Roman Empire
In 392 Valentinian II was murdered in Vienne. Arbogast arranged for the appointment of Eugenius as emperor. However, the eastern emperor Theodosius refused to recognise Eugenius as emperor and invaded the West, defeating and killing Arbogast and Eugenius at the Battle of the Frigidus. He thus reunited the entire Roman Empire under his rule.
Theodosius had two sons and a daughter, Pulcheria, from his first wife, Aelia Flacilla. His daughter and wife died in 385. By his second wife, Galla, he had a daughter, Galla Placidia, the mother of Valentinian III, who would be Emperor of the West.
Theodosius was the last Emperor who ruled over the whole Empire. After his death in 395, he gave the two halves of the Empire to his two sons Arcadius and Honorius; Arcadius became ruler in the East, with his capital in Constantinople, and Honorius became ruler in the West, with his capital in Milan and later Ravenna. The Roman state would continue to have two different emperors with different seats of power throughout the 5th century, though the Eastern Romans considered themselves Roman in full. Latin was used in official writings as much as, if not more than, Greek. The two halves were nominally, culturally and historically, if not politically, the same state.
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395–476: Decline of the Western Roman Empire
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After 395, the emperors in the Western Roman Empire were usually figureheads. For most of the time, the actual rulers were military strongmen who took the title of magister militum, patrician or both—Stilicho from 395 to 408, Constantius from about 411 to 421, Aëtius from 433 to 454 and Ricimer from about 457 to 472. The year 476 is generally accepted as the formal end of the Western Roman Empire. That year, Orestes refused the request of Germanic mercenaries in his service for lands in Italy. The dissatisfied mercenaries, including the Heruli, revolted. The revolt was led by the Germanic chieftain Odoacer. Odoacer and his men captured and executed Orestes. Within weeks, Ravenna was captured and Romulus Augustus was deposed, the event that has been traditionally considered the fall of the Roman Empire, at least in the West. Odoacer quickly conquered the remaining provinces of Italy.
Odoacer then sent the Imperial Regalia back to the emperor Zeno. Zeno soon received two deputations. One was from Odoacer requesting that his control of Italy be formally recognised by the Empire, in which case he would acknowledge Zeno's supremacy. The other deputation was from Nepos, asking for support to regain the throne. Zeno granted Odoacer the title Patrician. Zeno told Odoacer and the Roman Senate to take Nepos back; however, Nepos never returned from Dalmatia, even though Odoacer issued coins in his name. Upon Nepos's death in 480, Zeno claimed Dalmatia for the East; J. B. Bury considers this the real end of the Western Roman Empire. Odoacer attacked Dalmatia, and the ensuing war ended with Theodoric the Great, King of the Ostrogoths, conquering Italy under Zeno's authority.
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395–1453: Survival in the East: from Roman to Byzantine Empire
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As the Western Roman Empire declined during the 5th century, the richer Eastern Roman Empire would be relieved of much destruction, and in the mid 6th century the Eastern Roman Empire (known also as the Byzantine Empire) under the emperor Justinian I reconquered Italy and parts of Illyria from the Ostrogoths, North Africa from the Vandals, and southern Hispania from the Visigoths. The reconquest of southern Hispania was somewhat ephemeral, but North Africa served the Byzantines for another century, Italy for another 5 centuries, and Illyria almost a millennium.
Of the many accepted dates for the end of the classical Roman state, the latest is 610. This is when the Emperor Heraclius made sweeping reforms, forever changing the face of the empire. Greek was readopted as the language of government and Latin influence waned. By 610, the Eastern Roman Empire had come under Greek influence and became what many modern historians now call the Byzantine Empire, although the Empire was never called thus by its inhabitants (rather it was called Romania, Basileia Romaion or Pragmata Romaion, meaning "Land of the Romans", "Kingdom of the Romans"), who still saw themselves as Romans, and their state as the rightful successor to the ancient empire of Rome. The sack of Constantinople at the hands of the Fourth Crusade in 1204 is sometimes used to date the end of Eastern Roman Empire: the destruction of Constantinople and most of its ancient treasures, total discontinuity of leadership, and the division of its lands into rival states with a Catholic-controlled "Emperor" in Constantinople itself (see Latin Empire) was a blow from which the Empire never fully recovered. Nevertheless, the Byzantines continued to call themselves Romans until their fall to Ottoman Turks in 1453. That year the eastern part of the Roman Empire was ultimately ended by the Fall of Constantinople. Even though Mehmed II, the conqueror of Constantinople, declared himself the Emperor of the Roman Empire (Caesar of Rome / Kayser-i Rum) in 1453, Constantine XI is usually considered the last Roman Emperor. The Greek ethnic self-descriptive name Roman survives to this day.
