was  rather clever, it was intensely unpopular with   every class of citizen in Rome, so the measure  completely failed, his popularity plummeted across   the board despite his astounding reforms, and  he handily lost his next election for Tribune.    Wait hold on, this isn’t an assassination,   this is just realpolitik. Ugh, Dammiiiit. – Wait,  wait, there’s another page – oh yeah, here we go.   SO, one of Gaius’ pet policies was setting up new  colonies of Roman citizens in Carthage and Italy,   so that proper Romans had a place to live in  these shiny new provinces they killed so many   people to get. But the new Tribune proposed to  dissolve the colonies, so Gaius triggered illegal   protests against it, and in the ensuing scuffles,  one of Gaius’ supporters was killed. The Senate,   horrified at the uproar, feared a classic Gracchi  Brothers Power Grab, so they passed the Senatus   Consultum Ultimum, an ultimate decree branding  Gaius and his allies as enemies of the state and   granting themselves the authority to strategically  unalive them. And thus, the senators partied like   it’s 133 BC ­– Gaius and his gang fortified  themselves atop the Aventine hill, so the   Consul raised a mob and brought soldiers within  the city walls to go slash their way up. Sources   differ on the details, as is tradition, but Gaius  had likely fallen on his own sword by the time the   Senate found him. So technically, technically,  He Specifically was not actually assassinated…   However, 3,000 of his supporters were absolutely  murdered to death during and after the riot,   and that handy purge left a template for targeted  political violence that later Romans would be all   too eager to follow.    In the years after, nearly all of Gaius’  laws were repealed, but the Republic could   not escape him throughout its last century. His  defining reforms remained highly contentious,   and the political violence of his term became  frighteningly commonplace – decades later,   the issue of citizenship erupted into the Social  War in 91 BC, ending with all Italians getting   full citizenship, but nearly toppling the  entire Roman state in the process. Meanwhile,   the Equestrian class benefitted immensely from  Gaius’ reforms, taking on vast new powers with   none of the checks or customs that kept the Senate  at least nominally in line. The Roman Republic   didn’t collapse overnight, and the worst of its  civil wars was yet to come, several times over,   but the reforms, political battles, and violent  deaths of the Gracchi brothers made it far easier   to be Bad – and that was a temptation the Romans  absolutely did not need – because nobody could   kick Rome’s ass like Rome.    Okay, Rome buddy hold up you had no political  violence for 400 years, you got a really good   thing going, please don't screw this up... Oh WOW  yeah they really screw this one up don't they?   Jeez, yikes where do we start?    Well, crises like the Gracchi derived in part  from the roman Patron-Client system, in which a   wealthy and well-connected Roman provided for his  clients, who in turn supported him politically.   This worked fine on a small scale but things got  problematic when people effectively tried to buy   public support in large quantities. On top  of that, there were three mass slave revolts   in Sicily and Italy. Then there's the social war  where most of Italy revolted against Rome, after   which all Italians were granted full citizenship.  And let's also not forget the Catiline conspiracy   to overthrow the consulship of Cicero! All of  those civil wars were reconciled but still,   that's a lot of civil warring to happen in  just the span of a half century. But by far   the worst of the lot were the factional civil  wars between the populist Populares and the   aristocratic Optimates. Otherwise known as the two  civil wars between Marius and Sulla. Gaius Marius,   a seven-time Consul and general who conquered  parts of north Africa and settled the Social War,   headed the Populares. While the Optimates were  led by Lucius Sulla, another successful general.   The Optimates, for context, were the ones who  assassinated the Gracchi brothers. And they   clearly remained satisfied with their handiwork,  because when Sulla came back from a campaign   in Anatolia, he marched his army into Rome,  established himself as dictator, and proceeded to   massacre his rival Populares, Twice. He did all of  that, TWICE. That's huge! In 50 years we went from   not a single Roman being killed over politics  to armies marching on Rome and carrying out   prescribed hit lists of political enemies. Things  were really really bad in the first century.    For now though let's recap:   Rome started as one tiny irrelevant city and  grew itself very gradually through calculated   means. First conquering Italy, then the islands,  then Spain and soon after Greece north Africa and   Anatolia. What astounds me is that a typical Roman  would only ever see a small part of this unfold.   Whether intentionally or not, the Romans were  patient – and their combination of smarts, skills,   and strategic restraint let them build towards  something bigger than themselves. As Rome grew,   it appeared to be creating a world far greater and  more stable than the floundering conquests of a   Greek kid on a horse, but as we’ll see, that only  held true so long as Rome exercised restraint,   and that was not a given.    Ah the roman republic, perhaps the ancient world's  most brilliant form of government. It's had a   rough go in its later years, but with the right  people in charge I bet that it could continue on   for centuries to come – like this guy right here,  Julius Caesar, who I'm sure will do everything in   his power to preserve the Republic. We’ve seen  so far that as Roman politics got increasingly   factional and Roman territory got increasingly  massive, things started getting increasingly   civil war-y, as in they'd barely be able to go a  decade between 135 and 30 BC without collapsing   into some variety of a civil war. It's honestly  a minor miracle that Rome didn't permanently tear   itself in half before we even got to Caesar, so as  we push forward through history and get to talking   about our old buddy Julius I want to consider the  question of whether the Roman Republic – not Rome   as a whole but specifically the republican  system of government – was doomed to fail,   or whether it had any chance of survival. Because  our answer to that question really matters when   we look at people like Caesar and Augustus and  ask ourselves what they did and whether or not   they went too far, but since I'm impatient I'm  going to give you my answer right now: To me,   the republic had almost no chance of surviving  on its own. Zero. You saw what happened in the   first century, you know what kind of mess Rome was  in. The motives for individuals were irrevocably   misaligned from the good of the state. I love the  Roman Republic, it's one of my favorite systems   of government ever, But that poor thing was so  screwed. So with our sickly looking republic   on its last legs, let's meet the guy who took  it out back and killed it dead: Julius Caesar.    To establish what kind of guy Caesar really is,   I'll spin you a yarn about some Cilician pirates.  When Caesar was in his early 20s he managed to get   himself captured by a band of pirates who wanted  to ransom him off for 20 talents of silver.   There's no agreed-upon conversion between talents  and US dollars but for our purposes let's just say   that one talent is about a million bucks. So when  Caesar heard this sum, he straight up laughed at   them and demanded that they ask for a much more  respectable 50 talents instead. The pirates,   charmed by Caesar's overwhelming diva-ness  (and razor-sharp cheekbones I might add) Were   all too happy to keep him around for the sheer  entertainment factor. He played games with them,   told stories, and even wrote poems and speeches  for them. Sometimes they'd joke about how his   speeches were bad, and Caesar would respond by  saying that when he got free he'd come back and   crucify every last one of them, which the pirates  apparently thought was hilarious. Eventually the   pirates did get their 50 talents so they let  Caesar go, and then about five seconds later   Caesar came back with a bunch of ships and  arrested all of them, casually taking his   50 talents back. He brought the pirates to the  provincial governor but since he didn't really   seem to care all that much, Caesar took matters  into his own hands and took the high road by   keeping his promise and crucified all of them...  Fun! Moral of the story is Caesar cares a lot   about his image, he's amazingly charismatic, he's  not afraid to take matters into his own hands if   he needs to, and he does not screw around.    On to more historically significant matters, our  boy Gaius Julius Caesar was a well-to-do nobleman   from a prestigious family that traced its ancestry  back to the epic hero Aeneas and his mother Venus.   However, Caesar had a chip on his shoulder  because his dad was never Consul. You see in   Roman culture, the concept of Nobilitas was rooted  in the idea that you can inherit excellence,   but you have to confirm it by doing excellent  things in the present. So unlike in the middle   ages and the renaissance and the enlightenment  and the industrial revolution and the early modern   period you couldn't just coast by on familial  prestige, you actually had to, you know... DO   something for it in ancient Rome. Caesar's dad  not being Consul was a big deal so his primary   goal in life was to confirm his Nobilitas by just  being Consul. To do it he struck a deal with two   other prominent Romans: Crassus the richest man in  Rome and Pompey Rome's most accomplished general,   and they created an informal alliance. In other  words they made "The First Triumvirate". They   were all good friends, Pompey married Caesar's  daughter, Crassus bribed Caesar's way to the   consulship in 59 BC, Caesar passed all the laws  that Pompey & Crassus wanted. It was a good time!    In the process of ramming through debt forgiveness   and land redistribution legislation, Caesar maybe  (definitely) broke several procedural norms and   did things that were straight up illegal, but  since Ceasar was Consul he had "Imperium" the gold   Mario star of roman politics, which meant that  he couldn't be prosecuted for his actions while   he was in office. Regularly overriding the veto  of your co-consul on the principle of "Because I   said so" and filling the city with legionaries to  dissuade your political opponents may be definite   no-no's in the eyes of the Roman elite, but  no one could really do anything about it.    So for Caesar's year in power he was safe,   but once that consulship and his Imperium  expired, Caesar had a big target on his back,   so he needed to find a way to keep his Imperium  until he was allowed to run for consul again 10   years later. Conveniently, Governors and Generals  also have Imperium so Caesar's next move was to   secure himself a governorship of a province  and the command of a few legions so he could   go around campaigning with all the Imperium in the  world until he could stand for consul again. Some   senators, fearing that Caesar would do literally  exactly that, tried to swap his guarantee for   governor of a province for essentially governor  of the Italian woods, but Pompey and Crassus,   again, had enough power to overturn that. Coins  and stabby things tend to get you a lot in life!    But here we see just   how fragile the republic really was at this point:  anyone with enough connections and resources could   effectively cripple the normal flow of government  and steer it in favorable directions for their   own benefit. Speaking of, Caesar got himself four  legions and a cushy governorship in southern Gaul   along with a metric butt-load of military Imperium  to keep him safe, and set about campaigning in   Gaul for the next 10 years. It's astounding how  much we know in detail about these campaigns,   and it's because Caesar himself wrote extensive  commentaries on them. This was critical,   as he could justify his continued campaign in  Gaul year after year by showing how cool he was   and how great of a job he was doing, while also  building up support among the Roman people by also   showing how cool he was and how great of a job  he was doing. Plus we got a history out of it,   so win-win-win. Caesar’s work happens to be  hideously boring to actually read, granted,   but meh, quibbles.    Alright, so in enough detail that I can  still sleep at night but also in short   enough form that we wont be here for hours,  Caesar's campaign went roughly as follows:   In 58 BC Caesar attacked the Helvetii tribe on the  pretense that they were attacking an ally of Rome,   because remember, Rome would never be so crass as  to attack unprovoked. At the end of each year's   campaigning season, Caesar left his armies in  Gaul and spent the winters in northern Italy.   The next year Caesar went north, won a battle and  got ambushed one time. In 56 Caesar claimed that   the Veneti tribe had, quote, "revolted from Rome"  even though they were in god-damn Finisterre,   so... he conquered it. Safe to say at this point  that Caesar functionally considered all of Gaul   as already his, uh I mean Rome's. The next year  Caesar went really hard on the "Gaul is Roman"   thing. He considered Britain and Germany as  threats to Gaul and therefore as threats to   Rome So in the same year he bridged the Rhine  and attacked some Germans, and he sailed across   the English channel. The invasion of Britain was  honestly a total bust, so the next year, he went   back with a huge fleet because the man can't leave  well enough alone, and pushed as far north as the   Thames. After his floundering humiliating scramble  on the British beaches the year before, Caesar   had to prove that Rome was no pushover — to his  enemies, to himself, and to his Romans back home.   Oh uh, also he lost an entire legion to an ambush  in the dead of winter. so uh... Whoops! In 53 he   went back to Germany and afterwards left half of  his bridge still standing in a sort-of "Don't you   make me come back there" kind of warning.    The following year was probably the biggest year  of the campaign, because king Vercingetorix had   unified the remaining Gallic tribes against  Rome. After some battling back and forth,   Vercingetorix camped out on the fortified hill  city of Alesia. Now, Caesar needed to surround   and wall off the city to starve it out, but there  was also the distinct likelihood that he himself   got attacked while investing the city. So Cesar  needed to fortify both directions! His army built   a 10 mile long wall on the inside, and a 14 mile  long wall on the outside! That's 24 miles of WALL   that Caesar threw down because he was determined  to take this city. But uh oh boys, next thing you   know a ton of Gauls come down to attack Caesar. So  Caesar rolls a natural 20 on his deception check,   sends out a cavalry detachment to attack them,  but the Gauls think it's the first of an ENTIRE   Roman Reinforcement force, so they panic and  book it right the hell out of there, allowing   Caesar to take the city, and just like that,  all of Gaul basically belongs to Caesar. BOOM,   that's how you do a campaign.    The next two years were spent cleaning up the  last pockets of resistance, because remember,   Caesar still had a few years before he's allowed  to buy his way to the consulship again. To   complicate things Crassus died while on a campaign  in Parthia, and Pompey, feeling his oats, got the   senate to rescind Caesar's governorship of Gaul.  So even the Triumvirate, which was supposed to be   immune to the vices of factionalism, fell victim  to the vices of factionalism... That's uh, that's   not a good sign. So Caesar got Pompey's note, and  astutely realizing that going back to Rome on his   own was nearly a death sentence, Caesar – feeling  his oats – said "screw it" or more accurately said   "Alea Iacta Est" and brought the 13th legion over  the Rubicon river and into Italy. Pompey and most   of the Senate proceeded to nope right the hell  out of town and go to Greece. Caesar, rousing the   support of the people, was proclaimed temporary  "Dictator" (Latin for speaker) with the goal of   restoring peace, even though he technically  was the one who started the civil war but,   shhh, details. — Against all odds, he proceeded  to absolutely demolish Pompey's army in Greece   at the battle of Pharsalus. Then he chased poor  old Pompey to the end of the earth, which in this   case was Egypt. Pompey sought refuge with the boy  king Ptolemy who owed him a favor and was likely   very displeased to find himself beheaded  instead. Terrible way to start a vacation.    Caesar was absolutely   horrified to see Pompey's head because, first of  all, gross, but also because he was a fellow Roman   citizen, and Caesar was planning on pardoning him  afterwards, not killing him. See this is a lesson   in how healthy communication saves lives. But  yeah Caesar was super big on clemency, that was   pretty much his thing (except for you know the  pirates he crucified), but in addition to some   small pardons during the Gallic campaign, Caesar  pardoned pretty much Pompey's entire army and all   of his supporters who fled to Greece with him.  In my reading, that's one of the most important   aspects of Caesar's character. He was certainly a  controversial one, and arguably a full-on menace,   but it's important that we weigh the Nice with  the Yikes, because neither exists in a vacuum.   He broke a ton of laws and sold his soul just to  become Consul, but he made moderate reforms that   benefited the people. He killed a terrible sum  of Gauls and Romans in the wars following his   consulship, but he granted clemency more than  any other Roman would have even considered. And   he basically fashioned himself a king after he was  appointed dictator for life, but he was beloved by   his people and he used his power to stabilize  Rome. All in all, he did a lot of serious and   lasting good for Rome's people, but that good  was done through politically devious means for   suspiciously power-hungry motivations. He's a  thoroughly controversial character, then as now,   and even his nobler accomplishments are drenched  in blood and crime. My goal here is to give a full   perspective, so you can get a feel for some of  the questions people like Brutus asked themselves   when they were making plans to assassinate  him. But I' m getting behead of myself – Uh,   "ahead" of myself... awkward.    While Caesar was in Egypt deciding what to do with  poor old Pompey's head, he was making moves both   with and on the queen Cleopatra, supporting her in  her civil war against her brother. The arrangement   proved beneficial for both of them, as Cleopatra  could count on Caesar's Rome supporting rather   than annexing Egypt, and Caesar could count on  Cleopatra's Egypt as a continuous source of food,   which helped supply Caesar's generous public food  programs. And for bonus points, by all accounts   Cleopatra was utterly captivating to talk to,  so win-win. Following Caesar's return to Rome,   his position as dictator was extended to  10 years. During his time as Dictator,   Caesar managed to instate even more reforms that  promoted public welfare, government efficiency,   and general stability. For one, he limited  the political and military power of provincial   governors, mostly to stop other people from  doing to him what he did to Pompey and the   senate. He reformed the monstrosity that was the  old Roman calendar so well that we still use a   version of it today. He also conducted a census,  carried out several building projects, unified   the roman provinces more closely with italy,  and was just all around a really solid leader.   Did he pull a lot of super mega illegal stunts  to get himself to this point? Eheh, absolutely.   But did he make substantially beneficial  reforms that the people loved? Absolutely.    Now, after a long career of breaking the   system, Caesar’s first and final true mistake was  assuming that nobody could do to him what he did   the republic. In march of 44 BC Caesar was named  Dictator for Life and this made a lot of senators   really antsy, because at this point he was  basically king and Rome still very specifically   didn't like kings. So on the Ides of March,  Brutus, Cassius, and about 60 other senators   surrounded and killed Caesar in the theater  of Pompey. (Ironic). Caesar's last moments are   rather disputed, but my take on it is that when  he saw Brutus, his friend, whom he had pardoned   after Pharsalus, was a part of the conspiracy,  he accepted his fate and fell to the ground,   covering his face with his toga. I don't think  Caesar even was eloquent enough to have fancy last   words when there were 23 knives simultaneously  stabbing him. No one is. The assassins may have   fancied themselves liberators and restorers of  the republic, but they didn't count on the fact   that the Romans really liked Caesar because, oh  gee I don't know, he was a generous and effective   leader? While I disapprove of Caesar's motives  and means, I abhor his assassins. He granted   them clemency and they killed him! Dante puts  Brutus and Cassius in the lowermost pit of hell   for betraying their protector, and I'm with Dante  on this one. So, that's Caesar. Stabbed 23 times   and left bleeding out on the floor of the curia.  Brutus and Cassius were able to read the mood in   the room well enough to tell they weren't wanted,  so they and a bunch of senators hightailed it to   Greece to build up an army.    