The Roman Empire (c. 300 BCE–c. 300 CE)

At the other end of Afro-Eurasia, in a centuries-long process, Rome became a great power that ruled more than 60 million subjects. The Roman Empire at its height encompassed lands from the highlands of what is now Scotland in Europe to the lower reaches of the Nile River in modern-day Egypt and part of Sudan, and from the borders of the Inner Eurasian steppe in Ukraine and the Caucasus to the Atlantic shores of North Africa. (See Map 7.3.) Whereas the Han Empire dominated an enormous and unbroken landmass, the Roman Empire dominated lands around the Mediterranean Sea. Like the Han Chinese, though, the Romans acquired command over their world basically through violent military expansion, with the attendant use of authority, persuasion, and “soft power.” By the first century CE, almost unceasing wars against their neighbors had enabled the Romans to forge an unparalleled number of ethnic groups and minor states into a single, large political state.

CORE OBJECTIVES

EXPLAIN the process by which Rome transitioned from a minor city-state to a dominating Mediterranean power.

Foundations of the Roman Empire

Three major factors influenced the beginnings of Rome’s imperial expansion: migrations of foreign peoples, Rome’s own military might, and its political innovations.

POPULATION MOVEMENTS Between 450 and 250 BCE, migrations from northern and central Europe brought large numbers of Celts to settle in lands around the Mediterranean Sea. They convulsed the northern rim of the Mediterranean, staging armed forays into lands from what is now Spain in the west to present-day Turkey in the east. One of these migrations involved Gallic peoples from the region of the Alps and beyond who launched a series of violent incursions into northern Italy that ultimately led—around 390 BCE—to the seizure of Rome. The important result for the Romans was not their city’s capture, which was temporary yet traumatic, but rather the permanent dislocation that the invaders inflicted on the city-states of the Etruscans. These Etruscans, themselves likely a combination of indigenous people and migrants from Asia Minor centuries before, spoke their own language and were centered in what is now the region of Tuscany, north of Rome. Before the Gallic invasions, the Etruscans had dominated the Italian Peninsula. While the Etruscans with great difficulty drove the invading Gauls back northward, their cities never fully recovered nor did their ability to dominate other peoples in Italy, including their fledgling rival, the city of Rome. The Gallic migrations had weakened Etruscan power, one of the most formidable roadblocks to Roman expansion in Italy.

A wall painting of men and women dining together. — **Etruscan Women and Men Dining Together** This wall painting in a tomb from Tarquinia, north of Rome, pictures women participating in dining entertainments with men in an open and relatively egalitarian fashion not found elsewhere in Mediterranean societies of the time.

MILITARY INSTITUTIONS AND THE WAR ETHOS The Romans achieved unassailable military power by organizing the communities that they conquered in Italy into a system that generated manpower for their army. This development began around 340 BCE, when the Romans faced a concerted attack by their fellow Latin city-states. By then, the other Latins viewed Rome not as an ally in a system of mutual defense but as a growing threat to their own independence. After overcoming these nearby Latins, the Romans charged onward to defeat one community after another in Italy. Demanding from their defeated enemies a supply of men for the Roman army every year, Rome amassed a huge reservoir of military manpower.

In addition to their overwhelming advantage in manpower, the Romans cultivated an unusual war ethos. A heightened sense of honor drove Roman men to push themselves into battle again and again, and never to accept defeat. Guided by the example of great warriors and shaped by a regime of training and discipline, in which minor infractions of duty were punishable by death, the Roman army trooped out to war in annual spring campaigns beginning in the month—still called March today—dedicated to and named for the Roman god of war, Mars.

The Global View

Map 7.3 is titled, Roman Expansion to 120 C E.

By 275 BCE, Rome controlled the Italian Peninsula. It next entered into three great Punic Wars with Carthage, which had begun as a Phoenician colony and was now the major power centered in the northern parts of present-day Tunisia (see Chapters 4 and 5). The First Punic War (264–241 BCE) was a prolonged war finally settled by large-scale naval battles around the island of Sicily. With their victory, the Romans acquired a dominant position in the western Mediterranean. The Second Punic War (218–201 BCE), however, revealed the real strength and power of the Roman army. The Romans drew on their reserve force of nearly 750,000 men to ultimately repulse—although with huge casualties and dramatic losses—the Carthaginian general Hannibal’s invading force of 20,000 troops and war elephants. The Romans took the war to enemy soil, winning the decisive battle at Zama near Carthage in late 202 BCE. Despite their victory, Rome’s initial losses in the early years of the Second Punic War were so devastating that a law was passed limiting the wealth that women could display in public, and this lex Oppia remained in effect for almost twenty years, until the female citizens of Rome staged public protests and achieved its repeal. In a final war of extermination, waged between 149 and 146 BCE, the Romans used their overwhelming advantage in manpower, ships, and other resources to bring the five-centuries-long hegemony of Carthage in the western Mediterranean to an end.

