If you were to try to name a single city that has had perhaps the greatest impact on the
history of our world, it would be difficult to say for sure, but one city that should
surely be considered, among many, is Rome.
How did this city begin, how did it become the biggest and most powerful city in the
ancient world?
How did it fare through the middle ages, and how is it still relevant today?
According to ancient Roman legend, the Latin-speaking tribes of Latium (now Italy’s Lazio region)
were believed to have descended from refugees from Troy, likely in the 11th century BC,
made up of a small group of survivors of the Trojan War, led by Prince Aeneas.
They settled the central part of Italy’s Tyrrhenian Sea coast, and created numerous
city-states and worshipped Greek gods with Latin names.
No, it wasn’t theft if they were this similar to begin with.
In the 8th century BC, former princess turn Vestal Virgin, Rhea Silvia, was raped by Mars,
and gave birth to the twins Romulus and Remus.
In order to not cause a significant challenge to the throne of Alba Longa, the two were
put out into the River Tiber, and found ashore by a wolf who nursed them to health.
They were raised by farmers, protected the villagers from bandits, and thus became quite
popular.
Eventually, they went out to found their own city, but couldn’t agree which hill to found
it on, so Romulus eventually killed Remus, and Rome emerged a day later.
Unlike most other Latin city-states, they welcomed outcasts into their society, as well,
to build a population.
Some of the details of Rome’s founding are pretty complicated (and also pretty f**ked
up), so I’ll leave it there.
Rome started out as a kingdom, really a city-state, and had seven kings, from Romulus to Lucius
Tarquinius Superbus, or Tarquin the Proud (by the way, I’m going to try to pronounce
these names the way they would have been pronounced).
The kings established the framework of what Rome was to be, establishing things like calendars
and sewer systems.
However, the one problem was that the seventh king, Tarquin, basically sucked, so he was
deposed, and Rome vowed to never again give one man (and yes, it was generally men) sole
power over the country.
In 509 BC, the Roman Republic was established, a democratic society led by the Senate, with
two Consuls, elected once a year.
These senators came from the Patrician class, which was really a certain class of families
that were allowed to hold political office.
Everyone else were the Plebeians, even if they were as rich as Patrician families.
This angered quite a few people, until the rules were relaxed, and the plebs were allowed
into politics.
Fast forward, and it’s the year 264 BC, when Rome decides to take part in the newest
trend, So You Think You Can Mediterranean?
This was the start of the First Punic War, where Rome wanted Sicily, but Carthage, based
in modern-day Tunisia, (as well as some Greek colonies) already occupied it, but then some
fighting happened, and by the end of the war, in 246 BC, Rome now owned Sicily.
By the way, I should mention that, since Rome and Carthage were quickly becoming the two
superpowers of the Mediterranean, these three wars were probably the most important in Roman,
and likely by extension, Western history.
Anyway, in 218 BC, the Second Punic War started.
Hannibal, son of the successful General Hamilcar Barca, who made him declare an oath to never
be a friend of Rome, waged war against Rome while he was in his 20s.
Not exactly a friendly thing to do.
Hannibal’s most famous accomplishment came when, in 218 BC, he marched an army of elephants,
from Hispania, across the Alps, and into Italia, where he terrorized the Italian countryside.
The reason he did this, though, wasn’t because it was strategic (in fact, most of his army
perished in the mountains), it was because Rome now controlled the waterways, which would
have made a sea invasion impossible, since Rome also had much better ships.
However, by 201 BC, the war was going so badly for Carthage, that they were forced to abandon
Hispania.
The Third Punic War went from 149 to 146 BC, which was essentially the Siege of Carthage,
largely brought on by former Roman Consul, Marcus Porcius Cato, or Cato the Elder, who
ended all his speeches with the line, “and I also think Carthage must be destroyed”.
Imagine what that must have been like?
Cato: Res praeterea in Hispania agricolis deprimere oportet nos super tributa.