In my mind, Caesar killed the republic long before  he was even dictator. He proved how breakable   the system was. I mean, let's count it: he bribed  his way into office, illegally rammed legislation   through the Senate, intimidated his political  enemies with threats of force, escaped any and all   consequences for his actions on a technicality,  commandeered roman resources for his own prestige   and enrichment, marched an entire legion into  Rome, and declared war on a fellow Roman for his   own political gain. The entirety of Caesar's  main political career was either distinctly   unrepublican in character or explicitly illegal.  And remember that only after all of that did the   senate name Caesar as dictator for the FIRST time.  By the time Caesar was named Dictator Perpetuo and   functionally had become a king, he had long since  proven that the republic was fundamentally broken.   For most of the republic's history, its success  came from fantastic Roman teamwork, but here its   downfall came primarily from the selfishness of  powerful Romans. People realized how incredibly   fragile and gameable the institutions of the  Republic were when you stretched them across   the entire Mediterranean. So basically one  of two things could have happened to Rome:   either civil wars continued on and eventually  ripped Rome to bits, or something in Rome's   government changed to make it less susceptible  to all those civil wars in the first place.   Barring a full overhaul of the republic’s deepest  mechanisms, it was basically monarchy or bust at   this point because nothing else could stop the  chaos. While Augustus becoming emperor down the   line was far from a guarantee, Rome's transition  from a republic to a monarchy was inevitable if   it was to survive. It's a little paradoxical but  in a way Caesar saved Rome by destroying the then   unstable and unworkable republic. He abused the  hell out of its institutions, but in doing so,   he showed how effective a strong and stable  central government could be, and this was the   basis of Rome's accomplishments for the centuries  to follow. Today Caesar kills the republic,   next time, Augustus starts an empire.    Alright, Caesar’s dead, so uh… where do we go  from here? Well, Let’s do some History and find   out! If you were one of the handful of senators  that had just forcibly perforated your dictator,   your first move would be to get the Pluto out  of town. See, the assassins thought that they   were about to restore Rome to the full glory of  the republic, but they didn’t count on Caesar’s   massive popularity among the Roman people.  Needless to say, they didn’t quite get the warm   welcome and round of applause they were hoping  for. So Brutus, Cassius, and some others pulled a   Pompey and high-tailed to Greece to build an army.    Back in Rome, Caesar’s corpse was still sitting  there all squidgy-like on the floor of the Curia,   part of the senate was gone, and most of what was  still there didn’t really like Caesar. So we had   a power vacuum on our hands. The current consul  Marcus Antonius, Caesar’s trusted friend and ally,   attempted to brand himself as Caesar’s avenger  against the assassins in order to rally the   people to his side and fill that power vacuum.  As Consul, he was able to work out a compromise,   so that the assassins would be granted a general  amnesty so long as Caesar’s reforms stayed in   place. The problem for him, like Caesar, was that  even though the people liked him, the Senate,   and Cicero in particular, very much did not. So  after his consulship ended, Antony bailed to go   be governor of Cisalpine Gaul.    With Rome divided between dumpster fire  and more overtly treasonous dumpster fire,   let’s leave all manners of fire behind us and  jump over to Augustus, who at this point was   named the rather-less-august Gaius Octavianus,  after his father. For clarity, historians refer   to the pre-imperial Augustus as Octavian instead.  Octavian was the great nephew of Julius Caesar,   and they were decently close. At the time of  the assassination, he was studying astronomy   in Epirus, and after learning that Caesar had  died, Octavian rushed back to Rome. Upon reaching   Italy he read Caesar’s will, and promptly acquired  the single most valuable thing that Caesar could   possibly have given him: his name. From that  day on Gaius Octavianus was known to everyone   as Gaius Julius Caesar, the officially adopted  heir to the big man himself. And that was huge.    So now Gaius “Little Caesar’s”   Octavian and Mark “I’ll bang anything that moves  and drink whatever doesn’t” Antony were both in   the race to become Caesar’s avenger against  the assassins. This was important for both of   them because that role would entail not only glory  but a butt-load of power. The short of it is that   Octavian was successful in this because he was a  brilliantly crafty manipulator of iconography and   cultural symbolism, and he even convinced  all of Rome that Caesar had become a god.    The next handful   of political movements are honestly needlessly  complicated, but the gist is that most people just   wanted to be on the winning side, regardless of  which side that was, so the alliances were almost   constantly shifting. Octavian was probably the  one encouraging Cicero to give all of those angry   speeches against Antony, and then after Antony  skipped town and went north, he had to wrestle   the governorship from another one of Caesar’s  assassins. The Senate, being markedly anti-Caesar,   sided with the current governor and against  Antony, and declared him an enemy of the state.   The Senate wanted to send a legion or two to  deal with Antony, but they didn’t have an army.   Octavian, however, had promised Caesar’s veterans  that he could pay them if they remained loyal to   him. So Octavian, interestingly, buddied up with  the Senate to go fight Antony. Which, on paper,   makes no sense, because, you know, the whole  “Caesar’s Avenger” business. In practice, however,   Octavian was very pragmatic, and if helping  the anti-Caesar Senate fight the pro-Caesar   Antony seemed politically expedient for him, you  bed he’d do it in a heartbeat. As such, Octavian   and the two consuls that year marched up to Mutina  against Antony. Octavian’s Senatorial army won,   but both consuls were killed in the battle. When  the Senate asked Octavian to give up his army,   he said “hahahhh, eh, that’s a good one, NO”   and allied with Mark Antony to march on Rome with   eight legions and politely request that the Senate  declare him Consul or else. And they did! With   the Senate’s begrudging compliance, Mark Antony  hopped over to Spain to meet up with his Caesarian   political ally Marcus Lepidus.              Meanwhile, anybody remember Pompey? Y’know, first  triumvirate, fought a civil war with Caesar,   decapitated on an Egyptian beach? Yeah, that guy.  So the Senate granted Pompey’s son Sextus command   of the Republic’s entire navy and Sicily to  use as a base. Also Brutus and Cassius were   happily serving as governors of Macedonia and  Syria, respectively, just doing their thing,   having fun, building up their armies, all that  jazz. The Senate got a really great deal out of   that amnesty agreement.    Following the misunderstanding up at Mutina,  Octavian buddied up with Mark Antony and his   friend Lepidus to form the Triumviri Rei Publicae  Constituendae, in English, the Triumvirate for the   Reconstitution of the Republic, and in smaller  words, the “three guys for making Rome not-have   a civil war again”-team. Unlike the first  triumvirate, which was an informal political   alliance between Pompey Crassus and Caesar,  this second triumvirate, created by plebiscite,   was a legally-recognized entity that gave  each triumvir full dictatorial power,   so everything they said or did was law. Now, what  exactly “reconstituting the republic” meant was   up for debate, but as far as the Triumvirate  was concerned, the most important matter was   taking care of Brutus and Cassius in the east, and  financing the armies necessary for that would have   been quite expensive. The senate would likely have  disagreed with this because, in their eyes, the   formation of the Triumvirate was nothing more than  the Plebeian assembly handing over Rome to a few    Caesarinos playing dictator. So the Triumvirate  had to contend not only with the remote threat of   the assassins, but also with local hostility  in the senate. To solve this conundrum,   they split the difference and killed all of them.  The Triumvirate pulled a page out of Sulla’s book   and drafted up a hit list of Rome’s enemies,  which conveniently contained about 300 wealthy   anti-Caesarian senators and some two-thousand  landowners in Rome. The kicker is that everyone’s   funds were confiscated when they were killed, so  the Triumvirate conveniently accumulated insane   amounts of money in the process of killing off  all of their political enemies. The proscriptions   started with that initial 2000-some-odd people,  but rapidly ballooned to double that. They gutted   over a third of the senate. This was… *whooof*  obviously pretty messed up. I mean, it worked, but   jeez. They killed Cicero and hanged his head up  in the Forum. There’s no way the Triumvirate comes   out of this not looking like Murder Tyrants. Civil  war is one thing, but this was domestic slaughter.    The next big event   on the docket for the Triumvirs was using their  ill-gotten funds to finance a campaign against   the assassins. Antony and Octavian led their  armies into Greece and met Brutus and Cassius   at Philippi. Antony defeated Cassius, who killed  himself, and Brutus overran Octavian’s camp,   but conveniently Octavian didn’t die because  for some reason he wasn’t there. Suspicious.   After that, Antony came back to Octavian’s camp  and defeated Brutus, who then killed himself.   So the Triumvirs win, but Antony did all of the  hard work, and also Octavian had maybe possibly   bailed from the battle altogether. Forget  the proscriptions, in the eyes of the Romans,   Philippi was the biggest disgrace in Octavian’s  career, and you can see him trying to make up for   it by representing himself through calculated  military imagery for decades after the fact.    After Philippi, the Republic was somewhat,   slightly reconstituted, and in the wake of a  reconquered East and gutted senate, the Triumvirs   were the biggest players in the Roman world. So  they carved it up into East, West, and South, with   Octavian taking Italy, Spain, Gaul, and Illyria,  Antony taking Greece, Anatolia, Cyrenaica,   and Syria, and poor old Lepidus getting Carthage  and a little bit of African coast (if you got the   sense that Lepidus didn’t matter, it’s ok because  you are correct. He did not… Poor Lepidus).    On paper, things were peaceful and stable,   but late republican Rome being late republican  Rome, it really wasn’t. I mean, three people,   two people, each controlling a third, half,  of the Roman world, each of whom was looking   to follow Caesar’s example of unilaterally ruling  Rome, that’s fine, right? Yeah, I’m sure they’ll   be just, totally perfectly fine. No stress!
 In the wake of Caesar’s assassination,   Roman politics got even weirder than  they were in the century beforehand,   which, given the persistence and pervasiveness  of civil wars, is really saying something. After   the military success of the Triumvirate, the  collective Roman citizenry hoped really really   hard that it wouldn’t immediately explode into  another war. Well bad news, boyos, the Roman   Republic had been living on borrowed time for  over a century by this point, so realistically   we’re looking at four maybe five minutes tops  before it all crashes down. Fun times, right?    The period of peace   after the defeat of the assassins and the gutting  of the anti-cesarian members of the senate in the   notorious Proscriptions was an uneasy one to say  the least. Memories of several different battles   fought, Italian fields burned and drenched  in Roman blood, and family members killed   were swirling in everybody’s minds, so a lot of  people were unconvinced that they were looking   at a long-term solution. In poetry, this period is  known as the Great Fear, when everyone was really   anxious about civil wars, Fearful you would say!  And 100% certain that there would be more of them.   Rome’s greatest poets of the time, Horace and  Virgil, both acutely touch on the constant fear   felt by the populace.    And, as it happens, the poets were pretty much  right about the big bad specter of civil war. In   the east, Antony has been consolidating his power  by striking up alliances with nearby monarchs in   a bid to accumulate money and military power for  his planned campaign to Parthia, but perhaps most   importantly, he pulled a Caesar and sauntered over  to Egypt to schmooze with Cleopatra. In the west,   Octavian had a lot of problems. His land  reforms got the sympathy of his legions,   but proceeded to alienate the rest of Italy pretty  handily. Because that’s kind of what happens when   you confiscate people’s land and give it to your  army instead. In 40 BC, Antony’s wife Fulvia led a   revolt against Octavian and very briefly captured  Rome. Octavian then pushed them out to Gaul and   quashed the rebellion, after which he sacrificed  300 of the conspirators. Not imprisoned — not   even executed — Sacrificed. Octavian performed  human sacrifices on fellow Romans on the altar   of the deified Julius Caesar. The ancient  world was no stranger to animal sacrifices,   but when it came to people, Romans did not do  that. So uh, I’m just gonna jot this up next   to “Mass Murder of Wealthy Romans” on the list of  Octavian’s Deeply Distressing Personality Quirks.    Now the golden rule of late Republican Rome   is that anyone named Pompey is guaranteed to be a  colossal pain in the butt for anyone named Caesar,   and that’s definitely the case here. Sextus  Pompey, son of Pompey the Headless, had been   tooling around in the Mediterranean for the better  part of 8 years following Caesar’s assassination,   blockading ports and regularly cutting off Rome’s  food. Octavian was understandably miffed about   this, but couldn’t really do anything since  Pompey had Senate-sanctioned control of Rome’s   entire navy. Even though the Triumvirate was able  to defeat the assassins a few years beforehand in   a land battle, they were practically powerless  against the only real navy in the Mediterranean.   Technically Egypt had a pretty great navy too,  but they don’t count because they’re… you know,   not Roman and also Cleopatra was solidly in Mark  Antony’s corner, so, not about to help. Anyway,   after a treaty broke down and Pompey inflicted a  humiliating defeat on Rome, Octavian’s general and   all around badass right-hand-man Marcus Agrippa  proceeded to take matters into his own hands by   building up a navy of his own from scratch. The  problem was that with Pompey controlling the seas,   Agrippa’s forces couldn’t train how to sail in  open waters without threat of being immediately   murderized. So the madman DIGS A LAKE in the  middle of Italy and uses it as a makeshift   naval base to train up a fleet, which proceeded  to demolish Pompey’s navy because Agrippa is a   military GOD. My headcannon is that Agrippa,  equipped with nothing but a bucket, a shovel,   and a mission, dug the whole lake himself in a  night, though archaeology has yet to corroborate   my hypothesis. Yet.    After Agrippa’s solo-carry against Pompey,  Lepidus attempted to seize Sicily for himself,   but Octavian said “woah woah woah who let you  leave the house?” and immediately ejected him from   the Triumvirate, confining him to the priesthood.  Was this, by any chance, legal? Eh? So then there   were two! Moving on. Now, on paper, they were  cool, because Antony had married Octavian’s sister   Octavia after his first wife Fulvia casually  revolted against Rome, but in 32 BC he divorced   her and officially married Cleopatra, confirming  what everyone in Rome already knew was happening   for the better part of a decade. Observant viewers  will recognize that Not Being In-Laws Anymore is   the same step in the process when hostilities  first flared up between Caesar and Pompey. So uh,   get ready.    It’s around here that things start going  downhill really fast. The Mediterranean   was shaping up to end in a violent showdown  between the muscular military man Antony and   the super scrawny strategist Octavian. 32 BC  started off with the year’s two new consuls   delivering what was apparently a devastating  verbal smackdown against Octavian. The next day,   Octavian showed up in the senate with armed  guards. This strong statement was also a gross   violation of traditional rap-battle protocol,  after which part of the senate bailed to go join   up with Antony in the east. Hmm, you’ll have to  forgive me, it’s a little hard to hear with this   massive echo in the history. Unfortunately  for the senators, they found that Antony’s   half of the Republic was kind of suckish, so a few  defected back to Octavian. But, in the confusion,   Octavian sneakily got a hold of Antony’s will,  which, among other things, included the neat   little fact that Antony wanted to be buried in  Egypt with Cleopatra, and he bequeathed entire   Roman provinces to his children with her. Not only  was this distinctly kingly behavior on his part,   it was kingly behavior in service to a foreign  state at Rome’s direct expense. Octavian of course   pounced on this like a cat on an expensive-looking  vase, and waged an intense propaganda war against   Antony, branding him as having been bewitched  by scary foreigner Cleopatra and forgetting   how to be properly Roman. Octavian, by contrast,  painted himself as the pinnacle of Roman-ness, as   his family heritage traced back to the epic hero  Aeneas and the settlement of Rome itself — You   know, insofar as anyone could trace anything when  it came to ancient genealogy. Coincidentally,   just as soon as Antony’s will was exposed,  Octavian also began construction of a giant   mausoleum right on the banks of the Tiber river  in Rome. Ahem. Bring on the propaganda fight:    But perhaps the most important message   that Octavian pushed was that Antony had become  a slave to Cleopatra — by framing the problem as   “Antony was corrupted by this evil foreign queen  and her probably mind-control boobs,” he neatly   avoided the touchy subject of civil war.    Control over the narrative was key, and Octavian  had it. When he entered into war with Antony in   32, all of Rome was convinced that the prime  antagonist was Cleopatra, and didn’t think   that Octavian was making a power play to seize  the whole Republic for himself. But no time to   worry about the complex political implications of  large-scale conflict because off to war we go! And   here, Octavian’s controversial land redistribution  scheme from a decade earlier paid dividends now   that he was able to take the loyalty of several  entire legions to the bank. Once again, Agrippa,   ma boy, comes in clutch. First he prevented Antony  from sailing from his base in Greece to Italy,   which would have been a very bad time for Octavian  and friends because Rome was not a long march   away. After that, Antony and Cleopatra’s armies  set up camp at Actium in Northwest Greece,   with his supply chain running down to the  isthmus of Corinth and through to Egypt. Agrippa,   because Awesome is his middle name, proceeded  to intercept and cut off Antony’s supplies at   Corinth and then blockaded him in at  the bay of Actium, forcing a battle.    While dozens   if not hundreds of poems have been written to  commemorate Actium, I’m not sure there has ever   been a bigger anticlimax in all of Roman history.  Cannae? Heartbreak! Zama! Drama! Everything Caesar   did in Gaul? *mwah* Tactical Brilliance! Actium?  … meh? For how consequential of a battle it is,   it’s shockingly uninteresting. All the actual  cool stuff happened before the battle. Agrippa   laid on the moves to force the fight, and then  after that Cleopatra and Mark Antony decided that   leaving and losing was better than likely losing  anyway plus being captured and probably killed,   because honestly, fair, so they broke the blockade  and bailed. After the battle, everyone just went   home — Octavian went back to Rome to tidy up the  state and deal with a bread famine, and Antony and   Cleopatra went back to Egypt, navy-less but alive.    The next year, Octavian came to a defenseless  Alexandria. Sources are all over the place but   general gist is Antony killed himself,  Octavian tried to get Cleopatra to come   to Rome to be a set-piece in Octavian’s triple  triumph, but Cleopatra pulled a Dido by giving   Rome the finger through a dramatic suicide, which  honestly is entirely valid. From Octavian’s, and,   by extension, Rome’s side of the story, Cleopatra  looks one-dimensional and evil, but that is a   woefully inaccurate characterization. Historians  have treated Cleopatra so, so poorly. Sigh.    In any case,   now that our boy Octavian cleaned up at Actium, he  annexed the Duat out of Egypt, and did who knows   what with the bodies of Antonius and Cleopatra, so  the totally-not-a-civil-war-civil-war was won and   Rome was finally at peace. Yay! Given the straight  century of world-spanning turmoil that Rome had   just gone through, it should be no surprise that  people were really glad about this. In the years   that followed, Octavian consolidated power under  the guise of restoring the republic, even though   most people knew and honestly didn’t care because  they were either just glad the wars were over or   were among the two thirds of the senate that  Octavian himself installed. Also to mark his   new position, he changed his name to Augustus,  meaning, The Increased One or Majestic. He almost   changed it to Romulus, presumably just to mess  with historians, so let’s be very glad he didn’t.    And that’s the near-immediate collapse   of the Triumvirate and the final war of the Roman  Republic. Bottom line is that while Mark Antony   was a very dangerous adversary who could have won  had he paid more attention to his wits instead of   his wife’s … erm, let’s say eyes, Octavian had the  board tilted in his favor from day one. Not only   was Octavian a superior strategist, but he had an  exquisite team, finding by far the best general of   the day in bad-ass extraordinaire Marcus Agrippa,  and winning a crucial propaganda war thanks to his   friend Maecenas, Rome’s biggest patron of poetry  and the arts. As underhanded and downright brutal   as some of his tactics were, Octavian’s victory  reassembled Rome into one piece, and, critically,   demonstrated that perhaps the only way to keep  it in one piece was to have one man in charge,   and after coming this far there was no way  Augustus would let it be anyone else.