A mosaic of Roman farmers and soldiers. — **Roman Farmers and Soldiers** In the late Republic, most Roman soldiers came from rural Italy, where small farms were being absorbed into the landholdings of the wealthy and powerful. In the empire, soldiers were recruited from rural provincial regions. They sometimes worked small fields of their own and sometimes worked the lands of the wealthy—like the rural domain in the Roman province of Africa (in modern-day Tunisia) that is depicted in this mosaic.

With an unrelenting drive to war, the Romans continued to draft, train, and field extraordinary numbers of men for combat. Soldiers, conscripted at age seventeen or eighteen, served for up to ten years at a time or even longer. The Roman historian Livy recounted a speech, perhaps imagined, given in 171 BCE by Spurius Ligustinus, as an example of a soldier battle hardened from more than twenty years of service. After recounting his many campaigns in Macedonia, Syria, and Spain, fifty-year-old Ligustinus concluded: “So long as anyone who is calling up an army will judge me to be a suitable soldier, never will I try to be excused.” With so many young men devoted to war for such long spans of time, the war ethos became deeply embedded in the ideals of every generation. After 200 BCE, the Romans unleashed this successful war machine on the kingdoms of the eastern Mediterranean. In 146 BCE, the same year they annihilated what was left of Carthage, the Romans obliterated the great Greek city-state of Corinth, killing all its adult males and selling all its women and children into slavery. Rome’s monopoly of power over the entire Mediterranean basin was now unchallenged.

Roman military forces served under men who knew they could win not just glory and territory for the state, but also enormous rewards for themselves. They were talented men driven by burning ambition, from Scipio Africanus in the late 200s BCE, the conqueror of Carthage, to Julius Caesar, the great generalissimo of the 50s BCE. Julius Caesar’s eight-year-long cycle of Gallic wars was said to have resulted in the deaths about 1 million Gauls and the enslavement of another million. Western Afro-Eurasia had never witnessed war on this scale; it had no equal anywhere, except in China.

POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS AND INTERNAL CONFLICT The conquest of the Mediterranean placed unprecedented power and wealth into the hands of a few men in the Roman social elite. The rush of battlefield successes had kept Romans and their Italian allies preoccupied with the demands of army service overseas. Once this process of territorial expansion slowed, social and political problems that had been lying dormant began to resurface.

Following the traditional date of its founding in 509 BCE, the Romans had lived in a state that they called the “public thing,” or res publica (hence the modern word republic). In this state, policy issued from the Senate—a body of permanent members, 300 selected from among Rome’s most powerful and wealthy citizens (by definition, male)—and from popular assemblies of the citizens. Every year the citizens elected the officials of state, principally two consuls who held power for a year and commanded the armies. The people also annually elected ten men who, as tribunes of the plebs (“the common people”), held the task, often not fulfilled, of protecting the common people’s interests against those of the rich and powerful. In severe political crises, sometimes one man was appointed, a dictator, whose words, dicta, were law and who held absolute power over the state for no longer than six months. These institutions, however, originally devised for a city-state, were not always well-suited to ruling a Mediterranean-sized empire.

By the second century BCE, Rome’s power elites were exploiting the wealth from its Mediterranean conquests to acquire huge tracts of land in Italy and Sicily. They then imported enormous numbers of enslaved people from all around the Mediterranean to work this land. Free citizen farmers, the backbone of the army, were driven off their lands and into the cities. The result was a severe agrarian and recruiting crisis. In 133 and 123–121 BCE, two tribunes, the brothers Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, tried—much as Wang Mang would in China more than a century later—to address these inequalities. The Gracchi brothers attempted to institute land reforms guaranteeing to all of Rome’s poor citizens a basic amount of land that would qualify them for army service. But political enemies assassinated the elder brother, Tiberius, and orchestrated violent resistance that drove the younger brother, Gaius, to his death at the hands of an angry mob.

