hello in this lecture we're talking about the roman empire and the points that we'll cover are the rule of augustus caesar augustus caesar emerges victorious in the end of the destruction at the end of the destruction of the republic that we talked about last time he restores order and sets rome on a different trajectory we'll talk about the pax ramana and we'll talk about the transformation of the roman empire here is a bust and picture of augustus caesar he augustus caesar as we learned was part of the second triumvirate um but with his triumvirate partners he parted ways they became rivals and in a series of wars fought not just on the italian peninsula but in egypt and other places in the roman empire he defeated his enemies finally mark anthony and cleopatra famously at the battle of actium in 31 bce mark anthony and cleopatra both committed suicide and augustus returned to rome uncontested we look to his name at the time was octavian and he changed his name um and took on the the name of augustus caesar he goes down in history as having a very successful reign through his longevity his command over the army and his manipulation of political symbols and language that masked his power augustus conceded augustus succeeded in restoring political stability to rome he also transformed republican rome into imperial rome let me say a little bit more about that he assumes the title princeps which is an acknowledgment that something's different um but princeps meant the first man of the principate so this is the the principal is the roman political system invented by augustus it is a disguised monarchy in which the princess the first man is the emperor he takes the title augustus caesar he rules from 27 bce to 14 ce in the east even during his lifetime he is seen as a god and emperor but on the italian peninsula hearkening back to this these century old traditions that started in the 500s when the patrician class of rome overthrew the etruscan monarchy the etruscan monarchs there was a deep rooted aversion to a monarchy remember many senators acceded to the violent murder of caesar based on a fear that he would call himself king he called himself dictator for life we'd seen some dis dictators before um but so that the idea of kingship and monarchy was an idea that sat very poorly with romans because of the story it had been telling itself for centuries nonetheless the rome that augustus caesar ruled over remained a republic in name only this is one man rule um i think the record shows he was in large part up to the task but it meant he did um he did an awful lot of that work here just to switch switch pictures of him um here's another bust of augustus and we'll talk about um sculpture but notice the very idealized smooth skin for all the hours that he's putting in and to pull off what he pulled off he had to put in a lot of hours um and you can contrast it to this bust from a coin of caesar down in the corner that didn't hide the wrinkles and the care in his face and so here we see and some aesthetic differences between the reign of julius caesar and sculpture as it manifested under augustus caesar what are his goals his goals are to restore stability we've seen years of fighting in the streets in distant battles tension conflict violence he wants to restore stability he wants to restore order and he wants to restore legitimacy part of the problem is that we'd have to we'd had rome saw too many people in the centuries last republic claiming legitimacy without having sufficient buy-in to have a peaceful productive tenure so augustus restores the trappings of republic but the reality is one man rule how does he do it well basically he he assumes all the jobs he is counsel he is tribune he is um and he is this new title he creates the princess and the princess controls other appointments so we see more and more roles in government are not elected they're appointed and even as the institutions remain that continue to present that vision of shared power representative power separation of powers the one man augustus occupies so many of these roles so his authority is unchecked by that separation of powers concept that obtained for so long in the roman republic and that is one of the foundational principles of the republic of the united states of america so how does he go about this well he uses a combination of hardball tactics and softball tactics hardball conte his hardball tactics include he keeps control of the army he institutes a number of reforms he moves from having a citizen militia um where people are called up they go on campaign they'd return to their farms of course we'd seen that model be chipped away and chipped away over the years till the army doesn't even necessarily have a um own property have that property owning requirement um and augustus says we'll have this reform no more standing militia will have a full-time standing army this is your career um for decades and you'll move all around the empire and there's no um none of this on season off season type of life the and the army as we talked about in the primordium doesn't just come into the city and troops don't walk the streets only the praetorian guard um in rome they protect the princess and they also do do policing there they walk the cities of rome but not the army augustus creates colonies of retired soldiers he establishes about 40 different colonies across the roman empire and whereas soldiers and returning generals had created such problems in the past this gets them out of the way out of the center and provides a life for them meanwhile being these people that have been um honed in the roman army for their whole career settled in some far province they contribute to a process of romanization augustus also reduces the size of the army he lessened the expenditures and he also he also reduces the um eye towards expansion he contributed to building the limeys we'll see pictures of those augustus accepted the rhine river as the extent of the empire his successors won't keep to that rome will continue to expand but there was this practical