Rise. Height. Fall.
From villages to empire
Rome began as a small city-state on the banks of the Tiber, traditionally founded in 753 BC. Through centuries of war and diplomacy it expanded across the Italian peninsula, then into the wider Mediterranean world. By defeating Carthage in the three Punic Wars and absorbing the Hellenistic kingdoms, the Republic became the undisputed master of the ancient world.
Yet the Republic was ill-equipped to govern such scale. A century of civil wars — Caesar and Pompey, Octavian and Antony — tore the old constitution apart. In 27 BC the Senate granted Octavian the title Augustus, and the Roman Empire was born.
Julius Caesar — whose assassination ended the Republic
Masters of the world
Under the Julio-Claudian and Flavian dynasties, and especially during the Five Good Emperors (96–180 AD), Rome reached its territorial and cultural zenith. Trajan pushed the frontiers further than anyone before or after.
Roman engineering left monuments still standing today: aqueducts, the Colosseum, triumphal arches, and roads driven straight as arrows across every terrain. The philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote his Meditations on campaign — a text still read two millennia later.
The Colosseum — completed 80 AD under Emperor Titus
The long unravelling
Historians have proposed dozens of causes for Rome's decline, and most were working simultaneously — military pressure, crippling taxation, inflation, political instability, and successive plagues steadily sapped the empire's strength.
Constantine moved the capital east to Constantinople. Through the 5th century the Western Empire fragmented. On 4 September 476 AD, Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustulus — the last Western emperor. The Eastern Empire endured nearly another thousand years, until Constantinople fell to the Ottomans on 29 May 1453.