   At barely 35 years old, Octavian Caesar, the  great-nephew of one prematurely perforated Julius,   was the most powerful man in Rome. In the span  of a decade and a half, the “Impressive young   man,” as Cicero called him, cleverly swayed the  people to view him as the rightful heir to the   legacy of his“father” Julius Caesar, and struck  up an alliance with the prominent General Marcus   Antonius to secure his revenge against the big C’s  assassins. From there, he spent the next decade   consolidating his power in the Western Republic,  casting his co-triumvir Marcus Antonius as a   turncoat slave to his mistress Cleopatra, because  she was queen of the last Non-Roman corner of the   Mediterranean and c’mon it wasn’t going to conquer  itself. After waging and winning a war against the   both of them, Egypt got annexed and the Roman  republic was pacified by the might of Octavian,   now known by the name Augustus. But there  was still one issue: We’ve been here before,   and if things were going to change, what needed  to be done next? And how could the republic really   be restored if there’s one man clearly more  powerful than anyone else? Well, as we’ll see,   even though the road to the Roman Empire wasn’t  the most obvious, Augustus, ever the clever little   son of a god, pulled it off.    First things first, when he returned to Rome  from yoinking Egypt he astutely dodged the   subject of whether or not he was going to make  like his old man and fashion himself a king.   Instead he pulled a Bane and insisted that he was  restoring the republic and returning it to you,   the people. Indeed, I’m Bane. erm, anyway. And  since Augustus had already offed the other two   Triumvirs, he ditched the now awkward title  and resigned most of his official power. BUT   he did stay on as Consul, and remained  the effective governor of Egypt, Spain,   Gaul, Syria, and Illyria, so he had insane  funds, lots of territory, and most of Rome’s   legions in his pocket. And that would make  for some large pockets… It’s like Pokemon,   but instead it’s just lots of humans, land, and  coins in a giant burlap sack. He also took on the   generally ceremonial role of Princeps Senatus,  but since Octavian had stacked the Senate in his   favor over the past few years, it effectively  meant that he dictated legislation. That was   basically his trick — he never changed any core  institutions… he just happened to hold several   different key positions of extreme power all at  once. The Totalitarianism was a total accident.    Whereas the big C rolled   into Rome like “waddup I’m dictator for life” and  got immediately murdered because he his plot armor   wasn’t as strong as he thought, Augustus was much  more aware of feelings on the ground, and played   himself up as a peace-bringer above everything  else. So, at this point, no one had the reason   and especially not the means to start another  civil war. Half a decade into his not-quite   rule over the not-quite empire, the Senate gave  its official thumbs up to his peace-bringing,   republic-restoring, Pax Romana-securing ways, and  after that there were statues of Augustus going up   everywhere and coins bearing his face and a shield  on the senate house with an inscription about how   full of justice and piety he is. … Ok nuts, point  taken he’s definitely a king. But now, Romans saw   a good king in practice but not in name as vastly  preferable to the stabby alternative. 100 years of   civil war will do that to you.    The closest brush with rebellion happened a few  years into the empire, where a prefect of Egypt   named Cornelius Gallus won a small campaign and  erected a monument to his victory. Augustus,   visibly shaken by the wave of flashbacks to  Antony-and-Cleopatra, mailed Gallus a letter of   stern reprimand and then also a dagger for which  to impale himself. Gallus, guilty of little more   than pride and Governing-While-Alexandrian,  went down without a fight. After that,   Rome collectively kept its mouth shut, and  Augustus kept a very keen eye on Egypt.    On the foreign front,   Augustus expanded Rome’s borders to more or less  what they’d be for the next few centuries. He also   secured a peace deal with the Parthians, who  had been a particularly troublesome thorn in   Rome’s side for almost a century, as I’m sure  Crassus would tell you if he didn’t have gold   poured down his throat. On the domestic side,  the princeps selected senators, magistrates,   and generals to keep everything running smoothly.  On the literary front, Augustus had his poets   working in high-gear to crank out some of Rome’s  best literature. Given what came before that was   a low bar to clear, but this new stuff was pretty  sweet. It probably goes without saying that the   most famous Augustan-era work is Virgil’s Aeneid,  a masterful epic poem glorifying Rome’s ancient   Trojan history. And while Virgil slides in a  non-negligible number of digs at his boss, the   Aeneid was still a key component of the so-called  Augustan Program in the arts, literature,   and architecture: the celebration of just how dang  glorious Rome was, and the coolness of Augustus   for making Rome its best self. – and nowhere  was that more visible than in architecture. Of all the things Augustus did, his most widely  celebrated accomplishment was having found Rome   as a city of bricks and leaving it as a city of  marble. After the historian Suetonius put that   quote in the first emperor’s mouth, nothing else  in his impressive and winding career emblazoned   itself so thoroughly into the popular historical  conscience: not avenging his great uncle's   assassination, not winning Rome's last*-ish civil  war, not even conquering Egypt from the formidable   Cleopatra, and it also wasn't transforming the  Roman Republic into an empire or founding a   royal dynasty (despite their massive long-term  implications). Augustus himself would like us   to remember him for "Restoring the Republic" and  bringing peace to the Mediterranean, as he made a   very big deal about those two – but those may well  have been the groundwork for his lasting and most   tangible achievement of giving Rome its identity.  Now it's not as if the Roman people didn't have a   district character to them already – the previous  five centuries had shown them to be calculating,   devoted, opulent, fiercely pragmatic, more  fiercely militaristic, and mayhaps a tad   narcissistic - but these traits were understood  conceptually, through old fables of great Romans   demonstrating virtue in the face of peril. These  ideas of Roman-ness or "Romanitas" had yet to take   real physical form. While Rome had its temples  and one especially spiffy theater, Augustus saw   an opportunity to make the city itself into a  monument to Roman excellence. Now, there's a   word for this, and that word is "Propaganda",  but all his life Augustus was really really   freaking good at it, and his building program was  a natural extension of that weaselly talent. But   without a doubt, the centerpiece crowning his  city of marble, his greatest accomplishment,   was a strikingly-humble building called the Ara  Pacis Augustae: the Altar of Augustan Peace.    So if we consider the city as Augustus would   have – namely: a canvas for imperial propaganda,  we should appreciate just how blank it was in   the first century BC. The city was situated among  seven hills on the east bank of the Tiber river,   it was protected by the pre-republican-era Servian  wall, and the legal scope of the city was defined   by a boundary called the Pomerium, supposedly the  original course Romulus had plowed when founding   his city. Everything inside the Pomerium was the  true Rome, while everything outside the Pomerium   was just stuff that belonged to Rome. But with  trinkets like Athens, Ephesus, and Alexandria,   Rome’s belongings were rather more impressive  than itself, because Rome in the Republican era   was fully lacking in the big-ticket megaworks  that later came to define it: no Colosseum,   no Pantheon, no palaces, no massive baths,  and only very recently had Caesar spent his   dictatorial winnings on a major Forum and upgrades  to the Circus Maximus, which even still was an   open racetrack with wooden bleachers. Pompey had  earlier spent his campaign spoils on a new stone   theater and meeting house for the senate, and  that was the single nicest building in Rome.   Which IS cool, but when Alexandria had temples  with vending machines that gave out holy water   and the most magnificent library in the ancient  world, it was time Rome stepped up its game.    So, what to build, and where? Well,   first things first: libraries. Augustus built a  library for Greek and Roman literature in a new   temple to Apollo on the Palatine hill, and another  one in the Portico of his sister Octavia just   outside the Pomerium. At the same time, he built  another structure further outside the Pomerium:   an ornate mausoleum for him and his family that  signified his commitment to Rome by his intent to   die there. It’s a grand tholos-shaped tomb covered  with trees, and it was also a giant middle-finger   to his rival Marcus Antonius, who allegedly  wished to be buried in Alexandria rather than   Rome. Scandale!    Now one bit of land between the hills and the  Tiber river has some special significance due to   both geography and complex ancient legalese. See,  one of the Pomerium’s quirks is that armies were   forbidden to cross it and enter the city. History  informs us that they did, with distressingly high   frequency, but the point is they weren’t supposed  to. So in the republican period, the military   needed an easily-accessible place to train and  drill, and they dedicated this handy floodplain   by the river to their god of war and made it into  the Field of Mars, or Campus Martius. Various   generals over the centuries had built a handful of  temples with the spoils of successful campaigns,   but by the time of Augustus it was still pretty  sparse, so it would make the perfect place to   commemorate his victories – not just because it  was free real estate, but also great symbolism.   Mars was the father of the twins Romulus and Remus  and, by extension, the ancestor of Rome. Augustus,   meanwhile, traced his ancestry up to  the hero Aeneas and his mother Venus,   who was notably a consort of Mars. So this pairing  of Mars and Venus is echoed down the generations   by the match of their descendants, Rome and  Augustus. Mythologically this is fun and cool,   but the practical outcome was our favorite  Princeps making himself inextricable from the   very concept of Rome. That meant restoring  dozens of temples and finishing political   buildings like the Saepta Julia, a vote-counting  hall first commissioned by Caesar, so that way,   even while he made a big show of restoring the  institutions of the republic, the very machinery   of government was associated with the patronage  of Augustus. Clever – Bastard – But clever.    Another structure was more   cosmic in scope, as Augustus put an Egyptian  obelisk in the Campus Martius to work as a   sundial meridian, casting a shadow on a marble  grid to track the days of the  year according   to Caesar’s Julian Calendar. This Solarium  Augusti not only celebrated the subjugation   of Egypt by flaunting an obelisk, but it was  dedicated 35 years after the Calendar reform,   conveying the message that the Julio-Augustan  imperial family literally controls time. And   that’s not the only time he pulled this  nonsense. Back to the patronage thing,   Augustus spent over a decade on a whole new forum,  complete with a temple to Mars Ultor, the Avenger,   in celebration of his victory against Caesar’s  assassins. This forum was not only another place   where public business was conducted under the  auspices of the Princeps, but it had two statue   galleries on either side: one of famous men from  the Republican era, and one tracing the lineage   of the Julian family back up to Aeneas, both of  which culminated in our favorite boy. And then he   also built a new Theater to honor his dead nephew  Marcellus, but he specifically made it bigger than   Pompey’s theater. There’s a whole dynastic angle  to this, but frankly I just find this one petty,   which, granted, is less obnoxious than  proclaiming yourself the ruler of time.    Luckily, he wasn’t quite so pompous as   to take all the credit, and was happy to let his  badass right-hand man Marcus Agrippa show off as   well. Most famously, he made the first draft of  the as-of-yet tragically-domeless Pantheon, but   he also built the first major public baths in the  city of Rome, supplied by water from his new Aqua   Virgo – one of two aqueducts overseen by Agrippa  out of three built during the reign of Augustus,   the third of which was used to fill the Naumachia,  an arena across the river that staged whole-ass   naval battles. The Romans are among the rare few  who could make something so basic as water into   something so immensely hardcore.    So with all that built, we come to 13 BC, when  Augustus returned from campaigns in the west   and the Senate voted to build an Altar  of Augustan Peace on the Campus Martius,   finished and consecrated a few years later in  9 BC. Unlike, say, the temple of Mars Ultor,   this wasn’t a temple, it’s a sacrificial altar.  It’s raised on a podium with one staircase leading   in and walls on all 4 sides, but there’s no  roof! Roman state religion was a public affair,   and many sacrifices were done outdoors. But  since this was part of the Augustan program,   it was another vehicle for, of course, Propaganda!  And even by the standards of what he did so far,   the Ara Pacis was thick with symbolism, much of  it self-serving. The inside walls are decorated   with bountiful fruit garlands and ox skulls in the  traditional style, and the bottom of the outside   walls have ornate floral patterns of Acanthus  leaves and some 50 other species of plants and   animals. And as with all classical sculpture-work,  it would have been painted, so every leaf,   vine, & figure were brightly-colored and gilded to  really sell the natural beauty and the idea of a   new Golden Age that Augustus had created for Rome.    Looking upwards now toward the business portion  of the frieze, we find a selection of four panels   depicting mythological scenes. The figures are  a smidge dubious to identify, as some panels are   quite thoroughly trashed, but we can make some  educated guesses. On the front-left of the altar   is the scene of baby Romulus and Remus with their  wolf-mom and probably Mars looking over them;   While on the right side is a scene of sacrifices  made by probably Rome’s Second King Numa   Pompilius, who has strong associations with peace  and piety, but people used to say he’s Aeneas,   so ehhhh? The back right panel has the goddess  Roma armored up and sitting on a pile of either   her own weapons or ones she confiscated. unclear.  And finally, there’s the real splash panel of   anyone from Pax to Roma again to Mother Earth to  maybe Venus Genetrix, holding two children that   likely symbolize the people of Rome, surrounded  by the bounty of the lands on one side and the   sea on the other. Exact figures notwithstanding,  the combined effect is pretty clear: front panels   show “here’s what we came from” & the back panels  say “look at us, we did it, Golden Age ahoy”.    And lastly, the long ends of the   altar have paired processional friezes, possibly  in reference to the ones on the Parthenon, but   here depicting a religious procession from around  13 BC when the altar was commissioned. One side   shows politicians and the senatorial elite, while  the other shows the extended imperial family,   as a representation of The Senate and People of  Rome, except here the People is Augustus’ people,   rendered so specifically that we can actually  pick out individuals like the Princeps and his   wife Livia, Agrippa and Julia, and even some royal  kiddos – One kid is shown being visibly bored and   pulling on Agrippa’s toga so that he can see  better, which is pretty adorable, especially   by the standards of, again, vigorous propaganda.  The intermingled imagery of deities and royals,   celebrations of a plentiful Golden Age, and the  triumph of peace are all supporting Augustan   political power and pushing this concept of the  Princeps as a divine patron of Rome’s success.   And by putting all this on the Field of Mars,  it creates a causal chain between Roman power,   the Pax Romana, and natural prosperity, of which  our boy the Time King guarantees all three.
  The design of the Ara Pacis is so elegant, and  the sculpture-work is absolutely exquisite; it’s   in no small part because of powerful iconography  like this that Romans were willing to put up with   monarchs again, because the results spoke for  themselves and it all just seemed to fit. Perhaps   the symbolism is too powerful, as the Ara Pacis  was the focal-point of the most consequential   moment of Classical reception in the 1900s:  Fascism. But whatever subtlety was possessed   by the Divine Son of the Deified Julius Caesar,  the lord of time, Imperator Caesar Augustus, that   subtlety was fully lacking in Il Duce Mussolini,  so the already fiercely propagandistic iconography   of Augustan Rome was flipped on Turbo and used  by Italian and German fascists as an excuse for,   y’know,  atrocities. So it’s rather important that  historians and audiences alike be careful to not   blindly glorify any civilization. We should  celebrate the Nice and criticize the Yikes,   because neither exists in a vacuum. Augustus  was endlessly clever ­­– he was also a lying,   weaselly rascal and I f***ing hate  him. The Ara Pacis is spectacular,   Augustan Rome is magnificent, the empire’s new  identity was glorious, but what did it cost them? So as we might imagine, it wasn’t all smiles  in Augustan Rome, as the poet Ovid needs to   be absolutely certain you are aware. The short  of it is that Augustus tried to impose new laws   on marriage, so our boy Ovid decided to write a  giant poem about where and how to seduce any man   or woman in Rome. As it happens, the How often  involved seducing the maid first (which I don’t   quite follow but Rome was a different place  so who knows), and the Where was pretty much   every monument Augustus built. Unsurprisingly,  the new emperor was less than pleased at the   thought of those wild youths using his carefully  crafted high-brow iconography as set dressing for   casual hookups, and Ovid got exiled to the Black  sea for the rest of his life. Coincidentally,   Augustus also exiled his own daughter  at the same time. One and two may or may   not have gone together, but it would have been  completely in character for that salacious Ovid.    One successful empire later,   Augustus died in 14 AD at the age of 75. By the  time he died, almost no one could remember what   the Old Republic was like, either because they  were too young or too murdered. Although Augustus   was one of Rome’s longest-serving emperors, he  suffered from a recurring sickness that almost   killed him every other year. Yeah, throughout this  whole process, not only did he have to contend   with Brutus, Cassius, and Antony trying to kill  him, but he also had to, you know, not die to RNG.    And speaking of dying, his heirs weren’t   so lucky. See, being emperor and all, Augustus  wanted to choose a successor. So he groomed his   nephew Marcellus to become emperor, but then he  died (23 BC). Oh well, that’s Roman medicine for   you. So then he started preparing his stepson  Drusus and nope he’s dead too (9 BC). Oookay,   how about his two grandkids Gaius and Lucius  and are you kidding me (4, 2 AD). So with   options A-through-D exhausted, succession went  to his wife Livia’s first son Tiberius. With the   benefit of hindsight, a terrible choice,  but options were slim so what’ll’ya do.    While historians have written about Augustus   up and down the timeline, he made their jobs a  bit easier by writing not quite an autobiography,   but a pretty thorough resume. Upon his death,  he published the Res Gestae Divi Augusti,   basically “The Awesome Stuff I Did”. Some of it  is embellished, some of it is straight up lies,   but it shows what he thinks mattered most  about himself: and it was the stability he   brought to Rome. At the end of the day, that’s  why this whole emperor thing worked. Between the   senator murdering and the human sacrificing it’s  fair to say Augustus is a little problematic,   and the moderate amount of deception underpinning  his entire career is also a bit distressing,   but the Romans weren’t about to argue  with results. Through a long career of   carefully strategized political maneuvering,  military operations and cultural production,   Augustus laid the groundwork for  over one thousand more years of Rome,   and that’s a feat. His ascent to  power was far from guaranteed,   but this 19-year-old kid outplayed all of Rome,  and one metric History-Summarized later, this kid   was a 75-year old man who is also dead. So… with  the Age of Augustus finished, onward to Empire! Aah, the Roman Empire. Established by the  eternally baby-faced Augustus in 27 BC,   this innovation in governance placed one  emperor in charge of the entire Roman state,   which in turn ruled over the whole Mediterranean  world for the next half millennium. As the earlier   history of the Republic has shown, Rome is a dense  topic, but the ironic difficulty with Imperial   Roman history is that the great Senatus Populusque  Romanus had already won. At the death of Augustus,   Rome stretched from Iberia to Africa, the  long way – and while emperors did add a few   more provinces in the following centuries,  this new age was not defined by conquests,   but the victorious quiet of the Pax Romana.  