uh view of the limits of roman capabilities and resources as opposed to some megalomaniacal desire to expand expand endlessly and keep in mind one of the benefits of expanding new territories is the booty that one could gain on on taking a territory um and so there there's a recognition of the the booty one gained at first pass um was often tempered by the expenses of trying to keep control of an area so that's a few words about the army augustus also he initiates provincial administrative reforms he recognizes that corruption is a major problem it has contributed to the instability of previous decades and so he makes the following reforms one we're going to pay salaries if you don't pay people to do a certain job then how can you expect them to not fleece the people underneath them and if the people underneath them are fleeced too much this ferments unrest people will only take so much um so there is this sense we will pay salaries and you will be expected to not fleece the people he institutes merit hires so it's not so to move away from nepotism who you know who you're related to and say based on your service and demonstrated competencies you will be assigned this since augustus so this is an hr a human resources challenge augustus is um is willing to do that work um and so he is this practice of merit hires works for helping to re-establish stability across the empire and through the imperial bureaucracy he does other things to improve the bureaucracy and granted rome has a catch-22 the bureaucracy is too small to govern this large empire effectively but at the same time it's too big to um kind of be subject to sound oversight augustus greatly reduced corruption and the exploitation that had flourished in the late republic by creating well-paid civil service open to all classes not perfect is there still corruption yes or did do still people still get ahead through their connections yes but it's an improvement on what had been augustus also undergo um implements law reforms he creates a profession dedicated to juris prudence he formalizes in writing different law codes a citizen law law of various peoples and one of the things that we see manifesting in augustus's written law codes is this innovation that intent matters what what is what is in your heart and what your intentions are are significant in determining how guilty or innocent one is in a crime it's why in the united states of america um this is a remnant that we still see uh present in our legal system it's the difference between homicide one and manslaughter in both cases a life ends um the charge of murder means that there was intent that it has been determined there was intent to kill whereas manslaughter can be this was ending a life accidentally um and it's different we're gonna talk next time more about religion so what's different here is that the romans they never cared what you believed in your heart so long as you showed up and performed the rituals to the gods of the state that's what mattered no one's gonna there's no inquisition to make sure that you have the right belief that's coming we'll talk about the christian inquisition we'll talk about that attempt to know what's in one's heart romans didn't care about that you show up do your be at the ritual we're good to go um here this innovation in law is starting to show an interest in the state kind of turning its attention to the the inner um to knowing the heart of its its citizens so those are some of the um hardball tactics that augusta took he also advanced his goals of restoring stability order and legitimacy through a number of softball tactics of course some of those um and that money of these softball tactics um took place through a very hard medium marble and stone here i wanted to just point out this is a picture of this is a statue of augustus the augustus of prima porta which was probably a replica of a house in his a statue in the home of his wife and i recommend to you to watch a han academy video analyzing this statue with all of its symbolism in his breastplated vest he associates himself with the favor of the roman gods and reminds people of his victory in battles and with the little baby riding a dolphin down at his feet he cupid writing a dolphin he associates himself with the greek gods themselves will see more of that as the empire proceeds he invests in a great amount of building projects on his deathbed he is said he is said to have said i found a room of bricks i leave to you one of marble and um he may have had a slightly different meaning but he did a lot to build up great monuments of rome he didn't build the coliseum that comes later but he built them a number of fine monuments public spaces a forum some of which well the remnants of which still remain now other soft touch approaches through legislation and propaganda augustus saw with some except some success to check the moral and social decline and revive old roman ideals and traditions there was a palpable perception by contemporaries that there was a need for this um the poet horus wrote a verse that kind of demonstrates that when he wrote time corrupts all what has it not made worse our grandfathers sired feebler children theirs were weaker still ourselves and nor our curse must be to breed even more degenerate heirs so right there we see this motif motif um of the once upon a time things were better things were great and things are getting worse kids used to be tougher and better behaved and um more respectful to their parents whose parents you know walked to school uphill in the snow walk to school in the snow uphill both ways as opposed today's spoiled youth you've you've heard these no doubt yourself and so i think one of the things one of the tasks for the historian is to try and tease out is this just something people say all the time or to what extent do do generations and ages change certainly in terms of sexual maurice his we see things don't move just in one direction um and augustus is part of that trying to re-establish order they're living in a sense that things have decayed from