[We should lower taxes on farmers in Hispania] Et ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
[Oh, and Carthage must be destroyed]
Imagine if politicians did this today?
Anyway, the Siege of Carthage ended in 146 BC, when, under the leadership of a young
Tiberius Gracchus Rome captured the city, selling its citizens into slavery, and pouring
salt into the ground so nothing could grow on its former grounds, and destroying the
city to such an extent that we today can’t find it on a map.
It was somewhere around modern Tunis, but we’re not completely sure.
After this, the successful General Tiberius Gracchus, who was now fighting for farmers’
rights, became very unpopular in the senate, to the point where they accused him of trying
to become king, so they stabbed him and threw him into the Tiber.
A little less than 100 years later, though, another successful general, this time conquering
Gallia, would be accused of the same thing, Julius Caesar.
You see, the Republic had a system in place, where, in a time of crisis, a general or consul
could be temporarily promoted to the title of “Dictator”, and by 45 BC, iacta alea
est, and Caesar was granted this title for life, because of his popularity.
But, 23 stabs later, and the Senators had proven how they felt about this.
But, shocker, the people felt differently, and after 17 more years (inset civil war here),
and Octavian, Caesar’s adopted son, changed his name to Augustus Caesar, and became the
first Emperor of the Roman Empire.
They changed the name so that he wouldn’t be a “king”.
To many, Rome’s success stories kind of start here, despite the 700 years of previous
history.
Rome was under the control of the Caesar dynasty, which inspired many later empires and their
leaders to call themselves something similar, from Kaiser i-Rum in the early Ottoman Empire,
to the Kaiser of Germany, to being pronounced more like the word “seizure” in French
and English.
After Augustus, there was Tiberius, who was paranoid of assassination, and spent most
of his rule secluded in Capri, then came Crazy Caligula, and then Claudius, with his stutter,
limp, and successful conquest of Britain, and then the dynasty ended with Nero, who,
despite also being crazy, didn’t actually play the fiddle while Rome burned in 64 AD.
After Nero committed suicide in 68 AD, Galba took the throne, and then Otho, and then Vitellius,
and then Vespasian, commencing the Flavian Dynasty.
Around this time, the Jews rebelled, the second temple was destroyed, and the plundered goods
went to fund construction of the Flavian Amphitheater, or Colosseum, opened by Vespasian’s son,
Titus Flavius.
Now, as Rome expanded, it did so while also making newly conquered provinces Roman, not
just property of a government operated in the city of Rome, but everyone living in outer
provinces (at least those who weren’t slaves) were full Roman citizens.
They even did this with their pantheon of gods, where they would bring some gods from
conquered tribes into their religion.
For one example in Britain, the Romans didn’t want to give up their goddess Minerva, while
the Celts didn’t want to give up their goddess Sulis, so they combined the two into Sulis-Minerva.
After the once prosperous city of Pompeii was destroyed in the year 79, and basically
just forgotten, the Flavian dynasty continued with Domitian, Nerva, and then Trajan, the
first emperor born outside Italia, oversaw the empire’s largest territorial expanse
in 117, and swiftly followed by wall-building Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, Lucius Verus, philosopher-emperor
Marcus Aurelius, and ending with Commodus.
By 180 AD, however, came the end of Pax Romana, a two-century period in Roman history that
was actually pretty peaceful, both inside and just outside the empire.
Noticing the empires size, Diocletian proclaimed a new system in 293 for governing the empire,
known as the “tetrarchy”, which would split the empire into two halves, each ruled
by a senior “Augustus”, and a junior “Caesar”.
However, by 324 AD, Constantinus/Constantine I reassembled the empire under his control,
and declared that Christianity would be tolerated in the Roman Empire.
He died in 337 AD, converting to Christianity on his deathbed.
Theodosius I, dying in 395, the same year Christianity was made the state religion,
would be the last emperor to rule over both halves of the Roman Empire.