Likewise, the poets and artists of the Augustan   era had codified a new imperial identity for  Rome, stepping out of Greece’s shadow to set   the standard for Roman culture. With so much  groundwork diligently laid in the centuries BC,   Imperial Rome in these first 200 years AD was at  the top of its game, with nothing left to do but   make the most lavishly glorious civilization they  could. This rather uncharacteristically-calm state   of affairs gives us an opportunity to look at  the structure and breathtaking scale of the Roman   world, before, of course, everything starts to go  wrong. Don’t worry, we’ll get there. SO, to see   how Mediterranean society reached its peak under  the rule of the Caesars, Let’s do some History.    To begin with   we have... [Tiberius and Caligula crash into  frame] Sigh, okay we might need to get through   some shenanigans first. Because what the empire  lacks in grand conflicts between civilizations   it makes up for in an absolute carousel of royal  wackos. These monarchs generally lack the charm   of Caesar or the cleverness of Augustus, and  are instead best known for the nonsense they   got up to in their abundant time away from their  One Job. This all makes for excellent gossip,   but the trainwreck fascination runs thin by  the time a fifth locomotive careens off the   rails and crashes into the nearest chaos-orgy.  And frankly, enough of these stories come to us   from historians and senators with axes to grind,  in a culture that already loves exaggerating,   that it’s just best not to dwell on them: which  is why I invite your imagination to run wild as   I treat the emperors as glorified timestamps. So,  the distressingly-low survival rate of Augustus’   heirs led to Tiberius’ landing on the throne,  whereupon he holed up in his palace on the scenic   island of Capri to enjoy the aforementioned  carnival of orgies. His successor Caligula,   whose nickname means “Little Boots”, is remembered  for antics like nominating his horse for Consul   to insult the Senate and sending an army to  collect seashells off the coast of Gaul – but   he started a few notable trends: more building  projects, for one, but also concentrating more   power on himself, and critically, being  assassinated by his own guards in 41 AD.    Now this may have been useful in the short term,   but it doesn’t bode great for future emperors, so  we’ll have plenty of time to discuss that later.   At the moment, the Augustan reforms ensured that  Roman armies didn’t serve factions in the Senate   or the personal whims of their generals, but the  emperor. And after the chaos of the Late Republic,   this setup lessened the threat of civil wars and  let the army maintain the hard-won peace. By this   point, the Roman military had reached peak form,  or at least peak aesthetic, and the 30-odd Legions   were permanently stationed at the frontiers of  the empire to project power beyond Rome’s borders.   On paper, there’s quite a contrast between this  smooth operating in the provinces and the hijinks   of the royal palace, but by concentrating all of  the Crazy into one guy, the rest of the empire   could function without obstructions or conflict.  I doubt that was the plan, but it seemed to work.    And it’s here in the imperial era that the Roman   world transformed from "Italy’s Pile of Provinces”  into an integrated Mediterranean system. Centered   on the sea they called Mare Nostrum, the low cost  and high speed of seaborne transportation allowed   goods, resources, and plenty of food to flow  between port cities. Grain from North Africa,   metals from Iberia, wines from Gaul, and scholars  from Ephesus could be found in every corner of   the empire, and even far beyond. As was often  the case with Rome: commerce followed conquest,   as new provinces made for new and exciting sources  of wealth, and overland trade operated along the   robust network of roads that was built to  transport armies. This roadmap is one of   the single most beautiful sights I’ve ever laid  eyes on, and my wife Cyan is really pretty. And   the marblework doesn’t stop there, because lest  we forget, the Romans were engineering maniacs.   Concrete, domes, arches, water-highways that ferry  delicious H2O from the mountains down into cities,   HEATED FLOORS, the Romans literally had no chill  when it came to construction. And this marks   a distinction between the quiet vibrance  of private art and the big public works,   where they never built a thing for the sake of  its beauty, but rather for the sake of their   glory. The true Roman artists were the engineers  who built not only temples and theaters but roads,   bridges, aqueducts and baths. It's a practical,  functional artistry where the beauty lies in the   accomplishment and its usefulness to the empire,  and the fact that they are also beautiful is a   flourish. A really big one.    To illustrate a few converging themes, let’s  look at the single greatest monument to Roman   extravagance: the Colosseum. This neighborhood  of the city had burned down in 64 AD,   swiftly to be replaced with a palace for the  exceptionally crazed emperor Nero, and then   replaced again by the new emperor Vespasian – the  victor in a brief but fierce four-way civil war   after Nero’s death. Vespasian’s plan to legitimize  his new Flavian dynasty was essentially to bribe   the Roman people with a grand public project and  the promise of splendid games in said arena once   it was done. This herculean accomplishment  relied not just on Rome’s wealth, talents,   and technologies like concrete, but on an imperial  system specifically designed to make these   projects possible. State-owned stone quarries  and brickyards produced standardized building   materials which could be used for whatever the  emperor needed. And as far as Rome was concerned,   Slavery was just as vital to Rome’s growth,  development, and success, as every stage of   buildings like the Colosseum relied in part on  slave labor: first in the mines, quarries, and   brickyards, then in working alongside freedmen and  day laborers to actually build these megaworks,   and once the Colosseum was finished, slaves fought  in the arena to the delight of tens of thousands.   Somewhere around a quarter of the empire’s  population was enslaved and treated like property;   from the fields to the cities, the institution of  slavery permeated every aspect of Roman society.    The potential Cognitive Dissonance   between Rome’s accomplishments and the cruelty of  its methods was of distressingly-minimal concern   to the Roman people, as the Colosseum itself  shows how casually Romans went to a magnificent   theater for the sole purpose of watching  people get f*cking bodied. Gladiatorial   matches were the most notorious of festivities,  but there were also beast hunts, chariot races,   and, when they were feeling bold, entire naval  battles ­–­ all of which could be themed and   choreographed to represent famous stories from  history and myth. Even when celebrating peace,   the Romans loved a violent spectacle.    Zooming back out, let’s jump northwest to  Britannia, where emperor Claudius’ first foray   onto the isle was later consolidated by Agricola,  the governor who conquered Wales and northern   England during the reign of Vespasian. Britannia  was one of a few provinces added during the   imperial era, and while its capital of Londinium  was not a major metropolis of the Roman world,   it does show us how fast Rome could plop down  roots and establish a fully-functioning city out   of what seems like thin air. And while the city  of Rome looks like an urban planner’s nightmare,   their later additions are planned so well it’s  insulting to the rest of us. Ah, the grids,   its beautiful! And Roman Britain is surprisingly  well-documented because Agricola’s son-in-law was   the historian Tacitus. His account of Britannia  gives a good look at how the Romans saw conquered   peoples: not treating them with any particular  warmth, but very inclined to keep things running   smoothly. A common strategy was to designate  Client Kingdoms to preserve the local order   within the broader aegis of Rome’s authority. This  could be done on its own, or made as a first step   before direct Roman administration, or instead  done to pacify a frontier with the light touch   of diplomacy rather than throwing legions at it.  Most cultural transmission between the Romans and   their new subjects involved the “Barbaric”  party taking on Roman customs to become more   “Civilized”, but the diversity of cultures  within the empire produced a wide variety in   what it meant to be Roman – as Rome was in turn  influenced by local language, art, dress, and,   most crucially, religion. Having more or less  copy-pasted their entire pantheon, Rome had no   trouble seeing opportunities for crossover between  cultures and doing DBZ-fusions on similar deities.    This is… not   how Rome treated Judaism. For one, Judaism was  pointedly non-polytheistic, but it also didn’t   help that Rome and the province of Judea had  a frequently-adversarial relationship. After a   bloody conquest by Pompey, a string of oppressive  governors tightened the screws on Judea until a   revolt broke out in 66 AD, whereupon Vespasian  delegated the war to his son (and soon-to-be   emperor) Titus. Jerusalem was ultimately sacked  and looted, as the commemorative Arch of Titus   shows legionaries carting off a giant menorah, and  the Jews went into diaspora after the destruction   of the second temple. There are faint echoes of  this in how Rome treated Christianity, another   monotheistic religion considered subversive to  the empire, but for these first two centuries,   persecution of Christians was only a sporadic and  localized concern. Now, whether it was karma for   Jerusalem or just bad luck, Titus got hit  by twin crises during his brief two years   as emperor. In addition to another fire in Rome,  he had to pick up the soot-covered pieces after   Mount Vesuvius went kaplooie on the entire Bay of  Naples. After he died his brother became emperor,   continuing some trends and resuming others  from earlier: like more big building projects   after the fire, more power stripped away from  the senate, and more getting assassinated.    This time,   the Praetorian Guard further bullied the new  emperor Nerva to adopt the general Trajan as   his heir. And for all the inherent corruption that  led us to this point, this is where things start   really getting shiny. Trajan was a military master  who pushed Roman territory to its fullest extent,   and built a triumphal column to commemorate how  dope his conquest of Dacia was. The spoils of   this newly-subjugated province paid for yet more  public works, including the last and grandest   forum in Rome, complete with two libraries. And  this is a pleasant running theme this century:   anyone can spend money on their own palaces,  but only a real G gives it back to his people.    Trajan’s conquest of Mesopotamia   was impressively-flashy but completely untenable,  and his successor Hadrian had no interest in more   outward expansion, instead focusing on fortifying  Britannia and Germania and otherwise splashing   money on monuments across the empire. Rome hadn’t  completely given up hope of walloping its enemies,   as even the Philosopher-Emperor Marcus Aurelius  spent 14 long years begrudgingly waging war   against the increasingly-pesky Germans, but  I think this is about when the practical   reality finally set in: all the rich or easy  borderland territories had already been taken,   so the strategy of conquer everything that  looks at you funny was no longer viable,   and this is where Rome topped out. That’s far from  terrible, as these last three of the so-called   “Good Emperors” presided over a Rome at the  absolute height of its power and prosperity,   and there’s plenty to respect in several decades  of pleasantly-quiet history characterized by   wise rulers and a steady empire – But… and  remember now, we’re talking about Rome here,   it won’t be long until the Romans’ legendary  discipline starts to lapse and things go ouch,   because the great SPQR always maintained the  potential for a remarkably-precipitous drop.   But for now, there wasn’t a better time to inhabit  beautiful cities, to enjoy brilliant engineering,   to prosper from expansive trade, and to live  in a secure society. It wasn’t always the best,   but it was Roman Civilization at its best. And  honestly, doing our best is all we should ask. When discussing the history of Rome, it’s  only natural to come across a handful of   points at which things seem to go very wrong.  War here, plague there, civil war over here,   another general marches his army on Rome — and  after a certain point it doesn’t even register.   But these are all fairly momentary crises; a bad  time, to be sure, but ultimately a self-contained   catastrophe. Yet there is one truly abysmal  chapter in Roman history that takes the cake:   A quintuple-barrel calamity for the ages — and  no, I’m not talking about the Byzantines because   I’m not looking to cry today — I’m talking  about the Crisis of the Third Century, which,   by every reasonable prediction, should have  destroyed everything. Fully everything. Yet,   in a classic twist of Roman irony, the causes of  this crisis and even a few of its symptoms would   become the strategies used by Roman emperors  to end the crisis and even keep Rome going   for centuries to come. So let’s take a look  to find out how on earth that is possible.    The Roman Empire entered the 200s AD in an   iffy state. The golden age of the last century was  losing some of its shine thanks to a succession   of truly garbage emperors, starting with Commodus  the gladiator tyrant and not getting much better:   But beyond the scandalous hedonism of emperors  with more concubines than sense lay far more   dangerous habits, like how emperor Alexander  Severus bought the loyalty of larger and larger   armies by ballooning their pay. To afford this, he  debased the currency by mixing the gold and silver   with plebby dork metals, which tanked their  value. And far from actually protecting Rome,   this dynamic just gave the army leverage. In the  old Augustan days, legions served at the pleasure   of the emperor, but now, the emperor was just  some guy who wore purple, and if Commodus could   get strangled to death in a bath by his wrestling  buddy, the bar for intimidating, puppeting, or   just replacing an emperor was, like, 5 praetorian  guards. But then whomst to replace him with? Why,   one of the generals of course! And this was the  same basic trick that Sulla and Caesar had pulled,   but it saved the legwork of marching an army  on Rome. E-fficiency! So in the 50 years since   the first guy got axed, over 20 such “Barracks  Emperors” took their brief turn at the top. These   guys weren’t the most legitimate since they  conspicuously weren’t the children or legal   heirs of the previous emperor, but heyyyy, you’re  the emperor! Nevermind that another general two   provinces over is taking notes on how you got to  that point, you’ll be fine… for a few months. All   it took was some general beating up some goths for  their soldiers to say “great job, you should be   the emperor!” and then they get ideas and suddenly  there’s a mini civil war to sort out. And all this   squabbling left the door wide open for Rome’s  rivals beyond the frontier to come right on in.    Which frontier, you may ask? Good question!   All of them. In the good old days, Germania was  the primary Ouch-Zone, but now the entire North   was subject to incursions, from the Rhine all the  way across the Danube, with fun new friends like   Franks, Marcomanni, Goths, and plenty others.  Some of these migrations were simply people   looking for new lands to settle, while others  were significantly more forceful. Terrifyingly,   they also sailed down the Atlantic coast and  into the Eastern seas, striking as far as Athens   in 267. The Roman army was good, but it wasn’t  that good. When an emperor focused on one area,   another was left wide open, but when the emperor  tried to delegate, he might find his trusty   general scheming for that big promotion.    Meanwhile, the Eastern frontier was also  a nightmare. The Parthians has been a sore   spot for Rome since moneybags Crassus was  defeated and supposedly Taxidermied with   Gold back in 53 BC. But Parthia rarely went on  the offensive, they we just hard to conquer,   so all of Rome’s failed campaigns were essentially  self-inflicted. However, the newly-formed Sassanid   Persian Empire which took their place in the 220s  was far better organized, and much more of an   outward threat. In the 250s, King Shapur I pushed  into Armenia, Roman Mesopotamia, and briefly into   the Levant. The Sassanid menace would become a  running theme for the next few centuries, but   it came out of the gate real fast in the mid 200s.  In 260, they captured emperor Valerian in battle,   wherafter the King used him as a footstool. As  if being the emperor wasn’t bad enough already.    But let’s not   limit our sample-size, it was miserable to be any  kind of Roman nowadays. We’ve got coins getting   debased throughout the century to bribe the  army, trade routes constantly disrupted by war,   and entire regions being destroyed by invasions  and counterattacks. Plus, a plague in the   250s killed thousands a day in Rome and whittled  cities like Alexandria down to half, which in turn   drastically reduced the labor force available to  farm and fight, resulting in widespread food and   soldier shortages. As if the actual wars weren’t  enough of a problem, piracy within the empire was   rampant, so cities and provinces spent what little  resources they had on defensive walls and small   forts along major roads. All of this made clear  that the society enjoyed during the Pax Romana was   long gone, as it required the stability of strong  government and a strong military, both of which   were fully absent here in the 200s. Functions of  government were carried out primarily by the army,   who were only accountable to their very stab-ably  general. Luckily, when Rome worked, it worked,   so if those political and military foundations  could be patched up, at least on a local level,   things could be alright.    Now, believe it or not, the first three decades  of the crisis were actually rather straightforward   (and even a bit tame) compared to what went down  after 260. Valerian being captured by Persia left   Rome to his son and Co-Emperor Gallienus. Faced  with the problem of everything everywhere all of   the time, he was happy to delegate the Rhineland  frontier to Postumus, a general and Governor of   Roman Germania. Naturally, it took all of five  minutes for Postumus to be acclaimed as emperor,   but not for all of Rome, just the western  provinces. Gallienus couldn’t really do   anything about this, so Postumus had free  reign to form a quasi-intendent state in the   West that stretched from Britannia through Gaul  and Germania and down into Hispania. He created   parallel Roman institutions like the Senate  and Consuls, and had no intention of causing   trouble with the rest of Rome, he just wanted his  slice, and he was able to defend it fairly well.    Meanwhile, a strikingly similar story plays   out on the other end of the empire, where prince  Odaenathus of Palmyra fought back against King   Shapur and began acting independently of the new  emperor Gallienus. Rome entrusted Odaenathus with   defense of the east and granted him governorship  of the provinces of Cilicia and Syria down to   Arabia. With only the Eastern front to worry  about, Odaenathus held off the Sassanids until   his assassination in 267, when his widow Zenobia  became the de-facto ruler of Palmyra and governor   of all those provinces. Like in the west, this  Palmyrene territory was essentially an independent   state allied to Rome rather than provinces within  it. And Rome was too occupied to really complain,   until 270, when Zenobia took advantage of a  couple quick emperor deaths to annex Egypt and   Galatia and proclaim her son as Imperator Caesar  Augustus, which we can now fairly categorize as   open revolt. Even then, the new emperor only cared  that Egyptian grain exports stayed on schedule.   And it’s painfully telling that he could see part  of his empire in a state of active rebellion and   think “ehh, I’ll double back to that one later, I  have more immediate problems.” Plus, half of Egypt   was in favor of their annexation. It seems weird,  but you can see why: the Palmyrene Empire and   the Gallic Empire were smaller, more nimble, more  stable, and (slightly) less susceptible to upstart   barracks emperors. It just felt good to know that  the person in charge was only one province over,   rather than halfway across the sea and probably in  the process of getting murdered by his own guards.    