History of Rome.

Military technology.  The Roman military technology ranged from personal equipment and armament to deadly siege engines.  Foot soldier.  Weaponry.  The pilum (javelin) was a weapon favored by legionaries and weighed approximately five pounds/2.25 kilograms. It was designed to be used only once and was destroyed upon initial use. This feature prevented the enemy from reusing spears. All soldiers carried two versions of this weapon: a primary spear and a backup. A solid block of wood in the middle of the weapon provided legionaries protection for their hands while carrying the device. According to Polybius, historians have records of "how the Romans threw their spears and then charged with swords". This tactic seemed to be common practice among Roman infantry.  Armour.  While heavy, intricate armour was not uncommon (cataphracts), the Romans perfected a relatively light, full torso armour made of segmented plates (lorica segmentata). This segmented armour provided good protection for vital areas but did not cover as much of the body as lorica hamata (chain mail). The lorica segmentata provided better protection, but the plate bands were expensive and difficult to produce and difficult to repair in the field. Generally, mail was cheaper, easier to produce, and simpler to maintain, was one-size-fits-all and was more comfortable to wear; thus, it remained the primary form of armour even when lorica segmentata was in use.  Tactics.  Testudo is a tactical military maneuver original to Rome. The tactic was implemented by having units raise their shields in order to protect themselves from enemy projectiles raining down on them. The strategy only worked if each member of the testudo protected his comrade. Commonly used during siege battles, the "sheer discipline and synchronization required to form a Testudo" was a testament to the abilities of legionnaires. Testudo, meaning tortoise in Latin, "was not the norm, but rather adopted in specific situations to deal with particular threats on the battlefield". The Greek phalanx and other Roman formations were a source of inspiration for this maneuver.  Cavalry.  The Roman cavalry saddle had four horns and is believed to have been copied from Celtic peoples.  Siege warfare.  Roman siege engines such as ballistas, scorpions and onagers were not unique, but the Romans were probably the first people to put ballistas on carts for better mobility on campaigns. On the battlefield, it is thought that they were used to pick off enemy leaders. There is one account of the use of artillery in battle from Tacitus, Histories III,23:On engaging they drove back the enemy, only to be driven back themselves, for the Vitellians had concentrated their artillery on the raised road that they might have free and open ground from which to fire; their earlier shots had been scattered and had struck the trees without injuring the enemy. A ballista of enormous size belonging to the Fifteenth legion began to do great harm to the Flavians' line with the huge stones that it hurled; and it would have caused wide destruction if it had not been for the splendid bravery of two soldiers, who, taking some shields from the dead and so disguising themselves, cut the ropes and springs of the machine.  In addition to innovations in land warfare, the Romans also developed the corvus (boarding device) a movable bridge that could attach itself to an enemy ship and allow the Romans to board the enemy vessel. Developed during the First Punic War it allowed them to apply their experience in land warfare on the seas.  Ballistas and onagers.  While core artillery inventions were notably founded by the Greeks, Rome saw opportunity in the ability to enhance this long-range artillery. Large artillery pieces such as carroballista and onagers bombarded enemy lines, before full ground assault by infantry. The manuballista would "often be described as the most advanced two-armed torsion engine used by the Roman Army". The weapon often looks like a mounted crossbow capable of shooting projectiles. Similarly, the onager, "named after the wild ass because of its 'kick'", was a larger weapon that was capable of hurling large projectiles at walls or forts. Both were very capable machines of war and were put to use by the Roman military.  The Helepolis.  The helepolis was a vehicle used to besiege cities. The vehicle had wooden walls to shield soldiers as they were transported toward the enemy's walls. Upon reaching the walls, the soldiers would disembark at the top of the 15 m tall structure and drop on to the enemy's ramparts. To be effective in combat, the helepolis was designed to be self-propelled. The self-propelled vehicles were operated using two types of motors: an internal motor powered by humans, or a counterweight motor powered by gravity. The human-powered motor used a system of ropes that connected the axles to a capstan. It has been calculated that at least 30 men would be required to turn the capstan in order to exceed the force required to move the vehicle. Two capstans may have been used instead of just the one, reducing the number of men needed per capstan to 16, for a total of 32 to power the helepolis. The gravity-powered counterweight motor used a system of ropes and pulleys to propel the vehicle. Ropes were wrapped around the axles, strung through a pulley system that connected them to a counterweight hanging at the top of the vehicle. The counterweights would have been made of lead or a bucket filled with water. The lead counterweight was encapsulated in a pipe filled with seeds to control its fall. The water bucket counterweight was emptied when it reached the bottom of the vehicle, raised back to the top, and filled with water using a reciprocating water pump, so that motion could again be achieved. It has been calculated that to move a helepolis with a mass of 40 metric tons, a counterweight with a mass of 1 metric ton was needed.Greek fire.  Originally an incendiary weapon adopted from the Greeks in 7th century AD, the Greek fire "is one of the very few contrivances whose gruesome effectiveness was noted by" many sources. Roman innovators made this already lethal weapon even more deadly. Its nature is often described as a "precursor to napalm". Military strategists often put the weapon to good use during naval battles, and the ingredients to its construction "remained a closely guarded military secret". Despite this, the devastation caused by Greek fire in combat is indisputable.  Transportation.  Pontoon bridge.  Mobility, for a military force, was an essential key to success. Although this was not a Roman invention, as there were instances of "ancient Chinese and Persians making use of the floating mechanism", Roman generals used the innovation to great effect in campaigns. Furthermore, engineers perfected the speed at which these bridges were constructed. Leaders surprised enemy units to great effect by speedily crossing otherwise treacherous bodies of water. Lightweight crafts were "organized and tied together with the aid of planks, nails and cables". Rafts were more commonly used instead of building new makeshift bridges, enabling quick construction and deconstruction.  Medical technology.   Surgery.  Although various levels of medicine were practised in the ancient world, the Romans created or pioneered many innovative surgeries and tools that are still in use today such as hemostatic tourniquets and arterial surgical clamps. Rome was also responsible for producing the first battlefield surgery unit, a move that paired with their contributions to medicine made the Roman army a force to be reckoned with. They also used a rudimentary version of antiseptic surgery years before its use became popular in the 19th century and had very capable doctors. Wikipedia: Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.This episode includes AI-generated content.

Transportation.  Roads.  The Romans primarily built roads for their military. Their economic importance was probably also significant, although wagon traffic was often banned from the roads to preserve their military value. In total, more than 400,000 kilometres (250,000 mi) of roads were constructed, 80,500 kilometres (50,000 mi) of which were stone-paved.  Way stations providing refreshments were maintained by the government at regular intervals along the roads. A separate system of changing stations for official and private couriers was also maintained. This allowed a dispatch to travel a maximum of 800 kilometres (500 mi) in 24 hours by using a relay of horses.  The roads were constructed by digging a pit along the length of the intended course, often to bedrock. The pit was first filled with rocks, gravel or sand and then a layer of concrete. Finally, they were paved with polygonal rock slabs. Roman roads are considered the most advanced roads built until the early 19th century. Bridges were constructed over waterways. The roads were resistant to floods and other environmental hazards. After the fall of the Roman Empire the roads were still usable and used for more than 1000 years.  Most Roman cities were shaped like a square. There were 4 main roads leading to the center of the city, or forum. They formed a cross shape, and each point on the edge of the cross was a gateway into the city. Connecting to these main roads were smaller roads, the streets where people lived.  Bridges.  Roman bridges were built with stone and/or concrete and utilized the arch. Built in 142 BC, the Pons Aemilius, later named Ponte Rotto (broken bridge), is the oldest Roman stone bridge in Rome. The biggest Roman bridge was Trajan's Bridge over the lower Danube, constructed by Apollodorus of Damascus, which remained for over a millennium the longest bridge to have been built both in terms of overall and span length. They were most of the time at least 60 feet (18 m) above the body of water.  Carts.  Roman carts had many purposes and came in a variety of forms. Freight carts were used to transport goods. Barrel carts were used to transport liquids. The carts had large cylindrical barrels laid horizontally with their tops facing forward. For transporting building materials, such as sand or soil, the Romans used carts with high walls. Public transportation carts were also in use with some designed with sleeping accommodations for up to six people.  The Romans developed a railed cargo system for transporting heavy loads. The rails consisted of grooves embedded into existing stone roadways. The carts used in such a system had large block axles and wooden wheels with metal casings.  Carts also had brakes and elastic suspensions. The elastic suspension systems used leather belts attached to bronze supports to suspend the carriages above the axles. The system helped to create a smoother ride by reducing vibration. The Romans adopted bearings developed by the Celts. The bearings decreased rotational friction by using mud to lubricate stone rings.  Industry.  Mining.  The Romans also made great use of aqueducts in their extensive mining operations across the empire, some sites such as Las Medulas in north-west Spain having at least 7 major channels entering the minehead. Other sites such as Dolaucothi in south Wales was fed by at least five leats, all leading to reservoirs and tanks or cisterns high above the present opencast. The water was used for hydraulic mining, where streams or waves of water are released onto the hillside, first to reveal any gold-bearing ore, and then to work the ore itself. Rock debris could be sluiced away by hushing, and the water also used to douse fires created to break down the hard rock and veins, a method known as fire-setting.  Alluvial gold deposits could be worked and the gold extracted without needing to crush the ore. Washing tables were fitted below the tanks to collect the gold-dust and any nuggets present. Vein gold needed crushing, and they probably used crushing or stamp mills worked by waterwheels to comminute the hard ore before washing. Large quantities of water were also needed in deep mining to remove waste debris and power primitive machines, as well as for washing the crushed ore. Pliny the Elder provides a detailed description of gold mining in book XXXIII of his Naturalis Historia, most of which has been confirmed by archaeology. That they used water mills on a large scale elsewhere is attested by the flour mills at Barbegal in southern France, and on the Janiculum in Rome. Wikipedia: Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.This episode includes AI-generated content.

Waterworks.  Sanitation.  The Romans did not invent plumbing or toilets but instead borrowed their waste disposal system from their neighbors, particularly the Minoans. A waste disposal system was not a new invention, but rather had been around since 3100 BCE, when one was created in the Indus River Valley. The Roman public baths, or thermae served hygienic, social and cultural functions. The baths contained three main facilities for bathing. After undressing in the apodyterium or changing room, Romans would proceed to the tepidarium or warm room. In the moderate dry heat of the tepidarium, some performed warm-up exercises and stretched while others oiled themselves or had slaves oil them. The tepidarium's main purpose was to promote sweating to prepare for the next room, the caldarium or hot room. The caldarium, unlike the tepidarium, was extremely humid and hot. Temperatures in the caldarium could reach 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit). Many contained steam baths and a cold-water fountain known as the labrum. The last room was the frigidarium or cold room, which offered a cold bath for cooling off after the caldarium. The Romans also had flush toilets.  Roman baths.  The containment of heat in the rooms was important in the operation of the baths, as to avoid patrons from catching colds. To prevent doors from being left open, the door posts were installed at an inclined angle so that the doors would automatically swing shut. Another technique of heat efficiency was the use of wooden benches over stone, as wood conducts away less heat. Wikipedia: Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.This episode includes AI-generated content.

Engineering and construction.  Wood.  The Romans created fireproof wood by coating the wood with alum.  Stone.  It was ideal to mine stones from quarries that were situated as close to the site of construction as possible, to reduce the cost of transportation. Stone blocks were formed in quarries by punching holes in lines at the desired lengths and widths. Then, wooden wedges were hammered into the holes. The holes were then filled with water so that the wedges would swell with enough force to cut the stone block out of the Earth. Blocks with the dimensions of 69 by 14 by 15 ft (21.0 by 4.3 by 4.6 m) have been found, weighing about 1000 tons. There is evidence that saws were developed to cut stone in the Imperial age. Initially, Romans used saws powered by hand to cut stone but later went on to develop stone cutting saws powered by water.  Cements.  The mixture ratio of Roman lime mortars depended upon where the sand for the mixture was acquired. For sand gathered at a river or sea, the mixture ratio was two parts sand, one part lime, and one part powdered shells. For sand gathered further inland, the mixture was three parts sand and one part lime. The lime for mortars was prepared in limekilns, which were underground pits designed to block out the wind.  Another type of Roman mortar is known as pozzolana mortar. Pozzolana is a volcanic clay substance located in and around Naples. The mixture ratio for the cement was two parts pozzolana and one part lime mortar. Due to its composition, pozzolana cement was able to form in water and has been found to be as hard as natural forming rock.  Cranes.  Cranes were used for construction work and possibly to load and unload ships at their ports, although for the latter use there is according to the "present state of knowledge" still no evidence. Most cranes were capable of lifting about 6–7 tons of cargo, and according to a relief shown on Trajan's Column were worked by treadwheel.  Buildings.    The Pantheon.    The Romans designed the Pantheon thinking about the concepts of beauty, symmetry, and perfection. The Romans incorporated these mathematical concepts into their public works projects. For instance, the concept of perfect numbers was used in the design of the Pantheon by embedding 28 coffers into the dome. A perfect number is a number where its factors add up to itself. So, the number 28 is considered to be a perfect number, because its factors of 1, 2, 4, 7, and 14 add together to equal 28. Perfect numbers are extremely rare, with there being only one number for each quantity of digits (one for single digits, double digits, triple digits, quadruple digits, etc.). Embodying mathematical concepts of beauty, symmetry, and perfection, into the structure conveys the technical sophistication of Roman engineers.  Roman concrete was essential to the design of the Pantheon. The mortar used in the construction of the dome is made up of a mixture of lime and the volcanic powder known as pozzolana. The concrete is suited for use in constructing thick walls as it does not require to be completely dry to cure.  The construction of the Pantheon was a massive undertaking, requiring large quantities of resources and man-hours. Delaine estimates the amount of total manpower needed in the construction of the Pantheon to be about 400 000 man-days.    Hagia Sophia.  Although the Hagia Sophia was constructed after the fall of the Western empire, its construction incorporated the building materials and techniques of ancient Rome. The building was constructed using pozzolana mortar. Evidence for the use of the substance comes from the sagging of the structure's arches during construction, as a distinguishing feature of pozzolana mortar is the large amount of time it needs to cure. The engineers had to remove decorative walls to let the mortar cure.  The pozzolana mortar used in the construction of the Hagia Sophia does not contain volcanic ash but instead crushed brick dust. The composition of the materials used in pozzolana mortar leads to increased tensile strength. A mortar composed of mostly lime has a tensile strength of roughly 200 kilopascals (30 psi) whereas pozzolana mortar using crushed brick dust has a tensile strength of 3,000 kilopascals (500 psi). The advantage of using pozzolana mortar in the construction of the Hagia Sophia is the increase in strength of the joints. The mortar joints used in the structure are wider than one would expect in a typical brick and mortar structure. The fact of the wide mortar joints suggests the designers of the Hagia Sophia knew about the high tensile strength of the mortar and incorporated it accordingly.  Waterworks.  Aqueducts.  The Romans constructed numerous aqueducts to supply water. The city of Rome itself was supplied by eleven aqueducts made of limestone that provided the city with over one million cubic metres of water each day, sufficient for 3.5 million people even in modern times, and with a combined length of 350 kilometres (220 mi).  Water inside the aqueducts depended entirely on gravity. The raised stone channels in which the water traveled were slightly slanted. The water was carried directly from mountain springs. After it had gone through the aqueduct, the water was collected in tanks and fed through pipes to fountains, toilets, etc.   The main aqueducts in Ancient Rome were the Aqua Claudia and the Aqua Marcia. Most aqueducts were constructed below the surface with only small portions above ground supported by arches. The longest Roman aqueduct, 178 kilometres (111 mi) in length, was traditionally assumed to be that which supplied the city of Carthage. The complex system built to supply Constantinople had its most distant supply drawn from over 120 km away along a sinuous route of more than 336 km.  Roman aqueducts were built to remarkably fine tolerances, and to a technological standard that was not to be equaled until modern times. Powered entirely by gravity, they transported very large amounts of water very efficiently. Sometimes, where depressions deeper than 50 metres had to be crossed, inverted siphons were used to force water uphill. An aqueduct also supplied water for the overshot wheels at Barbegal in Roman Gaul, a complex of water mills hailed as "the greatest known concentration of mechanical power in the ancient world".  Roman aqueducts conjure images of water travelling long distances across arched bridges, however; only 5 percent of the water being transported along the aqueduct systems traveled by way of bridges. Roman engineers worked to make the routes of aqueducts as practical as possible. In practice, this meant designing aqueducts that flowed at ground level or below surface level, as these were more cost effective than building bridges, construction and maintenance for bridges was higher than that of surface and sub-surface elevations. Aqueduct bridges were often in need of repairs and spent years at a time in disuse. Water theft from the aqueducts was a frequent problem which led to difficulties in estimating the amount of water flowing through the channels. To prevent the channels of the aqueducts from eroding, a plaster known as opus signinum was used. The plaster incorporated crushed terracotta in the typical Roman mortar mixture of pozzolana rock and lime.  Dams.  The Romans built dams for water collection, such as the Subiaco Dams, two of which fed Anio Novus, one of the largest aqueducts of Rome. They built 72 dams in just one country, Spain and many more are known across the Empire, some of which are still in use. At one site, Montefurado in Galicia, they appear to have built a dam across the river Sil to expose alluvial gold deposits in the bed of the river. The site is near the spectacular Roman gold mine of Las Medulas. Several earthen dams are known from Britain, including a well-preserved example from Roman Lanchester, Longovicium, where it may have been used in industrial-scale smithing or smelting, judging by the piles of slag found at this site in northern England. Tanks for holding water are also common along aqueduct systems, and numerous examples are known from just one site, the gold mines at Dolaucothi in west Wales. Masonry dams were common in North Africa for providing a reliable water supply from the wadis behind many settlements.  The Romans built dams to store water for irrigation. They understood that spillways were necessary to prevent the erosion of earth-packed banks. In Egypt, the Romans adopted the water technology known as wadi irrigation from the Nabataeans. Wadis were a technique developed to capture large amounts of water produced during the seasonal floods and store it for the growing season. The Romans successfully developed the technique further for a larger scale.  Wikipedia: Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.This episode includes AI-generated content.