Thereafter, landless Roman citizens looked not to state institutions but to army commanders, to whom they gave their loyalty and support, to provide them with land and income. These generals became increasingly powerful and started to compete with one another, ignoring the Senate and the traditional rules of politics. As generals sought control of the state and their supporters took sides, a long series of civil wars began that lasted from 90 BCE to the late 30s BCE. The Romans now turned inward on themselves the tremendous militaristic resources built up during the conquest of the Mediterranean.

CORE OBJECTIVES

COMPARE imperial Rome with Han China in terms of political authority, economy, cultural developments, and military expansion.

Emperors, Authoritarian Rule, and Administration

Julius Caesar’s adopted son, Octavian (63 BCE–14 CE), ultimately reunited the fractured empire and emerged as undisputed master of the Roman world. Octavian’s authoritarian one-man rule marked the beginning of the Pax Romana (“Roman Peace,” 25 BCE–235 CE). This peace depended on the power of one man with enough authority to enforce an orderly competition among Roman aristocrats.

Octavian concentrated immense wealth and the most important official titles and positions of power in his own hands. Signaling the transition to a new political order in which he alone controlled the army, the provinces, and the political processes in Rome, Octavian assumed a new title, Augustus (“the Revered One”)—much as the Qin emperor Zheng had assumed the new title of Shi Huangdi (“First August Emperor”)—as well as the traditional republican roles of imperator (“commander in chief,” or emperor), princeps (“first man”), and Caesar (a name connoting his adoptive heritage, but which over time became a title assumed by imperial successors).

Rome’s subjects tended to see these emperors as heroic or even semidivine beings in life and to think of the good ones as becoming gods upon their death. Yet emperors were always careful to present themselves as civil rulers whose power ultimately depended on the consent of Roman citizens and the might of the army. They contrasted themselves with the image of “king,” a role the Romans had learned to detest from the monarchy they themselves had long ago overthrown to establish their Republic in 509 BCE. Nonetheless, the emperors’ powers were immense.

Being a Roman emperor required finesse and talent, and few succeeded at it. Of the twenty-two emperors who held power in the most stable period of Roman history (between the first Roman emperor, Augustus, and Marcus Aurelius in the late second century CE), fifteen met their end by murder or suicide. As powerful as he might be, no individual emperor alone could govern an empire of such great size and population, encompassing a multitude of languages and cultures. He needed institutions and competent people to help him. In terms of sheer power, the most important of these was the army. Consequently, the emperors systematically transformed the army into a full-time professional force. Men now entered the imperial army not as citizen volunteers but as paid professionals who enlisted for long, fixed terms of service and swore loyalty to the emperor and his family. It was part of the emperor’s image to present himself as a victorious battlefield commander, inflicting defeat on the “barbarians” who threatened the empire’s frontiers. As in China, the powerful nature of the family in Roman society meant that women in the imperial family wielded unusual power. Wives of emperors, from Livia the wife of the first emperor Augustus to Julia Domna and other wives of the Severan emperors at the beginning of the third century, often bore the honorific title of “Augusta,” and were real powers at court.

A photo of several bronze tablets on a wall with neat columns of ancient writing. — **A Roman Municipal Charter** These bronze tablets record the charter of Urso (Colonia Genetiva Julia), founded in Spain by Julius Caesar in the 40s BCE. Charters like this one, exhibited in the forum or central open area, displayed regulations for the conduct of public life in a Roman town, including rules governing family inheritance and property transfers, laws on the election of town officials, and definitions of their powers and duties. Of the more than seventy surviving clauses of the Urso charter, only one (number 133) specifically mentions women; this clause proclaims broadly that the wives of the town’s citizens are also bound by the law.

For most emperors, however, governance was largely a daily chore of listening to complaints, answering petitions, deciding court cases, and hearing reports from civil administrators and military commanders. At its largest in the second century CE, the Roman Empire encompassed more than forty administrative units, called provinces. As in Han China, each had a governor appointed or approved by the emperor; but unlike Han China, which had its formal Confucian-trained bureaucracy with ranks of senior and junior officials, the Roman Empire of this period was relatively understaffed in terms of central government officials. The emperor and his provincial governors depended very much on local help, sometimes aided by enslaved administrators and freedmen (formerly enslaved men) serving as government bureaucrats. With a limited staff of full-time assistants and an entourage of friends and acquaintances, each governor was expected to guarantee peace. However, the state relied on private companies for some essential tasks, such as the collection of imperial taxes, in which the profit motives of the publicans (the men in the companies that took up government contracts) were at odds with the expectations of fair government among the empire’s subjects.