Really, the actions of Postumus and   Zenobia show that they did work in the interest of  Rome, just, their corner of Rome, independently,   and with the power of an emperor. Both states paid  consistent homage to Rome, and, despite how bad it   looks on a map, were far less of a problem for the  emperor than his own usurping generals, and even,   arguably, a help, as they each removed an entire  front from the emperor’s To-Do list. And this,   wildly, set the stage for their later reconquest,  as the emperor Aurelian was free to focus the   first few years of his reign squarely on fighting  rival usurpers and barbarians along the Danube   and, uh oh, in Italy. In 271 he drove the Alemanni  tribe off the peninsula and built a new system of   walls around Rome. He also organized a retreat  from the always-slightly-untenable province of   Dacia, making the much-more-defensible Danube  River the consistent imperial border. With the   northern front temporarily settled, he turned  East, defeating Zenobia and reconquering the   Palmyrene territories by the end of 273, and then  the next year he schlepped west to reincorporate   the Gallic state. To the empire’s collective  astonishment, Aurelian had reunified Rome under   the singular authority of the emperor in just a  few years, and was granted the title of Restitutor   Orbis, no small praise! With the World Restored,  he turned his focus to reform of the state. But,   we’re not out of the woods yet, because Aurelian  got murdered by his own troops. In the decade   following, things were definitely better but still  kinda crap, with uncomfortably squishy emperors,   a nonfunctioning economy, and more Frankish  invasions in the 270s. But more people presented   a new opportunity, and Rome essentially employed  them in the reconstruction of devastated cities   and farmland in exchange for letting them stay.  This practice becomes quite a big deal in later   centuries.    So in the 250s and ‘60s the empire spiraled  out of control, and the 270s saw big progress,   but the 280s and ‘90s are where Roman authority  finally came back, during the reign and   reforms of Diocletian. After his acclamation as  emperor in 284, he issued more stable currency,   firmly separated military and civil leadership to  stop the army muscling in on the state, and moved   the Western seat of government up to Mediolanum  to better oversee the front while he took up   residence in the Eastern city of Nicomedia.  Further, he delegated regional authority to   his most capable officers and made his general  Maximian co-emperor in 286. Two Emperors wasn’t   a new idea, but by placing Maximian in charge  of the West and Diocletian taking the East,   this arrangement looked awful similar to  the business with Gaul and Palmyra, except   this time it was intentional, and formalized by  intermarrying the families, which also created a   line of legitimate succession. In 293 he expanded  this setup by adding two junior co-emperors known   as Caesars to support the two senior Augusti. This  Tetrarchy kept Diocletian firmly at the top, but   each emperor had regional autonomy. By recognizing  that Rome tended to split along geographic fault   lines, Diocletian’s Diet-Federalism turned a  perennial problem into a stabilizing strength. He   also snuffed the threat of civil wars by cutting  all the provinces in half, so each of the hundred   governors had a clearer responsibility and less  power to stand up against his local Tetrarch.   He also also grouped these new small provinces  into 12 regional Dioceses to really layer the   strata onto government. So in an insanely trolly  twist of fate, the Gallic and Palmyrene breakaway   empires were a trial-run of what Diocletian would  make official policy: Rome was too fragile for   one emperor, so, take it in parts. It was no Pax  Romana, and even the Tetrarchy would be temporary,   but it was enough! Diocletian’s reforms  made a difference where they counted,   and brought Rome out of the crisis on a much more  stable footing than they ever could have hoped for   two decades earlier.    I think people get excited about Rome for  the wrong reasons. “Rome conquered this,   Oh they conquered that!” those are all whatever —  what’s impressive are the moments when Rome stares   into the pale face of death and tells him to wait  his goddamn turn. No civilization could veto their   own demise quite like Rome, and there’s no greater  refusal than the Crisis of the Third Century:   to suffer five chaotic decades, but then learn  from chaos itself to adapt the empire and come   out on top. Rome would die, but not yet.    The beautiful city of Rome is great to visit  year-round because you can see all four seasons,   winter, spring, summer, fall—ohno *beep,  cut to pain* There’s a lot to unpack with   “The Fall of Rome”. Going from one of the  greatest civilizations in human history to   not existing at all is quite a long ways  to drop. So questions of why it happened,   when, and even if are hotly debated, and the  academic discourse starts to sound like a game   of Clue – It was the Vandals with the sack  in 455! No, stupid, it was Constantine with   the Christianity in 312! Mmmm, clearly it was  the Ottomans with the cannons in 1453! – So   instead of trying to pinpoint specific answers to  a frankly-impossible question, let’s run through   late imperial history to understand The Fall  as a process rather than any singular moment.    Just a century after the   death of Rome’s favorite philosopher-emperor, the  sullen-stoic Marcus Aurelius, the Pax Romana was   shattered and the fall looked like it was coming  any minute now. You could say that it was a lot of   damage – but in came Diocletian to Flex-Tape the  empire back together with a slate of reforms, and   at the turn of the 300s things were looking solid!  After 21 years and a whole lot of tape, Diocletian   retired from being emperor, taking a well-earned  rest at his Adriatic palace in direct emulation of   the Republican hero Cincinnatus, who’d saved Rome  from crisis and then relinquished all his power to   go home and farm. In the face of all the chaos  from the past century, Diocletian’s retirement   was a monumental gesture, not only declaring that  the empire was saved, but celebrating how Roman   Virtues had likewise survived.    One thing Diocletian really didn’t count on was  that, in his absence, the Augusti and Caesares   would immediately start fighting civil wars  with each other. I mean, you know what they say:   “When in Rome… sack it”. In this somewhat  refreshing return to form where Rome’s biggest   enemy is just itself, a Western Augustus by the  name of Constantine got to conquering his rival   tetrarchs. In the fight for control of Italy and  North Africa, he received a vision from an angel   telling him to paint the symbol of Christ onto his  army’s shields. And let’s be real here, if it’s   the fate of the empire, you’re not in the business  of saying No to angels, so he got doodling and won   the Battle at the Milvian bridge in 312. It’s  unclear whether Constantine fully converted,   but whatever the case, he was convinced enough  that he legalized Christianity throughout the   empire in 313 with the Edict of Milan, ending its  sporadic persecution. Now toleration is different   from incorporation, as Christians had their One  And Only God who remained firmly separate from   the pagan pantheon, but as far as the state was  concerned, they were both chill. Constantine’s   big hoist was to paint Christianity as compatible  with a concept called Pax Deorum: where Rome gets   divine favor if it’s good and pious. So whereas  Christianity had earlier been seen as subversive,   it could now be a team player. But the Eastern  empire was still controlled by a Tetrarch who made   the mistake of not being Constantine, so our boy  got to fixing that by conquering the rest of the   empire in 324 and founding an eastern capital  named Nova Roma, soon to be Constantinople.   Constantine was more successful at economic  reform than Diocletian, but he continued to rely   on foreign mercenaries for much of Rome’s defense,  and this will have unintended, albeit predictable,   consequences over the next century.    Through the 300s, Rome held on. Administration  was split between Rome and Constantinople,   sometimes there was one emperor, other times the  job was shared – that one guy tried and failed to   re-outlaw Christianity, big mess – but in the wake  of Constantine, things were loosely good, if a   little uneasy. So as long as nobody comes to rock  the bo– [BARBARIANS]. AAH, ahem, right. There’s   a lot we could unpack about the false dichotomy  between Civilized and Savage, but the simple fact   is that the term “Barbarian” was coopted from  Greek to describe all non-Romans. In centuries   past they were often allied with Rome to defend  imperial territory, but the trouble started with   the Huns to the northeast. When these aggressors  pushed into new land, they forced the current   residents, Ostrogoths, Visigoths, lots of goths,  to move somewhere else. The easiest and best   option was usually into allied Roman territory,  and just as back in the Third Century Crisis,   emperors often negotiated these relocations. So  the image of “Barbarian Invasions” obscures what’s   more of an awkward and bloody but managed domino  effect. This explains why the push was so gradual,   and why these people became increasingly  integrated into the military and political   framework of Rome as vassal Foederati. Even in the  most extreme examples when they started carving   their own entire kingdoms out of the provinces,  it was done by treaty, under the auspices of Rome,   in a remarkably-similar arrangement to the Gallic  and Palmyrene empires during the big Crisis.    So now that we   have all these barbarians at the edge of and even  inside the Roman world, I think it’s time that we   talk about ahem, Sacks Baby [Careless whisper  sting]. And this, like the rest, was a process:   as some Goths out east wanted to run away from  the Huns and get themselves some farmland,   so per the terms of their treaty, they asked and  received permission from Constantinople to cross   the Danube into the Balkans. They were joined  by some other Goths, who were denied permission   but crossed anyway, and the provincial generals  treated them all so harshly they rose in revolt,   meeting the Eastern Roman army outside Adrianople  in 378 and utterly thrashing them. Yet after some   more battles and negotiations, the result of all  this was more foederati. Perhaps not surprising,   because what choice did Rome have? Once again, the  military had started to eclipse the power of the   state, but instead of the legions & Roman generals  of the late Republic, here the leverage belonged   to the Foederati and their kings. And what do  armies do when they want something from the   state? They march on Rome! See, Roman traditions  alive and well! So in 410, the Visigoths made   their request for more land and better treatment  by means of rolling up to the city and promptly   sacking it. The damage was honestly minimal, but  the notion that the ancient capital is now in   striking distance was a real Oh Sh*t moment.    Elsewhere in the early 400s, more western  territory slowly fell away as huge populations   of Goths, Franks, and Vandals flowed in past the  Rhine & Danube and converted Roman provinces into   their own kingdoms. By far the scariest of these  were the Huns, who first arrived to torment the   empire around the turn of the century and landed  on the city of Rome’s doorstep in 452. In comes   Pope Leo I, who rode out to meet their leader  Attila and persuade him with either words,   the well-timed apparition of a couple angels  or the simple jingling of gold coins to kindly   not destroy our empire thank you very much.  To literally everyone’s surprise, Attila was   convinced, and withdrew from his campaign to get  married and then immediately die. Man, timing. The   city’s respite from invasion was brief, as soon  came the Vandals in 455 to give Rome a proper   sacking, like, Vandalized. Pope Leo had less  diplomatic success this time around, persuading   the Vandals not to kill people or destroy stuff on  the condition that they could plunder anything or   anyone they wanted. Still pretty bad!    With all the Foederati getting out of hand in the  Western part of the Roman empire, what about the   east? Well, back in the 390s, Emperor Theodosius  ran with two trends that Constantine had started:   first was mandating Nicene Christianity as Rome’s  official religion, which sounds pretty extreme but   in practice was one step in a long and steady  process of Christianization, starting from big   urban power-centers and spreading out to the  countrysides over the course of centuries. His   other move was having his two sons each inherit  half of the empire. Now we’ve seen this happen   before, and even since the Tetrarchy the  East & West had separate imperial courts,   but this division would prove to be permanent. The  timing was unfortunate, because things swiftly got   rough for the west, but this alone didn’t doom  them. Rather, it highlights some core issues   that started to stack up: the west was poorer and  less urbanized, had a far longer border to defend,   and was almost fully reliant on Foederati for  their armies. So when strained legions had to   prioritize the defense of Italy, Britannia and  Gaul quickly fell away, and soon went Hispania   and North Africa along with them, leading to  the kind of death-spiral that would make even   Aurelian terrified. Gang, I don’t think this  Orbis can be Restitutor’d, because in less than   a century the Roman empire had gone from this  (395) to thiiis (475), so how ‘bout we call it?    The armies   of king Odoacer conquered Italy and deposed  the 16 year old emperor Romulus Augustulus,   sending word to the Eastern Roman emperor Zeno  that he “had assumed control of the Western empire   on your behalf”, to which Constantinople said “I  didn’t ask you to do that but, thank you?”, to   which Odoacer responded “You’re welcome!” And with  that, the Western Roman Empire had transformed   into a series of Frankish and Gothic kingdoms, and  Italy was ruled by non-Romans for the first time   in 700 years. Unfortunately for our ability to  easily categorize history into Rome and Not Rome,   476 is less solid of an endpoint than we might  expect – the entity that was the Roman Empire   had collapsed like the Republic before it, and  a millennium-spanning state based in the Italian   peninsula did indeed go poof, but the concept of  a singular empire had already been dead for two   centuries, and Romans across the Mediterranean  were already learning how to have Roman Culture   without a Roman State – even so, that culture  had shifted as Rome transformed from Pagan to   Christian. Meanwhile, the Foederati had thoroughly  blurred the line between barbarian and Roman,   and were often more than happy to preserve Roman  institutions in their new kingdoms – Like Gothic   kings of Italy retaining and even empowering  the Senate. Looking ahead, the Mediterranean   world would remain fundamentally Roman in  character until the arrival of Islam in the   600s. So just as Rome had created an empire long  before Augustus became its first proper monarch,   the death of the Roman Empire lands both earlier  and later than the last emperor’s overthrow. Late   antiquity is absolutely fascinating, but  it sure as hell is not easy to categorize.    So we have kind-of a when   and a few whys for the fall of Rome, but it’s  a testament to Rome’s strength and flexibility   that it survived this long at all. It should have  been conquered by Hannibal during the Punic Wars,   it should have fractured in the Late Republic  with the carousel of military dictatorships,   and it should have collapsed during the  five-pronged Crisis of the Third Century.   And while on one level any civilization founded  on continuous conquest will run into extreme   difficulty when that expansion stops, we should  recognize that much as the Republic had faltered,   the unified empire was similarly no longer  cutting it. So Rome did what it does best,   and adapted. While the empire died, parts of Rome  very much lived on, via the Byzantine empire in   the East, the Christian Church and the Pope in  Rome, the Romance Languages, and intangibles   like literature, the culture of laws, and the  Platonic ideal of what it means to be an empire.    There’s a reason the question of why and how   Rome fell fascinates and even haunts us. It’s this  megalithic, world-conquering, seemingly-immortal   civilization, totally thrashed by a confluence  of factors, and any society can see a little bit   of themselves in the Fall of Rome. Now, permit me  to get philosophical here: but the fall isn’t the   sad ending to an otherwise-pristine civilization,  rather a constant process that began the instant   Romulus gave his city a name. And their frequent  failures remained inextricable from their great   successes, as they overcame unrelenting crises  throughout their history by learning from their   weaknesses, thinking practically, and adapting:  from kingdom to republic to empire to papacy. The   fall was always there, but so was Rome.    When the western Roman empire fell in 476 AD,  the average citizen could be forgiven for not   noticing. The Roman senate still convened, the new  king Odoacer was a Christian like his predecessor,   and he ruled over Italy with the full approval of  the emperor in Constantinople. Compared with the   sacking Rome suffered 21 years earlier at the  hands of the Vandals, the arrival of Odoacer,   “Barbarian” though he may be, was painless. Any  citizen old enough to remember the city at the   start of the century could say what monuments  were smashed or which provinces had been lost,   but even they had only known Rome since it became  Christian, and could never imagine a time when   their battered city was the singular master of the  world’s grandest empire. By 475, Rome’s capital,   its culture, and its state were already  unrecognizable from the time of Constantine – let   alone the glory days of Hadrian or Marcus Aurelius  three centuries earlier – so as consequential as   it was to depose the last Roman emperor in 476,  the Fall had already been happening for a while.   Yet, as we will learn, there was a long way still  to drop. But despite its many, many hardships,   the next half-millennium also saw Rome renew  itself, changing with circumstance to take on a   vital role in the new Medieval world as the seat  of the Popes. So, let’s trace how this city of   ruins became a city of cathedrals.    In answering what’s essentially the question of  “How did Ancient Rome become Medieval Italy”,   we should start with Demographics, because it’s  around the end of the empire that several new   groups began making themselves at home. For your  convenience and my sanity, let’s start with our   boy Odoacer, who came to Rome with a Germanic  army on one side and an entire population of   Germanic agriculturalist families on the other.  These were the most recent of several client   kingdoms whose people resettled in the empire  over the last century, and their unfamiliarity   with Latin didn’t stop them from fitting in with  Roman customs or Christian religion, and they even   played ball with the Roman aristocracy. Sure  as hell beats a sacking. But while the eastern   emperor Zeno had given Odoacer tacit approval to  take hold of Italy, he then gave the Ostrogothic   king Theodoric explicit approval to take it from  Odoacer. So Theodoric beat him in battle and then   killed the man during their truce dinner, and  proceeded to rule Italy and Illyria for the next   three decades as viceroy of the Byzantine emperor,  during which time he re-instituted the food-dole,   paid to host games, restored temples, imperial  monuments & public infrastructure, and even gave   the Senate a boost with coins inscribed “Senatus  Consulto”, By the Decree of the Senate. This Goth   was more effective and arguably more Roman than  most late Roman emperors. But also more imperial,   as Theodoric pulled some crafty diplomacy  to gain direct control of the Visigothic   Kingdom in Iberia, and also leveraged  marriage alliances to make the Burgundian   and Vandal Kingdoms into his vassal states.  This was brief, but damn was it impressive.    Theodoric’s badassery aside, Italy   was once again a singular kingdom, lacking the  centralized networks of trade and power that made   the empire thrive, but it fared better than most  western provinces in the wake of the Fall. The   cultural incentives and financial means to indulge  in any new public megaworks were long gone,   and likewise the population decline of Late  Antiquity cut Rome’s residents to a tenth as   people increasingly opted for the countryside; but  life carried on, empire be damned. That is, until   535, when Theodoric’s daughter Queen Amalasuintha  was killed by Gothic usurpers at the same time the   Byzantine empire was conquering its way up into  Italy on the orders of Emperor Justinian. In the   ensuing conflict between the new Gothic kings and  the incoming Byzantines, the winner was neither,   but the undeniable loser was Rome.    