the state of political institutions to the state of individual morality and a restoration is in order so augustus it works to it to re-establish the integrity of the family he does this by legislating against adultery which was at the time the chief ground grounds for divorce and as the republic was unraveling divorce was fairly common um like this in modern society you can see people um referencing the rate of divorce as an example of how society is getting worse until someone points out well there's more divorce now because a century a century ago women didn't have the same um financial autonomy that they have now so maybe we had less divorce but maybe we had even more abuse in marriage or unhappy marriages right so the the fact itself of more divorce depending on the context may indicate may or may not indicate the conclusion some people might draw at any rate back to rome um he so he makes it heart um legislates against adultery he a permanent court was set up to prosecute adulterous wives and their lovers among those found guilty and banished from rome were actually his own granddaughter um his own daughter and granddaughter and finally yeah he he put his money where his mouth was on that one um well well anyway that's a higher level roman history course um and finally to disarm the gangs that had been terrorizing cities he outlawed the carrying of daggers in the city this had once been a um well a for some source of pride but in augustus's view of things it led to too much violence it was going augustus propagated his legitimacy through coins through building projects which i mentioned um he said that um sculpture as we we also saw i showed you sculpture sculpture became more idealized and the early roman world weary caesar that i showed you um in a culture that had celebrated the old the there was there was a reason he was shown with all that wear and care and wrinkles but now instead we're gonna see more of a celebration of idealized youthful strength kind of um mo drawing from the um those idealized greek statues uh celebrating the human form augustus also here is um here is the um the augustus forum that he sponsored to the various gods augustus also sponsored a system of state um kind of literature uh you might say propaganda this picture right here is a um this picture right here is a picture of virgil who is the author of the epic poem the aeneid the aeneid is rome's version of the odyssey just as so the roman gods mapped with the greek gods and there was this cultural taking um the we can see virgil's aeneid as that sort of uh odyssey for romans and what you have here in the bottom you see a map that um charts the travels of this famous trojan that ends up being part of a roman legacy um and up there a third century mosaic image of virgil the author holding a manuscript of the aneed surrounded by the muses cleo the muse of history and melpanene the muse of tragedy on either side of him so um that is an example of his soft touch we will build a roman state that we can be proud of with literature and traditions to make us proud as romans note however rhetoric falls off the map because there's no more room in this society for open debate um i haven't told you yet that our great orator cicero was murdered um probably at the hands of mark anthony and even his um he was murdered at the hands of mark anthony the new roman empire is not a place that celebrates powerful rhetoric and augustus worked to find other types of literature and oral written expression to celebrate so livy horus aeneas ovid are all celebrated authors until ovid was actually exiled to a chilly black sea perhaps having been found out um having been involved in a scandal with augustus's granddaughter julia who was also exiled or um there's one interpretation that perhaps ovid had made remarks suggesting augustus's own misdeeds uh and then finally another soft power thing we see this dance with deification yes in the east he's already in his lifetime being um somewhat deified not so much back in rome but what happens is after an emperor passes away we'll see them more actively associated with gods again this draws from a roman um a roman tradition a lot part of that belief system of even republican rome was honoring the ancestors of the family honoring the dead in one's own family and so we can kind of see it isn't um it isn't a big leap to come to a place where this um hyper accelera celebration and association with gods of the first citizen the the princess the the first man of the principal so the reign of augustus initiates the pox romana and this is generally um timed from the rule of augustus caesar to the um end of the emperorship of um marcus aurelius and the pox ramana um initiates a time of relative peace open trade and communication and a time when things are good for a lot of roman citizens here is a picture of the expanding roman empire the medium green is the um extent of the empire at augustus's death and we see the famed network of roman roads throughout the roman empire and we see uh this map here shows us again kind of um outlines and different products that are grown it is not however it is not all a happy um it's not a happy story for everyone the roman tacitus wrote they make a desert and call it peace is how the roman historian tacitus quoting a caledonian chieftain calcus who rebelled against rome a speech that he had made um this map of england shows the numerous campaigns that the roman military um went on in england in order to subdue crowds there that did not want to be part um subject to the roman emperor so for them it wasn't so much epox ramana uh down here use the picture is an 18th century oak engraving from england recalling the um the vodka of an english tribe who led an uprising against rome in the 60s so and that is just to put on um the pax romana let's not put two rosie of a um a veneer on it and we see even in this age some of the problems um brewing but we'll we'll leave those for now and come to those later it's easy to see identify problems um with the hindsight of history and even as some