Town and City Life

Due to the conditions of peace and the wealth it generated, urban settlements were clustered in core areas of the empire—central Italy, southern Spain, northern Africa, and the western parts of present-day Turkey. The towns, whose municipal charters echoed Roman forms of government, provided the backbone of local administration for the empire. Towns often were walled, and inside those walls the streets and avenues ran at right angles. A large, open-air, rectangular area called the forum dominated the town center. Around it clustered the main public buildings: the markets, the main temples of principal gods and goddesses, and the building that housed city administrators. Residential areas featured regular blocks of houses, close together and fronting on the streets. Larger towns contained large apartment blocks that were not much different from the four- and five-story buildings in any modern city. In the smaller towns, sanitary standards were reasonably good.

A photo of an excavated Roman town. — **A Roman Town** Roman towns featured many of the standard elements of modern towns and cities. Streets and avenues crossed at right angles; streets were paved; sidewalks ran between streets and houses. The houses were often several stories high and had wide windows and open balconies. All these elements can be seen in this street from Ostia Antica.

The imperial metropolis of Rome was another matter. With well over 1 million inhabitants, it was larger than any other urban center of its time; Xianyang and Chang’an—the Qin and Han capitals, respectively—each had a population of between 300,000 and 500,000. While Rome’s inhabitants were privileged in terms of their access to government doles of wheat and aqueduct-supplied water, their living conditions could be appalling, with people jammed into ramshackle high-rise apartments prone to collapse in a fire. Apart from crime and violence, poor sanitary conditions and the diseases that accompany them were constant threats to the population.

Towns large and small tended to have two major entertainment venues: a theater, adopted from Hellenistic culture and devoted to plays, dances, and other popular events; and an amphitheater, a Roman innovation with a much larger seating capacity that surrounded the oval performance area at its center. In the amphitheaters, Romans could stage exotic beast hunts and gladiatorial matches for the enjoyment of huge crowds of appreciative spectators. These public entertainment facilities of Roman towns stressed the importance of gatherings in which citizens participated in civic life, as compared with the largely private entertainment of the Han elite.

A mosaic of several Roman gladiators.; A glass cup with designs of pairs of fighting gladiators. — **Deadly Roman Entertainment** The mosaic from Rome (*left*) shows two gladiators at the end of a full combat. The Greek letter theta, or “th” (the circle with a crossbar through it), under the names of Astivus and Rodan indicates that these men are dead—thanatos being the Greek word for “death.” The glass cup (*right*), which dates to the first century CE, shows pairs of fighting gladiators whose names appear along the rim. Gladiator contests were so popular that fans purchased such cups as souvenirs to commemorate a visit to one of the bloody spectacles. Diverse examples of these cups have been found across the empire.

Indigenous Peoples and Empire

The great conquests of the Han and Roman empires necessarily involved the armed domination of peoples already living in the spaces they conquered. Given the sheer size of these empires, the situations in which these indigenous peoples found themselves varied immensely. In some cases, ethnic groups—like the Musulamii in Africa led by the rebel Tacfarinas in the 20s CE, or the Iceni people in Britain led by their queen Boudicca in the early 60s CE—staged armed insurrections against the imperial state. The greatest internal wars against the empire were fought by Jewish peoples in Judea in a long war in the later 60s CE, and a second war led by the charismatic leader Bar Kokhba in the early 130s CE. Both wars were motivated by the religious ideology shared by a large number of Jews in Judea, which held that the one God, his people, and their traditions had an absolute precedence over both empire and emperor. Such rebellions often failed and the long-term Roman domination frequently led to the gradual erasure of indigenous cultures. The conquest of the Etruscans, a series of peoples living north of Rome, eventually led to the extinction of Etruscan culture, language, and social order. While these destructions of indigenous peoples and their lands were not technically genocidal in a modern sense, they were still examples of “ethnocide”: the death of the people’s identity and culture. Many indigenous peoples, however, showed surprising resilience to Roman domination. Some of the Maures in Africa, for example, maintained their languages, cultural norms, and types of self-rule until the end of the empire.