To simplify an embarrassingly-convoluted  back-&-forth, the Byzantine general Belisarius   recaptured Naples through an aqueduct and soon  retook Rome itself without a fight. Recovering the   ancient capital for the emperor in Constantinople  was almost as impressive as it was short-lived,   because the new-new Gothic king came down to  lay siege the following year. Rome held strong,   but Belisarius was recalled to defend the East  against Persia, during which time, plague hit,   and the peninsula fell right back under Gothic  control, this time with a new-new-new king who   plundered everything left in Rome that wasn’t  bolted to the floors. He wanted to burn the whole   city and turn it into a pasture, but relented  only after Belisarius implored the man not to,   on the basis that Rome stood as a monument to  the vast possibility of human achievement across   generations. Profound words, and broadly  accurate, but also rather generous given   the state of the city in the mid 500s. Even  before the wars, Rome was a shell of itself,   with only tens of thousands of residents living  in a city built for a million, and a steadily   dwindling catalogue of intact monuments. Aqueducts  ran dry, temples and palaces were stripped bare,   residents occupied the ruins of ancient  monuments, and centuries without repairs   became apparent when buildings large and  small toppled from earthquakes, floods,   or a particularly stuff breeze. And frequent  floods by the Tiber covered the city in layers   of silt, burying old ruins and turning piles of  scavenged rubble into grass-topped hills. Rome’s   destruction wasn’t the work of sack-bois alone,  but of systemic disrepair; it decayed, slowly,   consistently, over centuries, beyond what even the  most well-meaning kings could maintain – until one   day in 546 when the Goths had the city forcibly  abandoned and Rome was utterly, totally, empty.    Now… I know this looks bad… And it IS,   because the hollow city flipped between Goths  and Byzantines three more times before the   Byzantines finally held it for good in 552 and  helped some Italians resettle – yet, with an   astoundingly-prompt incursion by the new Germanic  Lombards, things continued to get worse for Italy   in the 500s. But consider: Rome cannot die. It is  too important and too stubborn for something so   trivial as death to claim it for long. Because  just as steadily as it had first been built,   so too could it be rebuilt, and that began with  the Church. Now, Christianity had been The New   Normal for a few centuries, but it was here,  as a frontier province of the Byzantine empire,   that the institution of the Papacy had free  reign to change from a purely-religious   authority in European Christianity to also  become something approximating a monarch for   its corner of Byzantine Italy. With the regional  Exarch governing all the way over in Ravenna,   Rome paid lip service to the emperor through  the 5 & 600s as the Popes became more confident   and capable leaders, leveraging their position as  the biggest landowner in Italy to be the de-facto   governors of the province. This evolved gradually  and then all at once, as the Byzantines embroiled   themselves in controversy about religious artwork  in the 720s, then the Lombards conquered Ravenna   and killed the Exarch in 751, but in 756 the  Frankish King Pepin donated that territory back   to the Popes for them to govern directly.  This special relationship with the Franks   developed under Pepin’s son Charlemagne, who  confirmed Papal authority in central Italy and   was later crowned by Pope Leo III as Emperor  of the Romans in 800 AD. Whoof, busy century.    So by the turn of the 800s,   Rome had grown its religious power over Europe,  took direct control over their Papal States,   and now had an entire empire in their pocket. This  would remain, despite some growing pains in the   coming centuries, the status quo of European  geopolitics for the next one-thousand years.   Charlemagne’s ascension also set the role of Latin  in the medieval world. The language of Rome always   had regional variations, and spoken Latin was  rarely as formal as oratory or literature;   but without an empire there to enforce linguistic  consistency, colloquial Latin began evolving   into the Romance Languages, sooner than you  might expect. Latin speakers across Europe   were softening consonants and merging vowel sounds  even before the fall of the West. It was all still   “Latin”, but it had diverged from the classical  model, and was already resembling Italian, French,   and Spanish. So Charlemagne’s big swerve was  to dictate that all Latin used in church should   fit a standard, classic-style pronunciation. But  since this new Church Latin sounded so different   from everyday speech, Europeans began writing  their vernacular languages phonetically to   distinguish the sounds from Latin. So it’s here  that Latin fossilized into a uniform standard,   while allowing these early vernaculars to  freely grow & evolve into the Romance Languages.    While the Idea of Rome was completely reinventing   itself over these centuries, so too was the actual  city. This started back in the 3 & 400s with   Rome’s first purpose-built Churches: like Saint  John in the Lateran, Santa Maria Maggiore, and Old   St Peter’s, all classically-styled but forgoing  the cramped layout of pagan temples to instead   emulate the roomier Basilica structure used in  Law courts; and soon enough this would become THE   standard design for European churches. Basilicas  kept popping up through the Fall of the West,   but the next few centuries were a little thin on  construction on account of those Gothic Wars and   the sacks therein causing the most concentrated  damage the city of Rome had ever suffered. So   despite the Popes’ growing power and influence,  this didn’t immediately correlate with imperial   splendor, as even this first batch of churches  was proving very costly to maintain. However,   this constraint provided an opportunity, as  in 609 AD the Pope made a brand new church by   reconsecrating the old Roman Pantheon as Saint  Mary of the Martyrs. Cheap, effective, and great   for preservation! The city’s ruins proved to be  remarkably useful through the medieval period,   as old buildings could be retrofitted into  housing, marble cladding could be plied off   and reused in churches, bronze statues could be  melted for new metal, and even marble statues   could be broken down into lime for mortar. It’s  painfully unsentimental, and I try not to think   about it too hard or I’ll cry about it, but it  was extremely practical. And some old structures   like the Aurelian walls were still perfectly fit  for purpose, persuading some 50,000 Italians to   move back into Rome after the Lombard conquests.  Finally, true to Belisarius’ word, Rome’s greatest   asset was ancient prestige, because when the  Muslim Conquests locked the Holy Land out of   the Christian pilgrimage circuit, that left Rome  as the premier destination for Christian pilgrims,   and that meant business.    For the average pilgrim arriving in Rome at the  turn of the millennium, they might be surprised   to encounter not one city, but seemingly three.  The old core among the hills had become largely   uninhabited, as the population clustered by the  Campus Martius around the Pantheon, while the   Papal government operated in the Lateran to the  southeast, and pilgrims stayed in Leonine city up   by St Peters, which was enclosed by a newly-added  Leonine wall. Despite its shrunken stature,   Rome was still the largest city in Christian  Europe after Constantinople, and centuries   of income from tolls, taxes, pilgrim lodgings,  souvenirs, gifts from royal Christian patrons,   and the occasional bribe all paid for shiny new  cathedrals in the city, allowed the Popes to   renovate some aqueducts and infrastructure,  as well as re-implementing the food dole   for the city’s poor. Pilgrimage was such big  business even dead visitors could be profitable,   as the church confiscated the possessions of  pilgrims who died in the city. If Rome could no   longer collect its payout by imperial right, they  were more than happy to become a tourist trap.    The reigns of Rome didn’t belong exclusively to   the Papacy, as there were still a dozen big noble  families who built personal fortresses in the   ruins of the city, but that’s a far cry from the  thousands of aristocrats in the classical period;   and this political climate left zero room for  Rome’s oldest institution: the Senate. Justinian   tried to save it by lowering the property  qualifications to join, but its power, prestige,   and headcount steadily eroded over the decades  until, on some unknown day, it ended. In the 570s   it was still sending embassies to the East, and  they greeted the emperor when he visited in 603,   but by 628 Pope Honorius had them disbanded, and  converted the senate house into a church. All the   more striking than deposing the child emperor  in 476: the most fundamental and persistent   institution of the Roman state had died with  so little fanfare we don’t even know when. Yet,   the ancient aristocratic tradition of causing  trouble for the state was alive and well, as those   powerful families vied for influence over the  Papacy in the 10th and 11th centuries to wildly   chaotic and extraordinarily debauched results –  and that is all I have the PG-clearance to say.    Finally, Rome’s earlier political break with   Constantinople was cemented by a religious schism,  dividing the Pope’s Catholic church from the   eastern Orthodox church. And three decades later,  Rome got sacked by the Normans in 1084. Aah,   after all these centuries, the Gauls return to  sack Rome… nature is healing. So – what on earth   have we just witnessed transpire? Frankly, a lot  of contradictions: the empire fell, but a version   of Roman society endured; the city shrank, but  it didn’t die; provinces were reconquered by the   Byzantines, but became more independent; and  still, old ruins were used for new purposes,   religious diplomacy created an entire empire,  Latin simultaneously took on new life and   became immortal, and, once again, a millennium of  European geopolitics sprung out from Rome. Even   Belisarius couldn’t have realized just how right  he was about the meaning and unending significance   of Rome - as these five transformative centuries  established its identity not just as an ancient   capital, but as The Eternal City.    You ever lie awake at night thinking wistfully  about the Roman Empire, or is that just a me   thing? Sigh, this is so sad, Alexa, play Roman  Empire 2. *byzantine chanting* Oh HELL yeah,   this is my jam. See, the big plot twist of the  Fall of Rome is that it didn’t. While the West   was off transforming into medieval Europe,  the East continued being The Roman Empire   for another thousand years. First question,  HOW? And two, a millennium is a long time,   what traits stuck to the classical roots, and  what innovations came in during the medieval   period? To see how we got from point R(ome)  to point B(yzantines), let’s do some history.    Our story begins in the early 300s AD,   with a barely-standing Roman empire now split  into 4 administrative regions in the hopes of   easing the govern—ohhh no they’re already fighting  each other. Look away kids, this is real messy.   Flash forward 2 decades, Constantine reconquers  everything, picks up Christianity along the way,   and decides that the empire really needs a  new capital. So he chose the ancient site of   Byzantium at the northeast corner of the Aegean  sea, as it stood at the crossroads of the Black   Sea and the Mediterranean, and was closer to the  rich and well-urbanized provinces of the east,   so it would be the perfect spot for a new imperial  city. After 6 years of whirlwind construction,   Constantine consecrated the city in 330 as New  Rome, much to the annoyance of the Romans back in,   you know, the first Rome.    But reunifying an empire and introducing an  entirely new religion comes with challenges,   and Constantine soon found Christians fiercely  debating the nuances of trinitarian theology.   Academic discussion about church doctrine  is all well and good until the Alexandrians   started rioting about it, so Constantine exerted  some imperial authority to keep Christianity   under control. Instead of the vivid but  ultimately-ahistorical method of lions,   he held the church-wide Council of Nicaea,  for bishops to negotiate a universal, legally   binding orthodoxy of the empire. Now, this being  the Roman empire we’re talking about, nothing   can stop these people from finding an excuse to  throttle each other, but broadly speaking, the   Council of Nicaea did the trick by establishing a  consistent theological and political framework for   Roman Christianity. In doing so, they coopted an  intrinsically disruptive social force into Roman   power structures. Slick move.    These two changes marked the start of the East’s  geographical and religious divergence from the   Old empire, but things really accelerated  in the century after. After Constantine’s   3 sons got into a civil war with each other,  the world’s most tragic introvert Julian got   dragged kicking and screaming into being the  Roman emperor, whereupon he spent two years   trying and failing to reconvert the empire to  paganism before being speared to death while   on a poorly-organized campaign in Persia. Then a  series of unremarkable emperors took turns doing   absolutely nothing to solve the serious problems  the Empire still faced after Constantine: wars,   weak administration, and a wimpier army than Rome  was used to having. Sure, Constantine pulled the   hard-carry to give the empire another century of  life, but things were still looking mighty grim.    In came Theodosius, an emperor who had the   wildcard idea (not actually all that wildcard) to  permanently split the empire into an independent   Eastern and Western half. Other Emperors cut  their administration in halves or quarters, but   it always came back together one way or another;  only Theodosius made it stick. So it’s here in 395   that the Byzantine empire officially gets going,  but that’s somewhat of a misnomer, as the Eastern   Empire wasn’t widely called “Byzantine” until  the 1500s. Confusingly enough, that name was used   as early as the 500s, but in specific cases and  usually for poetic effect. But for the empire’s   whole runtime, as far as its inhabitants were  concerned, they were Rhomaīoi living in Rhomāniā.   No ambiguity. Still Rome! Back to the western  imperial collapse at hand, this bisection went   pretty poorly for them, but it put the East in a  position to stay strong, productive, and cohesive.   So if Theodosius indirectly sentenced Western Rome  to death, then his successors plunged the knives   by responding to the perilous threat of Goths  by bribing them to go bother the west instead.   Classy. Meanwhile the Western emperors were too  feckless to stop very simple problems from boiling   over into Rome getting sacked… twice. But the  Byzantine defense strategy was more than just   making everything Italy’s problem. At the turn of  the 5th century, Constantinople outgrew its first   fortifications and began building the Theodosian  walls, a massive set of three-tiered ramparts that   defended the city for the next thousand years.    But even the strongest walls couldn’t save the  empire from its greatest danger: Sports. See,   Romans loved their chariot races, and aligned  themselves with either the blue or the green team.   Ah yes, I see no way in which this rabid tribalism  could ever go wrong. But this rapidly spun out of   control as the blues and greens evolved into  entire social clans and began butting heads on   politics and religion and started throwing hands  about it in the middle of church. But by far,   the worst riots broke out during the reign of  emperor Justinian. For context, him and his   uncle and adoptive-father Justin came from humble  beginnings and rose through the military ranks to   rule the empire in one of history’s rare-few  reverse regencies, where the younger Justinian   was the power behind his father’s throne.  While he wasn’t pulling the imperial strings,   Justinian was falling in love with the famed  actress Theodora, and they together would become   the ultimate power-couple of the 6th century. But  back to the riots, Emperor Justinian tried to curb   the influence of the Blues and Greens in politics,  and succeeded only in irritating both of them so   badly that they teamed up in open revolt. These  wiley sportsfans shouted victory chants (Νίκα) and   poured out of the chariot stadium to light  Constantinople on fire for five straight days.    This might seem excessive, but it was a standard   mode of political demonstration. The races  were one of a few spots where the citizens of   Constantinople would regularly see their emperor,  and this proximity meant that mass demonstration   was an effective and ultimately common way of  expressing political discontent and demanding   that the emperor step down. Just as Roman armies  often acclaimed a new emperor while on campaign,   the centralization of power in Constantinople  meant that citizens could de-acclaim them! Even   in a monarchy, the citizens held considerable  sway, and the old idea of the SPQR wasn’t truly   dead. That’s bad news for Justinian, who was ready  to hop on a ship and bail the hell out of there,   but Empress Theodora told him to face his fate  with honor and live, or die, as an emperor. Quote:   “May I never see the day when those who meet me do  not call me Empress. If you wish to save yourself,   my lord, there is no difficulty. We are rich;  over there is the sea, and yonder are the ships.   Yet reflect for a moment whether, when you have  once escaped to a place of security, you would   not gladly exchange such safety for death. As for  me, I agree with the adage, that Royal Purple is   the noblest shroud.” YES Basilissa, SLAYYYY. That  is only part of why she is the biggest Hellenic   badass this side of Cleopatra.    Ahem, it’s good, I’m good, we’re good. The Nika  Riots ultimately fell to the blade during a bloody   massacre in the stadium, and Justinian was left  to pick up the charred pieces of his ruined city,   having earned the brutal honor of being the only  roman emperor to violently oppose de-acclamation   and succeed. So he made up for it by giving the  people a win, immediately setting about rebuilding   Constantinople even shinier than before, and that  meant a new centerpiece church: the Hagia Sophia.   In an evolution from your standard Roman Temples,  this one’s got a dome. And in a doubly brilliant   move, the dome is ringed with windows, which cast  an ever-changing light onto the gold mosaics,   and the halo-effect makes the dome look like it’s  damn-near floating. When Justinian first entered   the completed church, he exclaimed “Solomon, I  have surpassed thee”. We’re extremely lucky to   still have this masterpiece of a church around  today, and you can see the influence of its   design all throughout the eastern Mediterranean  and well beyond the empire’s lifetime. Good.   Dome. Meanwhile, Justinian was also hard at work  codifying hundreds of years of Roman laws into   one standard law book. The Corpus Juris Civilis  remains the basis of most European law codes to   this day.    Justinian liked big ideas: one law, one church,  and one empire. But this last one was a sticking   point, because the Roman Empire had been  missing its Rome for over 50 years. Now,   you likely wouldn’t have seen the Italians  complaining, because the Ostrogothic kings   were decidedly much better at their  jobs than the latter Western emperors,   and Italy still saw itself as Romans living in a  Roman state with Roman institutions – Heck, these   Gothic Kings still consulted with the Senate!  However, this was of no concern to Justinian,   who simply wanted to paint the map purple, so he  put Belisarius in charge of retaking the West. And   retake he did, because Belisarius, is a boss.  For his first act, he reclaimed Carthage and   the north-African coast from the Vandals of all  people, with minimal casualties, in just under   a year. To celebrate his spectacular victory,  Justinian awarded Belisarius with a triumph,   an honor exclusively reserved for Emperors ever  since Augustus. With this foothold in the west,   Belisarius launched his reconquest of Italy. This  would prove trickier, but with careful progression   up the peninsula and inventive tactics like  storming Naples by aqueduct, Belisarius pushed   all the way into Rome and made Hannibal look like  a chump. Marching on Rome is a right reserved   only to Roman generals, thank you very much.  The Ostrogoths put up a fierce counterattack,   and surrounded the city of Rome for nearly a year,  but Belisarius held out, and continued up to Milan   and the political capital of Ravenna.    But the problem with investing manpower into  the strategically-dubious west is that the   much-more-consequential East lay severely exposed.  The Sasanian Persian King Khosrau was well aware   of this, as he even joked with Justinian that  he was just as much to thank for the victory   as Belisarius, because he had the good manners  to not invade the east while they were busy.   Justinian obligingly paid Khosrau a share of  the spoils for his “help”. This is par for the   course with that scamp Khosrau, because 6 years  later he did invade, sacked the city of Antioch,   and then built a city he literally named Khosrau’s  Better Antioch. What a champion. This dynamic was   no mere joke, but after an entire millennium of  Roman-Persian history, the two rivals were so   deeply familiar they couldn’t help but respect  each other, and many of their rulers maintained   genuine friendships even in the middle of great  power conflict. In Khosrau II’s words, Rome and   Persia were the Two Eyes of the world, chosen by  God to illuminate human civilization. Sure they   fought, business is business, but as such, they  were professionals. That said… Khosrau did proceed   to invade Mesopotamia in 540.    So now Justinian found himself split between  two distant fronts, with the Ostrogoths still   carving out pockets of resistance in Italy. And  all of this was made worse by the sudden guest   appearance of the Black Death, which ravaged  Byzantines and Persians alike. The empire would   have surely collapsed if not for the herculean  efforts of Theodora, who kept it all in one piece   while Justinian was actively in a plague-coma. In  the middle of all this battling back-and-forth,   Ostrogoths sacked and destroyed Rome, leaving the  city a complete ghost town, and forcing Belisarius   to re-reconquer Italy from the boot to the alps.  