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800–1806: Revival in the West: the Holy Roman Empire
On the Christmas Day of year 800 Pope Leo III crowned the Frankish monarch Charlemagne "Emperor of the Romans" and Imperator Augustus, a direct challenge to the Roman throne in Constantinople. This led to a conscious attempt to replace the Byzantine Empire, with papal authority, as the legitimate Roman state. Although land divisions due to inheritance and rivalry between Charlemagne's successors soon fragmented this medieval state, which historians call the Carolingian Empire, it did have considerable cultural influence.
More than 150 years later the title of Emperor of the Romans passed to the German monarch Otto I, who founded the Holy Roman Empire, consisting of some of the territories of Charlemagne's ancient empire, along with all of modern-day Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and some of modern-day Poland. Although most of the emperors were Germanic, the Holy Roman Emperors thought of themselves as being successors to those of the Roman Empire and called themselves Augusti.
The Empire was formally dissolved on August 6, 1806 when the last Holy Roman Emperor, Francis II abdicated, following a military defeat by the French under Napoleon, thus removing the last claim to the Roman throne in western Europe.
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Language
The language of Rome before its expansion was Latin and this became the Empire's official language. By the time of the imperial period Latin could be thought of as at least two languages: the written Classical Latin and the spoken Vulgar Latin. While Classical Latin remained relatively stable, even through the Middle Ages, Vulgar Latin as with any spoken language was fluid and evolving. Vulgar Latin became the lingua franca in the western provinces later evolving into the modern Romance languages: Italian, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Romanian, etc.
Although Latin remained the official and most widely spoken language through to the fall of Rome and for some centuries after in the East, the Greek language was the lingua franca in the eastern provinces.[8] With the exception of Carthage, the Romans generally did not attempt to supplant local cultures and languages. It is to their credit that they generally left established customs in place and only gradually supplemented with the typical Roman-style improvements.[9] Greek was already widely spoken in many cities in the east, and as such, the Romans were quite content to retain it as an administrative language there rather than disrupt tax collection efficiency. As such, it is interesting to note that in the eastern provinces public notices were typically posted in three languages; Latin, Greek, and the local tongue.[citation needed] Moreover, the process of hellenisation continued more extensively, well beyond city boundaries, during the Roman period, for the Romans perpetuated "Greek" culture,[10] but with all the trappings of Roman improvements.[11] This further spreading of Hellenistic culture was largely due to the extensive infrastructure (in the form of entertainment, health, and education amenities, and extensive transportation networks, etc.) put in place by the Romans and their tolerance, and inclusion, of other cultures, a characteristic which set them apart from the xenophobic nature of the Greeks preceding them.[12]
During the 7th century AD Greek became the most widely spoken language in the Empire due to the contraction of the imperial borders to the eastern regions where the Greek language was most dominant; the administrative language was actually changed to Greek during the reign of Heraclius (610-641AD).[13] Since the Roman annexation of Greece in 146BC the Greek language gradually obtained a unique place in the Roman world, owing initially to the large number of Greeks slaves in Roman households.[14] It was also viewed as the language of high culture.[citation needed] In the city of Rome itself Greek gradually became the second language of the educated and the elite.[15] Greek became the common language in early the Church (as it's major centers in the early Christian period were in the East), and the language of scholarship and the arts. However, due to the presence of other widely spoken languages in the densily populated east, such as Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Aramaic and Phoenician (which was also extensively spoken in North Africa), Greek never became as imbedded as Latin eventually did in the west. This is directly evident in the extent to which the derivative languages are spoken today. Like Latin, the language gained a dual nature with the literary language, an Attic Greek variant, existing alongside spoken language, Koine Greek, which evolved into Medieval or Byzantine Greek (Romaic).[16]
By the 4th century AD Greek no longer held such dominance over Latin in the Church, Arts and Sciences as it had previously, resulting to a great extent from the growth of the western provinces (reflected in the publication in the early 5th century AD of the Vulgate Bible, the first officially accepted Latin Bible; before this only Greek translations were accepted). As the Western Empire declined, the number of people who spoke both Greek and Latin declined as well, contributing greatly to the future East–West / Orthodox–Catholic cultural divide in Europe. Important as both languages were, today the descendants of Latin are widely spoken in many parts of the world, while the Greek dialects are limited mostly to Greece, Cyprus, and small enclaves in Turkey and southern Italy. To some degree this can be attributed to the fact that the western provinces fell mainly to "Latinised", Christian tribes, whereas the eastern provinces fell to Muslim Arabs and Turks for whom Greek held less cultural significance.
As alluded to earlier, many other languages existed in the multi-ethnic Empire as well, and some of these were given limited official status in their provinces at various times. These languages were well established before the arrival of Greek, and Latin relatively shortly thereafter, a position they firmly maintained within their respective geographic regions. Notably, by the beginning of the Middle Ages, Syriac and Aramaic had become more widely used by the educated classes in the far eastern provinces, in addition to Greek and Latin.[17] Similarly Coptic and Armenian became significant among the educated in Egypt and Armenia, respectively.