A section of a victory column depicting soldiers setting fire to a village.; A section of a victory column depicting soldiers selling women and children into slavery. — **Destruction of Indigenous Peoples** These two scenes on the victory column of the emperor Marcus Aurelius in Rome show Roman military operations along the Danube in the 180s CE. In the first, the two villages of the indigenous people, Quadi and Marcomanni, are torched by Roman soldiers. In the second, the women and children of a village are led off into slavery. Other parts of the column (not shown here) display scenes of the adult men of the two villages, now reduced to prisoners, being systematically executed in large numbers. Few indigenous communities would be able to survive the trauma of such violent attacks on them.

On the other side of the coin, imperial powers attempted to acculturate conquered peoples. They did so not by the use of public school systems and mass media (which did not exist then) but by encouraging the conquered to imitate what the imperial power portrayed as the better, superior culture of the conquering state: its language and literature, its paved roads, public baths, magnificent theaters, aqueducts, and other spectacular buildings. In this way, indigenous peoples like the Sabines and the Marrucini in Italy and the Turdetani and Bastuli in southern Iberia, gradually lost their own languages and cultures and became Roman. Many local elites inside the empire were attracted by the advantages of imperial rule and gradually adopted Roman speech, ideas, and way of life. By contrast, indigenous communities along the outer frontiers further removed from the military might of Rome, like the Gallic, Germanic, and Gothic peoples along the northern periphery of the empire, were better able to maintain their independence. They even managed to inflict serious defeats on Roman armies, as German groups commanded by their leader Arminius did in 9 CE, destroying three legions of the Roman army. Roman authorities had to deal with these peoples either by offering them paid service in units of the Roman army (both Tacfarinas and Arminius had served in the Roman army), by buying off their leaders with annual subsidies, or by other diplomatic means. Being relatively large in numbers and inhabiting huge expanses of land in the north, those particular frontier peoples successfully maintained their languages, cultures, and identities even after the end of the empire itself.

Bronze tablets with neat lines of ancient Latin script. — **Integration of Indigenous Peoples** On these great bronze tablets, found at Lyon (Roman Lugdunum) in central France, the words of a speech by the emperor Claudius have been recorded. In his speech, Claudius argued for a policy to admit indigenous Gallic nobles into the Roman senate. In it, however, he also had to admit the deep-seated prejudices against Gallic “barbarians.” They were peoples whom Romans thought to be so uncivilized that the Romans rejected any policy of integration. Even in the face of these prejudices, many Gallic persons became Roman citizens and, eventually, some of them even became senators. The bronze tablets were set up by the Gallic elites who felt honored by the emperor’s lobbying on their behalf.

Social and Gender Relations

In Rome’s civil society, laws and courts governed formal relationships, including those based on patronage and the family. By the last century BCE, the Roman state’s complex legal system featured a rich body of written law, courts, and well-trained lawyers. Deeply entrenched throughout the empire, this legal infrastructure long outlasted the Roman Empire. Also firmly embedded in Roman society was a system of personal relationships that linked the rich and powerful with the mass of average citizens. Men and women of wealth and high social status acted as patrons, protecting and supporting dependents (called “clients”) inhabiting the lower classes. From the emperor at the top to the local municipal man at the bottom, the bonds between these groups in each city found formal expression in legal definitions of patrons’ responsibilities to clients; at the same time, this informal social code raised expectations that the wealthy would be civic benefactors, sponsoring the construction of public libraries, bathhouses, and theaters.

A full-size statue of Claudia Antonia Tatiana of Aphrodisias, a woman with curly hair and a flowing dress. — **Claudia Antonia Tatiana of Aphrodisias** Roman women of the upper class—like Claudia Antonia Tatiana of Aphrodisias (pictured here), Plancia Magna of Perge, Eumachia of Pompeii, Regilla of Athens, and Junia Rustica of Spain—accrued a great deal of money and power. Such women could own a business, serve in a prominent civic priesthood, or become a major civic donor. Tatiana’s clothing and hairstyle are typical of elite women in the Severan period (early third century CE). Just as women in the 1980s adopted the Princess Di haircut, and many in the late 2010s sported popstar Ariana Grande’s signature high ponytail, elite women across the Roman Empire often styled their hair after the empress’s. In this case, the empress Julia Domna’s cantaloupe-shaped updo became a model to be imitated.