The 5th century, however, would turn out quite badly for the Western Roman Empire, and a
bit of a bother to the Eastern Roman Empire, especially as Rome became a shadow of its
former self, and the imperial capital was even moved to Ravenna.
Over the century, the empire gave up province after province to various Germanic tribes,
and in 476, Romulus Augustus, the last Western Emperor was deposed by Odoacer, who briefly
established a kingdom in Italy, until the Eastern Roman Empire, under Justinian I, reclaimed
it by the Eastern Roman Empire’s territorial height in 555.
In the 8th century, though, as we begin to split our story off from the rest of the old
empire, the century began with church arguments, and ended with a brief Lombard invasion in
772, which was ended by Charlemagne a year later.
On Christmas, 800, the Pope went up to Charlemagne, and decided, “Surprise!
You’re the new Emperor of Rome!”, to which Charlemagne might have said, “Dude, knock
first!”.
Well, they were in St. Peter’s Basilica, so maybe it wasn’t that much of a shock,
but Charlemagne was the first “Western Roman Emperor” in over 300 years, so people thought
this was a big thing.
Nah, not really.
One thing I should also mention is that a new state was established, simply known as
the Papal States, established in 754 AD (so close to being symmetrical).
During this time, Italy was split into multiple tiny states, also including the Kingdom of
Venice as well as the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, as well as Genoa, as well as Florence, as
well as Canada.
The Papal States, essentially the direct precursor to Vatican City, was more powerful than it
may have looked on a map, since the Pope basically controlled everything, unless you weren’t
Catholic.
Things were somewhat stable in Lazio for the next thousand years, though Italy was still
too divided to contribute to the first rounds of colonialism.
At the turn of the 19th century, Rome was briefly captured by Napoleon, but that didn’t
last long.
However, in the 1860s and 70’s, a new threat came upon the horizon.
*Sniff, sniff*, do you smell that?
It’s fascism!
Well, not at first, but we’ll get to that.
Actually, it was the very non-fascist Kingdom of Italy, who, in 1870, decided Rome would
make a way better capital than Turin, and so they took it.
The Pope hid behind the walls of the Vatican until 1929, until they finally struck a deal
with the actually fascist Benito Mussolini to let them be independent, though hilariously
tiny.
Italy established some colonies in Libya, Somalia and Ethiopia, but by 1914, WWI came
along, and Italy initially joined the Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary,
but not the Central Powers.
In 1915, however, they were brought into secret meetings with representatives from the Allied
and Central Powers, the Allies offering them territory for joining them, and the Central
Powers offering the same for neutrality.
Italy chose the other option to neutrality, much like we did last winter.
After the war, they were also given a permanent seat in the League of Nations.
In 1929, the same year as the previous agreement with the Pope, there was a huge crash on Wall
Street, no, like, an economic crash, and the whole world basically blew up.
All the sudden, everyone was doing absolutely poorly, and people were going off to form
new political ideas, leading to socialism and fascism.
Germany and Italy went with fascism, which went rather poorly for them by 1945.
After the war, King Victor Emmanuel III abdicated, and proclaimed his son Umberto as his successor
in May, 1946, but a month later, republicans won a popular referendum, and the Kingdom
of Italy became the current Republic of Italy.
Italy became a founding member of the EU, and a member of NATO (and held some US missiles),
and Rome hosted the 1960 Summer Olympics, and the 1990 FIFA World Cup.
After the opening of Leonardo da Vinci-Fiumicino Airport in 1961, tourism took off, and Rome
attracts 7-10 million tourists every year, while having a population of about 4 million,
the 3rd most visited city in the EU.
Plus they have a sovereign nation within their city limits.
Not bad for such a city.
Thanks for watching this summary of the history of the city of Rome, or the history of Italy,
in a sense.
I apologize if I missed something massive, but to be fair, it’s Rome we’re talking
about here!
If you enjoyed it, please give it a like, share it, and subscribe to learn something
new every Sunday.