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Legacy
The influence of Roman civilisation (itself influenced by a variety of peoples) the world exhibits today has been aptly (though with some exaggeration) summarised in a National Geographic article entitled The World According to Rome:
The enduring Roman influence is reflected pervasively in contemporary language, literature, legal codes, government, architecture, engineering, medicine, sports, arts, etc. Much of it is so deeply inbedded that we barely notice our debt to ancient Rome. Consider language, for example. Fewer and fewer people today claim to know Latin - and yet, go back to the first sentence in this paragraph. If we removed all the words drawn directly from Latin, that sentence would read; "The."[18]
Several states claimed to be the Roman Empire's successors after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The Holy Roman Empire, an attempt to resurrect the Empire in the West, was established in 800 when Pope Leo III crowned Frankish King Charlemagne as Roman Emperor on Christmas Day, though the empire and the imperial office did not become formalised for some decades. After the fall of Constantinople, the Russian Tsardom, as inheritor of the Byzantine Empire's Orthodox Christian tradition, counted itself the third Rome (with Constantinople having been the second). And when the Ottomans, who based their state on the Byzantine model, took Constantinople in 1453, Mehmed II established his capital there and claimed to sit on the throne of the Roman Empire, and he even went so far as to launch an invasion of Italy with the purpose of "re-uniting the Empire", although Papal and Neapolitan armies stopped his march on Rome at Otranto in 1480. Constantinople was not officially renamed Istanbul until March 28, 1930.
Excluding these states claiming its heritage, if the traditional date for the founding of Rome is accepted as fact, the Roman state can be said to have lasted in some form from 753 BC to the fall in 1461 of the Empire of Trebizond (a successor state and fragment of the Byzantine Empire which escaped conquest by the Ottomans in 1453), for a total of 2,214 years. The Roman impact on Western and Eastern civilisations lives on. In time most of the Roman achievements were duplicated by later civilisations. For example, the technology for cement was rediscovered 1755–1759 by John Smeaton.
The Empire contributed many things to the world, such as a calendar with leap years, the institutions of Christianity and aspects of modern neo-classicistic and Byzantine architecture. The extensive system of roads that was constructed by the Roman Army lasts to this day. Because of this network of roads, the time necessary to travel between destinations in Europe did not decrease until the 19th century, when steam power was invented. Even modern Astrology comes to us directly from the Romans.
The Roman Empire also contributed its form of government, which influences various constitutions including those of most European countries and many former European colonies. In the United States, for example, the framers of the Constitution remarked, in creating the Presidency, that they wanted to inaugurate an "Augustan Age". The modern world also inherited legal thinking from Roman law, fully codified in Late Antiquity. Governing a vast territory, the Romans developed the science of public administration to an extent never before conceived or necessary, creating an extensive civil service and formalised methods of tax collection.
While in the West the term Roman acquired a new meaning in connection with the church and the Pope of Rome the Greek form Romaioi remained attached to the Greek-speaking Christian population of the Eastern Roman Empire (a name still used, at times, by modern Greeks in addition to their common appellation).[19]
The Roman Empire's territorial legacy of controlling the Italian peninsula would serve as an influence to Italian nationalism and the unification (Risorgimento) of Italy in 1861.
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See also
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Notes
- ^ Other possibilities are Imperium Romanum and Romania. Res publica, as a term denoting the Roman "commonwealth" in general, can refer to both the Republican and the Imperial era, while Imperium Romanum is used to denote the territorial extent of Roman authority. The later term Romania, which was eventually carried over to Byzantium, appears in Greek and Latin sources from the fourth century onward. (See Wolff, R.L. "Romania: The Latin Empire of Constantinople". In: Speculum, 23 (1948), pp. 1-34 (pp. 2-3).)
- ^ a b c d Taagepera, Rein (1979). "Size and Duration of Empires: Growth-Decline Curves, 600 B.C. to 600 A.D.". Social Science History 3 (3/4): 125. doi:.
- ^ John D. Durand, Historical Estimates of World Population: An Evaluation, 1977, pp. 253-296.
- ^ During the struggles of the Late Republic hundreds of senators were killed or died, and the Roman Senate had been refilled with loyalists of the First Triumvirate and later those of the Second Triumvirate.
- ^ Octavian/Augustus officially proclaimed that he had saved the Roman Republic and carefully disguised his power under republican forms; consuls continued to be elected, tribunes of the plebeians continued to offer legislation, and senators still debated in the Roman Curia. However, it was Octavian, and every effective emperor thereafter, who influenced everything and controlled the final decisions, and in final analysis, had the legions to back him up, if it ever became necessary.