A torn thin sheet of wood with script written on it. — **You Are Invited** This thin sheet of wood, one of the many Vindolanda Tablets (named for the fort in Roman Britain where they were found), records a birthday invitation written around 100 CE. It is remarkable not only that this mundane document has survived, but also that it was sent by a woman (Claudia Severa, wife of a garrison commander) to her friend (Sulpicia Lepidina, wife of a military prefect). The note gives an unexpected snapshot of interactions between military wives accompanying their husbands along the Roman frontier.

While patronage was important, the family was at the very foundation of the Roman social order. Legally speaking, the authoritarian paterfamilias (“father of the family”) had nearly total power over his dependents, including his wife, children, and grandchildren and the people he enslaved. Despite this patriarchal system, Roman women, even those of modest wealth and status, had much greater freedom of action and much greater control of their own wealth and property than did women in most Greek city-states. As in Han China, some women in the Roman world could be well educated, literate, well connected, and in control of their own lives—despite what the laws and ideas of Roman males might suggest.

The Economy and New Scales of Production

Rome achieved staggering transformations in agriculture and mining. The area of land surveyed and cultivated rose steadily throughout this period, as Romans spread into arid lands on the periphery of the Sahara Desert to the south and opened up heavily forested regions in present-day France and Germany to the north. Roman agriculture and mining relied on chattel slavery—the use of human beings purchased as private property (see Chapter 6). The massive concentration of wealth and enslaved people at the center of the Roman world led to the first large-scale commercial plantation agriculture and the first technical handbooks on how to run such operations for profit; it also led to dramatic slave wars, such as the Sicilian Revolt (135–132 BCE) and the Spartacus War (73–71 BCE), although the latter began among enslaved trainees in a school for gladiators. Slave-worked plantations specialized in products destined for the big urban markets: wheat, grapes, and olives, as well as cattle and sheep. An impressive road system connected the far-flung parts of the empire. Milestones marked most of these roads, and complex ancient maps, called itineraries, charted major roads and distances between towns. (See Map 7.4.)

Map 7.4 is titled, Pax Romana: The Roman Empire in the Second Century C E.

MAP 7.4 | Pax Romana: The Roman Empire in the Second Century CE

The Roman Empire enjoyed remarkable peace and prosperity in the second century CE. Economic production increased, and Roman culture expanded throughout the realm.

According to the map, what commodities cluster in which regions? With what groups did Romans trade beyond their empire, and for what commodity in particular?
What are some of the major sea-lanes and roads linking the different parts of the empire?
What do you note about the locations of legionary bases and naval bases? What is the strategic value of their locations? How are the limits of empire delineated?

An image of a coin hoard. — **Coin Hoard** Examining batches of coins buried for safekeeping reveals the range of coins in circulation at any one time. This coin hoard was found near Didcot in Oxfordshire, England. Buried around 165 CE, it contained about 125 gold coins minted between the 50s and 160s CE and represents the equivalent of about eleven years’ pay for a Roman soldier. Gold coins were used for expensive transactions or to store wealth. Most ordinary purchases or payments were made with silver or brass coins.

Rome mined copper, tin, silver, and gold—out of which the Roman state produced the most massive coinage system known in western Afro-Eurasia before early modern times. Public and private demand for metals was so great that traces of the air pollution generated by Roman mining operations remain in ice core samples taken from Greenland today. Rome’s standardized currency facilitated taxation and the increased exchange of commodities and services. The economy functioned more efficiently due to this production of coins, which was paralleled only by the coinage output of Han dynasty China and its successors.

The Rise of Christianity

Over centuries, Roman religion had cultivated a dynamic world of gods, spirits, and demons that was characteristic of earlier periods of Mediterranean history. Christianity took shape in this richly pluralistic world. Its foundations lay in a direct confrontation with Roman imperial authority: the trial of Jesus. After preaching the new doctrines of what was originally a sect of Judaism, Jesus was found guilty of sedition and executed by means of crucifixion—a standard Roman penalty—as the result of a typical Roman provincial trial overseen by a Roman governor, Pontius Pilatus.

Although we do have contemporary mentions of Pontius Pilatus, the governor, no historical reference to Jesus survives from his own lifetime. Shortly after the crucifixion, Paul of Tarsus, a Jew and a Roman citizen from southeastern Anatolia, claimed to have seen Jesus in full glory outside the city of Damascus. Paul and the Mediterranean communities to whom he preached and wrote letters between 40 and 60 CE referred to Jesus as the Anointed One (the Messiah, in keeping with Jewish expectations) or the Christ—ho Christos in common or koinē Greek (the dominant language in the eastern Mediterranean thanks to Hellenism). Only many decades later did accounts that came to be called the Gospels—such as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—describe Jesus’s life and record his sayings. Jesus’s preaching drew not only on Jewish models but also on the Egyptian and Mesopotamian image of the great king as shepherd of his people (see Chapter 3). With Jesus, this image of the good shepherd took on a new, personal closeness. Not a distant monarch but a preacher, Jesus had set out on God’s behalf to gather a new, small flock.

