Rome: An Empire's Story Read Online Free PDF

Simon Price and Peter Thonemann’s The Birth of Classical Europe (London, 2010) and Chris Wickham’s The Inheritance of Rome (London, 2009), respectively the first and second volumes of the Penguin History of Europe. Two excellent guides to social and economic history for at least part of the period are Peter Garnsey and Richard Saller, The Roman Empire: Economy, Society, Culture (London, 1987) and Peter Garnsey and Caroline Humfress, The Evolution of the Late Antique World (Cambridge, 2001). Michael Crawford’s The Roman Republic (London, rev. edn. 1992) is a model of how Roman history can and should be written, argumentatively and based on every available kind of evidence from archaeology, coins, and inscriptions to contemporary documents and later literature.

II
EMPIRES OF THE MIND
Then Romulus, proudly clad in the tawny pelt of the she-wolf who nursed him, will ensure the future of the race, will found the martial walls and from his own name call them ROMANS . I have fixed no boundaries to their dominions, no fixed term to their rule, I have given them EMPIRE WITHOUT END . Even harsh Juno, who at present fills land and sea and sky with fear, will in the end think better of them, and at my side will show her favour to the Romans, masters of the world, the people of the toga. This has been decreed.
    (Virgil, Aeneid 1.275–83)
    Empire came to bewitch the Roman imagination. Ours too. Every study of ancient Rome, whether of its love poetry or festivals, its monumental art or the routines of the family, now invokes empire as one—sometimes as the — crucial context. But what they understood and we understand by ‘empire’ is not always the same thing. This chapter explores some of different senses of empire that are entwined at the heart of our stories of Rome.
    An Imperial People
    Sometimes it feels as if empire was written into Roman DNA. The Romans of the classical period definitely believed something like this. When epicpoets or historians imagined the very earliest days of the city’s history, they pictured it as already fixed on a course for greatness. The coming of empire was the central theme of the Aeneid , a great epic poem composed by Virgil in the court of Augustus. 1 The epigraph of this chapter is taken from Jupiter’s prophecy of Rome’s future greatness that stands near the start of that epic. If at first it was designed to serve the immediate political needs of the poet and his patron, it had a much more influential afterlife. The Aeneid was the starting point of education in Italy and the western provinces for centuries to come. It occupied a place in Roman culture much like the Declaration of Independence and Constitution do in America, or Shakespeare does in Britain. Constantly quoted and instantly recognizable, lines of the Aeneid are even ubiquitous as graffiti across the empire. Most come from the first book of the epic, suggesting most pupils did not get very far. But the children of provincial notables will have read Jupiter’s famous lines as they struggled to learn Latin, and in the process learnt what it was to be Roman too.
    The Aeneid does not tell the story of Augustus’ rise to power, nor even of Rome’s conquest of Italy and the Mediterranean. Instead, the story is set in the heroic age, the period immediately following that of Homer’s two great Greek epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey . It tells how Prince Aeneas led a band of refugees away from the blazing ruin of Troy, after it had been sacked by the Greeks. The first six books follow their wanderings further and further west, driven first by fear, then drawn on by destiny into a strange and strangely modern new world. Monsters, hostile natives, and angry gods try to frustrate their journey. Then there are temptations along the way. No berth is more alluring than Carthage, which the Trojans find under construction, and ruled by Dido, the beautiful Phoenician queen and another refugee from the eastern Mediterranean. Of course