Ancient Roman technology.  Ancient Roman technology is the collection of techniques, skills, methods, processes, and engineering practices which supported Roman civilization and made possible the expansion of the economy and military of ancient Rome (753 BC – 476 AD).  The Roman Empire was one of the most technologically advanced civilizations of antiquity, with some of the more advanced concepts and inventions forgotten during the turbulent eras of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Gradually, some of the technological feats of the Romans were rediscovered and/or improved upon during the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Modern Era; with some in areas such as civil engineering, construction materials, transport technology, and certain inventions such as the mechanical reaper, not improved upon until the 19th century. The Romans achieved high levels of technology in large part because they borrowed technologies from the Greeks, Etruscans, Celts, and others.  With limited sources of power, the Romans managed to build impressive structures, some of which survive to this day. The durability of Roman structures, such as roads, dams, and buildings, is accounted for in the building techniques and practices they utilized in their construction projects. Rome and its surrounding area contained various types of volcanic materials, which Romans experimented with in the creation of building materials, particularly cements and mortars. Along with concrete, the Romans used stone, wood, and marble as building materials. They used these materials to construct civil engineering projects for their cities and transportation devices for land and sea travel.  Warfare was an essential aspect of Roman society and culture. The military was not only used for territorial acquisition and defense, but also as a tool for civilian administrators to use to help staff provincial governments and assist in construction projects. The Romans adopted, improved, and developed military technologies for foot soldiers, cavalry, and siege weapons for land and sea environments.  In addition to military engineering, the Romans also made significant contributions to medical technologies.  Types of power.  Human power.  The most readily available power sources to the ancients were human and animal. Mechanical devices were developed to assist in the manipulation of objects which exceeded human strength – one such device being the windlass, which used ropes and pulleys to manipulate objects. The device was powered by multiple people pushing or pulling on handspikes attached to a cylinder.  Human power was also a factor in the movement of ships, particularly warships. Though wind-powered sails were the dominant form of power in water transportation, rowing was often used by military craft during battle engagements.  Animal power.  The primary usage of animal power was for transportation. Several species of animals were used for differing tasks. Being strong and cheap to maintain, oxen were used to farm and transport large masses of goods. If speed was desired, horses were utilized. The main environment which called for speed was the battlefield, with horses being used in the cavalry and scouting parties. For carriages carrying passengers or light materials donkeys or mules were generally used, as they were faster than oxen and cheaper on fodder than horses. Other than being used as a means of transportation, animals were also employed in the operation of rotary mills. Beyond the confines of the land, a schematic for a ship propelled by animals has been discovered. The work known as De rebus bellicis describes a ship powered by oxen. In this design oxen are attached to a rotary, moving in a circle on a deck floor, spinning two paddle wheels, one on either side of the ship. The likelihood that such a ship was ever built is low, due to the impracticality of controlling animals on a watercraft.  Water power.   Power from water was generated through the use of a water wheel. A water wheel had two general designs: the undershot and the overshot. The undershot water wheel generated power from the natural flow of a running water source pushing upon the wheel's submerged paddles. The overshot water wheel generated power by having water flow over its buckets from above. This was usually achieved by building an aqueduct above the wheel. Although it is possible to make the overshot water wheel 70 percent more efficient than the undershot, the undershot was generally the preferred water wheel. The reason being the economic cost of building an aqueduct was too high for the mild benefit of having the water wheel turn faster. The primary purpose of water wheels was to generate power for milling operations and to raise water above a system's natural height. Evidence also exists that water wheels were used to power saws, though only scant descriptions of such devices remain.  Wind power.  Wind power was used in the operation of watercraft, through the use of sails. Windmills do not appear to have been created in ancient times.  Solar power.  The Romans used the Sun as a passive solar heat source for buildings, such as bath houses. Thermae were built with large windows facing southwest, the location of the Sun at the hottest time of day.  Theoretical types of power.  Steam power.  The generation of power through steam remained theoretical in the Roman world. Hero of Alexandria published schematics of a steam device that rotated a ball on a pivot. The device used heat from a cauldron to push steam through a system of tubes towards the ball. The device produced roughly 1500 rpm but would never be practical on an industrial scale as the labour requirements to operate, fuel and maintain the heat of the device would have come at too great a cost.  Technology as a craft.  Roman technology was largely based on a system of crafts. Technical skills and knowledge were contained within the particular trade, such as stonemasons. In this sense, knowledge was generally passed down from a tradesman master to a tradesman apprentice. Since there are only a few sources from which to draw upon for technical information, it is theorized that tradesmen kept their knowledge a secret. Vitruvius, Pliny the Elder and Frontinus are among the few writers who have published technical information about Roman technology. There was a corpus of manuals on basic mathematics and science such as the many books by Archimedes, Ctesibius, Heron (a.k.a. Hero of Alexandria), Euclid and so on. Not all of the manuals which were available to the Romans have survived, as lost works illustrate.  Wikipedia: Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.This episode includes AI-generated content.

Collapse in the West and survival in the East (395–476 AD).  The non-federated mobile field army, known as the comitatenses, was eventually split into a number of smaller field armies: a central field army under the emperor's direct control, known as the comitatensis palatina or praesentalis, and several regional field armies. Historians Santosuosso and Vogt agree that the latter gradually degraded into low-quality garrison units similar to the limitanei that they either supplemented or replaced. By the 5th century, a significant portion of Western Rome's main military strength lay in rented barbarian mercenaries known as foederati.  As the 5th century progressed, many of the Empire's original borders had been either wholly or partially denuded of troops to support the central field army. In 395, the Western Roman Empire had several regional field armies in Italy, Illyricum, Gallia, Britannia and Africa, and about twelve border armies. By about 430, two more field armies were established in Hispania and Tingitania but the central government had lost control of Britannia as well as much of Gaul, Hispania, and Africa. In the same period, the Eastern Roman Empire had two palatine field armies (at Constantinople), three regional field armies (in the East, in Thrace, and in Illyricum) and fifteen frontier armies.  As Roman troops were spread increasingly thin over its long border, the Empire's territory continued to dwindle in size as the population of the empire declined. Barbarian war bands increasingly began to penetrate the Empire's vulnerable borders, both as settlers and invaders. In 451, the Romans defeated Attila the Hun, but only with assistance from a confederation of foederatii troops, which included Visigoths, Franks and Alans. As barbarian incursions continued, some advancing as far as the heart of Italy, Rome's borders began to collapse, with frontier forces swiftly finding themselves cut off deep in the enemy's rear.  Simultaneously, barbarian troops in Rome's pay came to be "in a condition of almost perpetual turbulence and revolt" from 409 onwards. In 476 these troops finally unseated the last emperor of the Western Roman Empire. The Eastern Roman forces continued to defend the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire until its fall in 1453.  The former Oxford University historian Adrian Goldsworthy has argued that the cause of the fall of the Roman Empire in the West should not be blamed on barbarization of the late Roman Army, but on its recurrent civil wars, which led to its inability to repel or defeat invasions from outside its frontiers. The East Roman or Byzantine empire on the other hand had fewer civil wars to contend with in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, or in the years from 383 to 432 A.D. Wikipedia: Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.This episode includes AI-generated content.

Comitatenses and limitanei (284–395 AD).  A distinction between frontier guard troops and more mobile reserve forces had emerged with the use of certain troops to permanently man frontiers such as Hadrian's Wall in Britannia in the 2nd century AD. The competing demands of manned frontiers and strategic reserve forces had led to the division of the military into four types of troops by the early 4th century:The limitanei or riparienses patrolled the border and defended the border fortifications. According to some older theories, the limitanei were "settled and hereditary" militia that were "tied to their posts." But according to most recent research, the limitanei were originally regular soldiers, including infantry, cavalry, and river flotillas, although they eventually became settled militia. According to Luttwak, by the time of Constantine I, the cunei of cavalry, and auxilia of infantry, both usually around 500 men strong, were local provincial units under sector commanders. According to Pat Southern and Karen Dixon, the legiones, auxilia, and cunei of the border armies were part of the limitanei, but higher-status than the older cohortes and alae which they had replaced.  The comitatenses and the palatini were central field armies, usually stationed in the interior or rear areas of the empire as a strategic reserve. The permanent field armies of the palatini and comitatenses were expansions of the field escort of the emperors, which were larger than bodyguard units, becoming temporary field armies known as the sacer comitatus. The palatini were "praesental" armies, central field armies under the direct command of the emperors, while the comitatenses, were usually the regional field armies, although units could be moved between the two forces. The initial expansion of the emperor's escort units, although substantial, still did not form a large enough force to campaign independently until further expanded by Diocletian and Constantine I.  The emperor Constantine I created the scholae to replace the old praetorian guard. The scholae were his personal guard and were mainly equipped as cavalry. Vogt suggests that the scholae formed two small central reserves (Latin: scholae) held to the strategic rear even of the comitatenses, one each in the presence of the emperors of West and East respectively. Of the four troop types, the limitanei (border guards) were once considered to have been of the lowest quality, consisting largely of peasant-soldiers that were both "grossly inferior" to the earlier legions and inferior also to their counterparts in the mobile field armies. However, more recent work establishes that the limitanei were regular soldiers.  While the limitanei were supposed to deal with policing actions and low-intensity incursions, the duty of responding to more serious incidents fell upon the regional or provincial troops of the reduced field reserves of the comitatenses. The countering of the very largest scale incursions on a strategic scale was the task of the mobile field troops, the palatini and comitatenses diverted to strengthen the field armies and possibly accompanied by the emperor's scholae. Both border and field armies consisted of a mix of infantry and cavalry units although the weight of cavalry was, according to some authorities, greater in the mobile field armies. Overall, approximately one quarter of the army consisted of cavalry troops but their importance is uncertain. Older works such as the Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1911) state that the Roman military of the late Empire was "marked by that predominance of the horseman which characterised the earlier centuries of the Middle Ages," but many more recent authors believe that the infantry remained predominant.  There is some dispute about whether this new military structure was put into place under the Emperor Diocletian or Constantine since both reorganised the Roman Army in the late 3rd and early 4th centuries to some degree. Both Diocletian and even his predecessor of thirty years Gallienus may already have controlled mobile strategic reserves to assist the empire's border forces; either Diocletian or Constantine expanded this nascent force into permanent field armies.  Recruitment from amongst Roman citizens had become greatly curtailed as a consequence of a declining population, "cripplingly numerous" categories of those exempted from military service and the spread of Christianity with its pacifist message. Together, these factors culminated in "the withdrawal of the urban class from all forms of military activity." In their place, much of Rome's military were now recruited from non-Italian peoples living within the empire's borders. Many of these people were barbarians or semi-barbarians recently settled from lands beyond the empire, including several colonies of Carpi, Bastarnae and Sarmatians.  Although units described as legiones existed as late as the 5th century in both the border and field armies, the legionary system was very different from that of the principate and early empire. Since the term legion continued to be used, it is unclear exactly when the structure and role of the legions changed. In the 3rd or 4th century, however, the legions' role as elite heavy infantry was substantially reduced and may have evaporated entirely. Instead, those "legions" that remained were no longer drawn exclusively (and perhaps hardly at all) from Roman citizens. Either Diocletian or Constantine reorganised the legions into smaller infantry units who, according to some sources, were more lightly armoured than their forebears. Their lighter armament may have been either because they "would not consent to wear the same weight of body armour as the legionaries of old" or, as in at least one documented instance, because they were prohibited from wearing heavy armour by their general in order to increase their mobility. 4th-century legions were at times only one sixth the size of early imperial legions, and they were armed with some combination of spears, bows, slings, darts and swords, reflecting a greater contemporary emphasis on ranged fighting. The auxilia and numeri had also largely disappeared. Constantine further increased the proportion of German troops in the regular army; their cultural impact was so great that even legionaries began wearing German dress. At the start of Diocletian's reign, the Roman army numbered about 390,000 men, but by the end of his reign he successfully increased the number to 581,000 men.  Adoption of barbarian allies (358–395 AD).  By the late 4th century, the Empire had become chronically deficient in raising sufficient troops from amongst its own population. As an alternative, taxation raised internally was increasingly used to subsidise growing numbers of barbarian recruits. The Romans had, for some time, recruited individual non-Roman soldiers into regular military units. In 358 AD, this practice was accelerated by the wholescale adoption of the entire Salian Franks people into the Empire, providing a ready pool of such recruits. In return for being allowed to settle as foederatii in northern Gallia on the near side of the Rhine, the Franks were expected to defend the Empire's borders in their territory and provide troops to serve in Roman units.  In 376, a large band of Goths asked Emperor Valens for permission to settle on the southern bank of the Danube River on terms similar to the Franks. The Goths were also accepted into the empire as foederati; however, they rebelled later that year and defeated the Romans at the Battle of Adrianople. The heavy losses that the Roman military suffered during this defeat ironically forced the Roman Empire to rely still further on such foederati troops to supplement its forces. In 382, the practice was radically extended when federated troops were signed up en masse as allied contingents of laeti and foederatii troops separate from existing Roman units. Near-constant civil wars during the period 408 and 433 between various Roman usurpers, emperors and their supposed deputies such as Constantine III, Constantius III, Aetius and Bonifacius resulted in further losses, necessitating the handing over of more taxable land to foederati.  The size and composition of these allied forces remain in dispute. Santosuosso argues that foederati regiments consisted mostly of cavalry that were raised both as a temporary levy for a specific campaign need and, in some cases, as a permanent addition to the army. Hugh Elton believes that the importance of foederati has been overstated in traditional accounts by historians such as A.H.M. Jones. Elton argues that the majority of soldiers were probably non-Italian Roman citizens, while Santosuosso believes that the majority of troops were almost certainly non-citizen barbari. Wikipedia: Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.This episode includes AI-generated content.

The army during the decline of the Empire.  Barbarisation of the army (117–253 AD).  By the time of the emperor Hadrian the proportion of Italians in the legions had fallen to just ten percent and provincial citizens now dominated. This low figure is probably a direct result of the changing needs of military staffing: a system of fixed border defences (Latin: limes) were established around the Empire's periphery under Hadrian, consolidating Trajan's territorial gains. These called for troops to be stationed permanently in the provinces, a prospect more attractive to locally raised rather than Italian troops. The higher prestige and pay to be found in the Italian dominated Praetorian Guard must also have played a role. The majority of the troops in the legions at the start of the 3rd century AD were from the more Romanised (though non-Italian) provinces, especially Illyria. As the century progressed, more and more barbarians (Latin: barbari) were permitted to settle inside of, and tasked with aiding in the defence of, Rome's borders. As a result, greater numbers of barbarous and semi-barbarous peoples were gradually admitted to the army.  However, whether this regionalisation of the legions was partnered by a drop in the professionalism of the troops is contested. Antonio Santosuosso argues that the strict discipline and high motivation of the days of Marius had lapsed, but Andrew Alfoldi states that the Illyrian troops were both valiant and warlike, and Tacitus described German recruits as being natural mercenaries (Latin: vivi ad arma nati). It seems that discipline in the legions did slacken, with soldiers granted permission to live with wives outside of military lodgings and permitted to adopt a more lavish and comfortable lifestyle, in contrast to the strict military regimen of earlier years. However, it is by no means certain that this led to any reduction in the effectiveness of the legions, due to the greater ferocity and stature of the barbari recruits. The flavour of the Roman military, however, was now dictated by the increasing number of regional recruits, leading to a partial barbarisation of Rome's military forces beginning in this period. The barbarisation of the lower ranks was paralleled by a concurrent barbarisation of its command structure, with the Roman senators who had traditionally provided its commanders becoming entirely excluded from the army. By 235 AD the Emperor himself, the figurehead of the entire military, was a man born outside of Italy to non-Italian parents.  The gradual inclusion of greater numbers of non-citizen troops into the military was taken a further step by the creation under Hadrian of a new type of force in addition to the legions and auxilia, known as numeri. Formed in bodies of around 300 irregular troops, the numeri were drawn from subjugate provinces and peoples of client-states or even from beyond the borders of the empire. They were both less regimented and less Romanised than auxiliary troops, with a "pronounced national character," including native dress and native war cries. The introduction of the numeri was a response to the need for cheap troops, who were nevertheless fierce and provided a force balance of light infantry and cavalry. They were therefore largely less well armed and less well trained than auxilia or legions, although more prestigious elite irregular native troops were also utilised. However, the legions still made up around one half of the Roman army at this point.  Successive crises (238–359 AD).  By the late Empire, enemy forces in both the East and West were "sufficiently mobile and sufficiently strong to pierce the Roman defensive perimeter on any selected axis of penetration"; from the 3rd century onwards, both Germanic tribes and Persian armies pierced the frontiers of the Roman Empire. In response, the Roman army underwent a series of changes, more organic and evolutionary than the deliberate military reforms of the Republic and early Empire. A stronger emphasis was placed upon ranged combat ability of all types, such as field artillery, hand-held ballistae, archery and darts. Roman forces also gradually became more mobile, with one cavalryman for every three infantrymen, compared to one in forty in the early Empire. Additionally, the Emperor Gallienus took the revolutionary step of forming an entirely cavalry field army, which was kept as a mobile reserve at the city of Milan in northern Italy. It is believed that Gallienus facilitated this concentration of cavalry by stripping the legions of their integral mounted element. A diverse range of cavalry regiments existed, including catafractarii or clibanarii, scutarii, and legionary cavalry known as promoti. Collectively, these regiments were known as equites. Around 275 AD, the proportion of catafractarii was also increased. There is some disagreement over exactly when the relative proportion of cavalry increased, whether Gallienus' reforms occurred contemporaneously with an increased reliance on cavalry, or whether these are two distinct events. Alfoldi appears to believe that Gallienus' reforms were contemporaneous with an increase in cavalry numbers. He argues that, by 258, Gallienus had made cavalry the predominant troop type in the Roman army in place of heavy infantry, which dominated earlier armies. According to Warren Treadgold, however, the proportion of cavalry did not change between the early 3rd and early 4th centuries.  Larger groups of barbari began to settle in Rome's territories around this time, and the troops they were contracted to provide to the Roman army were no longer organised as numeri but rather were the forerunners of the later rented native armies known as federated troops (Latin: foederati). Though they served under Roman officers, the troops of these units were far more barbarised than the numeri, lacked Romanisation of either military structure or personal ideology, and were ineligible for Roman citizenship upon discharge. These native troops were not permitted to fight in native war bands under their own leaders, unlike the later foederati; instead, these troops were split into small groups attached to other Roman units. They existed therefore as a halfway house between numeri, who were encouraged to be Romanised, and the foederati, who raised officers from their own ranks and were almost entirely self-dependent. Wikipedia: Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.This episode includes AI-generated content.