Through the writings of Paul and the Gospels, both written in koinē Greek, this image of Jesus rapidly spread beyond Palestine (where Jesus had preached only to Jews and only in the local language, Aramaic). Core elements of Jesus’s message, such as the responsibilities of the well-off for the poor and the promised eventual empowerment of “the meek,” appealed to many ordinary people in the wider Mediterranean world. But it was the apostle Paul who was especially responsible for reshaping this message for a wider audience. While Jesus’s teachings were directed at villagers and peasants, Paul’s message spoke to a world divided by religious identity, wealth, slavery, and gender differences: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). This new message, universal in its claims and appeal, was immediately accessible to the dwellers of the towns and cities of the Roman Empire.

Map 7.5 is titled, Imperial Rome and Later (Eastern) Han China (c. 200 C E).

MAP 7.5 | Imperial Rome and Later (Eastern) Han China, C. 200 CE

Imperial Rome and the Later (Eastern) Han dynasty thrived simultaneously for about 200 years at the start of the first millennium CE. Despite their geographic spread and the Silk Roads running across Afro-Eurasia, the two empires did not have as much direct contact as one might expect.

What major groups lived on the borders of imperial Rome and Han China?
What were the geographical limits of the Roman Empire? Of Han China?
Based on the map and your reading, what drew imperial Rome and Han China together? What kept them apart?

Just half a century after Jesus’s crucifixion, the followers of Jesus saw in his life not merely the wanderings of a Jewish charismatic teacher, but a head-on collision between “God” and “the world.” Jesus’s teachings came to be understood as the message of a divine being who for thirty years had moved (largely unrecognized) among human beings.

Jesus’s followers formed a church: a permanent gathering entrusted to the charge of leaders chosen by God and fellow believers. For these leaders and their followers, death offered a defining testimony for their faith. Some of these Christians actually hoped for the confrontation of a Roman trial and the opportunity to offer themselves as witnesses (martyrs) for their faith.

At first, such trials and persecutions of Christians were sporadic and were responses to local concerns. Not until the emperor Decius, in the mid-third century CE, did the state direct an empire-wide attack on Christians. But Decius died within a year of launching this assault, and Christians interpreted their persecutor’s death as evidence of the hand of God in human affairs. By the last decades of the third century CE, Christian communities of various kinds, reflecting the different strands of their movement through the Mediterranean as well as the local cultures in which they settled, were present in every society in the empire.

The Limits of Empire

The limitations of Roman force were a pragmatic factor in determining who belonged in and was subject to the empire, as opposed to who was outside it and therefore excluded. The Romans pushed their authority in the west to the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, and to the south they drove it to the edges of the Sahara Desert. In both cases, there was little additional useful land available to dominate. Roman power was blocked, however, to the east by the Parthians and then the Sasanians and to the north by the Goths and other Germanic peoples.

THE PARTHIANS AND SASANIANS On Rome’s eastern frontiers, powerful Romans, such as Marcus Crassus in the mid-50s BCE, Mark Antony in the early 30s BCE, and the emperor Trajan around 115 CE, wished to imitate the achievements of Alexander the Great and conquer the arid lands lying east of Judea and Syria. Crassus and Antony failed miserably, stopped by the Parthian Empire and its successor, the Sasanian Empire. The Romans, under Trajan, briefly annexed the provinces of Armenia and Mesopotamia but abandoned them soon thereafter. The Parthian people had moved south from present-day Turkmenistan and settled in the region comprising the modern states of Iraq and Iran. Parthian social order was founded on nomadic pastoralism and a war capability based on technical advances in mounted horseback warfare. Reliance on horses made the Parthian style of fighting highly mobile and ideal for warfare on arid plains and deserts. They perfected the so-called Parthian shot: a reverse arrow shot from a bow with great accuracy at long distance and from horseback at a gallop. On the flat, open plains of Iran and Iraq, the Parthians had a decisive advantage over slow-moving, cumbersome mass infantry formations that had been developed for war in the Mediterranean. Eventually the expansionist states of Parthia and Rome became archenemies: they confronted each other in Mesopotamia for nearly four centuries.