of those roots are present and have been throughout our look at roman history um this is considered a pretty good time also i um here is a picture of tacitus that i thought i would show this roman orator senator historian who said many many pity things we could talk a long time about quotes of tacitus and i thought that um he among other things wrote it is the rare fortune of these days that one may think what one likes and say what one thinks that's his take on the time he's living in um and maybe hearkening back to that to my remark about um rhetoric is gone and there is and one can live well but there are limits to critiquing the state one of the things that rome needs to do in this time is bound itself um and or not that it needs to but there's this recognition of how far can we go it was probably this was probably that i will go to the ends of the earth was the sentiment that probably contributed to alexander the greats and then mutinying on him in india if you'll recall and so augustus certainly had um had a sense of um infinite expansion isn't the way to go um he actually forgive me he recognized not not the rhine but danube as a limit of the um roman extension although his successors would go farther but the rome started to bound its empire in with with um the limey's so it looks like limes but it was pronounced limeys and this was um sometimes used as um a district but generally meant a boundary line or a marker and so the roman army one of the things they would do they built roads and then they would also build these walls and sometimes there are actual walls as you see here but otherwise they were kind of ditches and ramparts to kind of um keep barbarian armies from coming in certainly um you could build a ditch that a horse would that it would definitely uh impede the passage of calvary so um and and so that was done and it could be um depending on the materials present you'd have to dig a lot of ditches a whole lot of manpower but not necessarily assemble a fence um and so the there's a variety of ways in which the limeys were constructed we do see in the the century of the roman empires that they that they're built in various places out there in in england you had hadrian's wall being built i showed you a picture of that and then at other places in the empire where there's particular challenges from outsiders the the outsiders that we're going to focus on most when we talk about the transformation will be those germanic barbarians up in the north um uh so those are kind of the the limey's room thinking about its own end uh its own um territorial extent rather not its chronological end so um the pucks are mana so a good amount of good times we might say it's not uh good everywhere there's uprisings being put down in england over around the black sea we also have um challenges to roman hegemony campaigns that are fought in the middle east in jerusalem we'll see the roman jewish war so um and many those that were defeated um might have been killed they might have been enslaved and many romans um and many romans themselves even in this time of of the pox romana see in rome's imperialism a complete abandonment of the roman republican values that they thought had made rome great if you will whatever criticism by republican-minded citizens and whatever political um troubles or wayward emperors and boy there are some wayward emperors um the problem of one-man rule when you don't get a good ruler um those problems are tremendously exacerbated and people suffer um this period did see an unprecedented level of socioeconomic stability that fostered a trade and fostered cultural contact within the emperor empire and beyond it um a period of relative peace the longest period of um relative peace in western history some say we see it's a period of economic prosperity this restoring stability at the center went a long way in helping achieve that um rome's unification of the ancient world had far-reaching economic consequences it was the box romano was responsible for the elimination of tolls and a number of artificial barriers the suppression of piracy and lawlessness and the establishment of a reliable coinage such factors along with this durable relative piece explain in large measure the greatest expansion of commerce that occurred in the first and century second centuries of the common era industry was also stimulated but its expansion was limited since wealth remained concentrated and there was no mass market for industrialized goods that's centuries away um industry was organized on the small shop basis the bread maker the um and various types of artisans producers were widely scattered about and generally worked in self-sufficient ways and that later economists would contrast to efficiency um the economy of the empire it remained basically agricultural and what one thing we do see happening is these huge estates these latifundia they prospered and on these tracks usually belonging to absentee owners who were probably um many of them in rome kind of working as best they could their political advantage appointments etc and on these estates with their absentee owners you had large number of colonized free tenants they tilled the soil basically as sharecroppers um or tenant tenant farmers even and these colonize began replacing slave labor while the empire was expanding more rapidly they are constantly bringing back booty of enslaved peoples and those enslaved peoples are going to work on the big states and some other public work projects perhaps but as expansion ceases these disenfranchised once upon a time landowner perhaps or others they become they start to do that labor um and this these are um it's becoming increasingly hard to secure labor because there's a disappearance of the flow of war captains so those those are kind of some general remarks here i'm going to go through some slides really quickly without much emphasis on kind of ruler to ruler this isn't the kind of history i necessarily like to do but just to kind of give us a sense some of you have heard some of these names and we have with