The army at the height of the Empire.  Imperial legions and reformation of the auxilia (27 BC – 117 AD).  By the turn of the millennium, Emperor Augustus' primary military concern was to prevent Roman generals from further usurping the imperial throne. The experience of Caesar and, earlier, Marius and Sulla, had demonstrated the willingness of "emergency" (re-activated previously decommissioned) legions containing troops keen for plunder to follow their generals against the state. Augustus therefore removed the need for such emergency armies by increasing the size of the standing armies to a size sufficient to provide territorial defence on their own. Perhaps due to similar concerns, the legions and auxiliaries of the army were supplemented under the Emperor Augustus by an elite formation of guards dedicated to the protection of the Emperor. The first such unit was based in Rome and were known as the Praetorian Guard, and a second similar formation were known as the Cohortes urbanae.  The legions, which had been a mix of life professionals and civilian campaigners, was altered into a standing army of professionals only. The actual structure of the cohort army remained much the same as in the late Republic, although around the 1st century AD the first cohort of each legion was increased in size to a total of 800 soldiers. However, while the structure of the legions remained much the same, their make-up gradually changed. Whereas early Republican legions had been raised by a draft from eligible Roman citizens, imperial legions were recruited solely on a voluntary basis and from a much wider base of manpower. Likewise, whereas Republican legions had been recruited almost exclusively in Italy, early Imperial legions drew most of their recruits from Roman colonies in the provinces from 68 AD onwards. One estimate place the proportion of Italian troops at 65% under Augustus in c. 1 AD, falling to around 49% by the end of Nero's reign.  Since the legions were officially open only to Roman citizens, Max Cary and Howard Hayes Scullard argue that at least in some provinces at this time "many provincials must have been recruited who lacked any genuine claim to Roman citizenship but received it unofficially on enlistment," a practice that was to increase in the 2nd century. This is most likely in those provinces where the pool of Roman citizens was not large enough to fulfil the provincial army's recruitment needs. One possible example is Britain, where one estimate puts the citizen pool in the 1st century at only 50,000 out of a total provincial population of around two million.  At the same time as the legions underwent these transformations, the auxilia were reorganized and a number of allied troops were formalised into standing units similar to legions. Rather than being raised re-actively when required, the process of raising auxiliary troops was carried out in advance of conflicts according to annual targets. Whereas the internal organisation of the auxilia had previously been left up to their commanders, in the early empire they were organised into standardised units known as turmae (for cavalry alae) and centuriae (for infantry cohortes). Although never becoming as standardised in their equipment as the legions, and often retaining some national flavour, the size of the units at least was standardised to some degree. Cavalry were formed into either an ala quingenaria of 512 horsemen, or an ala millaria of 1,000 horsemen. Likewise, infantry auxilia could be formed into a cohors quingenaria of 500 men or a cohors millaria of 1,000 men. Mixed cavalry/infantry auxiliaries were typically formed with a larger proportion of foot than horse troops: the cohors equitata quingenaria consisted of 380 foot and 120 horsemen, and the cohors equitata millaria consisted of 760 foot and 240 horsemen.   The vitality of the empire at this point was such that the use of native auxilia in the Roman army did not apparently barbarise the military as some scholars claim was to happen in the late empire. On the contrary, those serving in the auxilia during this period frequently strove to Romanise themselves. They were granted Roman citizenship on retirement, granting them several social advantages, and their sons became eligible for service in the legions.  As with the army, many non-Italians were recruited into the Roman Navy, partly because the Romans had never readily taken to the sea. It appears that the navy was considered to be slightly less prestigious than the auxilia but, like the auxilia, troops could gain citizenship on discharge upon retirement. In terms of structure, each ship was staffed by a group of men approximately equivalent to a century, with ten ships forming a naval squadron.  Introduction of vexillationes (76–117 AD).  Through the final years of the 1st century AD, the legions remained the backbone of the Roman army, although the auxilia in fact outnumbered them by up to half as much again. Within the legions, the proportion of troops recruited from within Italy fell gradually after 70 AD. By the close of the 1st century, this proportion had fallen to as low as 22 percent, with the remainder drawn from conquered provinces. Since technically only citizens were allowed to enlist in the legions, where recruits did not possess citizenship then, at least in some instances, citizenship "was simply given [to] them on enlistment". During this time, the borders of the Empire had remained relatively fixed to the extent originally reached under the Emperor Trajan. Because of this, the army was increasingly responsible for protecting existing frontiers rather than expanding into foreign territory, the latter of which had characterised the army's earlier existence. As a result, legions became stationed in largely fixed locations. Although entire legions were occasionally transferred into theatres of war, they remained largely rooted in one or more legionary bases in a province, detaching into smaller bodies of troops (Latin: vexillationes) on demand. This policy eventually led to a split of the military's land-based forces into mobile and fixed troops in the later Empire. In general, the best troops were dispatched as vexillationes, and the remainder left to guard border defenses were of lower quality, perhaps those with injuries or near retirement. Wikipedia: Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.This episode includes AI-generated content.

Marian legion (107–27 BC).  Modern historiography has regularly cast Marius as abolishing the propertied militia and replacing it with landless soldiers motivated largely by pay. This belief emerges from the ancient literary sources, but rests on a relatively weak basis. Despite enrolling some three to five thousand volunteers during the Jugurthine War, Gaius Marius assumed command of consular legions recruited via hitherto normal procedure in the following Cimbric War. Conscription continued after Marius's time, especially during the Social War, and the wealth and social background of the men who joined before and after the opening of recruitment changed little. There is little evidence that later Roman armies during the 1st century BC were made up of volunteers; almost all ancient references to army recruitment, outside private armies, involve conscription.  For much of the 20th century, historians held that the property qualification separating the five classes and the capite censi was reduced over the course of the second century to a nugatory level due to a shortage of manpower. The basis for that belief, however, was merely three undated Roman figures for the amount of property required to serve which would serve as evidence for reductions only if forced into a descending order. Many scholars have also now abandoned the notion that Italy suffered in the second century BC any deficit of manpower which would have driven such putative reductions.  Modern historians have also sometimes credited to Marius the abolition of Roman cavalry and light infantry and their replacement with auxilia. There is no direct evidence for this contention, which is driven largely by literary sources' silence on those branches after the 2nd century; continued inscriptional evidence attests both citizen cavalry and light infantry into the end of the republic. The decline of Roman light infantry has been connected not to reform but cost. Because the logistical cost of supporting light infantry and heavy infantry was relatively similar, the Romans chose to deploy heavy infantry in extended and distant campaigns due to their greater combat effectiveness, especially when local levies could substitute for light infantry brought from Rome and Italy.  The changes to the Roman army during the 1st century BC are now more attributed to the Social War and the civil wars from 49 to 31 BC. The large-scale downsizing of Roman cavalry detachments likely emerged from the extension of citizenship to all of Italy. Because Italy's enfranchisement meant that Rome was now directly liable for the cavalry's upkeep rather than their local communities, Rome instead levied auxilia from allies who, by treaty, were responsible for their contingents' upkeep.  Pay remained extremely low – only five asses per day – and irregular. Moreover, although the surviving sources frequently characterise soldiers as "poor", these sources largely reflect the perspectives of the elite, by whom the vast majority of the population were considered "poor" and for whom poverty needed not entail actual landlessness. Many of the soldiers of the 1st century BC possessed modest lands. Nor did the legions meaningfully professionalise: as, in general, both soldiers and commanders served only for short periods intending, respectively, to secure plunder or political advancement from military victory.  After the Social War, the state also started to keep men under arms for longer periods to maintain available experienced manpower, and coupled this with longer terms for commanders, particularly Caesar and Pompey. Client armies emerged but not in the 100s BC but rather in the decades before Caesar's civil war, which broke out in 49 BC.  The legions of the late Republic were, structurally, almost entirely heavy infantry. The legion's main sub-unit was called a cohort and consisted of approximately 480 infantrymen. The cohort was therefore a much larger unit than the earlier maniple sub-unit and was divided into six centuriae of 80 men each. Each centuria was separated further into 10 "tent groups" (Latin: contubernia) of 8 men each. Legions additionally consisted of a small body, typically 120 men, of Roman legionary cavalry (Latin: equites legionis). The equites were used as scouts and dispatch riders rather than battlefield cavalry. Legions also contained a dedicated artillery crew of perhaps 60 men, who would operate devices such as ballistae.  Each legion was normally partnered with an approximately equal number of allied (non-Roman) auxiliae troops. The addition of allied troops to the Roman army was a formalisation of the earlier arrangement of using light troops from the Socii and Latini, who had received Roman citizenship after the Social War. Auxiliary troops could be formed from either auxiliary light cavalry known as alae, auxiliary light infantry known as cohors auxiliae, or a flexible mixture of the two known as cohors equitata. Cavalry types included mounted archers (Latin: sagittarii) and heavy shock cavalry (Latin: cataphracti or clibanarii). Infantry could be armed with bows, slings, throwing spears, long swords, or thrusting spears. Auxiliary units were originally led by their own chiefs, and, in this period, their internal organisation was left to their commanders.  However, "the most obvious deficiency" of the Roman army remained its shortage of cavalry, especially heavy cavalry; even auxiliary troops were predominantly infantry. Luttwak argues that auxiliary forces largely consisted of Cretan archers, Balearic slingers and Numidian infantry, all of whom fought on foot. As Rome's borders expanded and its adversaries changed from largely infantry-based to largely cavalry-based troops, the infantry-based Roman army began to find itself at a tactical disadvantage, particularly in the East.  After having declined in size following the subjugation of the Mediterranean, the Roman navy underwent short-term upgrading and revitalisation in the late Republic to meet several new demands. Under Caesar, an invasion fleet was assembled in the English Channel to allow the invasion of Britain; under Pompey, a large fleet was raised in the Mediterranean Sea to clear the sea of Cilician pirates. During the civil war that followed, as many as a thousand ships were either constructed or pressed into service from Greek cities.  Non-citizen recruitment (49–27 BC).  By the time of Julius Caesar in 54 BC, regular legionary units were supplemented by exploratores, a body of scouts, and speculatores, spies who infiltrated enemy camps. Due to the demands of the civil war, the extraordinary measure of recruiting legions from non-citizens was taken by Caesar in Transalpine Gaul (Latin: Gallia Transalpina), by Brutus in Macedonia, and by Pompey in Pharsalus. This irregular and extraordinary recruitment was not, however, typical of recruitment during this period, and Roman law still officially required that legions were recruited from Roman citizens only.  Wikipedia: Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.This episode includes AI-generated content.

Professionalisation during the Republican period.  Manipular legion (315–107 BC).  The army of the early Republic continued to evolve, and although there was a tendency among Romans to attribute such changes to great reformers, it is more likely that changes were the product of slow evolution rather than singular and deliberate policy of reform. The manipular formation was probably copied from Rome's Samnite enemies to the south, perhaps as a result of Roman defeats in the Second Samnite War.  During this period, a military formation of around 5,000 men was known as a legion (Latin: legio). However, in contrast to later legionary formations of exclusively heavy infantry, the legions of the early and middle Republic consisted of both light and heavy infantry. The term manipular legion, a legion based on units called maniples, is therefore used to contrast the later cohortal legion of the Empire that was based around a system of cohort units. The manipular legion was based partially upon social class and partially upon age and military experience. It therefore represents a theoretical compromise between the earlier class-based army and the class-free armies of later years. In practice, even slaves were at one time pressed into the army of the Republic out of necessity. Normally a single legion was raised each year, but in 366 BC two legions were raised in a single year for the first time.  Maniples were units of 120 men each drawn from a single infantry class. The maniples were small enough to permit tactical movement of individual infantry units on the battlefield within the framework of the greater army. The maniples were typically deployed into three discrete lines (Latin: triplex acies) based on the three heavy infantry types of hastati, principes and triarii. The first type, the hastati, typically formed the first rank in battle formation. They typically wore a brass chest plate (though some could afford mail), a helmet called a galea, and occasionally, greaves (shin guards). They carried an iron bossed wooden shield, 120 cm (4 ft) tall and rectangular in shape with a curved front to partially protect the sides. Traditionally they were armed with a sword known as a gladius and two throwing spears known as pila: one the heavy pilum of popular imagination and one a slender javelin. However the exact introduction of the gladius and the replacement of the spear with the sword as the primary weapon of the Roman legions is uncertain, and it's possible that the early manipular legions still fought with the hastati and principes wielding the hasta or spear.  The second type, the principes, typically formed the second rank of soldiers back from the front of a battle line. They were heavy infantry soldiers armed and armoured as per the hastati. The triarii, who typically formed the third rank when the army was arrayed for battle, were the last remnant of hoplite-style troops in the Roman army. They were armed and armoured as per the principes, with the exception that they carried a pike rather than two pila. A triarii maniple was divided into two formations each six men across by 10 men deep. A manipular legion typically contained between 1,200 hastati, 1,200 principes and 600 triarii. The three classes of unit may have retained some slight parallel to social divisions within Roman society, but at least officially the three lines were based upon age and experience rather than social class. Young, unproven men would serve as hastati, older men with some military experience as principes, and veteran troops of advanced age and experience as triarii.  The heavy infantry of the maniples was supported by a number of light infantry (Latin: velites) and cavalry (Latin: equites) troops, typically 300 horsemen per manipular legion. The cavalry was drawn primarily from the richest class of equestrians, but additional cavalry and light infantry were drawn at times from the socii and Latini of the Italian mainland. The equites were still drawn from the wealthier classes in Roman society. There was an additional class of troops (Latin: accensi, also adscripticii and later supernumerarii) who followed the army without specific martial roles and were deployed to the rear of the triarii. Their role in accompanying the army was primarily to supply any vacancies that might occur in the maniples, but they also seem to have acted occasionally as orderlies to the officers.  The light infantry of 1,200 velites consisted of unarmoured skirmishing troops drawn from the youngest and lower social classes. They were armed with a sword and shield (90 cm (3 ft) diameter), as well as several light javelins, each with a 90 cm (3 ft) wooden shaft the diameter of a finger, with a c. 25 cm (10 in) narrow metal point. Their numbers were swollen by the addition of allied light infantry and irregular rorarii.  The Roman levy of 403 BC was the first to be requested to campaign for longer than a single season, and from this point on such a practice became gradually more common, if still not typical.  A small navy had operated at a fairly low level after the Second Samnite War, but it was massively upgraded during this period, expanding from a few primarily river- and coastal-based patrol craft to a full maritime unit. After a period of frenetic construction, the navy mushroomed to a size of more than 400 ships on the Carthaginian pattern. Once completed, it could accommodate up to 100,000 sailors and embarked troops for battle. The navy thereafter declined in size. This was partially because a pacified Roman Mediterranean called for little naval policing, and partially because the Romans chose to rely during this period on ships provided by Greek cities, whose peoples had greater maritime experience.  Proletarianisation of the infantry (217–107 BC).  The extraordinary demands of the Punic Wars, in addition to a shortage of manpower, exposed the tactical weaknesses of the manipular legion, at least in the short term. In 217 BC, Rome was forced to effectively ignore its long-standing principle that its soldiers must be both citizens and property owners when slaves were pressed into naval service; around 213 BC, the property requirement was reduced from 11,000 to 4,000 asses. Since the Romans are unlikely to have preferred to employ slaves over poor citizens in their armies, it must be assumed that, at this point, the proletarii of the poorest citizens must also have been pressed into service despite their lack of legal qualification. By 123 BC, the financial requirement for military service was slashed again from 4,000 asses to just 1,500 asses. By this time, therefore, it is clear that many of the property-less former proletarii had been nominally admitted into the adsidui.  During the 2nd century BC, Roman territory saw an overall decline in population, partially due to the huge losses incurred during various wars. This was accompanied by severe social stresses and the greater collapse of the middle classes into lower classes of the census and the proletarii. As a result, both the Roman society and its military became increasingly proletarianised. The Roman state was forced to arm its soldiers at the expense of the state, since many of the soldiers who made up its lower classes were now impoverished proletarii in all but name, and were too poor to afford their own equipment.  The distinction between the heavy infantry types of hastati, principes and triarii began to blur, perhaps because the state was now assuming the responsibility of providing standard-issue equipment to all but the first class of troops, who alone were able to afford their own equipment. By the time of Polybius, the triarii or their successors still represented a distinct heavy infantry type armed with a unique style of cuirass, but the hastati and principes had become indistinguishable.  In addition, the shortage of available manpower led to a greater burden being placed upon its allies (socii) for the provision of allied troops. Where accepted allies could not provide the required force types, the Romans were not averse during this period to hiring mercenaries to fight alongside the legions. Wikipedia: Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.This episode includes AI-generated content.

Early Roman army.  Tribal forces (c. 752 BC – c. 578 BC).  According to the historians Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, writing at a far later date, the earliest Roman army existed in the 8th century BC. During this period Rome itself was probably little more than a fortified hilltop settlement and its army a relatively small force, whose activities were limited "mainly [to] raiding and cattle rustling with the occasional skirmish-like battle". Historian Theodor Mommsen referred to it as Rome's curiate army, named for its presumed subdivision along the boundaries of Rome's three founding tribes (Latin: curiae)), the Ramnians, Tities and Luceres. This army's exact structure is not known, but it is probable that it loosely resembled a warrior band or group of bodyguards led by a chieftain or king.  Mommsen believes that Roman military organization of this period was regimented by the "Laws of the apocryphal] King Italus" but these laws, though referred to by Aristotle, have been lost.  The army (Latin: legio) consisted, according to Livy, of exactly 3,000 infantry and 300 horsemen, one third from each of Rome's three founding tribes. Warriors served under six "leaders of division" (Latin: tribuni) who in turn served under a general, usually in the person of the reigning King. Mommsen uses philological arguments and references from Livy and others to suggest that the greater mass of foot-soldiers probably consisted of pilumni (javelin-throwers), with a smaller number possibly serving as arquites (archers). The cavalry was far smaller in number and probably consisted solely of the town's richest citizens. The army may also have contained the earliest form of chariots, hinted at by references to the flexuntes ("the wheelers").  By the beginning of the 7th century BC, the Iron-Age Etruscan civilization (Latin: Etrusci) was dominant in the region. Like most of the other peoples in the region, the Romans warred against the Etruscans. By the close of the century, the Romans had lost their struggle for independence, and the Etruscans had conquered Rome, establishing a military dictatorship, or kingdom, in the city.  Etruscan-model hoplites (578 BC – c. 315 BC).  Although several Roman sources including Livy and Polybius talk extensively about the Roman army of the Roman Kingdom period that followed the Etruscan capture of the city, no contemporary accounts survive. Polybius, for example, wrote some 300 years after the events in question, and Livy some 500 years later. Additionally, what records were kept by the Romans at this time were later destroyed when the city was sacked. The sources for this period cannot therefore be seen as reliable, as they can be for later military history, e.g. from the First Punic War onwards.  According to our surviving narratives, the three kings of Rome during the Etruscan occupation were Tarquinius Priscus, Servius Tullius, and Tarquinius Superbus. During this period the army underwent a reformation into a centurial army based on socio-economic class. This reformation is traditionally attributed to Servius Tullius, the second of the Etruscan kings. Tullius had earlier carried out the first Roman census of all citizens. Livy tells us that Tullius reformed the army by transplanting onto it the structure derived originally for civil life as a result of this census. At all levels, military service was, at this time, considered to be a civic responsibility and a way of advancing one's status within society.However, Rome's social classes were qualified rather than created by the census. It is perhaps more accurate to say therefore that the army's structure was slightly refined during this period rather than radically reformed. Prior to these reforms, the infantry was divided into the classis of rich citizens and the infra classem of poorer citizens. The latter were excluded from the regular line of battle on the basis that their equipment was of poor quality. During the reforms, this crude division of poorer and richer citizens was further stratified. The army thereafter consisted of a number of troop types based upon the social class of propertied citizens, collectively known as adsidui. From the poorest in the "fifth class" to the richest in the "first class" and the equestrians above them, military service was compulsory for all. However, Roman citizens at this time generally viewed military service as a proper undertaking of duty to the state, in contrast to later views of military service as an unwelcome and unpleasant burden.  Whereas there are accounts of Romans in the late empire mutilating their own bodies in order to exempt themselves from military service, there seems to have been no such reluctance to serve in the military of early Rome. This may in part be due to the generally lower intensity of conflict in this era; to the fact that men were fighting close to and often in protection of their own homes, or due to—as posited by later Roman writers—a greater martial spirit in antiquity.  The equestrians, the highest social class of all, served in mounted units known as equites. The first class of the richest citizens served as heavy infantry with swords and long spears (resembling hoplites) and provided the first line of the battle formation. The second class were armed similarly to the first class, but without a breastplate for protection, and with an oblong rather than a round shield. The second class stood immediately behind the first class when the army was drawn up in battle formation. The third and fourth classes were more lightly armed and carried a thrusting-spear and javelins. The third class stood behind the second class in battle formation, normally providing javelin support. The poorest of the propertied men of the city comprised the fifth class. They were generally too poor to afford much equipment at all and were armed as skirmishers with slings and stones. They were deployed in a screen in front of the main army, covering its approach and masking its manoeuvres.  Men without property, who were thereby excluded from the qualifying social classes of the adsidui, were exempted from military service on the grounds that they were too poor to provide themselves with any arms whatsoever. However, in the most pressing circumstances, even these proletarii were pressed into service, though their military worth was probably questionable. Troops in all of these classes would fight together on the battlefield, with the exception of the most senior troops, who were expected to guard the city.  The army is said to have increased from 3,000 to 4,000 men in the 5th century BC, and then again from 4,000 to 6,000 men sometime before 400 BC. This later army of 6,000 men were then divided into 60 centuries of 100 men each.  Wikipedia: Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.This episode includes AI-generated content.