The Sasanians expanded the technical advances in mounted horseback warfare that the Parthians had used so successfully in open-desert warfare against the slow-moving Roman mass infantry formations. King Shapur I (r. 240–270 CE) exploited the weaknesses of the Roman Empire in the mid-third century CE, even capturing the Roman emperor Valerian. One early Christian writer, Lactantius, used Valerian’s fate at the hands of the Sasanians—he was forced to serve in captivity as a footstool for the Sasanian king, then flayed and stuffed after death to stand in the Sasanian throne room as a warning to ambassadors—as a lesson for what happens to those who persecute Christians. As successful as the Parthians and the Sasanians were in fighting the Romans, however, they could never permanently challenge Roman sway over Mediterranean lands. Their decentralized political structure limited their coordination of resources, and their horse-mounted style of warfare was ill-suited to fighting in the more rocky and hilly environments of the Mediterranean world. (See Chapter 8 for more on the Sasanians.)

A stone carving of a Roman legionary soldier and a German fighter. — **Soldier versus Barbarian** On the frontiers of the Roman Empire, the legionary soldiers faced the non-Roman “barbarians” from the lands beyond. In this piece of a stone-carved picture from Trajan’s Forum in Rome, we see a civilized and disciplined Roman soldier, to the left, facing a German fighter—with uncut flowing hair, no formal armor, and a thatched hut for a home. Frontier realities were never so clear-cut, of course. Roman soldiers, often recruited from the “barbarian” peoples, were a lot more like them than was convenient to admit, and the indigenous peoples were influenced by Roman cultural models and were closer to them than this picture indicates.

GERMAN AND GOTHIC “BARBARIANS” In the lands across the Rhine and Danube, to the north, once again environmental conditions largely determined the limits of empire. The long and harsh winters, combined with excellent soil and growing conditions, produced hardy, dense population clusters scattered across vast distances. These illiterate, kin-based agricultural societies had changed little since the first millennium BCE.

As the Roman Empire fixed its northern frontiers along the Rhine and Danube Rivers, two factors determined its relationship with the Germans and Goths on the rivers’ other side. First, these small societies had only one big commodity for which the empire was willing to pay: human bodies. So the slave trade out of the land across the Rhine and Danube became immense: gold and silver (especially in the form of coins), wine, armaments, and other luxury items flowed across the rivers in one direction in exchange for enslaved people flowing into the empire. Second, the wars between the Romans and these societies were unremitting, as every emperor faced the expectation of dealing harshly with these so-called barbarians. Ironically, internal conflicts within the Roman Empire ultimately prompted increasing use of “barbarians” as soldiers and even as officers who served the empire.

While the Han Empire fell in the early third century CE, the Roman Empire would arguably continue to exist politically for more than two centuries, during which its history would become intertwined with the rise of Christianity, one of the world’s universalizing religions.

Punic Wars: Series of three wars fought between Rome and Carthage from 264 to 146 BCE that resulted in the end of Carthaginian hegemony in the western Mediterranean, the growth of Roman military might (army and navy), and the beginning of Rome’s aggressive foreign imperialism.
Augustus: Latin term meaning “the Revered One”; title granted by the Senate to the Roman ruler Octavian in 27 BCE to signify his unique political position. Along with his adopted family name, Caesar, the military honorific imperator, and the senatorial term princeps, Augustus became a generic term for a leader of the Roman Empire.
Christianity: New religious movement originating in the Eastern Roman Empire in the first century CE, with roots in Judaism and resonance with various Greco-Roman religious traditions. The central figure, Jesus, was tried and executed by Roman authorities, and his followers believed he rose from the dead. The tradition was spread across the Mediterranean by his followers, and Christians were initially persecuted—to varying degrees—by Roman authorities. The religion was eventually legalized in 312 CE, and by the late fourth century CE it became the official state religion of the Roman Empire.
res publica: Term (meaning “public thing”) used by Romans to describe their Republic, which was advised by a Senate and was governed by popular assemblies of free adult males, who were arranged into voting units, based on wealth and social status, to elect officers and legislate.
Pax Romana: Latin term for “Roman Peace,” referring to the period from 25 BCE to 235 CE, when conditions in the Roman Empire were relatively settled and peaceful, allowing trade and the economy to thrive.