An empire across three continents

• The Roman Empire covered a vast stretch of territory that included most of Europe as we know it today and a large part of the Fertile Crescent and North Africa
• The Roman Empire embraced a wealth of local cultures and languages
• Women had a stronger legal position in the Roman Empire than they do in many countries today
• Much of the Roman Empire's economy was run on slave labour, denying freedom to substantial numbers of persons
• From the fifth century on, the Roman Empire fell apart in the west but remained intact and exceptionally prosperous in its eastern half
• The caliphate built on the prosperity and inherited the urban and religious traditions of the eastern Roman Empire
• Sources for Roman historians

  • Texts (histories, letters, speeches, sermons, laws)
  • Documents (inscriptions, papyri)
  • Material remains (buildings, monuments, pottery, coins, mosaics, landscapes)
• Combining different sources can be a fruitful exercise for historians, but depends on their skill
• The Roman Empire and the Persian Empire were the two superpowers that ruled over most of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East in the period between the birth of Christ and the early part of the seventh century
• The Roman Empire was culturally much more diverse than the Persian Empire
• Latin and Greek were the most widely used languages for administration in the Roman Empire
• The regime established by Augustus in 27 BCE was called the 'Principate'
• The Senate represented the aristocracy, the wealthiest families of Roman and Italian descent, mainly landowners
• The Roman army was a paid professional army where soldiers had to put in a minimum of 25 years of service
• The emperor, the aristocracy and the army were the three main 'players' in the political history of the Roman Empire
• Except for one notorious year (69 CE), the first two centuries of the Roman Empire were relatively stable, with succession to the throne based on family descent
• The 'Augustan age' is remembered for the peace it ushered in after decades of internal strife and centuries of military conquest
• The only major campaign of expansion in the early Roman Empire was Trajan's fruitless occupation of territory across the Euphrates
• The Roman Empire gradually extended its rule by absorbing a whole series of 'dependent' kingdoms into Roman provincial territory
• At its peak in the second century, the Roman Empire stretched from Scotland to the borders of Armenia, and from the Sahara to the Euphrates
• The great urban centres that lined the shores of the Mediterranean were the true bedrock of the Roman imperial system
• The provincial upper classes actively collaborated with the Roman state in administering their own territories and raising taxes
• Throughout the second and third centuries, the provincial upper classes supplied most of the cadre that governed the provinces and commanded the armies
• The emperor Gallienus consolidated the rise to power of the new elite of administrators and military commanders by excluding senators from military command
• Alexandria, Antioch were the biggest among them) were the true bedrock of the imperial system
• It was through the cities that government was able to tax the provincial countrysides which generated much of the wealth of the empire
• The local upper classes actively collaborated with the Roman state in administering their own territories and raising taxes from them
• Throughout the second and third centuries, it was the provincial upper classes who supplied most of the cadre that governed the provinces and commanded the armies
• They came to form a new elite of administrators and military commanders who became much more powerful than the senatorial class because they had the backing of the emperors
• Gallienus (253-68) consolidated their rise to power by excluding senators from military command
• Gallienus forbade senators from serving in the army or having access to it, in order to prevent control of the empire from falling into their hands
• In the late first, second and early third centuries the army and administration were increasingly drawn from the provinces, as citizenship spread to these regions and was no longer confined to Italy
• Individuals of Italian origin continued to dominate the senate at least till the third century, when senators of provincial origin became a majority
• These trends reflected the general decline of Italy within the empire, both political and economic, and the rise of new elites in the wealthier and more urbanised parts of the Mediterranean, such as the south of Spain, Africa and the east
• City in the Roman sense

  An urban centre with its own magistrates, city council and a 'territory' containing villages which were under its jurisdiction
• Villages could be upgraded to the status of cities, and vice versa, usually as a mark of imperial favour (or the opposite)
• One crucial advantage of living in a city was simply that it might be better provided for during food shortages and even famines than the countryside
• Galen: 'The famine prevalent for many successive years in many provinces has clearly displayed for men of any understanding the effect of malnutrition in generating illness. The city-dwellers, as it was their custom to collect and store enough grain for the whole of the next year immediately after the harvest, carried off all the wheat, barley, beans and lentils, and left to the peasants various kinds of pulse - after taking quite a large proportion of these to the city. After consuming what was left in the course of the winter, the country people had to resort to unhealthy foods in the spring; they ate twigs and shoots of trees and bushes and bulbs and roots of inedible plants...'
• Public baths were a striking feature of Roman urban life
• Urban populations also enjoyed a much higher level of entertainment. For example, one calendar tells us that spectacula (shows) filled no less than 176 days of the year!