Structural history of the Roman military.  The structural history of the Roman military concerns the major transformations in the organization and constitution of ancient Rome's armed forces, "the most effective and long-lived military institution known to history." At the highest level of structure, the forces were split into the Roman army and the Roman navy, although these two branches were less distinct than in many modern national defense forces. Within the top levels of both army and navy, structural changes occurred as a result of both positive military reform and organic structural evolution. These changes can be divided into four distinct phases.  Phase I.  The army was derived from obligatory annual military service levied on the citizenry, as part of their duty to the state. During this period, the Roman army would wage seasonal campaigns against largely local adversaries.  Phase II.  As the extent of the territories falling under Roman control expanded and the size of the forces increased, the soldiery gradually became salaried professionals. As a consequence, military service at the lower (non-salaried) levels became progressively longer-term. Roman military units of the period were largely homogeneous and highly regulated. The army consisted of units of citizen infantry known as legions (Latin: legiones) as well as non-legionary allied troops known as auxilia. The latter were most commonly called upon to provide light infantry, logistical, or cavalry support.  Phase III.  At the height of the Roman Empire's power, forces were tasked with manning and securing the borders of the vast provinces which had been brought under Roman control. Serious strategic threats were less common in this period and emphasis was placed on preserving gained territory. The army underwent changes in response to these new needs and became more dependent on fixed garrisons than on march-camps and continuous field operations.  Phase IV.  As Rome began to struggle to keep control over its sprawling territories, military service continued to be salaried and professional for Rome's regular troops. However, the trend of employing allied or mercenary elements was expanded to such an extent that these troops came to represent a substantial proportion of the armed forces. At the same time, the uniformity of structure found in Rome's earlier military disappeared. Soldiery of the era ranged from lightly armed mounted archers to heavy infantry, in regiments of varying size and quality. This was accompanied by a trend in the late empire of an increasing predominance of cavalry rather than infantry troops, as well as a requirement for more mobile operations. In this period there was more focus (on all frontiers but the east) on smaller units of independently-operating troops, engaging less in set-piece battles and more in low-intensity, guerrilla actions.  Wikipedia: Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.This episode includes AI-generated content.

Roman Kingdom, part 3.  Servius Tullius.  Priscus was succeeded by his son-in-law Servius Tullius, Rome's second king of Etruscan birth, and the son of a slave. Like his father-in-law, Servius fought successful wars against the Etruscans. He used the booty to build the first wall all around the Seven Hills of Rome, the pomerium. He also reorganized the army.  Servius Tullius instituted a new constitution, further developing the citizen classes. He instituted Rome's first census, which divided the population into five economic classes, and formed the Centuriate Assembly. He used the census to divide the population into four urban tribes based on location, thus establishing the Tribal Assembly. He also oversaw the construction of the Temple of Diana on the Aventine Hill.  Servius' reforms made a big change in Roman life: voting rights based on socio-economic status, favouring elites. However, over time, Servius increasingly favoured the poor in order to gain support from plebeians, often at the expense of patricians. After a 44-year reign, Servius was killed in a conspiracy by his daughter Tullia and her husband Lucius Tarquinius Superbus.  In the first century AD, the emperor Claudius mentioned Mastarna, an Etruscan adventurer who became king of Rome after the death of his chief Caelius Vibenna; Claudius identified Mastarna with Servius Tullius. Mastarna and Caelius Vibenna are also depicted on the François Tomb, a painted tomb with Etruscan inscriptions usually dated to the fourth or third century BC. Mastarna—whose name appears to be the Etruscan form of the Latin title magister 'leader'—may have become king of Rome in the time of the Tarquinii. Momigliano writes that Mastarna "is so different from the traditional Servius Tullius that it appears prudent to keep the two apart."   Lucius Tarquinius Superbus.  The seventh and final king of Rome was Lucius Tarquinius Superbus. He was the son of Priscus and the son-in-law of Servius, whom he and his wife had killed. He ruled for 25 years.  Tarquinius waged a number of wars against Rome's neighbours, including against the Volsci, Gabii and the Rutuli. He also secured Rome's position as head of the Latin cities. He also engaged in a series of public works, notably the completion of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, and works on the Cloaca Maxima and the Circus Maximus. However, Tarquin's reign is remembered for his use of violence and intimidation to control Rome and his disrespect for Roman custom and the Roman Senate.  Tensions came to a head when the king's son, Sextus Tarquinius, raped Lucretia, wife and daughter to powerful Roman nobles. Lucretia told her relatives about the attack and committed suicide to avoid the dishonour of the episode. Four men, led by Lucius Junius Brutus, and including Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus, Publius Valerius Poplicola, and Spurius Lucretius Tricipitinus incited a revolution that deposed and expelled Tarquinius and his family from Rome in 509 BC. Lucius Junius Brutus and Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus became Rome's first consuls, marking the beginning of the Roman Republic. An attempt by the Etruscan ruler Lars Porsena to restore the Tarquinii to power was abandoned, and a subsequent attack by Porsena's son on Aricia was beaten back by the Latins and their allies from Cumae.  In the first century AD, the Roman historians Tacitus and Pliny recorded an alternative tradition, according to which Porsena had actually captured Rome and imposed humiliating conditions on the Romans. Thus, some modern scholars have suggested that Porsena took Rome and from there attacked Aricia, withdrawing after his defeat. According to Tim Cornell, rather than trying to restore the Tarquinii at all, it is more likely that Porsena abolished the Roman monarchy, and that the republic was established after his departure. Momigliano writes that, if Porsena did in fact take Rome, he must have installed a new Etruscan ruler there, and the Romans probably did not elect their first consuls until after the defeat of Porsena by the other Latins and the Cumaeans. Wikipedia: Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.This episode includes AI-generated content.

Roman Kingdom, part 2.  Senate.  According to legend, Romulus established the Senate after he founded Rome by personally selecting the most noble men (wealthy men with legitimate wives and children) to serve as a council for the city. As such, the Senate was the King's advisory council as the Council of State. The Senate was composed of three hundred senators, with a hundred senators representing each of the three ancient tribes of Rome: the Ramnes, Tities, and Luceres. Within each tribe, a senator was selected from each of the tribe's ten curiae. The king had the sole authority to appoint the senators, but this selection was done in accordance with ancient custom.  Under the monarchy, the Senate possessed very little power and authority as the king held most of the political power of the state and could exercise those powers without the Senate's consent. The chief function of the Senate was to serve as the king's council and be his legislative coordinator. Once legislation proposed by the king passed the Curiate Assembly, the Senate could either veto it or accept it as law. The king was, by custom, to seek the advice of the Senate on major issues. However, it was left to him to decide what issues, if any, were brought before them and he was free to accept or reject their advice as he saw fit. Only the king possessed the power to convene the Senate, except during the interregnum, during which the Senate possessed the authority to convene itself.  Kings of Rome.  Romulus.  Son of the Vestal Virgin Rhea Silvia, ostensibly by the god Mars, the legendary Romulus was Rome's founder and first king. After he and his twin brother Remus had deposed King Amulius of Alba and reinstated the king's brother and their grandfather Numitor to the throne, they decided to build a city in the area where they had been abandoned as infants. After killing Remus in a dispute, Romulus began building the city on the Palatine Hill. His work began with fortifications. He permitted men of all classes to come to Rome as citizens, including slaves and freemen without distinction. He is credited with establishing the city's religious, legal and political institutions. The kingdom was established by unanimous acclaim with him at the helm when Romulus called the citizenry to a council for the purposes of determining their government.  Romulus established the Senate as an advisory council with the appointment of 100 of the most noble men in the community. These men he called patres (from pater, father, head), and their descendants became the patricians. To project command, he surrounded himself with attendants, in particular the twelve lictors. He created three divisions of horsemen (equites), called centuries: Ramnes (Romans), Tities (after the Sabine king) and Luceres (Etruscans). He also divided the populace into 30 curiae, named after 30 of the Sabine women who had intervened to end the war between Romulus and Tatius. The curiae formed the voting units in the popular assemblies (Comitia Curiata).  Romulus was behind one of the most notorious acts in Roman history, the incident commonly known as The Rape of the Sabine Women. To provide his citizens with wives, Romulus invited the neighbouring tribes to a festival in Rome where the Romans committed a mass abduction of young women from among the attendees. The accounts vary from 30 to 683 women taken, a significant number for a population of 3,000 Latins (and presumably for the Sabines as well). War broke out when Romulus refused to return the captives. After the Sabines made three unsuccessful attempts to invade the hill settlements of Rome, the women themselves intervened during the Battle of the Lacus Curtius to end the war. The two peoples were united in a joint kingdom, with Romulus and the Sabine king Titus Tatius sharing the throne. In addition to the war with the Sabines, Romulus waged war with the Fidenates and Veientes and others.  He reigned for thirty-seven years. According to the legend, Romulus vanished at age fifty-four while reviewing his troops on the Campus Martius. He was reported to have been taken up to Mount Olympus in a whirlwind and made a god. After initial acceptance by the public, rumours and suspicions of foul play by the patricians began to grow. In particular, some thought that members of the nobility had murdered him, dismembered his body, and buried the pieces on their land. These were set aside after an esteemed nobleman testified that Romulus had come to him in a vision and told him that he was the god Quirinus. He became not only one of the three major gods of Rome, but the very likeness of the city itself.  A replica of Romulus's hut was maintained in the centre of Rome until the end of the Roman Empire.  Numa Pompilius.  After Romulus died, there was an interregnum for one year, during which ten men chosen from the Senate governed Rome as successive interreges. Under popular pressure, the Senate finally chose the Sabine Numa Pompilius to succeed Romulus, on account of his reputation for justice and piety. The choice was accepted by the Curiate Assembly.  Numa's reign was marked by peace and religious reform. He constructed a new temple to Janus and, after establishing peace with Rome's neighbours, closed the doors of the temple to indicate a state of peace. They remained closed for the rest of his reign. He established the Vestal Virgins at Rome, as well as the Salii, and the flamines for Jupiter, Mars and Quirinus. He also established the office and duties of pontifex maximus. Numa reigned for 43 years. He reformed the Roman calendar by adjusting it for the solar and lunar year, as well as by adding the months of January and February to bring the total number of months to twelve.  Tullus Hostilius.Tullus Hostilius was as warlike as Romulus had been, completely unlike Numa as he lacked any respect for the gods. Tullus waged war against Alba Longa, Fidenae and Veii and the Sabines. During Tullus's reign, the city of Alba Longa was completely destroyed and Tullus integrated its population into Rome. Tullus is attributed with constructing a new home for the Senate, the Curia Hostilia, which survived for 562 years after his death.  According to Livy, Tullus neglected the worship of the gods until, towards the end of his reign, he fell ill and became superstitious. However, when Tullus called upon Jupiter and begged assistance, Jupiter responded with a bolt of lightning that burned the king and his house to ashes. His reign lasted for 32 years.  Ancus Marcius.   Following the mysterious death of Tullus, the Romans elected a peaceful and religious king in his place, Numa's grandson, Ancus Marcius. Much like his grandfather, Ancus did little to expand the borders of Rome and only fought wars to defend the territory. He also built Rome's first prison on the Capitoline Hill.  Ancus further fortified the Janiculum Hill on the western bank and built the first bridge across the Tiber River. He also founded the port of Ostia Antica on the Tyrrhenian Sea and established Rome's first salt works, as well as the city's first aqueduct. Rome grew, as Ancus used diplomacy to peacefully unite smaller surrounding cities into alliance with Rome. Thus, he completed the conquest of the Latins and relocated them to the Aventine Hill, thus forming the plebeian class of Romans.  He died a natural death, like his grandfather, after 25 years as king, marking the end of Rome's Latin–Sabine kings.  Lucius Tarquinius Priscus.  Lucius Tarquinius Priscus was the fifth king of Rome and the first of Etruscan birth. After immigrating to Rome, he gained favour with Ancus, who later adopted him as son. Upon ascending the throne, he waged wars against the Sabines and Etruscans, doubling the size of Rome and bringing great treasures to the city. To accommodate the influx of population, the Aventine and Caelian hills were populated.  One of his first reforms was to add 100 new members to the Senate from the conquered Etruscan tribes, bringing the total number of senators to 200. He used the treasures Rome had acquired from the conquests to build great monuments for Rome. Among these were Rome's great sewer systems, the Cloaca Maxima, which he used to drain the swamp-like area between the Seven Hills of Rome. In its place, he began construction on the Roman Forum. He also founded the Roman games.  Priscus initiated great building projects, including the city's first bridge, the Pons Sublicius. The most famous is the Circus Maximus, a giant stadium for chariot races. After that, he started the building of the temple-fortress to the god Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill. However, before it was completed, he was killed by a son of Ancus Marcius, after 38 years as king. His reign is best remembered for introducing the Roman symbols of military and civil offices, and the Roman triumph, being the first Roman to celebrate one.  Wikipedia: Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.This episode includes AI-generated content.

Roman Kingdom, part 1.  The Roman Kingdom, also known as the Roman monarchy and the regal period of ancient Rome, was the earliest period of Roman history, when the city and its territory were ruled by kings. According to tradition, the Roman Kingdom began with the city's founding abouy 753 BC, with settlements around the Palatine Hill along the river Tiber in central Italy and ended with the overthrow of the kings and the establishment of the Republic abot 509 BC.  Little is certain about the kingdom's history as no records and few inscriptions from the time of the kings have survived. The accounts of this period written during the Republic and the Empire are thought largely to be based on oral tradition.  Origin.  The site of the founding of the Roman Kingdom (and eventual Republic and Empire) included a ford where one could cross the river Tiber in central Italy. The Palatine Hill and hills surrounding it provided easily defensible positions in the wide fertile plain surrounding them. Each of these features contributed to the success of the city.  The traditional version of Roman history, which has come down principally through Livy (59 BC – AD 17), Plutarch (before 50 – after AD 120), and Dionysius of Halicarnassus (c. 60 BC – after 7 BC), recounts that a series of seven kings ruled the settlement in Rome's first centuries. The traditional chronology, as codified by Varro (116 – 27 BC) and Fabius Pictor (c. 270 – c. 200 BC), allows 243 years for their combined reigns, an average of almost 35 years. Since the work of Barthold Georg Niebuhr, modern scholarship has generally discounted this schema. The Gauls destroyed many of Rome's historical records when they sacked the city after the Battle of the Allia in 390 BC (according to Varro; according to Polybius, the battle occurred in 387 or 386), and what remained eventually fell prey to time or to theft. With no contemporary records of the kingdom surviving, all accounts of the Roman kings must be carefully questioned.  Monarchy.  The kings following Romulus, the city's founder, were elected by the people of Rome to serve for life and did not rely upon military force to gain or keep the throne. The only king to break fully with this tradition was Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, the final king, who according to tradition seized power from his predecessor and ruled as a tyrant.  In reality, most kings of Rome seem to have been leaders of armed bands who through persuasion or force acquired the support of the Roman aristocracy. The kings were not necessarily of Roman or Latin origin. Arnaldo Momigliano writes, "There was probably only a thin dividing line between the band chief called in to help an existing rex [king] and a band chief called in to replace him and therefore to rule in his stead."  The insignia of the kings of Rome were twelve lictors (attendants or servants) wielding the symbolic fasces bearing axes, the right to sit upon a curule seat, the purple toga picta, red shoes, and a white diadem around the head. Of all these insignia, the most important was the purple toga picta.  Chief Executive.  The king was invested with supreme military, executive, and judicial authority through the use of imperium, formally granted to the king by the Curiate Assembly with the passing of the Lex curiata de imperio at the beginning of each king's reign. The imperium of the king was held for life and protected him from ever being brought to trial for his actions. As the king was the sole owner of imperium in Rome at the time, he possessed ultimate executive power and unchecked military authority as the commander-in-chief of all of the Roman legions. Also, the laws that kept citizens safe from magistrates' misuse of imperium did not exist during the monarchical period.  The king had the power to either appoint or nominate all officials to offices. He would appoint a tribunus celerum to serve as both the tribune of the Ramnes tribe in Rome and as the commander of the king's personal bodyguard, the celeres. The king was required to appoint the tribune upon entering office and the tribune left office upon the king's death. The tribune was second in rank to the king and also possessed the power to convene the Curiate Assembly and lay legislation before it.  Another officer appointed by the king was the praefectus urbi, who acted as the warden of the city. When the king was absent from the city, the prefect held all of the king's powers and abilities, even to the point of being bestowed with imperium while inside the city.  The king also received the right to be the only person to appoint patricians to the Senate.  Chief Priest.  What is known for certain is that the king alone possessed the right to the augury on behalf of Rome as its chief augur, and no public business could be performed without the will of the gods made known through auspices. The people knew the king as a mediator between them and the gods (cf. Latin pontifex, "bridge-builder", in this sense, between men and the gods) and thus viewed the king with religious awe. This made the king the head of the national religion and its chief executive. Having the power to control the Roman calendar, he conducted all religious ceremonies and appointed lower religious offices and officers. It is said that Romulus himself instituted the augurs and was believed to have been the best augur of all. Likewise, King Numa Pompilius instituted the pontiffs and through them developed the foundations of the religious dogma of Rome.   Chief Legislator.  Under the kings, the Senate and Curiate Assembly had very little power and authority. They were not independent since they lacked the right to meet together and discuss questions of state at their own will. They could be called together only by the king (and the tribune in the case of the Curiate Assembly) and could discuss only the matters that the king laid before them. While the Curiate Assembly had the power to pass laws that had been submitted by the king, the Senate was effectively an honorary council. It could advise the king on his action but by no means could prevent him from acting. The only thing that the king could not do without the approval of the Senate and the Curiate Assembly was to declare war against a foreign nation.  Chief Judge.  The king's imperium both granted him military powers and qualified him to pronounce legal judgement in all cases as the chief justice of Rome. Though he could assign pontiffs to act as minor judges in some cases, he had supreme authority in all cases brought before him, both civil and criminal. This made the king supreme in times of both war and peace. While some writers believed there was no appeal from the king's decisions, others believed that a proposal for appeal could be brought before the king by any patrician during a meeting of the Curiate Assembly.  To assist the king, a council advised him during all trials, but this council had no power to control his decisions. Also, two criminal detectives (quaestores parricidi) were appointed by him as well as a two-man criminal court (duumviri perduellionis), which oversaw cases of treason. According to Livy, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, the seventh and final king of Rome, judged capital criminal cases without the advice of counsellors, thereby creating fear amongst those who might think to oppose him.  Election of the kings.  Whenever a king died, Rome entered a period of interregnum. Supreme power of the state would devolve to the Senate, which was responsible for finding a new king. The Senate would assemble and appoint one of its own members—the interrex—to serve for a period of five days with the sole purpose of nominating the next king of Rome. If no king were nominated at the end of five days, with the Senate's consent the interrex would appoint another Senator to succeed him for another five-day term. This process would continue until a new king was elected. Once the interrex found a suitable nominee to the kingship, he would bring the nominee before the Senate and the Curiate would review him. If the Senate passed the nominee, the interrex would convene the Curiate Assembly and preside over it during the election of the king. Once the nominee was proposed to the Curiate Assembly, the citizens of Rome could either accept or reject him. If accepted, the king-elect did not immediately enter office. Two other acts still had to take place before he was invested with the full regal authority and power.  First, it was necessary to obtain the divine will of the gods respecting his appointment by means of the auspices, since the king would serve as high priest of Rome. This ceremony was performed by an augur, who conducted the king-elect to the citadel, where he was placed on a stone seat as the people waited below. If found worthy of the kingship, the augur announced that the gods had given favourable tokens, thus confirming the king's priestly character. The second act which had to be performed was the conferral of the imperium upon the king. The Curiate Assembly's previous vote only determined who was to be king, and had not by that act bestowed the necessary power of the king upon him. Accordingly, the king himself proposed to the Curiate Assembly a law granting him imperium, and the Curiate Assembly by voting in favor of the law would grant it. In theory, the people of Rome elected their leader, but the Senate had most of the control over the process.  Wikipedia: Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.This episode includes AI-generated content.