The one bright spot amid all this is the city of   Ravenna, which soon became home to some splendid  and miraculously preserved feats of Byzantine art   and architecture. As early as the 500s, Byzantines  had already gotten their golden aesthetic and   talent for mosaics to near perfection.    Over the course of his four decades in  power, Justinian survived de-acclamation,   rebuilt Constantinople, codified the laws,  standardized the church hierarchy, survived a   plague, and reconquered the west, or at least what  was left of it. For better and definitely worse,   Justinian’s reign was a massive step in the  evolution of the Byzantine empire. And for all   his (arguably-misguided) efforts to reclaim  Rome, Justinian’s lasting legacy proved the   empire no longer needed it. And it’s just as  well, because 3 years after Justinian died,   the Lombards came across the alps, and by the end  of the century they’d swiped 2/3 of Italy. Oops.    Meanwhile, back in Constantinople,   things were going somewhere between eh and oof.  Emperor Maurice was deposed by the army in favor   of the completely incompetent Phocas, so the  Persian king Khosrau II, who really liked Maurice   and was personally indebted to him for his help  in an earlier civil war – vowed revenge, declared   war, and pushed all the way into Anatolia, before  diverting south to capture the levant and Egypt.   This is really bad, and would have probably been a  total game-over if not for the miraculous arrival   of Heraclius, the son of North Africa’s governor.  He showed up, booted Phocas right on out of there,   and assumed control of the Empire. By combining  civil and military authority, his government   was flexible and better able to repel the Persian  threat. Earlier Roman armies just threw legions at   a problem until it went away, knowing they could  always raise more, but Heraclius the army he had,   and that was it. Byzantine armies from here out  needed to be reserved and efficient in their   use of force. So after a long and hard-fought  campaign that nearly bankrupted the empire,   Heraclius impressively pushed into the heart of  Persia and brokered a peace. Everything reverted   to pre-war status, and both empires stood  battered to within an inch of their life.    But the long-term consequences of   this would become all-too clear all-too soon, as  the newfound Muslim caliphate soon began expanding   out of Arabia, and neither Persia nor Byzantium  had the means to stop them. In 8 short years, the   Rashidun caliphate conquered the entire levant,  and within another 10 they had Egypt and Persia as   well. Constantinople itself was threatened by an  Arab siege, but they held out thanks to a little   trick called Basically Napalm. This was a colossal  break from the status quo that Rome and Persia   had held for a millennium, to the point where the  Byzantines even sent help to the Sasanians against   the Caliphate. But by the end of the century,  the Byzantine empire found itself shut out of the   entire southern Mediterranean for good. Meanwhile,  the other front wasn’t looking much better;   What other front, you ask? Well, Slavic forces had  pushed down into the Peloponnese, splitting Greece   in half and leaving the empire looking like a  checkerboard. It’s at least good to see that   the time-honored Roman tradition of spectacular  territorial implosion is alive and well. Let’s   take solace in at least that.    It’s no coincidence that this chapter in  Byzantine history is considered the beginning of   the so-called “Dark Ages”, hereafter exclusively  referred to as the “Ouch Times”, but we’ve still   got over 700 years left on the clock, so as we’ll  see, the empire’s best years still lay ahead of   them. Amid all the land getting yoinked, it’s easy  to miss what else has changed and to easy forget   what continuity is still there. The empire in  300 was Pagan, bilingual in Greek-and-Latin,   and spread out over the whole Mediterranean.  The empire now maintained the same core laws and   form of government that Rome’s had for several  centuries, but geographically and culturally,   this newly-Christianized empire was becoming far  more Greek. They’d still call themselves Romans,   and they were, but we can associate them with  distinctly Greek traits. Its borders much more   closely reflected the classical Greek world,  Greek became the main language, and the empire’s   strongest literary legacy was in its preservation  and continuation of ancient scholarship. Some 2/3   of all the ancient Greek texts we have today came  to us from the Byzantines. Forget the library of   Alexandria, it’s the Library of Constantinople  that did the Hard Carry. On the one hand, all   this Greekness and newfangled Christianity lets  historians take pot shots saying the Byzantine   empire isn’t really the authentic Roman empire  nyehhhh, but we’ll see how the Byzantines maintain   that fundamentally Roman capacity to adapt and  evolve to survive in changing circumstances. Both   literally and figuratively, the Byzantine golden  age was just over the horizon. My god, like, so   much gold mosaic, it’s honestly kind of insane.
  The Byzantine Empire has long maintained a   delicate balance of simultaneously doing fantastic  and also being constantly in peril. Normally this   would be a contradiction, but the Byzantines  made “Golden Disaster Empire” their entire damn   brand. As we’ll see over the next 500 years, the  Ouch Times brought genuinely brilliant reforms   while the Golden Age endured some catastrophic  failures – But just like the Romans of old,   the Byzantines kept on keeping on despite the  odds, and earned their place as one of the   longest-lasting empires in history. SO, let’s see  how the Byzantines survived the middle ages and   gained their golden reputation.    When last we left our purple-robéd friends,  the entire southern half of the empire had   been swiftly yoinked by the shiny new Muslim  Caliphate, and within a century these new   neighbors had landed on Constantinople’s doorstep  on two separate occasions, only to be repelled   by the very fires of Hell itself. See, the  Byzantines had a little trick called Greek Fire,   a secret substance that could be shot from a  siphon at an incoming navy, burning everything   from the mast down to the surface of the water.  But that’s not all the Byzantines had learned   from the Fall of Rome — In addition to their  functionally-impenetrable Theodosian walls,   they maintained hundreds of underground cisterns  to fortify their water supply. No city on Earth   was better defended than Constantinople, but the  same couldn’t be said for the Byzantine provinces,   as the Muslim armies were having their run of  the place all the way up into Anatolia. It was   only in 740 that Emperor Leo III finally held the  Eastern line, and his son Constantine V fortified   the other troublesome frontier by pushing back  against the Slavic peoples in the west. Hey,   it took a century and a half, but solid  recovery. However, there’s a more literal   reason that some historians have described this  age as “Dark”, and it has to do with Icons.    The Byzantines were a rather artistic bunch,   and they loved to have images of Jesus, Mary and  friends in their churches and in their homes. But   in the eyes of people like Emperor Leo, this  was beginning to look a lot like Idolatry,   where images are worshipped more piously than  even God. His response, simple enough, was to   smash every last image he could get his hands on.  So starting in 726 he and his fellow Iconoclasts   destroyed every mosaic, fresco, statue, and  doodle in sight. Constantine V, for his part,   doubled down, and began persecuting the clergy for  spurring this apparent idolatry. Meanwhile, across   the Adriatic, the Pope in Rome was justifiably  horrified, and the Byzantine province of Ravenna   took the occasion to declare independence, which  is why their mosaics are among the few to actually   survive this mess. After Constantine died, his  wife Irene called a council to outlaw Iconoclasm,   but Emperor Leo V reinstated it, and then  eventually empress Theodora re-outlawed   it for good in 843. The final rules were that  statues are No-Bueno, but all 2D art was chill,   so the Byzantines got back to work with gorgeous  frescos and mosaics. Greek art would proceed to   snub visual realism in favor of stylized figures  with enough gold to give a protestant a seizure,   and that style governs eastern orthodox art to  this day. So while I weep on a weekly basis for   how pathetically few pieces of original art  survived Iconoclasm and the Ottomans — the   dreaded double-whammy — I can take comfort knowing  that the Byzantine style has well over 1500 years   of continuity.    For all the well-meaning damage the Iconoclasts  did to art, they made some crucial reforms to   the Byzantine military and government by, as  it happens, making them the same thing. See,   back in the classical days, Roman Provinces had  no innate defenses, and had to wait for stationed   Legions to show up from Jupiter-Knows-Where.  Clearly that model didn’t work anymore,   so the Byzantines reconfigured their armies  and their provinces to fit. In the 6 and 700s,   the provinces were gradually redrawn as Themata,  with the governor taking on the additional role of   Strategos, overseeing both the civic and military  care of his Thema. And in place of old-fashioned   imperial legions, Byzantine Themata each had their  own army, staffed with citizens from that Thema,   and funded by land grants within that Thema,  so every soldier had a tangible stake in the   wellbeing of the state. Though the empire  shrank to half its size between 6 and 800,   the extremely perilous eastern front went  from an unmitigated disaster-zone to a   fortress — the Byzantines were stronger and  safer than ever thanks to the Thema reforms.    Meanwhile, the boys in the libraries   were also hard at work protecting the empire, as  scholars and historians were writing and revising   military manuals. Books like the Strategikon laid  out grand strategy and pinpoint tactics to help   generals in the field. The empire was well past  the expansionist glory days where they could slog   it out in big decisive battles and raise a fresh  army the next year. With potential enemies on each   frontier waiting to pounce at the first sign of  frailty, every victory was a pyrrhic victory.   So campaigns were won by carefully calculated  strategy and good intelligence operations. It   was all a game of restraint and flexibility, so  the empire kept on top of trends by voraciously   adopting outside ideas.    Those are the big picture swerves, but the tactics  and composition of the Byzantine army also got an   upgrade, trading raw manpower for peak efficiency.  While infantry remained a staple, the Byzantines   stayed in fashion by remodeling the old Roman  Legionary into the fancy new Skutatoi. Namely,   they ditched the Scutum for the hotness that  is the Kite Shield, which explains why the   name Skutatoi literally means “Shield Boys”.  There to support our favorite Shieldy Bois were   the Toxotai archers, but the biggest and baddest  unit in the Byzantine army was the Kataphraktos.   They were basically hoplites on horses, with  the steed and rider decked out head to hoof   in scale armor. Their name technically means  “Fully Armored,” but I like to translate it   as “Full-Metal Cavalry”. Kataphrakts traced their  origins to the Parthian wars of the late Republic,   but came to prominence here as a counter to the  Arabic cavalry – At first the Arabs ran circles   around the poor Skutatoi, but eventually the  Kataphrakts became the core of the Byzantine army,   and a byword for Byzantine power. Infantry and  archers would weaken an enemy line, and then the   Kataphraktoi would hammer through the weak points  and shatter the enemy formations. GG. And like,   saying it in English – Karaphracts – it’s cool  enough, but when you get real the Greek into it   you get Kataphraktos, and then you really  feel the Byzantine power, y’know? … What,   just me? Ah fine whatever.    So as an empire that’s about 75% coast, the  Byzantines also had ports to protect on all sides:   in the Aegean, along the Mediterranean, and on  the Black Sea – so they maintained a pretty beefy   navy. In the world’s best case of “If It isn’t  broke, don’t fix it” the Byzantines still used a   version of the Trireme, some 2,000 years later,  as their primary ship. The Dromon, as it became   known, had been upgraded with a Lateen sail and  got absolutely loaded with catapults, ballistae,   and of course, Greek fire siphons. Plus, instead  of simply ramming into enemy ships like some   ancient Athenian doof, the Dromoi were equipped  with spurs to smash enemy oars and immobilize   them, for ease of boarding and/or burning. Slick  upgrade. Unfortunately, the Navy wasn’t enough   to stop repeated Muslim incursions into Crete,  Sicily, and Sardinia, but they dutifully protected   the mainland coasts, the islands of the Aegean,  and the many trade routes that passed through   Constantinople via the Bosphorus river.    With Iconoclasm over and the empire no longer  teetering on the edge of total collapse,   the Byzantines entered two centuries of prosperity  and relative peace. Starting with Basil I,   who I can’t help but picture as a leaf, a line of  Macedonian emperors guided the Byzantine empire   through its Golden Age, the peak of imperial  prestige and of its cultural influence abroad.   With the Muslim armies to the east & south at  least somewhat handled, the Byzantines turned   their attention to the Bulgarians, and used  a clever mix of religious diplomacy to pacify   them via conversion to Christianity. They did the  same with Prince Volodymyr of the Kyivan Rus’,   which set Eastern Europe with their quasi-Greek  Cyrillic alphabet and their Byzantine-leaning   brand of Orthodox Christianity. In return,  Volodymyr hooked the Byzantines up with the   Varangian guard, a legendary band of Scandinavian  mercenaries who served as the emperor’s royal   guard for centuries. Now this was no Pax Romana –  the Byzantines still had to fight on all fronts,   and the Bulgarians even swiped northern Greece in  the 900s, later recovered by the efforts of Basil   II a century later – but compared to the way  things were, the Byzantines were doing great.    Meanwhile, Constantinople had never been better.   By the year 1,000 it held half-a-million people,  and remained the largest, best-defended, and most   magnificent city in the world. Hagia Sophia  was one of countless churches to get gorgeous   new decorations after iconoclasm. Times clearly  changed, but Constantinoupoli remained a gorgeous   window into the classical world, with Roman-style  churches, a cartoonishly huge chariot stadium, and   marble and porphyry as far as the eye could see.  But Constantinople wasn’t just a Roman capital:   it was the keystone city of the Mediterranean, a  Cosmopolis where people from all over could come,   trade, work, and live – Just as there were  Catholic churches in the Italian quarters of the   city, so too was there a Mosque for the city’s  Muslim population and diplomatic guests. The   Romans never missed an opportunity to commemorate  culture through architecture! And all across the   empire, Byzantine architects were hard at work  building gorgeous urban cathedrals and cliffside   monasteries. But funnily enough, our best looks at  peak Byzantine art come not just from outside the   empire, but from its rivals. To the west, Venice  and the Normans made for some of Constantinople’s   oddest frenemies, because as much as they used  spears and ships to snag some Byzantine power and   prosperity for themselves, they were the most  enthusiastic adopters of the Byzantine style.   Seriously, between Saint Mark’s Basilica and the  Palatine Chapel, Italy is the best place to see   golden-age art. Then to the north is Saint Sophia  cathedral in Kyiv, still to this day the pride of   Ukraine’s Byzantine Orthodox legacy.    Culturally, things had never been better, but  politically, the cracks in the proverbial mosaic   were starting to show. The Byzantines had been  steadily reaching back out to the Balkans and out   of Anatolia, but the empire was more comfortable  being on the defensive than the offensive,   and the carefully-constructed Themata system began  suffering from bloat. Strategoi got complacent and   ignored their civic duties to play Monopoly-Men  within their Thema, and between Theodosian walls   and gold-covered domes, cushy bureaucrats in  Constantinople barely raised their heads from   their books. So each camp blamed the other for the  empire’s problems, and both did exactly nothing to   fix it. The emperor didn’t help matters by  ignoring the Themata to rely more and more   on the Tagma, a standing army meant primarily  for campaigning. This put the Byzantines in an   extremely precarious position, spread too thin and  poorly prepared to face new threats, like trying   to stab your enemies with a limp spaghetti. To  the west, the Normans swooped into southern Italy   to conquer the last Byzantine pockets, and to the  east, the Seljuk Turks dunked on the Byzantines so   hard that Anatolia just disappeared. And they  didn’t even have to try that hard! Half the   Byzantine army deserted en-route to the battle of  Manzikert in 1071, and the generals made a series   of miscalculations on their way to an entirely  avoidable outcome. It was hardly even the battle   that doomed them, after Manzikert, the Byzantines  kind of shrugged and let them have the rest. By   1075, the empire had never been smaller or weaker.  You’d think the Greeks would know a thing or two   about Hubris, but apparently not!    And unfortunately for our Grekbois here, the  1000s only frayed the already dodgy relationship   between the churches in Constantinople and  Rome. Justinian’s big idea of One Church   and One Empire went kaput as soon as the southern  Mediterranean went poof, and Byzantine authority   in Rome remained nominal at best. When the Papal  States officially split in 754 it was only a   formality. Communication between east and west was  already tricky because of how few Byzantines spoke   Latin and how few Italians spoke Greek. And tiffs  like Iconoclasm exacerbated disagreements about   whether the Pope had supreme spiritual authority  or whether Byzantines had the right to mind their   own business. These views were… fundamentally  incompatible, and this multicentury spat came to   a head when a Roman delegate excommunicated the  entire Byzantine church in the middle of Hagia   Sophia in the middle of service, daaaaaaamn (but  like literalllyyyyy), so the Greeks responded with   excommunications of their own, and just like that  we’ve got a Schism. While nobody at the time quite   realized the implications, this marked the final  split of ties between the Catholic church in Rome   and the Eastern Orthodox church.    But one Byzantine emperor saw this as a rare  opportunity. Alexios I ended nearly a decade   of civil war to assume the throne in 1081, and his  Komninos dynasty oversaw a remarkable revival of   Byzantine fortunes throughout the 1100s. He  held the empire steady for nearly 4 decades,   made new trade agreements with the Venetians, and  hatched a clever plan to regain Anatolia. He went   to Pope Urban with the offer to recognize Papal  supremacy in exchange for a dispatch of soldiers   to help with the Byzantine reconquest. But Urban’s  hearing was a little selective, because he ended   up sending along several armies’-worth of European  bandits who wanted to, lemme make sure im hearing   this right: Retake The Holy Land? That wasn’t  the plan at all! *sigh, Well I guess this is   our life now, so now Alexios had to wrangle this  box of Oops All Crusaders and point them towards   Jerusalem so they didn’t Deus Vult all over  his empire instead. Ultimately, the Crusaders   were much more excited to conquer their own new  lands than restore lost Byzantine territories,   and subsequent crusades would only entangle the  Byzantines further into the mess that is medieval   European politics, earning nothing but antagonism  from their western neighbors. Meanwhile the   Normans were constantly poking and prodding into  Greece, and soon enough the Venetians would have   a monopoly on Byzantine trade. But despite all  that, the Komninoi left the empire a lot better   than they first got it, having reclaimed coastal  Anatolia, modernized the economy by Venetian   supervision, and continued to make churchloads of  gold-covered art. Also during this time, princess   Anna Komnene composed an epic poem about the reign  of her father Alexios, and in so doing became the   first woman historian and absolute literary  badass! Honestly, I feel like that’s kinda   the Byzantine motto at this point — definitely  precarious, but hey, it could’ve been a lot worse!    When we picked up this chapter   of Byzantine history, the empire was in a really  bad way, what with the hemorrhaging provinces and   smashing all of their art — but it’s no accident  that they went on to steady their empire and   revitalize their culture. The Byzantines survived,  and then dug themselves out of the Ouch Times by   being clever and never giving up — The Thema  System is a genius innovation in statecraft,   and it bought the Byzantines an entire  Golden Age to work with — And of course,   as time went on they got a little careless, but  then when things got dire, they persevered and   turned things around, again! I don’t just like  Byzantine history in spite of their setbacks,   I love Byzantine history because they’re a  Golden Disaster Empire dammit. Remember, in life,   it doesn’t matter how you get knocked down, or how  you lose all of North Africa, or all of Greece,   or Anatolia too, wow they’ve really been through  it haven’t they? What matters – What matters,   is that you keep on trying no matter what, because  golden ages can dawn when you least expect it.    