augustus he is from a line that's called the julio claudian emperor um emperors and they were it's sort of a dynasty but this is isn't a bloodline dynasty here we have adoption um and sort of this the emperor picks the person he thinks is going to do best the senate approves him maintaining those fictions of a representative government and it passes on in this batch of julio claudia emperors we really have some um uh some figures like caligula and nero who have given um historians and historical filmmakers in hollywood a lot of material to work with they provide some examples of how much damage a bad ruler can do and some of the some of the excesses that get tolerated when one is sitting at the very top of the hierarchy this and we'll talk more about nero and his persecution of christians um and excess by someone at the top of the hierarchy that resulted in much death and suffering um the giulio claudian emperors were followed by the flavian dynasty here we actually do have a father and two sons in visitation titus and domitian i won't say a lot about these but just to kind of point to other events that happen in their reign in this first century of ce the common error and now you'll know now we're counting up no more bce ce you won't really see that in my dates because we're counting up we haven't brought jesus into our story yet although um initially that changing of the calendar turns on him people in this time period um or in the first century aren't yet counting like this but nonetheless we will to try and make sense of a chronology at any rate it's under visbation that we have the first jewish roman war from a great revolt by jews in jerusalem the roman army comes we see the destruction of the second temple the siege of masada there's another um movie that's been made about that more than one back in rome the famous one of the most famous symbols of ancient rome the colosseum is begun finished under his uh son um it is on his son titus's watch that mount vesuvius erupts in the year 79 um and there is from a fresco in pompeii actually um the god buckus uh with vesuvius in the background the pox romana is rounded out what's known as the five good emperors this again is not a bloodline and i'll never really ask you to know these people again these slides are just for you to have some kind of data points in your sense of what are some of the um rulers of the roman empire empire um maybe is something to know is that trajan an emperor who is actually probably born in the iberian peninsula and doesn't live in rome um it is under him that the empire reaches its greatest extent um a very celebrated rain um sufficiently stable and long length of rain is often good for stability um he also participates in devaluing the currency something we'll talk more about and the um and we'll talk a little bit more about marcus aurelius whose son commodus is a bit of a piece of work for all his dad's fine philosophy um but he was very much a kind of philosopher philosopher in in power something we well a philosopher in power um edward gibbon an 18th century historian who wrote one of the most famous account books um the history of the decline and fall of the roman empire 18th century six volume collection if you ever have insomnia don't read this because it actually is a pretty um it's a page turner he really writes with a sense of drama about the moment in ways that the present-day scholars might pooh-pooh but i share with you this quote from from gibbon um characterizing the uh this period he says if a man were called upon to fix that period in history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous he would without hesitation name that which elapsed from the deaths of domitian to the extension of commodus um what he's pre he's naming the the period we call the poxer mana so um historians still they chip away very much at this notion of a pox ramana i took some moments to say hey it's not all that good there's peop it's not good if you don't like roman rule and want to be your own sovereign power but um nonetheless that that title um plucks ramana remains for us here's another slide kind of showing you more marble busts of roman dead um romans now i just want to um make one point so back in the city though i've talked a little bit about the extent of the empire back in the city we have the what's become normal in rome are massive public works projects and also um a massive a dole um and and that is kind of giving out bread to people that don't have work don't have sufficient work um and so this when we look at what happened to rome now it's something to be aware of that rome is increasingly populous this state provides food aid essentially um and people that have little means they they know that so it kind of um drives a little bit of a consolidation to this big city of course in big cities there's also jobs that people can do but the um one of the one of the lessons of the destruction of the republic had been how dangerous it could be to have mass mobilization of disenfranchised people and so under the roman empire it is a state priority to provide free food um maybe um 250 000 recipients getting food even for their families so that might have been um historians wonder if maybe more than 700 000 people get food um get free food from the state we don't really know the the population um but it is significant it's a significant number of people and so the state to maintain this goal of stability which had been so uh such a premium fundamental goal for augustus one of the things the state does is it provides that food aid it also provides entertainment there's a give people something to do so they don't cause trouble so we see circuses we see a big hippodrome where races are held that people can go and watch we see betting we see gladiator events um that are dramatic and exciting um sometimes people really die often um and so gladiator events and then there's other holidays that are that are spent in all in ancient rome by 200 or so you have about 100 days a year where some sort of public entertainment is is on display