Natale di Roma. Natale di Roma (or 'Birthday of Rome') is an annual festival held in Rome on April 21 to celebrate the legendary founding of the city. According to legend, Romulus is said to have founded the city of Rome on April 21, 753 BC. A Roman chronology derived its system, known by the Latin phrase Ab urbe condita, meaning 'from the founding of the City', from this date and counted the years from this presumed foundation. The dominant method of identifying years in Roman times, though, was to name the two consuls who held office that year.  Celebrations of the festival in the age of Rome.    The celebration of the anniversary of the Urbe as an element of imperial propaganda ultimately assigned fundamental importance to the question of the year of foundation.  Starting from Emperor Claudius, the method of calculating the City's age, proposed by Marcus Terentius Varro, prevailed over others. Claudius was the first to have the anniversary of Rome celebrated in 47, eight hundred years after the presumed date of foundation. In 147–148, Antoninus Pius initiated a similar celebration, and in 248, Philip the Arab celebrated the first millennium of Rome, along with the Ludi Saeculares (celebrated every hundred years), as Rome reached ten centuries. Coins have survived that celebrate the event. On a coin of the claimant to the throne Pacatianus, the number "1001" explicitly appears, indicating how the citizens of the Roman Empire understood they were at the beginning of a new era, Saeculum Novum. When the Roman Empire became Christian, in the following centuries, this millenary image was utilized in a more metaphysical sense.  During the imperial age, the feast of Saint Caesarius of Terracina (whose name Kaisarios probably predestined him to become the patron saint of Caesars) was established for the day April 21, the date of the foundation of Rome: this date acquired significant meaning, especially for the imperial propaganda it served; a pretext to celebrate the figure of the emperor and his patron saint.  The festival after the fall of the Western Roman Empire.  With the earlier spread and later adoption of Christianity as the state religion, along with the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the subsequent invasions, migrations, and conquests by barbarian populations, Rome, like everything that was its empire, saw the disappearance of many of its customs and traditions, including many of its festivals.  During the Renaissance.  The Roman Academy of Pomponio Leto (a student of the pagan theologian Gemistus Pletho) soon became a circle of literati devoted to classical antiquity, even aiming to restore the ancient Roman religion (a unique project in the context of 15th-century humanism, indicating a certain subversive inclination). This seems to have taken place within the Academy itself, where they ritually celebrated the birthday of Rome (April 21) and where Leto had restored the Pontifex Maximus.  This is also seemingly confirmed by some inscriptions discovered in the 19th century in the Roman catacombs, where the names of the members of the Roman Academy are found alongside inscriptions encouraging debauchery. Pomponio Leto is called Pontifex Maximus and Pantagathus, meaning priest.  During the Risorgimento.  Some of these were recovered by Humanism, but it was with the advent of the Risorgimento that the celebration of Natale di Roma was restored as a "tradition". The most revolutionary among the Mazzinians, Garibaldians, and some liberals celebrated the event, for instance, in the spring of 1849, when Rome, having recently become a free Republic that had overthrown the temporal power of the Pope, fought for survival. It is said that a meal was held in the Forums with toasts for the presumed foundation of the Urbe by Romulus and the refounding (liberation) by the revolutionaries themselves. Francesco Sturbinetti delivered one of the most heartfelt speeches.  During the Fascist era.  On April 3, 1921, during a speech in Bologna, the then leader of the Italian Fascist Movement, Benito Mussolini, proclaimed the anniversary of the founding of Rome as an official holiday of fascism. This decision was commented on by Antonio Gramsci as the fascism's attempt to naturalize its role in Italian history, through the claim to Roman origins. In the document that sanctioned the national-fascist fusion between the Italian Nationalist Association and the National Fascist Party, signed on March 16, 1923, representatives of the two political forces established to celebrate the unifying agreement with a manifesto containing an appeal for national unity, to be posted in all Italian cities on the evening of April 20, the eve of Natale di Roma, a day "signifying the occurred rebirth of Roman greatness".  On the same April 19, a draft decree-law proposed by President Benito Mussolini was approved by the Council of Ministers, abolishing the holiday on May 1 and fixing the celebration of Labor Day on April 21, Natale di Roma. It was the first celebration instituted by Mussolini's government, which, starting from April 21, 1924, became a national holiday, named "Natale di Roma - Labor Day". This decree was repealed in 1945, restoring Labor Day to May 1.  Italian Republic.  In the years of the Italian Republic, "Natale di Roma" has been celebrated with conferences and historical reenactments. In recent years, this event has regained significance, leading Italian institutions to recognize it more. Associations such as the "Gruppo Storico Romano" (GSR) and Pietas Comunita Gentile have contributed to organizing the event through historical reenactments and religious events with the affiliated associations involved in the modern Roman religion. The Gruppo Storico Romano annually organizes a parade with participants in period costumes and representations of scenes from ancient life and celebrations that echo the religious rites of ancient Rome.  In 2024, the 2777th "Natale di Roma" was held, with the participation of Italian institutional representatives. During the event, a plan was announced to increase funding for historical reenactments and possible legislation aimed at regulating such celebrations to preserve and enhance cultural traditions. Additionally, the band of the Italian Army participated in the celebrations. Every year, organizations from across Europe come to celebrate this date, demonstrating the importance and international appeal of the event.Wikipedia: Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.This episode includes AI-generated content.

Romulus and Remus.  In the best known form of the legend, Romulus and Remus are the grandsons of Numitor, the king of Alba Longa. After Numitor is deposed by his brother Amulius and his daughter Rhea Silvia is forced to become a Vestal virgin, she becomes pregnant – allegedly raped by the war god Mars – and delivers the two illegitimate brothers. Amulius orders that the children be left to die on the slopes of the Palatine or in the Tiber River, but they are suckled by a she-wolf at the Lupercal cave and then discovered by the shepherd Faustulus and taken in by him and his wife Acca Larentia. (Livy combines Larentia and the she-wolf, considering them most likely to have referred to a prostitute, also known in Latin slang as a lupa or she-wolf.) Faustulus eventually reveals the brothers' true origins, and they depose or murder Amulius and restore Numitor to his throne. They then leave or are sent to establish a new city at the location where they had been rescued.  The twins then come into conflict during the foundation of the city, leading to the murder of Remus. The dispute is variously said to have been over the naming of the new city, over the interpretation of auguries, whether to place it on the Palatine or Aventine Hill, or concerned with Remus's disrespect of the new town's ritual furrow or wall. Some accounts say Romulus slays his brother with his own hand, others that Remus and sometimes Faustulus are killed in a general melee. Wiseman and some others attribute the aspects of fratricide to the 4th-century BC Conflict of the Orders, when Rome's lower-class plebeians began to resist excesses by the upper-class patricians.  Romulus, after ritualistically ploughing the generally square course of the city's future boundary, erects its first walls and declares the settlement an asylum for exiles, criminals, and runaway slaves. The city becomes larger but also acquires a mostly male population. When Romulus' attempts to secure the women of neighbouring settlements by diplomacy fail, he uses the religious celebration of Consualia to abduct the women of the Sabines. According to Livy, when the Sabines rally an army to take their women back, the women force the two groups to make peace and install the Sabine king Titus Tatius as comonarch with Romulus. The story has been theorised by some modern scholars to reflect anti-Roman propaganda from the late fourth century BC, but more likely reflects an indigenous Roman tradition, given the Capitoline Wolf which likely dates to the sixth century BC. Regardless, by the third century, it was widely accepted by Romans and put onto some of Rome's first silver coins in 269 BC. In his 1995 Beginnings of Rome, Tim Cornell argues that the myths of Romulus and Remus are "popular expressions of some universal human need or experience" rather than borrowings from the Greek east or Mesopotamia, inasmuch as the story of virgin birth, intercession by animals and humble stepparents, with triumphant return expelling an evil leader are common mythological elements across Eurasia and even into the Americas. Aeneas.  The tradition of Romulus was also combined with a legend telling of Aeneas coming from Troy and travelling to Italy. This tradition emerges from the Iliad's prophecy that Aeneas's descendants would one day return and rule Troy once more. Greeks by 550 BC had begun to speculate, given the lack of any clear descendants of Aeneas, that the figure had established a dynasty outside the proper Greek world. The first attempts to tie this story to Rome were in the works of two Greek historians at the end of the fifth century BC, Hellanicus of Lesbos and Damastes of Sigeum, likely only mentioning off hand the possibility of a Roman connection; a more assured connection only emerged at the end of the fourth century BC when Rome started having formal dealings with the Greek world.  The ancient Roman annalists, historians, and antiquarians faced an issue tying Aeneas to Romulus, as they believed that Romulus lived centuries after the Trojan War, which was dated at the time c. 1100 BC. For this, they fabricated a story of Aeneas's son founding the city of Alba Longa and establishing a dynasty there, which eventually produced Romulus.   In Livy's first book he recounts how Aeneas, a demigod of the Trojan royal Anchises and the goddess Venus, leaves Troy after its destruction during the Trojan War and sailed to the western Mediterranean. He brings his son – Ascanius – and a group of companions. Landing in Italy, he forms an alliance with a local magnate called Latinus and marries his daughter Lavinia, joining the two into a new group called the Latini; they then found a new city, called Lavinium. After a series of wars against the Rutuli and Caere, the Latins conquer the Alban Hills and its environs. His son Ascanius then founds the legendary city of Alba Longa, which became the dominant city in the region. The later descendants of the royal lineage of Alba Longa eventually produce Romulus and Remus, setting up the events of their mythological story. Dionysius of Halicarnassus similarly attempted to show a Greek connection, giving a similar story for Aeneas, but also a previous series of migrations. He describes migrations of Arcadians into southern Italy some time in the 18th century BC, migrations into Umbria by Greeks from Thessaly, and the foundation of a settlement on the Palatine Hill by Evander (originally hailing also from Arcadia) and Hercules, whose labour with the cattle of Geryon was placed in the Forum Boarium by the Romans.  The introduction of Aeneas follows a trend across Italy towards Hellenising their own early mythologies by rationalising myths and legends of the Greek Heroic Age into a pseudo-historical tradition of prehistoric times; this was in part due to Greek historians' eagerness to construct narratives purporting that the Italians were actually descended from Greeks and their heroes. These narratives were accepted by non-Greek people's due Greek historiography's prestige and claims to systematic validity.  Archaeological evidence shows that worship of Aeneas had been established at Lavinium by the sixth century BC. Similarly, a cult to Hercules had been established at the Ara Maxima in Rome during the archaic period. By the early fifth century BC, these stories had become entrenched in Roman historical beliefs. These cults, along with the early – in literary terms – account of Cato the Elder, show how Italians and Romans took these Greek histories seriously and as reliable evidence by later annalists, even though they were speculations of little value.  Much of the syncretism, however, may simply reflect Roman desires to give themselves a prestigious backstory: claim of Trojan descent proved politically advantageous with the Greeks by justifying both claims of common heritage and ancestral enmity.  Other myths.  There was no single mythic tradition of Rome's founding. By the time of the Pyrrhic War (280–275 BC), there were some sixty different myths for Rome's foundation that circulated in the Greek world. Most of them attributed the city to an eponymous founder, usually "Rhomos" or "Rhome" rather than Romulus. One story told how Romos, a son of Odysseus and Circe, was the one who founded Rome. Martin P. Nilsson speculates that this older story was becoming a bit embarrassing as Rome became more powerful and tensions with the Greeks grew. Being descendants of the Greeks was no longer preferable, so the Romans settled on the Trojan foundation myth instead. Nilsson further speculates that the name of Romos was changed by some Romans to the native name Romulus, but the same name Romos (later changed to the native Remus) was never forgotten by many of the people, so both these names were used to represent the founders of the city.Another story, attributed to Hellanicus of Lesbos by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, says that Rome was founded by a woman named Rhome, one of the followers of Aeneas, after landing in Italy and burning their ships. That by the middle of the fifth century Aeneas was also allegedly the founder of two or three other cities across Italy was no object. These myths also differed as to whether their eponymous matriarch Roma was born in Troy or Italy – i.e. before or after Aeneas's journey – or otherwise if their Romus was a direct or collateral descendant of Aeneas.  Myths of the early third century also differed greatly in the claimed genealogy of Romulus or the founder, if an intermediate actor was posited. One tale posited that a Romus, son of Zeus, founded the city. Callias posited that Romulus was descended from Latinus and a woman called Roma who was the daughter of Aeneas and a homonymous mother. Other authors depicted Romulus and Romus, as a son of Aeneas, founding not only Rome but also Capua. Authors also wrote their home regions into the story. Polybius, who hailed from Arcadia, for example, gave Rome not a Trojan colonial origin but rather an Arcadian one. Wikipedia: Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.This episode includes AI-generated content.

Ancient tradition and founding myths.  By the late Republic, the usual Roman origin myth held that their city was founded by a Latin named Romulus on the day of the Parilia Festival (21 April) in some year around 750 BC.  Important aspects of the myth concerned Romulus's murder of his twin Remus, the brothers' descent from the god Mars and the royal family of Alba Longa, and that dynasty's supposed descent from Aeneas, himself supposedly descended from the goddess Aphrodite and the royal family of Troy. The accounts in the first book of Livy's History of Rome and in Vergil's Aeneid were particularly influential. Some accounts further asserted that there had been a Mycenaean Greek settlement on the Palatine (later dubbed Pallantium) even earlier than Romulus and Remus, at some time prior to the Trojan War.  Modern scholars disregard most of the traditional accounts as myths. There is no persuasive archaeological evidence for either the Romulan foundation or for the idea of an early Greek settlement. Even the name Romulus is now generally believed to have been retrojected from the city's name – glossed as "Mr Rome" by the classicist Mary Beard – rather than reflecting a historical or actual figure. Some scholars, particularly Andrea Carandini, have argued that it remains possible that these foundation myths reflect actual historical events in some form and that the city and Roman Kingdom were in fact founded by a single actor in some way. This remains a minority viewpoint in present scholarship and highly controversial in the absence of further evidence, with the arguments made by Carandini and others appearing to rest on highly tendentious interpretations of what is currently known with certainty from scientific excavations.  The Romans' origin myths, however, provide evidence of how the Romans conceived of themselves as a mixture of different ethnic groups and foreign influences, The Romans took the foundation of their own new cities seriously, undertaking many rituals and attributing many of them to remote antiquity. They long maintained the Hut of Romulus, a primitive dwelling on the Palatine attributed to their founder, although they had no firm basis for associating it with him specifically.  Chronological disagreements.  While the Romans believed that their city had been founded by an eponymous founder at a specific time, when that occurred was disputed by the ancient historians. The earliest dates placed it c. 1100 BC out of a belief that Romulus had been Aeneas's grandson. This moved Rome's foundation much closer to the fall of Troy, dated by Eratosthenes to 1184–83 BC; these dates are attested as early as the 4th century BC. Romulus was later chronologically connected to Aeneas and the time of the Trojan War by introducing a line of Alban kings, which scholars consider to be entirely spurious.  Most scholars view the move from a foundation date in the 1100s to one in the 700s to have come from Roman calculations from estimates of the lengths of the republican and regal periods. Their attempts to estimate how long the regal period lasted, however, are largely rejected as synthetic calculations. It may also be that the date of the city's foundation was assigned from Greek historiography, especially influenced by Timaeus of Tauromenium (born c. 350 BC) who may have been the first to move the founding of the city from the era of the Trojan war to the more historical 814 BC. A later intervention, possibly at the hands of Fabius Pictor (born c. 270 BC) or his source Diocles of Peparethus, then placed the foundation date within the Olympiads (ie within "historical" time), settling eventually on c. 750 BC. Dionysius of Halicarnassus (born c. 60 BC) placed it in the first year of the 7th Olympiad, that is, 752/51 BC.  From Claudius's Secular Games in AD 47 to Hadrian's Romaea in AD 121, the official date seems to have used the chronology established by Varro in the late 1st century BC, placing Rome's founding in 753 BC. Augustus's Fasti running to AD 13 and the Secular Games celebrated at Rome's 900th and 1000th anniversaries under Antoninus Pius and Philip I, meanwhile, used dates computed from a foundation a year later in 752 BC. Despite known errors in Varro's work,[63] it is the former date that has become the most repeated in modernity and is still used for computing the AUC calendar era. Wikipedia: Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.This episode includes AI-generated content.