- ^ Birley, E.B.. "A Note on the Title 'Gemina'". Journal of Roman Studies (18): pp. 56–60.
- ^ Cassius Dio, Roman History LXIII.29
- ^ Fergus Millar, A Greek Roman Empire: Power and Belief under Theodosius II (408-450). Sather Classical Lectures, Vol. 64. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Pp. 279. ISBN 0-520-24703-5; Warren Treadgold "A Concise History of Byzantium" (New York: St Martin's Press, 2001); Warren Treadgold "A History of the Byzantine State and Society" (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997)
- ^ Charles Freeman "The Greek Achievement: The Foundation of the Western World" (New York: Penguin, 1999)
- ^ This is somewhat simplistic as the Romans did not simply adopt/copy Greek or other cultures. See, for example, 'Freeman, C. "The Greek Achievement: The Foundation of the Western World" (New York: Penguin, 1999)' for a more detailed description of how the Romans interacted with Greek (and other) cultures.
- ^ http://www.religiousstudies.uncc.edu/jdtabor/overview-roman-world.html; http://www.jstor.org/pss/3155063; http://www.scriptureinhistory.org.au/Articles/Syria%20article.htm
- ^ Charles Freeman "The Greek Achievement: The Foundation of the Western World" (New York: Penguin, 1999)
- ^ Warren Treadgold "A Concise History of Byzantium" (New York: St Martin's Press, 2001); Warren Treadgold "A History of the Byzantine State and Society" (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997)
- ^ Charles Freeman "The Greek Achievement: The Foundation of the Western World" (New York: Penguin, 1999)
- ^ McDonnell/MacDonnell, Roman Manliness: Virtus and the Roman Republic; Charles Freeman "The Greek Achievement: The Foundation of the Western World" (New York: Penguin, 1999)
- ^ Greek Language, Encyclopedia Britannica
- ^ Versteegh, Cornelis H. M., Greek Elements in Arabic Linguistic Thinking, E. J. Brill, 1977, Chapter 1.
- ^ T.R. Reid "The World According to Rome" National Geographic Vol. 2 No. 2 1997 p. 54. The final statement is not entirely accurate (in terms of the linguistic etymology): many words with Latin roots, such as engineering and sports, were borrowed from French[1][2] and were thus derived indirectly, while the main verb and the preposition in the first sentence are native English forms.
- ^ Encyclopedia Britannica,History of Europe, The Romans, 2008, O.Ed.
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References
- John Bagnell Bury, A History of the Roman Empire from its Foundation to the death of Marcus Aurelius, 1913
- J. A. Crook, Law and Life of Rome, 90 BC–AD 212, 1967, ISBN 0-8014-9273-4
- Suzanne Dixon, The Roman Family, 1992, ISBN 0-8018-4200-X
- Donald R. Dudley, The Civilization of Rome, 2nd ed., 1985, ISBN 0-452-01016-0
- Charles Freeman, The Greek Achievement: The Foundation of the Western World, 1999, ISBN 0-670-88515-0
- Anne Millard, Encyclopedia of World History, 2003, ISBN 0-7460-5361-4
- Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1776–1788
- Adrian Goldsworthy, Roman Warfare, 2000 ISBN 0-304-35265-9
- Peter Heather The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians, 2005, ISBN 0-330-49136-9
- A.H.M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire, 284–602, 1964, ISBN 0-8018-3285-3
- Andrew Lintott, Imperium Romanum: Politics and administration, 1993, ISBN 0-415-09375-9
- Ramsay Macmullen, Roman Social Relations, 50 BC to AD 284, 1981, ISBN 0-300-02702-8
- Michael Rostovtzeff, The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire 2nd ed., 1957
- Santo Mazzarino. The end of the ancient world. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1966, (West Hanover : Halliday Lithograph corp.) English translation by George Holmes
- Ronald Syme, The Roman Revolution, 1939, ISBN 0-19-280320-4
- Colin Wells, The Roman Empire, 2nd ed., 1992, ISBN 0-00-686252-7
- Fergus Millar, A Greek Roman Empire: Power and Belief under Theodosius II (408-450). Sather Classical Lectures, Vol. 64. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Pp. 279. ISBN 0-520-24703-5
- McDonnell/MacDonnell, Roman Manliness: Virtus and the Roman Republic
- Warren Treadgold, A History of the Byzantine State and Society, 1997 ISBN-10: 0-804-72421-0
- Warren Treadgold, A Concise History of Byzantium, 2001 ISBN 0-333-71829-1
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External links
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- Detailed history of the Roman Empire
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- Complete map of the Roman Empire in year 100
- The Roman Empire in the First Century from PBS. Resources about Emperors, poets, philosophers, civic life, and an "Emperor of Rome" game
- Historical Atlas (Swedish)
- Timeline of the Roman Empire and its split on WikiTimeScale.org
- BBC Romans for Children
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