It’s easy to lose   track of just how long-running the Byzantines  are. While the Roman Empire in the west was   getting Goth-smacked into oblivion in 476 AD, the  eastern half of the empire, with its capital of   Constantinople, was, by comparison, doing pretty  great. For one, they existed, so that’s a plus,   and the Byzantine Empire evolved into a gorgeous  gold-coated hybrid of classical Greco-Roman and   medieval Christian culture. But unfortunately  for our Byz-Bois, shiny mosaics and ginormous   domes couldn’t prevent the infinite abyss of  disasters that lay in wait over the millennium   to come. Between Persians, Goths, Arabs, Turks,  Normans, and the more-than-occasional civil war,   it’s safe to say the Byzantines could not catch  a break. And the latter medieval period continued   this distinctly Promethean trend, where they  suffer a constant and arduous Evisceration by   Eagle without ever actually dying from it. As we  will indeed see in just a moment, our favorite   Golden Disaster Empire managed to keep on thriving  and defying the specter of death despite even the   most Garbâge of circumstances. So, let’s see how  the Byzantine Empire procrastinated its own death   and even then, kinda slipped past the deadline.     I tell ya, those Romans are crafty bastards.    Now, we begin, contradictorily,   with the fall of the Empire – about two  centuries ahead of the typical 1453. I know,   we’re making great time. Because long before the  Ottomans ever enter the picture, the Byzantines   were struggling to coexist with the Italian  merchant empires they were growing so reliant   on. Venetian and Genoese traders tussled in the  Latin neighborhoods of Constantinople like they   were street gangs in Shakespearean Verona, but  the Byzantines poured the proverbial Greek Fire   on the problem by arresting and then murdering  tens of thousands of Latin citizens in the city.   Bad look. This Giant Yikes was compounded by the  baffling ineptitude of the ruling Angelos dynasty,   whose constant infighting left the empire woefully  mismanaged. This got… infinitely worse when the   powers of Europe launched Crusade Numero 4 on the  promise of: “This Time It Might Actually Work”.   To the ensuing surprise of precisely nobody, it  got off to a rocky start, with their understaffed   army getting excommunicated by the Pope before  they even left the Adriatic sea. But the light   at the end of the Crusaders’ tunnel was prince  Alexios Angelos, who offered Byzantine money and   military support in exchange for reinstating his  deposed father. Money he distinctly did not have.    So here we see Mr Angelos   ignoring the key rules from Alexios Komnenos’  Declassified Crusading Survival Guide: Rule #1:   Under Any Circumstances, Do Not Ask Crusaders  for Help. We’ve been through this before,   it is not worth it. Rule #2: If the Crusaders  arrive anyway, transport your Crusaders across   your empire as fast as humanly possible. Do  Not let them get any ideas. Rule #3: While   your Crusaders are inside your empire, never for  any reason provoke your Crusaders. They are armed,   violent, and prone to fits of disproportionate  holy rage. Yet, in 1204, the Angeloi failed   spectacularly on every point ­– And, spying  an opportunity to quit while they were ahead,   the Crusaders simply sacked Constantinople.  Venice deliberately instigated the pillaging,   but by this point the Byzantines Really  Should Have Known Better than to Tee Them Up.    So, The Sack. Beyond being a rough   approximation of Literal Hell On Earth for the  Byzantines unfortunate to be on the receiving end,   the Crusaders desolated the art and architecture  of the city. Venetians had the good sense to steal   the priceless relics of Constantinople  for The Glory Of The Republic instead of   mindlessly burning and/or murdering everything  and/or one — but whether trashed or taken,   Constantinople still ended up ruined, and the  rest of the Empire was next on the To-Thieve list.  
Venice, the crafty little devils, chose to  swipe up the islands of the Aegean, while the   Franks installed a Latin emperor on the Byzantine  throne and carved up the Greek mainland. On paper,   the Byzantine Empire breaks right here: the  capital was now kaput, and the Aegean Basin   which so long preserved the Greco-Roman world  went poof. But even The End Of The Empire couldn’t   shake that damn Hellenic persistence, as Byzantine  nobles in Survival-Mode quickly carved out states   in the wake of the Crusade, in Trebizond, Nicaea,  and Epirus. Each became a haven for Greeks fleeing   their new Frankish overlords in Mainland Greece,  whose Latin Empire proved to be little more than a   post-crusade money-pot. But the Franks quickly got  bored by the prospect of actually governing and   soon became weaker than the assorted Byzantines  they had so recently stomped. Are we actually   surprised?    The three Hellenic states started out on the  defensive, to put it mildly, but some shifty   strategy and good old-fashioned luck gave Nicaea a  leg up. The man in charge Michael Palaiologos was   an old-fashioned Big Ideas guy, and he retooled  his army away from pure defense to be more nimble   and aggressive, allowing him to campaign on  four fronts at once, spread out over the Western   Anatolian coast and gain a foothold in Thrace  and Macedonia. And then the Nicaeans reconquered   Constantinople kind of by accident. While a small  army scouted around the city to suss out its   defenses, they learned that the Frankish army was  out on campaign, so the Byzantines snuck through a   small break in the wall, opened a gate, and then  took the city. For all the disasters to befall   the Byzantines, it’s only fair that the RNG Just  This Once works out in their favor. That said,   Emperor Mikey-mike Pabbity-labbity soon found his  work cut out for him, as the city had hardly been   cleaned since the crusade half a century earlier,  and sliding so close to death’s door prevented the   Byzantines from cutting quite as Imperial a  figure as they used to. Still, it was better   than the alternative.    As we’ve seen, it was hard enough to defend the  Byzantine dominion back in the good old days,   but with the emperor now presiding over a  kingdom and a capital that were both hollow   shells of their former selves, the more impressive  achievement was not in retaking Constantinople,   but in keeping it. Tricky, but not impossible,  as Romans in every era adapted their military to   the needs of the moment, and a weakened empire  on the backfoot had to win harder fights with   inconsistent resources. So they got clever: their  solution was to update a taxation system called   the Pronoia by applying it to the military –  essentially staffing your heavy cavalry by giving   them local taxation rights rather than paying and  equipping them yourself. The Emperor was still in   charge of all the contracts and could revoke  or transfer them at will, so weirdly enough,   this functions like a militarized version  of the tax-farming Publicani system from   way back in the Republic! And according to  contemporary sources, the army’s infantry   manpower seems to have just… shown up whenever  there was a battle?? So the late Byzantine army   retained the iconic heavy  cavalry, paid for by  a medieval innovation on a Republic-era system,   and all supported by a throwback to Polis-era  farmers-turned-soldiers – A patchy system to be   sure, and the implied desperation is apparent,  but it did the trick, and it’s one hell of an   illustration for how old Greek and Roman ideas  were still at play in the Byzantine world.    Otherwise, clever   diplomacy was the sharpest weapon in the Byzantine  arsenal; and as ever, the rivalry between Venice   and Genoa made this difficult, as their schoolyard  slapfight had a conspicuous habit of always going   down in Constantinople. And of course, there were  a few strategic flubs, such as when the Byzantines   hired a band of Catalan mercenaries who went rogue  at the slightest provocation and claimed the Duchy   of Athens for the next 7 decades. But even this  wasn’t the worst mercenary customer experience the   Byzantines would endure. As, in 1343, the royal  treasury was too thin to pay for Venetian help,   so the former-empress Anna pawned what she  had, which was the empire’s crown jewels.   Despite selling Constantinople’s royal honor  for some warships, Anna lost her war, which,   I should say, was a civil war, against the  empire. This one really illuminates what   kind of fuster-clucks the Byzantines regularly  threw themselves into, because the death of the   last emperor Andronikos left a beeby 9 year  old John Palaiologos in charge. His mother   Anna sought to rule as regent, but Andronikos’  second-in-command John Kantakouzenos wanted to   be co-emperors until the kiddo was old enough.  That civil war split Byzantine society across   class lines and featured its very own religious  controversy. So when John Kantakouzenos and his   wife Irene were officially coronated in 1347,  the original crown jewels were off in Venice,   like every other Byzantine artifact, so  their crowns were copies made of tinted   glass – augh God that’s so sad it Hurts; forget  the crusade, that’s what kills me. Naturally,   Johnny P turned 20 a few years later and threw  another civil war to kick out his co-emperor,   so this whole tragedy was a giant waste.    Yet, somehow, despite all of that, hardly the  worst thing to happen in the 1340s, because,   fun surprise: Plague. Man, it does not let up.  Population is ravaged, economy in ruins, let us   not dally here, friends, we all know the drill,  and this would provide a golden opportunity for   the Ottomans over in Anatolia. See, back while our  Byz-bois were busy reconstituting their empire,   several tiny principalities sprung up in the east  after the collapse of the Sultanate of Rum. No,   not the drink, that’s the Arabic and Turkish  word for Rome. But where had the Rum gone? Well,   each individual Beylik was eager to carve out  its own space, and the state of Osman Bey was the   most adept and dynamic of the bunch. From their  starting spot on Nicaea’s doorstep, they leveraged   their own military skill, a diplomatic talent  for playing rival Byzantine factions against each   other, and the convenient apparition of Plague  to recast the entire Eastern Roman world in only   a century. Of course, the Ottomans were not Roman  in the way the Byzantines were Roman – they were a   Sunni Muslim state with unique institutions  and culture – but they were one of many,   many societies who found themselves in the Roman  orbit and slowly began to scoot themselves toward   the center. This wasn’t a rivalry between the  Two Eyes of the World like back with Persia,   and this wasn’t a surprise arrival of a brand-new  society like the early Caliphate, this was,   in the grand scheme of Roman history, the last  in a long line of a very familiar situation. The   Roman world was a lush and expansive grove,  and a lot of societies fancied themselves   enjoying that fruit. The Ottomans’ rise would  not be immediate, but they quickly made it   clear they were the next big Muslim power, at  the direct expense of the last big Roman one.    So, about a century after the reconquest   of Constantinople, there were four fundamental  and unavoidable problems to the empire’s long-term   health: The Ottomans were gaining strength and  pushing west, Venice and Genoa turned the Aegean   into their personal battlefield, and the complete  lack of a Byzantine economy meant they were fully   dependent on those two for trade, then, to cap it  off we’ve got the endless internal power struggles   and succession crises — let’s not kid ourselves,  this is still the Romans we’re talking about   here. With worries like that, fully rebuilding  the empire was a no-go, so the Byzantines were   picking their battles and biding their time, which  meant putting themselves under the protection of   the Ottomans. But, ever defiant in the face of  peril, giving up was never an option. While The   Empire was shrinking down to Just Constantinople,  things looked shockingly different on the other   side of the Aegean.    Back when Michael Palaiologos was tripping  ass-first into retaking Constantinople in 1261,   he also had the good fortune of capturing the  Latin Prince of Achaea in a battle, and ransomed   him back in exchange for a few castles down in  the Peloponnese. They weren’t much, but they   were well-fortified among the mountains, much like  the ancient Spartans had been way back when. Over   the next two centuries, this distant Byzantine  outpost in Lakonia became a prosperous corner of   the Hellenic world, as Greeks from the Morea and  beyond flocked into the city of Mystras to try   and pick up where the empire left off. So in the  13 and 1400s, Mystras became a haven of Byzantine   culture and scholarship. And, I mean, look, I’m  not going to pretend like one decently well-off   corner of the Greek world is on par with the  empire pre-crusade, because of course it’s not,   but I will come to bat for the Morea as a paragon  of that Romano-Hellenic perseverance, to keep on   trying even after everything seemed lost. No I’m  not getting sentimental, that’s just marble dust   in my eye, shut up. *Ahem. Anyway, like with  Constantinople, keeping this territory safe   required a gentle diplomatic touch, but the game  was a hell of a lot easier with water on 3 sides   and mountains on the 4th. And with Constantinople  sweating javelins at the sight of incoming   Ottomans, it became clear that the Morea could  handle itself, so it gained autonomy in 1349.   By the early 1400s they expanded outside Lakonia  onto almost the entire Peloponnese, and briefly   had authority over Attica. The Byzantine Morea  also had a practical benefit to Constantinople, as   emperors-in-waiting got their political training  as governors down in the Peloponnese, to the point   where the last emperor Constantine XI was actually  crowned in Mystras rather than up in the capital.   Uh oh, did I say last? Yeah, about that.    The thing with the Ottomans is they didn’t…  stop. Despite the empire’s best efforts   and the too-little-too-late help of European  Crusader armies that disintegrated on impact,   it was clear the show was wrapping up. By 1453,  Sultan Mehmet finally had the means to take the   city of Constantinople, and by means I mean  cannons the size of a house. After blockading   the Bosphorus and cutting off the city’s line of  supply, the Ottomans blasted open the Theodosian   walls and poured in. Emperor Constantine is said  to have given a rousing speech to his countrymen   before charging into where the fighting was  fiercest, never to be seen again. After the   battle, the Sultan toured the city and was  so awed by the beauty of Hagia Sophia that   he preserved it and converted it into a mosque,  rather than blasting it and starting from scratch,   as was more often the move.    But even after this (he said, moving the goalpost  back for dramatic effect), it wasn’t The End for   the Byzantines. For one, the Ottomans continued  the time-honored love of ultra-domed architecture,   and ethnic Rhomaioi would play a meaningful  role in Ottoman history and culture as artists,   administrators, artisans, sailors,  soldiers, and people. After all,   Kostantiniyye remained the keystone city of the  Mediterranean, more prosperous and secure than   it had been in centuries. It’s disingenuous  to pretend that nothing was lost when Mehmet   breached the Theodosian walls in 1453, that  blood was not spilled and a state did not end,   but when the man declares himself Kaysar-I Rum,  he's declaring in Rome’s own terms that, as its   new Caesar, he is both conqueror and builder –  That civilization was now his responsibility;   he took it, yes, but he did not destroy it. It's  a similar case in other corners of the once-Greek   world, where Hellenic culture persevered and  prospered for centuries despite being part   of Other People’s Empires. There’s an old saying  that “Rome conquered Greece but Greece conquered   Rome” describing how Hellenic culture always  pervades whatever state it becomes part of,   and that has never stopped being true, be it  Rome, the Ottomans, or anyone else. The Venetian   Republic’s outlying territories in the Aegean and  Ionian seas were also majority-Greek, and here   they played an outsized role in bringing classical  ideas to a Catholic European audience. Venetian   Greece contributed mightily to the budding  Renaissance, and Crete especially became a beacon   for art and scholarship that mixed traditional  Hellenism with Renaissance innovations. So,   despite the earth-shattering treachery of  Crusading Venetians centuries prior, the painfully   ironic end-result is that Venice played a vital  part in the long-term preservation of Byzantine   culture — Man that is uncomfortable to say out  loud. But as we enter the 15 and 1600s, the days   of Greeks in Constantinople ruling their ancient  empire are long, long gone – so let’s wrap up.    The standard question   of the Byzantine Empire is essentially “Why didn't  they die way the hell sooner when everything was   always on fire?” Because, on one level, yeah, the  Byzantine story is over 1,000 straight years of   the map getting smaller, but that time-lapse would  have been swift if they didn’t persevere. Let’s   not forget they had over 1,000 years. By some  metrics, that’s The Longest Empire. And it got   that far because at no point in Byzantine history  was it too late to care, or too late to try,   because they believed that they had something  about their state, their people, their faith,   and their identity that was worth dying for  and worth living for. And even when the last   mini-golden-age was a distant memory, that  tireless determination to Do Their Best kept   them going in even the most dire circumstances  to create the next mini-golden-age. So when we   look back at the empire to ask why the Byzantines  endured after Rome falls in 476, it’s for the same   reason as when Constantinople fell in 1204, but  the Byzantines, the greeks, the Rhomaioi, endured. And here we are – that's it. That's the history  of Rome – from the first origins of that city by   the Tiber to the fall of the Basileia Rhomaion and  the end of the last true Roman State. Of course,   that's not quite the entire story, as I easily  could have gone on gushing about architecture,   or followed the progression of Roman literature  across that multi-millennium span, but that was   never the goal here – This was, as concise as I  could hope to get it, a clean, singular narrative   of Roman civilization across more than 2000  years – a comprehensive and unifying history,   but certainly not a definitive one.    Notably, my history of Roman statehood ends  right at the dawn of the Italian Renaissance,   where classical art and scholarship would  spring to the front of European consciousness   and continue to influence Western culture up  through our present day. And in the meantime,   Germany sat at the helm of a Roman-inspired Empire  for its own thousand-year run. In that regard,   the Roman legacy left a massive impact  on European society long after the   original Roman state was gone. Because  although the old empire “Fell” in 476 AD,   by the year 1000 Rome remained the cultural  center-point for all of Europe: in religion,   language, art & architecture, literature,  and politics. Likewise in the East,   the civilization cultivated by the Byzantines  endured long after Kostantiniyye came under the   reign of the Sultan. Even when those states died,  the ideas they stood for and the people who called   them home carried on regardless. Rome always  adapts, and these were its final transformations.    And that’s just as   true outside their Mediterranean heartland as it  was within it. Roman Christianity spread further   afield in the Medieval period than any legion had  dared to march. Across the sea, the new Muslim   empires made classical Greco-Roman scholarship  a key ingredient in the Islamic civilization   they created. Then far away in a once-unknown  continent, descendants of Roman Britannia looked   to the ancient Republic as a model for their new  nation. And farthest-reaching yet subtlest of all   is their language of Latin, which lives on through  the Romance languages as well as their goofball   hybrid cousins like English. If you can understand  this video in the language I’m speaking it,   odds are pretty damn good that you live in a  world substantially shaped by Roman civilization.    Even in death, Rome is ever-present:   it’s not the first layer of European or Christian  culture, it’s not the most important layer, it’s   not even the most obvious layer sometimes, but it  is always there: influencing the ways we interact   with the world, how we understand our societies,  and the things & ideas we value. Rome is a mess,   but it earned its place as our mess too.      Thank you all so much – truly,   so so much, for watching. This is the culmination  of years and years and years of work on this   channel, and it’s so fulfilling to bring all those  10-minute intervals of biweekly history into one   comprehensive documentary’s-worth of storytelling.  A tremendous thanks to our longtime viewers and   our lovely patrons for making a project this  colossal into a reality. Now pardon me as I   take the absolute thickest nap imaginable, and  I’ll see you in the next, much shorter, video.