Archaeological evidence.  There is archaeological evidence of human occupation of the area of modern Rome from at least 5,000 years ago, but the dense layer of much younger debris obscures any Palaeolithic and Neolithic sites. Traces of occupation have been found in the general region – including Lavinium and the coast near Ardea – going back to the 15th century BC. The area was home to the Apennine and Proto-Villanovan cultures before the advent of the more regional Latial culture.Bronze Age.  Archaeological evidence suggests that Rome developed over a long period, but it was definitely occupied by the middle of the Bronze Age. Core samples have shown that the terrain of Bronze-Age Rome differed greatly from what is present now. The area of the Forum Boarium north of the Aventine Hill was a seasonally dry plain that simultaneously provided a safe inland port for the era's seafaring ships, a wide area for watering horses and cattle, and a safe ford of the Tiber with shallow and slow-flowing water even if Tiber Island had not yet formed, one of the river's major fords between Etruria and Campania. This advantageous but exposed location was closely flanked by the Capitoline, which at that time rose sharply from the more easterly bank of the Tiber and provided a ready citadel for defense and for control of the salt production along the river and at its mouth. The other hills and the marshes between them provided similarly defensible points for settlement.  Accordingly, thick deposits of manure and ancient pottery shards have been discovered in the Forum Boarium from the middle of the Bronze Age. Current evidence suggests that there were three separate bronze-using settlements on the Capitoline during the period 1700–1350 BC and in the neighboring valley that later became the Roman Forum from 1350–1120 BC. Some 13th century BC structures indicate that the Capitoline was already being terraced to manage its slope. Evidence in the Final Bronze Age around 1200–975 BC is clearer, showing occupation of the Capitoline, Forum, and adjacent Palatine. Excavations near the modern Capitoline Museums suggest the construction of fortifications and some scholars have speculated that settlements also existed on the other hills, especially the Janiculum, Quirinal, and Aventine. The Capitoline currently seems to have been the earliest settled but it is debated whether the settlements on the other hills were independent, colonies of the Capitoline settlement, or formerly separate villages already consolidated into a single polity. By 1000 BC, a necropolis existed in the Forum for cremation graves. By the early Iron Age c. 900 BC, graves started to be placed into the ground. Other cemeteries appear on the Esquiline, Quirinal, and Viminal Hills by the 9th century, containing pottery, imported Greek wares, fibulae, and bronze objects.  Remains from huts on the Palatine have been found that date to the 9th or 8th centuries BC, with accelerating development by the early to middle 8th century BC.  Eighth and seventh centuries BC.  By this time, four major settlements emerged in Rome. The nuclei appeared on the Palatine, the Capitoline, the Quirinal and Viminal, and the Caelian, Oppian, and Velia. There is, however, no evidence linking any settlement on the Quirinal hill with the Sabines, as is alleged by some ancient accounts.The area of the Forum also was converted at this time into a public space. Burials there discontinued and portions of it were paved over. Votive offerings appear in the comitium in the eighth century, indicating a more central religious cult, and other public buildings appear to have been erected around that time. One of those buildings was the domus publica (the official residence of the pontifex maximus), which is now believed to have been constructed between 750 and 700 BC. Religious activity started also in this period on the Capitoline hill, suggesting a connection to the ancient cult of Jupiter Feretrius. Other offerings discovered indicate Rome's connections outside Latium, with imported Greek pottery from Euboea and Corinth.  The first evidence of a wall appears in the middle or late eighth century on the Palatine, dated between 730 and 720 BC. It is possible that the circuit of the wall marked out what later Romans believed to be the original pomerium (sacred boundary) of the city. The discovery of gates and streets connected to the wall, with the remains of various huts, suggest that Rome had by this time: acquired a defined boundary ... and a more sophisticated level of social and political organisation ... the use of the Forum as a public space point[s] to the development of shared civil and ritual space for the inhabitants of all communities, demonstrating an increasing level of centralisation.  Like other Villanovan proto-urban centres, this archaic Rome was likely organised around clans that guarded their own areas, but by the later eighth century had confederated. The development of city-states was likely a Greek innovation that spread through the Mediterranean from 850 to 750 BC. The earliest votive deposits are found in the early seventh century on the Capitoline and Quirinal hills, suggesting that by that time a city had formed with monumental architecture and public religious sanctuaries. Certainly, by 600 BC, a process of synoikismos was complete and a unified Rome – reflected in the production of a central forum area, public monumental architecture, and civic structures – had by then been formed. Wikipedia: Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.This episode includes AI-generated content.

Founding of Rome.  The founding of Rome was a prehistoric event or process later greatly embellished by Roman historians and poets. Archaeological evidence indicates that Rome developed from the gradual union of several hilltop villages during the Final Bronze Age or early Iron Age. Prehistoric habitation of the Italian Peninsula occurred by 48,000 years ago, with the area of Rome being settled by around 1600 BC. Some evidence on the Capitoline Hill possibly dates as early as about 1700 BC and the nearby valley that later housed the Roman Forum had a developed necropolis by at least 1000 BC. The combination of the hilltop settlements into a single polity by the later 8th century BC was probably influenced by the trend for city-state formation emerging from ancient Greece.  Roman myth held that their city was founded by Romulus, son of the war god Mars and the Vestal virgin Rhea Silvia, fallen princess of Alba Longa and descendant of Aeneas of Troy. Exposed on the Tiber river, Romulus and his twin Remus were suckled by a she-wolf at the Lupercal before being raised by the shepherd Faustulus, taking revenge on their usurping great-uncle Amulius, and restoring Alba Longa to their grandfather Numitor. The brothers then decided to establish a new town but quarreled over some details, ending with Remus's murder and the establishment of Rome on the Palatine Hill. The year of the supposed founding was variously computed by ancient historians, but the two dates seeming to be officially sanctioned were the Varronian chronology's 753 BC (used by Claudius's Secular Games and Hadrian's Romaea) and the adjacent year of 752 BC (used by the Fasti and the Secular Games of Antoninus Pius and Philip I). Despite known errors in Varro's calculations, it is the 753 BC date that continues to form the basis for most modern calculations of the AUC calendar era.The legendary account was still much discussed and celebrated in Roman times. The Parilia Festival on 21 April was considered to commemorate the anniversary of the city's founding during the late Republic and that aspect of the holiday grew in importance under the Empire until it was fully transformed into the Romaea in AD 121. Most modern historians dismiss these ancient accounts of a single founder descended from a Trojan lineage establishing the city at specific point in time as fiction. Cultural context.  The conventional division of pre-Roman cultures in Italy deals with cultures which spoke Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages. The Italic languages, which include Latin, are Indo-European and were spoken, according to inscriptions, in the lower Tiber Valley. It was once thought that Faliscan – spoken north of Veii on the right bank of the Tiber – was a separate language, but inscriptions discovered in the 1980s indicate that Latin was spoken more generally in the area. Etruscan speakers were concentrated in modern Tuscany with a similar language called Raetic spoken on the upper Adige (the foothills of the eastern Italian Alps).  When drawing a connection between peoples and their languages, a reconstruction emerges with Indo-European peoples arriving in various waves of migrations during the first and second millennia BC: first a western Italic group (including Latin), followed by a central Italic group of Osco-Umbrian dialects, with a late arrival of Greek and Celtic on the Italian peninsula, from across the Adriatic and Alps, respectively. These migrations are generally believed to have displaced speakers of Etruscan and other pre-Indo-European languages; although it is possible that Etruscan arrived also by migration, almost certainly before 2000 BC.  The start of the Iron age saw a gradual increase in social complexity and population that led to the emergence of proto-urban settlements in central and northern Italy writ large. These proto-urban agglomerations were normally clusters of smaller settlements that were insufficiently distant to be separated communities; over time, they would unify.  Wikipedia: Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.This episode includes AI-generated content.

Ancient Rome.  In modern historiography, ancient Rome is the Roman civilisation from the founding of the Italian city of Rome in the 8th century BC to the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD. It encompasses the Roman Kingdom (753–509 BC), the Roman Republic (509‍–‍27 BC), and the Roman Empire (27 BC – 476 AD) until the fall of the western empire. Ancient Rome began as an Italic settlement, traditionally dated to 753 BC, beside the River Tiber in the Italian Peninsula. The settlement grew into the city and polity of Rome, and came to control its neighbours through a combination of treaties and military strength. It eventually controlled the Italian Peninsula, assimilating the Greek culture of southern Italy (Magna Graecia) and the Etruscan culture, and then became the dominant power in the Mediterranean region and parts of Europe. At its height it controlled the North African coast, Egypt, Southern Europe, and most of Western Europe, the Balkans, Crimea, and much of the Middle East, including Anatolia, the Levant, and parts of Mesopotamia and Arabia. That empire was among the largest empires in the ancient world, covering around 5 million square kilometres (1.9 million square miles) in AD 117, with an estimated 50 to 90 million inhabitants, roughly 20% of the world's population at the time. The Roman state evolved from an elective monarchy to a classical republic and then to an increasingly autocratic military dictatorship during the Empire. Ancient Rome is often grouped into classical antiquity together with ancient Greece, and their similar cultures and societies are known as the Greco-Roman world. Ancient Roman civilisation has contributed to modern language, religion, society, technology, law, politics, government, warfare, art, literature, architecture, and engineering. Rome professionalised and expanded its military and created a system of government called res publica, the inspiration for modern republics such as the United States and France. It achieved impressive technological and architectural feats, such as the empire-wide construction of aqueducts and roads, as well as more grandiose monuments and facilities. Wikipedia: Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.This episode includes AI-generated content.

Kingdom of Italy.  Rome became the focus of hopes of Italian reunification when the rest of Italy was reunited under the Kingdom of Italy with a temporary capital at Florence. In 1861, Rome was declared the capital of Italy even though it was still under the control of the Pope. During the 1860s, the last vestiges of the Papal States were under the French protection of Napoleon III. And it was only when this was lifted in 1870, owing to the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, that Italian troops were able to capture Rome entering the city through a breach near Porta Pia. Afterwards, Pope Pius IX declared himself as prisoner in the Vatican, and in 1871 the capital of Italy was moved from Florence to Rome.  Soon after World War I, Rome witnessed the rise to power of Italian Fascism guided by Benito Mussolini, who, at the request of King Victor Emmanuel III, marched on the city in 1922, eventually declaring a new Empire and allying Italy with Nazi Germany.The interwar period saw a rapid growth in the city's population, that surpassed 1,000,000 inhabitants.  This Roman Question was finally resolved on 11 February 1929 between the Holy See and the Kingdom of Italy. The Lateran Treaty was signed by Benito Mussolini on behalf of King Victor Emmanuel III and by Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Gasparri for Pope Pius XI. The treaty, which became effective on 7 June 1929, and the Concordat established the independent State of the Vatican City and granted Roman Catholicism special status in Italy.  During World War II, Rome suffered few bombings (notably at San Lorenzo) and relatively little damage because none of the nations involved wanted to endanger the life of Pope Pius XII in Vatican City. There were some bitter fights between Italian and German troops in the south of the city and even in sight of the Colosseum, shortly after the armistice between Italy and Allied armed forces. On 4 June 1944 Rome became the first capital city of an Axis nation to fall to the Allies, but was relatively undamaged because on 14 August 1943, a day after the last allied bombing, the Germans declared it an "open city" and withdrew, meaning that the Allies did not have to fight their way in.  In practice Italy made no attempt to interfere with the Holy See within the Vatican walls. However, they confiscated church property in many other places, including the Quirinal Palace, formerly the pope's official residence. Pope Pius IX (1846–78), the last ruler of the Papal States, claimed that after Rome was annexed he was a "Prisoner in the Vatican".  Vatican City officially pursued a policy of neutrality during World War II, under the leadership of Pope Pius XII. Although the city of Rome was occupied by Germany from 1943 and the Allies from 1944, Vatican City itself was not occupied. One of Pius XII's main diplomatic priorities was to prevent the bombing of Rome; so sensitive was the pontiff that he protested even the British air dropping of pamphlets over Rome, claiming that the few landing within the city-state violated the Vatican's neutrality. Before the American entry into the war, there was little impetus for such a bombing, as the British saw little strategic value in it.  After the American entry, the US opposed such a bombing, fearful of offending Catholic members of its military forces, while the British then supported it. Pius XII similarly advocated for the declaration of Rome as an "open city", but this occurred only on 14 August 1943, after Rome had already been bombed twice. Although the Italians consulted the Vatican on the wording of the open city declaration, the impetus for the change had little to do with the Vatican.  Capital of the Italian Republic.  Rome grew substantially after the war, as one of the driving forces behind the "Italian economic miracle" of post-war reconstruction and modernisation. It became a fashionable city in the 1950s and early 1960s, the years of "la dolce vita" ("the sweet life"), with popular classic films such as Ben Hur, Quo Vadis, Roman Holiday and La Dolce Vita being filmed in the city's iconic Cinecittà Studios.  A new rising trend in population continued until the mid-1980s, when the commune had more than 2.8 million residents; after that, population started to slowly decline as more residents moved to nearby suburbs. The Rome metropolitan area has about 4.4 million inhabitants as of 2015.  Being the capital city of Italy, all the principal institutions of the nation are located there, including the President; the seat of government with its single Ministeri; the Parliament; the main judicial Courts, and the diplomatic representatives for both Italy and the Vatican City. A number of notable international cultural, scientific and humanitarian institutions are located in Rome, including the German Archaeological Institute, and the FAO. Rome hosted the 1960 Summer Olympics, using many ancient sites such as the Villa Borghese and the Thermae of Caracalla as venues. For the Olympic Games new structures were created: the Olympic Stadium (which was itself enlarged and renovated to host qualifying rounds and the final match of the 1990 FIFA football World Cup); the Villaggio Olimpico (Olympic Village), created to house the athletes, was later redeveloped as a residential district.  Rome's Leonardo da Vinci–Fiumicino Airport opened in 1961. Tourism brings an average of 7–10 million visitors a year. Rome is the 2nd most visited city in the European Union, after Paris. The Colosseum (4 million tourists) and the Vatican Museums (4.2 million tourists) are the 39th and 37th (respectively) most visited places in the world, according to a 2009 study. Many of the ancient monuments of Rome were restored by the Italian state and by the Vatican for the 2000 Jubilee.  Historical city centre.  Today's Rome is a modern metropolis, yet it reflects the stratification of the epochs of its long history. The historical centre, identified as those parts within the limits of the ancient Imperial walls, contains archaeological remains from Ancient Rome. These are continuously being excavated and opened to the public, such as the Colosseum; the Roman Forum, and the Catacombs. There are areas with remains from Medieval times. There are palaces and artistic treasures from the Renaissance; fountains, churches and palaces from Baroque times. There is art and architecture from the Art Nouveau, Neoclassic, Modernist and Rationalist periods. There are museums, such as the Musei Capitolini, the Vatican Museums, Galleria Borghese.   Parts of the historical centre were reorganised after the 19th-century Italian Unification (1880–1910 – Roma Umbertina). The increase of population caused by the centralisation of the Italian state necessitated new infrastructure and accommodation. There were also substantial alterations and adaptations made during the Fascist period, for example, the creation of the Via dei Fori Imperiali; and the Via della Conciliazione in front of the Vatican. These projects involved the destruction of a large part of the old Borgo neighbourhood. New quartieri were founded, such as EUR (Esposizione Universale Roma), San Basilio, Garbatella, Cinecittà, Trullo and Quarticciolo. So great was the influx of people that on the coast, there was restructuring of Ostia and the inclusion of bordering villages such as Labaro, Osteria del Curato, Quarto Miglio, Capannelle, Pisana, Torrevecchia, Ottavia, Casalotti.  Wikipedia: Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.This episode includes AI-generated content.

Modern history.  Italian unification.  In 1870, the Pope's holdings were left in an uncertain situation when Rome itself was annexed by the Piedmont-led forces which had united the rest of Italy, after a nominal resistance by the papal forces. Between 1861 and 1929 the status of the Pope was referred to as the "Roman Question". The successive Popes were undisturbed in their palace, and certain prerogatives recognised by the Law of Guarantees, including the right to send and receive ambassadors. But the Popes did not recognise the Italian king's right to rule in Rome, and they refused to leave the Vatican compound until the dispute was resolved in 1929. Other states continued to maintain international recognition of the Holy See as a sovereign entity.  The rule of the Popes was interrupted by the short-lived Roman Republic (1798–1799), which was under the influence of the French Revolution. During Napoleon's reign, Rome was annexed into the French Empire as the capital of the department of Rome. After the fall of Napoleon's Empire, the Papal States were restored by the Congress of Vienna, with the exception of Avignon and the Comtat Venaissin, which remained part of France.Another Roman Republic arose in 1849, within the framework of revolutions of 1848. Two of the most influential figures of the Italian unification, Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi, fought for the short-lived republic. However, the actions of these two great men would not have resulted in unification without the sly leadership of Camillo Benso di Cavour, Prime Minister of Piedmont-Sardinia.Even among those who wanted to see the peninsula unified into one country, different groups could not agree on what form a unified state would take. Vincenzo Gioberti, a Piedmontese priest, had suggested a confederation of Italian states under rulership of the Pope. His book, Of the Moral and Civil Primacy of the Italians, was published in 1843 and created a link between the Papacy and the Risorgimento. Many leading revolutionaries wanted a republic, but eventually it was a king and his chief minister who had the power to unite the Italian states as a monarchy.  In his attempt to unify Northern Italy under the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, Cavour enacted major industrialisation of the country in order to become the economic leader of Italy. In doing so, he believed that the other states would naturally come under his rule. Next, he sent the army of Piedmont to the Crimean War to join the French and British. Making minor successes in the war against Russia, cordial relations were established between Piedmont-Sardinia and France; a relationship to be exploited in the future.  The return of Pope Pius IX in Rome, with help of French troops, marked the exclusion of Rome from the unification process that was embodied in the Second Italian Independence War and the Mille expedition, after which all the Italian peninsula, except Rome and Venetia, would be unified under the House of Savoy. Garibaldi first attacked Sicily, luckily under the guise of passing British ships and landing with little resistance.Taking the island, Garibaldi's actions were publicly denounced by Cavour but secretly encouraged via weapons supplements. This policy or real-politik, where the ends justified the means of unification, was continued as Garibaldi faced crossing the Strait of Messina. Cavour privately asked the British navy to allow Garibaldi's troops across the sea, while publicly he again, denounced Garibaldi's actions. The manoeuvre was a success and Garibaldi's military genius carried him on to take the entire kingdom.  Cavour then moved to take Venetia and Lombardy via an alliance with France. The Italians and French together would attack the two states with France getting the city of Nice and the region of Savoy in return. However, the French pulled out of their agreement soon after, enraging Cavour who subsequently resigned. Only Lombardy had been captured at the time.With French units still stationed at Rome however, Cavour, being called back to office, foresaw a possibility of Garibaldi attacking the Papal States and accidentally disrupting French-Italian relations. The army of Sardinia was therefore mobilised to attack the Papal States but remain outside Rome.  In the Austro-Prussian war however, a deal was made between the new Italy and Prussia, where Italy would attack Austria in return for the region of Venetia. The war was a major success for the Prussians (though the Italians did not win a single battle), and the northern front of Italy was complete.   In July 1870, the Franco-Prussian War started, and French Emperor Napoleon III could no longer protect the Papal States. Soon after, the Italian army under general Raffaele Cadorna entered Rome on 20 September, after a cannonade of three hours, through Porta Pia (see capture of Rome). The Leonine City was occupied the following day, a provisional Government Joint created by Cadorna out of local noblemen to avoid the rise of the radical factions. Rome and Latium were annexed to the Kingdom of Italy after a plebiscite held on 2 October. 133,681 voted for annexation, 1,507 opposed (in Rome itself, there were 40,785 "Yes" and 57 "No").When Rome was eventually taken, the Italian government reportedly intended to let Pope Pius IX keep the part of Rome, west of the Tiber, known as the Leonine City as a small remaining Papal State, but Pius IX rejected the offer because acceptance would have been an implied endorsement of the legitimacy of the Italian kingdom's rule over his former domain. One week after entering Rome, the Italian troops had taken the entire city save for the Apostolic Palace; the inhabitants of the city then voted to join Italy. On 1 July 1871, Rome became the official capital of united Italy and from then until June 1929 the popes had no temporal power.  The pope referred to himself during this time as the "prisoner of the Vatican", although he was not actually restrained from coming and going. Pius IX took steps to ensure self-sufficiency, such as the construction of the Vatican Pharmacy. Italian nobility who owed their titles to the pope rather than the royal family became known as the Black Nobility during this period because of their purported mourning.  Wikipedia: Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.This episode includes AI-generated content.