and um some and one juvenile who was a kind of writer and a little bit rye critic in his satire wrote wrote the following about that he said already long ago from when we sold our vote to no man the people have abdicated our abdicated our duties for the people who once upon a time handed out military command high civil office legions everything now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things bread and circuses um and this is where this phrase you might have heard you know give people bread in a circus um juvenile thought it was a troubling um dynamic in society it's also been said that in our own modern culture we have the equivalent of the bread and circus is is fox news and walmart um and a constant entertainment in the television that really stimulates and angers people and gives them something to fear you know as exciting perhaps as a gladiatorial combat um and then meanwhile we have a system where people can buy cheap plastic things at walmart they might break they might be bad for your health that there's that kind of consumer satisfaction that is delivered so some have made have made the comparison that you know fox news or constant entertainment and and and walmart are the uh 20th century 21st century american equivalents to the the bread in a circus and people might um talk about and think about what that means for society and what that means for society or society is going if we were hegelians we would think history is going in one particular direction and if we just can um find and pay attention to the right indicators we can know where we're located in history that's a somewhat passe idea and now historians were more inclined to think about contingency and and the agency of individuals um as as driving the future in directions that no one can know for sure even though we see patterns repeat and dynamics repeat we don't have a sense that history repeats itself i live in a generation that is more more inclined to accept contingency as um as something we need to appreciate in terms of understanding how history moves now so the pucks are mana all isn't all is not well and we're going to i'm gonna again be super super quick here um in the third century we start to see crises um the empire doesn't even hold together entirely this map shows you that the golic roman empire in the third century it breaks off and exists the same thing with the palmarine in the southeast part of the empire a big problem is currency debasement um this is something trajan did he's not the only one um that less and less real precious metal is going into the money this graph here um it shows it may not be entirely correct but sort of general trend less and less silver content is in the money here is another graph indicating um if the blue indicates silver and the orange indicates other metals here is 27 bce where you have nine more than 90 percent of a coin is made out of silver and by 300 ce it's reverse so this leads to problems inflation people don't trust the currency so that economic stability that stretched across the emperor and facilitated what we call the pax romana gives way when you don't really have a working money system so to skip ahead um diocletian who rules from 282 to 305 he is a ruler for whatever we'll say about him he recognizes that the empire's got problems we've got to do things differently and he determines it's too big he creates something called the tetrarchy where he divides the m the roman empire into two different empires with one capital in rome and rome will sort of preside over um the western part of the empire where some linguistic differences have emerged people speak latin or what will become romance languages but in this part of the empire there's more latin speaking and the eastern part of the empire which is going to be based in constantinople um constantinople will be the metropole from which the eastern part of the empire is administered and this part of the empire we have more greek speakers so that we start to see the east west divide it is politically determined at first but it plays off along some linguistic divides we're going to see more cultural divides and more religious divides as well that now what diocletian does he actually divides the empire into four bits with kind of two different emperors and then uh a co-ruler with four different places this statue up is um four leaders symbolizing the tetrarchy the tetrarchy lasts only from 293 to 313. it's an interesting political experiment i mean how often in history do you see people um seed power walk away from power what we the the generalization that tends to hold true is um people with power seek more power power corrupts it isn't something that people um seed willingly but diocletian does see a problem and he makes this move to separate power um where previous empires had thought the solution is in centralizing centralizing power perhaps and sometimes that that works fairly well he says it's unrealistic we've we've got to have um two different centers to govern the tetrarchy doesn't last but this divide into two empires east and west will tremendously significant we'll talk more about that um as our course proceeds here's another um image with some dates and and kind of can help you visualize that now there's so far in all of this i haven't talked about barbarians those germanic peoples that are very much a part of explaining how the roman empire declines falls is transformed all these terms have been applied and i haven't talked at all about christianity and there's a really important story here of how rome moves from a pagan to a christian empire and so we have here marcus irelia sacrificing to the roman gods this philosopher emperor um to a painting of christians being persecuted under nero to this um 9th century byzantine manuscript capturing the emperor constantine's vision before the battle of milvi at the melvian bridge um which is going to lead to the end of persecution so next time we will talk more about the emergence and rise of christianity in rome as rome moves from a pagan to a christian empire