Counter-Reformation.  Pope Paul IV, elected in 1555, was a member of the anti-Spanish party in the Italian War of 1551–59, but his policy resulted in the Neapolitan troops of the viceroy again besieging Rome in 1556. Paul sued for peace, but had to accept the supremacy of Philip II of Spain. He was one of the most hated Popes of all, and, after his death the raging populace burned the Holy Inquisition's palace and destroyed his marble statue on the Campidoglio.  Pope Paul's Counter-Reformation views are well shown by his order that a central area of Rome, around the Porticus Octaviae, be delimited, creating the famous Roman Ghetto, the very constricted area in which the city's Jews were forced to live in seclusion. They had to remain in the rione Sant'Angelo and locked in at night. The Pope decreed that Jews should wear a distinctive sign, yellow hats for men and veils or shawls for women. Jewish ghettos existed in Europe for the next 315 years.  The Counter-Reformation gained pace under his successors, the milder Pope Pius IV and the severe Pope Pius V. The former was a nepotist lover of court splendours, but more severe customs arrived anyway through the ideas of his advisor, the prelate Charles Borromeo, who was to become one of the most popular figures among Rome's people. Pius V and Borromeo gave Rome a true Counter-Reformation character. All pomp was removed from the court, the jokers were expelled, and cardinals and bishops were obliged to live in the city. Blasphemy and concubinage were severely punished. Prostitutes were expelled or confined in a reserved district. The Inquisition's power in the city was reasserted, and its palace rebuilt with an increased space for prisons. During this period Michelangelo opened the Porta Pia and turned the Baths of Diocletian into the spectacular basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri, where Pius IV was buried. The expression of mannerism was meticulously widespread with Vignola, for civil and religious buildings in Rome and throughout the Papal States, his masterpieces, even before the Church of the Gesù (1568), became villas such as Villa Giulia and Villa Farnese.  The pontificate of his successor, Gregory XIII, was considered a failure. As he tried to use milder measures than those of St. Pius, the worst element of the Roman population felt free to scourge again the streets. The French writer and philosopher Montaigne maintained that "life and goods were never as unsure as at the time of Gregorius XIII, perhaps", and that a confraternity even held same-sex marriage in the church of San Giovanni a Porta Latina. The courtesans repressed by Pius had now returned.  Sixtus V was of very different temper. Although short (1585–1590), his reign however is remembered as one of the most effective in the modern Rome's history. He was even tougher than Pius V, and was variously nicknamed castigamatti ("punisher of the mad"), papa di ferro ("Iron Pope"), dictator and even, ironically, demon, since no other Pope before him pursued with such a determination the reform of the church and the customs. Sixtus profoundly reorganised the Papal States' administration, and cleaned the streets of Rome of thugs, procurers, duelling and so on. Even the nobles and Cardinals could not consider themselves free from the arms of Sixtus' police. The money from taxes, which were not now wasted in corruption, permitted an ambitious building programme. Some ancient aqueducts were restored, and a new one, the Acquedotto Felice (from Sixtus' name, Felice Peretti) was constructed. New houses were built in the desolate district of Esquilino, Viminale and Quirinale, while old houses in the centre of the city were destroyed to open new, larger streets. Sixtus's principal aim was to make Rome a better destination for pilgrimages, and the new streets were intended to permit a better access to the major Basilicas. Old obelisks were moved or erected to embellish St. John in Lateran, Santa Maria Maggiore and St. Peter, as well as Piazza del Popolo, in front of Santa Maria del Popolo.Baroque period.  In the 18th century, the Papacy reached the peak of its temporal power, the Papal States including most of Central Italy, including Latium, Umbria, Marche and the Legations of Ravenna, Ferrara and Bologna extending north into the Romagna, as well as the small enclaves of Benevento and Pontecorvo in southern Italy and the larger Comtat Venaissin around Avignon in southern France.  Baroque and Rococo architecture flourished in Rome, with several famous works being completed. Work on the Trevi Fountain began in 1732 and was completed in 1762. The Spanish Steps were designed in 1735. Pope Clement XIII's tomb by Canova was completed in 1792.  The arts also flourished throughout this period. Palazzo Nuovo became the world's first public museum in 1734 and some of the most famous views of Rome in the 18th century were etched by Giovanni Battista Piranesi. His grand vision of classic Rome inspired many to visit the city and examine the ruins themselves. Wikipedia: Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.This episode includes AI-generated content.

Renaissance Rome.  The latter half of the 15th century saw the seat of the Italian Renaissance move to Rome from Florence. The Papacy wanted to surpass the grandeur of other Italian cities. To this end the popes created increasingly extravagant churches, bridges, town squares and public spaces, including a new Saint Peter's Basilica, the Sistine Chapel, Ponte Sisto (the first bridge to be built across the Tiber since antiquity), and Piazza Navona. The Popes were also patrons of the arts engaging such artists as Michelangelo, Perugino, Raphael, Ghirlandaio, Luca Signorelli, Botticelli, and Cosimo Rosselli.  Under Pope Nicholas V, who became Pontiff on 19 March 1447, the Renaissance can be said to have begun in Rome, heralding a period in which the city became the centre of Humanism. He was the first Pope to embellish the Roman court with scholars and artists, including Lorenzo Valla and Vespasiano da Bisticci.  On 4 September 1449 Nicholas proclaimed a Jubilee for the following year, which saw a great influx of pilgrims from all Europe. The crowd was so large that in December, on Ponte Sant'Angelo, some 200 people died, crushed underfoot or drowned in the River Tiber. Later that year the Plague reappeared in the city, and Nicholas fled.  However Nicholas brought stability to the temporal power of the Papacy, a power in which the Emperor was to have no part at all. In this way, the coronation and the marriage of Frederick III, Holy Roman Emperor on 16 March 1452, was more a civil ceremony. The Papacy now controlled Rome with a strong hand. A plot by Stefano Porcari, whose aim was the restoration of the Republic, was ruthlessly suppressed in January 1453. Porcari was hanged together with the other plotters, Francesco Gabadeo, Pietro de Monterotondo, Battista Sciarra and Angiolo Ronconi, but the Pope gained a treacherous reputation, as when the execution was beginning, he was too drunk to confirm the grace he had previously given to Sciarra and Ronconi.Nicholas was also actively involved in Rome's urban renewal, in collaboration with Leon Battista Alberti, including the construction of a new St Peter's Basilica.   Nicholas' successor Calixtus III neglected Nicholas's cultural policies, instead devoting himself to his greatest passion, his nephews. The Tuscan Pius II, who took the reins after his death in 1458, was a great Humanist, but did little for Rome. During his reign Lorenzo Valla demonstrated that the Donation of Constantine was a forgery. Pius was the first Pope to use guns, in campaign against the rebel barons Savelli in the neighbourhood of Rome, in 1461. One year later the bringing to Rome of the head of the Apostle St. Andrew produced a great number of pilgrims. The reign of Pope Paul II (1464–1471) was notable only for the reintroduction of the Carnival, which was to become a very popular feast in Rome in the following centuries. In the same year (1468) a plot against the Pope was uncovered, organised by the intellectuals of the Roman Academy founded by Pomponio Leto. The conspirators were sent to Castel Sant'Angelo.  More important by far was the Pontificate of Sixtus IV, considered the first Pope-King of Rome. In order to favour his relative Girolamo Riario, he promoted the unsuccessful Congiura dei Pazzi against the Medici of Florence (26 April 1478) and in Rome fought the Colonna and the Orsini. The personal politics of intrigue and war required much money, but in spite of this Sixtus was a true patron of art in the manner of Nicholas V. He reopened the academy and reorganised the Collegio degli Abbreviatori, and in 1471 began the construction of the Vatican Library, whose first curator was Platina. The Library was officially founded on 15 June 1475 by Pope Sixtus IV with the issuance of the papal bull Ad decorem militantis ecclesiae. He restored several churches, including Santa Maria del Popolo, the Aqua Virgo and the Hospital of the Holy Spirit; paved several streets and also built a famous bridge over the Tiber River, which still bears his name. His main building project was the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican Palace. Its decoration called on some of the most renowned artists of the age, including Mino da Fiesole, Sandro Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Pietro Perugino, Luca Signorelli and Pinturicchio, and in the 16th century Michelangelo decorated the ceiling with his famous masterpiece, contributing to what became one of the most famous monuments of the world. Sixtus died on 12 August 1484.  Chaos, corruption and nepotism appeared in Rome under the reign of his successors, Innocent VIII and Pope Alexander VI (1492–1503). During the vacation period between the death of the former and the election of the latter there were 220 murders in the city. Alexander had to face Charles VIII of France, who invaded Italy in 1494 and entered Rome on 31 December of that year. The Pope could only barricade himself into Castel Sant'Angelo, which had been turned into a true fortress by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger. In the end, the skilful Alexander was able to gain the support of the king, assigning his son Cesare Borgia as military counsellor for the subsequent invasion of the Kingdom of Naples. Rome was safe and, as the King directed himself southwards, the Pope again changed his position, joining the anti-French League of the Italian States which finally compelled Charles to flee to France.  The most nepotist Pope of all, Alexander, favoured his ruthless son Cesare, creating for him a personal Duchy out of territories of the Papal States, and banning from Rome Cesare's most relentless enemy, the Orsini family. In 1500 the city hosted a new Jubilee, but grew ever more unsafe as, especially at night, the streets were controlled by bands of lawless "bravi". Cesare himself assassinated Alfonso of Bisceglie; as well as, presumably, the Pope's son, Giovanni of Gandia.  The Renaissance had a great impact on Rome's appearance, with works like the Pietà by Michelangelo and the frescoes of the Borgia Apartment, all made during Innocent's reign. Rome reached the highest point of splendour under Pope Julius II (1503–1513) and his successors Leo X and Clement VII, both members of the Medici family. During this twenty-year period Rome became the greatest centre of art in the world. The old St. Peter's Basilica was demolished and a new one begun. The city hosted artists like Bramante, who built the Temple of San Pietro in Montorio and planned a great project to renovate the Vatican; Raphael, who in Rome became the most famous painter in Italy, creating frescos in the Cappella Niccolina, the Villa Farnesina, the Raphael's Rooms, and many other famous paintings. Michelangelo began the decoration of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and executed the famous statue of Moses for the tomb of Julius. Rome lost in part its religious character, becoming increasingly a true Renaissance city, with a great number of popular feasts, horse races, parties, intrigues and licentious episodes. Its economy was prosperous, with the presence of several Tuscan bankers, including Agostino Chigi, a friend of Raphael and a patron of the arts. Despite his premature death, and to his eternal credit, Raphael also promoted for the first time the preservation of the ancient ruins.  Sack of Rome (1527).  In 1527 the ambiguous policy followed by the second Medici Pope, Pope Clement VII, resulted in the dramatic sack of the city by the unruly Imperial troops of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor. After the execution of some 1,000 defenders, the pillage began. The city was devastated for several days, many of the citizens were killed or took shelter outside the walls. Of 189 Swiss Guards on duty only 42 survived. The Pope himself was imprisoned for months in Castel Sant'Angelo. The sack marked the end of one of the most splendid eras of modern Rome.  The 1525's Jubilee resulted in a farce, as Martin Luther's claims had spread criticism and even hatred against the Pope's greed throughout Europe. The prestige of Rome was then challenged by the defections of the churches of Germany and England. Pope Paul III (1534–1549) tried to recover the situation by summoning the Council of Trent, although being, at the same time, the most nepotist Pope of all. He even separated Parma and Piacenza from the Papal States to create an independent duchy for his son Pier Luigi. He continued the patronage of art supporting the Michelangelo's Last Judgment, asking him to renovate the Campidoglio and the ongoing construction of St. Peter's. After the shock of the sack, he also called the brilliant architect Giuliano da Sangallo the Younger to strengthen the walls of the Leonine City.  The need for renovation in the religious customs became evident in the vacancy period after Paulus' death, when the streets of Rome became seat of masked carousels which satirised the Cardinals attending the conclave. His two immediate successors were feeble figures who did nothing to escape the actual Spanish suzerainty over Rome. Wikipedia: Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.This episode includes AI-generated content.

Cola di Rienzo and the Pope's return to Rome.  In spite of its decline and the absence of the Pope, Rome had not lost its spiritual prestige: in 1341 the famous poet Petrarca came to the city to be crowned as Poet laureate in Capitoline Hill. Noblemen and poor people at one time demanded with one voice the return of the Pope. Among the many ambassadors that in this period took their way to Avignon, emerged the bizarre but eloquent figure of Cola di Rienzo. As his personal power among the people increased by time, on 20 May 1347 he conquered the Capitoline at the head of an enthusiastic crowd. The period of his power, though very short-lived, aspired to the prestige of Ancient Rome. Now in possession of dictatorial powers, he took the title of "tribune", referring to the pleb's magistracy of the Roman Republic. Cola also considered himself at an equal status of that of the Holy Roman Emperor. On 1 August, he conferred Roman citizenship on all the Italian cities, and even prepared for the election of a Roman emperor of Italy. It was too much: the Pope denounced him as heretic, criminal and pagan, the populace had begun to be disenchanted with him, while the nobles had always hated him. On 15 December, he was forced to flee.   In August 1354, Cola was again a protagonist, when Cardinal Gil Alvarez De Albornoz entrusted him with the role of "senator of Rome" in his programme of reassuring the Pope's rule in the Papal States. In October the tyrannical Cola, who had become again very unpopular for his delirious behaviour and heavy bills, was killed in a riot provoked by the powerful family of the Colonna. In April 1355, Charles IV of Bohemia entered the city for the ritual coronation as Emperor. His visit was very disappointing for the citizens. He had little money, received the crown not from the Pope but from a Cardinal, and moved away after a few days.  With the emperor back in his lands, Albornoz could regain a certain control over the city, while remaining in his safe citadel in Montefiascone, in the Northern Lazio. The senators were chosen directly by the Pope from several cities of Italy, but the city was in fact independent. The Senate council included six judges, five notaries, six marshals, several familiars, twenty knights and twenty armed men. Albornoz had heavily suppressed the traditional aristocratic families, and the "democratic" party felt confident enough to start an aggressive policy. In 1362 Rome declared war on Velletri. This move, however, provoked a civil war. The countryside party hired a condottieri band called "Del Cappello" ("Hat"), while the Romans bought the services of German and Hungarian troops, plus a citizen levy of 600 knights and even 22,000 infantry. This was the period in which condottieri bands were active in Italy. Many of the Savelli, Orsini and Annibaldi expelled from Rome became leaders of such military units. The war with Velletri languished, and Rome again gave itself to the new Pope, Urban V, provided Albornoz did not enter the walls.  On 16 October 1367, in reply to the prayers of St Brigid and Petrarca, Urban finally visited for the city. During his presence, Charles IV was again crowned in the city (October 1368). In addition, the Byzantine emperor John V Palaeologus came in Rome to beg for a crusade against the Ottoman Empire, but in vain. However, Urban did not like the unhealthy air of the city, and on 5 September 1370 he sailed again to Avignon. His successor, Gregory XI, officially set the date of his return to Rome at May 1372, but again the French cardinals and the King stopped him.  Only on 17 January 1377, Gregory XI could finally reinstate the Holy See in Rome.  Western schism and conflict with Milan.  The incoherent behaviour of his successor, the Italian Urban VI, provoked in 1378 the Western Schism, which impeded any true attempt of improving the conditions of the decaying Rome. The 14th century, with the absence of the popes during the Avignon Papacy, had been a century of neglect and misery for the city of Rome, which dropped to its lowest level of population. With the return of the papacy to Rome repeatedly postponed because of the bad conditions of the city and the lack of control and security, it was first necessary to strengthen the political and doctrinal aspects of the pontiff.  When in 1377 Gregory XI was in fact returned to Rome, he found a city in anarchy because of the struggles between the nobility and the popular faction, and in which his power was now more formal than real. There followed four decades of instability, characterised by the local power struggle between the commune and the papacy, and internationally by the great Western Schism, at the end of which was elected Pope, Martin V. He restored order, laying the foundations of its rebirth.  In 1433 the Duke of Milan, Filippo Maria Visconti signed a peace treaty with Florence and Venice. He then sent the condottieri Niccolò Fortebraccio and Francesco Sforza to harass the Papal States, in vengeance for Eugene IV's support to the two former republics.  Fortebraccio, supported by the Colonna, occupied Tivoli in October 1433 and ravaged Rome's countryside. Despite the concessions made by Eugene to the Visconti, the Milanese soldiers did not stop their destruction. This led the Romans, on 29 May 1434 to institute a Republican government under the Banderesi. Eugene left the city a few days later, during the night of 4 June.  However, the Banderesi proved incapable of governing the city, and their inadequacies and violence soon deprived them of popular support. The city was therefore returned to Eugene by the army of Giovanni Vitelleschi on 26 October 1434. After the death in mysterious circumstances of Vitelleschi, the city came under the control of Ludovico Scarampo, Patriarch of Aquileia. Eugene returned to Rome on 28 September 1443. Wikipedia: Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.This episode includes AI-generated content.

Guelphs and Ghibellines.  In 1204 the streets of Rome were again in flames when the struggle between Pope Innocent III's family and its rivals, the powerful Orsini family, led to riots in the city. Many ancient buildings were then destroyed by machines used by the rival bands to besiege their enemies in the innumerable towers and strongholds which were a hallmark of the Middle Age Italian towns.  The struggle between the Popes and the emperor Frederick II, also king of Naples and Sicily, saw Rome support the Ghibellines. To repay his loyalty, Frederick sent to the commune the Carroccio he had won from the Lombards at the battle of Cortenuova in 1234, and which was exposed in the Campidoglio.  In that year, during another revolt against the Pope, the Romans headed by senator Luca Savelli sacked the Lateran. Savelli was the father of Honorius IV, but in that age family ties often did not determine one's allegiance.  Rome was never to evolve into an autonomous, stable reign, as happened to other communes like Florence, Siena or Milan. The endless struggles between noble families (Savelli, Orsini, Colonna, Annibaldi), the ambiguous position of the Popes, the haughtiness of a population which never abandoned the dreams of their splendid past but, at the same time, thought only of immediate advantage, and the weakness of the republican institutions always deprived the city of this possibility.  In an attempt to imitate more successful communes, in 1252 the people elected a foreign Senator, the Bolognese Brancaleone degli Andalò. In order to bring peace in the city he suppressed the most powerful nobles (destroying some 140 towers), reorganised the working classes and issued a code of laws inspired by those of northern Italy. Brancaleone was a tough figure, but died in 1258 with almost nothing of his reforms turned into reality. Five years later Charles I of Anjou, then king of Naples, was elected Senator. He entered the city only in 1265, but soon his presence was needed to face Conradin, the Hohenstaufen's heir who was coming to claim his family's rights over southern Italy, and left the city. After June 1265 Rome was again a democratic republic, electing Henry of Castile as senator. But Conradin and the Ghibelline party were crushed in the Battle of Tagliacozzo (1268), and therefore Rome fell again in the hands of Charles.  Nicholas III, a member of Orsini family, was elected in 1277 and moved the seat of the Popes from the Lateran to the more defensible Vatican. He also ordered that no foreigner could become senator of Rome. Being a Roman himself, he had himself elected senator by the people. With this move, the city began again to side for the papal party. In 1285 Charles was again Senator, but the Sicilian Vespers reduced his charisma, and the city was thenceforth free from his authority. The next senator was again a Roman, and again a pope, Honorius IV of the Savelli.  Boniface VIII and the Avignon captivity.  The successor to Celestine V was a Roman of the Caetani family, Boniface VIII. Entangled in a local feud against the traditional rivals of his family, the Colonna, at the same time he struggled to assure the universal supremacy of the Holy See. In 1300 he launched the first Jubilee and in 1303 founded the first University of Rome. The Jubilee was an important move for Rome, as it further increased its international prestige and, most of all, the city's economy was boosted by the flow of pilgrims. Boniface died in 1303 after the humiliation of the Schiaffo di Anagni ("Slap of Anagni"), which signalled instead the rule of the King of France over the Papacy and marked another period of decline for Rome.  Boniface's successor, Clement V, never entered the city, starting the so-called "Avignon captivity", the absence of the Popes from their Roman seat in favour of Avignon, which would last for more than 70 years. This situation brought the independence of the local powers, but these were revealed to be largely unstable; and the lack of the holy revenues caused a deep decay of Rome.[79][80] For more than a century Rome had no new major buildings. Furthermore, many of the monuments of the city, including the main churches, began to fall into ruin. Wikipedia: Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.

Medieval Rome.  Break with Constantinople and formation of the Papal States.  In 727, Pope Gregory II refused to accept the decrees of Emperor Leo III, which promoted the Emperor's iconoclasm. Leo reacted first by trying in vain to abduct the Pontiff, and then by sending a force of Ravennate troops under the command of the Exarch Paulus, but they were pushed back by the Lombards of Tuscia and Benevento. Byzantine general Eutychius sent west by the Emperor successfully captured Rome and restored it as a part of the empire in 728.  On 1 November 731, a council was called in St. Peter's by Gregory III to excommunicate the iconoclasts. The Emperor responded by confiscating large Papal estates in Sicily and Calabria and transferring areas previously ecclesiastically under the Pope to the Patriarch of Constantinople. Despite the tensions Gregory III never discontinued his support to the imperial efforts against external threats.  In this period the Lombard kingdom revived under the leadership of King Liutprand. In 730, he razed the countryside of Rome to punish the Pope, who had supported Duke Transamund II of Spoleto. Though still protected by his massive walls, the Pope could do little against the Lombard king, who managed to ally himself with the Byzantines. Other protectors were now needed. Gregory III was the first Pope to ask for concrete help from the Frankish Kingdom, then under the command of Charles Martel (739).  Liutprand's successor Aistulf was even more aggressive. He conquered Ferrara and Ravenna, ending the Exarchate of Ravenna. Rome seemed to be his next victim. In 754, Pope Stephen II went to France to name Pippin the Younger, king of the Franks, as patricius Romanorum, i.e. protector of Rome. In August that year, the King and Pope together crossed back the Alps and defeated Aistulf at Pavia. When Pippin went back to St. Denis however, Aistulf did not keep his promises, and in 756 besieged Rome for 56 days. The Lombards returned north when they heard news of Pippin again moving to Italy. This time he agreed to give the Pope the promised territories, and the Papal States were born.  In 771 the new King of the Lombards, Desiderius, devised a plot to conquer Rome and seize Pope Stephen III during a feigned pilgrimage within its walls. His main ally was one Paulus Afiarta, chief of the Lombard party within the city. He conquered Rome in 772 but angered Charlemagne. However the plan failed, and Stephen's successor, Pope Hadrian I called Charlemagne against Desiderius, who was finally defeated in 773. The Lombard Kingdom was no more, and now Rome entered into the orbit of a new, greater political institution. Numerous remains from this period, along with a museum devoted to Medieval Rome, can be seen at Crypta Balbi in Rome.  Formation of the Holy Roman Empire.  On 25 April 799 the new Pope, Leo III, led the traditional procession from the Lateran to the Church of San Lorenzo in Lucina along the Via Flaminia (now Via del Corso). Two nobles (followers of his predecessor Hadrian) who disliked the weakness of the Pope with regards to Charlemagne, attacked the processional train and delivered a life-threatening wound to the Pope. Leo fled to the King of the Franks, and in November, 800, the King entered Rome with a strong army and a number of French bishops. He declared a judicial trial to decide if Leo III were to remain Pope, or if the deposers' claims had reasons to be upheld. This trial, however, was only a part of a well thought out chain of events which ultimately surprised the world. The Pope was declared legitimate and the attempters subsequently exiled. On 25 December 800, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne Holy Roman Emperor in St. Peter's Basilica.  This act forever severed the loyalty of Rome from its imperial progenitor, Constantinople. It created instead a rival empire which, after a long series of conquests by Charlemagne, now encompassed most of the Christian Western territories.  Following the death of Charlemagne, the lack of a figure with equal prestige led the new institution into disagreement. At the same time the universal church of Rome had to face emergence of the lay interests of the City itself, spurred on by the conviction that the Roman people, though impoverished and abased, had again the right to elect the Western Emperor. The famous counterfeit document called the Donation of Constantine, prepared by the Papal notaries, guaranteed to the Pope a dominion stretching from Ravenna to Gaeta. This nominally included the suzerainty over Rome, but this was often highly disputed, and as the centuries passed, only the strongest Popes were to be able to assert it. The main element of weakness of the Papacy within the walls of the city was the continued necessity of the election of new popes, in which the emerging noble families soon managed to insert a leading role for themselves. The neighbouring powers, namely the Duchy of Spoleto and Toscana, and later the Emperors, learned how to take their own advantage of this internal weakness, playing the role of arbiters among the contestants.  Rome was indeed prey of anarchy in this age. The lowest point was touched in 897, when a raging crowd exhumed the corpse of a dead pope, Formosus, and put it on trial.  Roman Commune.  From 1048 to 1257, the papacy experienced increasing conflict with the leaders and churches of the Holy Roman Empire and the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire. The latter culminated in the East-West Schism, dividing the Catholic Church and Eastern Orthodox Church. From 1257 to 1377, the pope, though the bishop of Rome, resided in Viterbo, Orvieto, and Perugia, and then Avignon. The return of the popes to Rome after the Avignon Papacy was followed by the Western Schism: the division of the western church between two, and for a time three, competing papal claimants.  In this period the renovated Church was again attracting pilgrims and prelates from all the Christian world, and money with them: even with a population of only 30,000, Rome was again becoming a city of consumers dependent upon the presence of a governmental bureaucracy. In the meantime, Italian cities were acquiring increasing autonomy, mainly led by new families which were replacing the old aristocracy with a new class formed by entrepreneurs, traders and merchants. After the sack of Rome by the Normans in 1084, the rebuilding of the city was supported by powerful families such as the Frangipane family and the Pierleoni family, whose wealth came from commerce and banking rather than landholdings. Inspired by neighbouring cities like Tivoli and Viterbo, Rome's people began to consider adopting a communal status and gaining a substantial amount of freedom from papal authority.  Led by Giordano Pierleoni, the Romans rebelled against the aristocracy and Church rule in 1143. The Senate and the Roman Republic, the Commune of Rome, were born again. Through the inflammatory words of preacher Arnaldo da Brescia, an idealistic, fierce opponent of ecclesiastical property and church interference in temporal affairs, the revolt that led to the creation of the Commune of Rome continued until it was put down in 1155, though it left its mark on the civil government of the Eternal City for centuries. 12th-century Rome, however, had little in common with the empire which had ruled over the Mediterranean some 700 years before, and soon the new Senate had to work hard to survive, choosing an ambiguous policy of shifting its support from the Pope to the Holy Roman Empire and vice versa as the political situation required. At Monteporzio, in 1167, during one of these shifts, in the war with Tusculum, Roman troops were defeated by the imperial forces of Frederick Barbarossa. Luckily, the winning enemies were soon dispersed by a plague and Rome was saved.  In 1188 the new communal government was finally recognised by Pope Clement III. The Pope had to make large cash payments to the communal officials, while the 56 senators became papal vassals. The Senate always had problems in the accomplishment of its function, and various changes were tried. Often a single Senator was in charge. This sometimes led to tyrannies, which did not help the stability of the newborn organism.Wikipedia: Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.This episode includes AI-generated content.

Roman Empire.  Eastern Roman (Byzantine) restoration.  In 480, the last claimant to the title of Western Roman emperor, Julius Nepos, was murdered and a Roman general of barbarian origin, Odoacer, declared allegiance to Eastern Roman emperor Zeno. Despite owing nominal allegiance to Constantinople, Odoacer and later the Ostrogoths continued, like the last emperors, to rule Italy as a virtually independent realm from Ravenna. Meanwhile, the Senate, even though long since stripped of wider powers, continued to administer Rome itself, with the Pope usually coming from a senatorial family. This situation continued until Theodahad murdered Amalasuntha, a pro-imperial Gothic queen, and usurped the power in 535. The Eastern Roman emperor, Justinian I (reigned 527–565), used this as a pretext to send forces to Italy under his famed general Belisarius, recapturing the city next year, on 9 December AD 536. In 537–538, the Eastern Romans successfully defended the city in a year-long siege against the Ostrogothic army, and eventually took Ravenna, too.  Gothic resistance revived however, and on 17 December 546, the Ostrogoths under Totila recaptured and sacked Rome. Belisarius soon recovered the city, but the Ostrogoths retook it in 549. Belisarius was replaced by Narses, who captured Rome from the Ostrogoths for good in 552, ending the so-called Gothic Wars which had devastated much of Italy. The continual war around Rome in the 530s and 540s left it in a state of total disrepair – near-abandoned and desolate with much of its lower-lying parts turned into unhealthy marshes as the drainage systems were neglected and the Tiber's embankments fell into disrepair in the course of the latter half of the 6th century. Here, malaria developed. The aqueducts, except for one, were not repaired. The population, without imports of grain and oil from Sicily, shrank to less than 50,000 concentrated near the Tiber and around the Campus Martius, abandoning those districts without water supply. There is a legend, significant though untrue, that there was a moment where no one remained living in Rome.  Justinian I provided grants for the maintenance of public buildings, aqueducts and bridges—though, being mostly drawn from an Italy dramatically impoverished by the recent wars, these were not always sufficient. He also styled himself the patron of its remaining scholars, orators, physicians and lawyers in the stated hope that eventually more youths would seek a better education. After the wars, the Senate was theoretically restored, but under the supervision of the urban prefect and other officials appointed by, and responsible to, the Eastern Roman authorities in Ravenna.  However, the Pope was now one of the leading religious figures in the entire Byzantine Roman Empire and effectively more powerful locally than either the remaining senators or local Eastern Roman (Byzantine) officials. In practice, local power in Rome devolved to the Pope and, over the next few decades, both much of the remaining possessions of the senatorial aristocracy and the local Byzantine Roman administration in Rome were absorbed by the Church.The reign of Justinian's nephew and successor Justin II (reigned 565–578) was marked from the Italian point of view by the invasion of the Lombards under Alboin (568). In capturing the regions of Benevento, Lombardy, Piedmont, Spoleto and Tuscany, the invaders effectively restricted Imperial authority to small islands of land surrounding a number of coastal cities, including Ravenna, Naples, Rome and the area of the future Venice. The one inland city continuing under Eastern Roman control was Perugia, which provided a repeatedly threatened overland link between Rome and Ravenna. In 578 and again in 580, the Senate, in some of its last recorded acts, had to ask for the support of Tiberius II Constantine (reigned 578–582) against the approaching Dukes, Faroald I of Spoleto and Zotto of Benevento.  Maurice (reigned 582–602) added a new factor in the continuing conflict by creating an alliance with Childebert II of Austrasia (reigned 575–595). The armies of the Frankish King invaded the Lombard territories in 584, 585, 588 and 590. Rome had suffered badly from a disastrous flood of the Tiber in 589, described by Paul the Deacon as a "swarm of snakes." This was followed by a plague in 590, which was notable for the legend of the angel seen, while the newly elected Pope Gregory I (term 590–604) was passing in procession by Hadrian's Tomb, to hover over the building and to sheathe his flaming sword as a sign that the pestilence was about to cease. The city was safe from capture at least.  Agilulf, however, the new Lombard King (reigned 591 to c. 616), managed to secure peace with Childebert, reorganised his territories and resumed activities against both Naples and Rome by 592. With the Emperor preoccupied with wars in the eastern borders and the various succeeding Exarchs unable to secure Rome from invasion, Gregory took personal initiative in starting negotiations for a peace treaty. This was completed in the autumn of 598—later recognised by Maurice—lasting until the end of his reign.  The position of the Bishop of Rome was further strengthened under the usurper Phocas (reigned 602–610). Phocas recognised his primacy over that of the Patriarch of Constantinople and even decreed Pope Boniface III (607) to be "the head of all the Churches". Phocas's reign saw the erection of the last imperial monument in the Roman Forum, the column bearing his name. He also gave the Pope the Pantheon, at the time closed for centuries, and thus probably saved it from destruction.  During the 7th century, an influx of both Byzantine Roman officials and churchmen from elsewhere in the empire made both the local lay aristocracy and Church leadership largely Greek speaking. The population of Rome, a magnet for pilgrims, may have increased to 90,000.[62] Eleven of thirteen popes between 678 and 752 were of Greek or Syrian descent. However, the strong Byzantine Roman cultural influence did not always lead to political harmony between Rome and Constantinople. In the controversy over Monothelitism, popes found themselves under severe pressure (sometimes amounting to physical force) when they failed to keep in step with Constantinople's shifting theological positions. In 653, Pope Martin I was deported to Constantinople and, after a show trial, exiled to the Crimea, where he died.  Then, in 663, Rome had its first imperial visit for two centuries, by Constans II—its worst disaster since the Gothic Wars when the Emperor proceeded to strip Rome of metal, including that from buildings and statues, to provide armament materials for use against the Saracens. However, for the next half century, despite further tensions, Rome and the Papacy continued to prefer continued Byzantine Roman rule: in part because the alternative was Lombard rule, and in part because Rome's food was largely coming from Papal estates elsewhere in the Empire, particularly Sicily.Wikipedia: Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.This episode includes AI-generated content.

Roman Republic.  The commonly held stories of the early part of the Republic (before roughly 300 BC, when Old Latin inscriptions and Greek histories about Rome provide more concrete evidence of events) are generally considered to be legendary, their historicity being a topic of debate among classicists. The Roman Republic traditionally dates from 509 BC to 27 BC. After 500 BC, Rome is said to have joined with the Latin cities in defence against incursions by the Sabines. Winning the Battle of Lake Regillus in 493 BC, Rome established again the supremacy over the Latin countries it had lost after the fall of the monarchy. After a lengthy series of struggles, this supremacy became fixed in 393, when the Romans finally subdued the Volsci and Aequi. In 394 BC, they also conquered the menacing Etruscan neighbour of Veii. The Etruscan power was now limited to Etruria itself, and Rome was the dominant city in Latium.  A formal treaty was agreed with the city-state of Carthage in 509 BC which defined the spheres of influence of each city and regulated trade between them.  At the same time, Heraclides stated that 4th-century Rome was a Greek city (Plut. Cam. 22).  Rome's early enemies were the neighbouring hill tribes of the Volscians, the Aequi, and of course the Etruscans. As years passed and military successes increased Roman territory, new adversaries appeared. The fiercest were the Gauls, a loose collective of peoples who controlled much of Northern Europe including what is modern North and Central-East Italy.  In 387 BC, Rome was sacked and burned by the Senones coming from eastern Italy and led by Brennus, who had successfully defeated the Roman army at the Battle of the Allia in Etruria. Multiple contemporary records suggest that the Senones hoped to punish Rome for violating its diplomatic neutrality in Etruria. The Senones marched 130 kilometres (81 mi) to Rome without harming the surrounding countryside; once they had sacked the city, the Senones withdrew from Rome. Brennus was defeated by the dictator Furius Camillus at Tusculum soon afterwards.  After that, Rome hastily rebuilt its buildings and went on the offensive, conquering the Etruscans and seizing territory from the Gauls in the north. After 345 BC, Rome pushed south against other Latins. Their main enemy in this quadrant were the fierce Samnites, who outsmarted and trapped the legions in 321 BC at the Battle of Caudine Forks. In spite of these and other temporary setbacks, the Romans advanced steadily. By 290 BC, Rome controlled over half of the Italian peninsula. In the 3rd century BC, Rome brought the Greek poleis in the south under its control as well.  Amidst the never-ending wars (from the beginning of the Republic up to the Principate, the doors of the temple of Janus were closed only twice—when they were open it meant that Rome was at war), Rome had to face a severe major social crisis, the Conflict of the Orders, a political struggle between the Plebeians (commoners) and Patricians (aristocrats) of the ancient Roman Republic, in which the Plebeians sought political equality with the Patricians. It played a major role in the development of the Constitution of the Roman Republic. It began in 494 BC, when, while Rome was at war with two neighbouring tribes, the Plebeians all left the city (the first Plebeian Secession). The result of this first secession was the creation of the office of Plebeian Tribune, and with it the first acquisition of real power by the Plebeians.  According to tradition, Rome became a republic in 509 BC. However, it took a few centuries for Rome to become the great city of popular imagination. By the 3rd century BC, Rome had become the pre-eminent city of the Italian peninsula. During the Punic Wars between Rome and the great Mediterranean empire of Carthage (264–146 BC), Rome's stature increased further as it became the capital of an overseas empire for the first time. Beginning in the 2nd century BC, Rome went through a significant population expansion as Italian farmers, driven from their ancestral farmlands by the advent of massive, slave-operated farms called latifundia, flocked to the city in great numbers. The victory over Carthage in the First Punic War brought the first two provinces outside the Italian peninsula, Sicily and Sardinia. Parts of Spain (Hispania) followed, and in the beginning of the 2nd century the Romans got involved in the affairs of the Greek world. By then all Hellenistic kingdoms and the Greek city-states were in decline, exhausted from endless civil wars and relying on mercenary troops.  The Romans looked upon the Greek civilisation with great admiration. The Greeks saw Rome as a useful ally in their civil strifes, and it was not long before the Roman legions were invited to intervene in Greece. In less than 50 years the whole of mainland Greece was subdued. The Roman legions crushed the Macedonian phalanx twice, in 197 and 168 BC; in 146 BC the Roman consul Lucius Mummius razed Corinth, marking the end of free Greece. The same year Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus, the son of Scipio Africanus, destroyed the city of Carthage, making it a Roman province.  In the following years, Rome continued its conquests in Spain with Tiberius Gracchus, and it set foot in Asia, when the last king of Pergamum gave his kingdom to the Roman people. The end of the 2nd century brought another threat, when a great host of Germanic peoples, namely Cimbri and Teutones, crossed the river Rhone and moved to Italy. Gaius Marius was consul five consecutive times (seven total), and won two decisive battles in 102 and 101 BC. He also reformed the Roman army, giving it such a good reorganisation that it remained unchanged for centuries.  The first thirty years of the last century BC were characterised by serious internal problems that threatened the existence of the Republic. The Social War, between Rome and its allies, and the Servile Wars (slave uprisings) were hard conflicts, all within Italy, and forced the Romans to change their policy with regards to their allies and subjects. By then Rome had become an extensive power, with great wealth which derived from the conquered people (as tribute, food or manpower, i.e. slaves). The allies of Rome felt bitter since they had fought by the side of the Romans, and yet they were not citizens and shared little in the rewards. Although they lost the war, they finally got what they asked, and by the beginning of the 1st century AD practically all free inhabitants of Italy were Roman citizens.  However, the growth of the Imperium Romanum (Roman power) created new problems, and new demands, that the old political system of the Republic, with its annually elected magistrates and its sharing of power, could not solve. Sulla's civil war and his later dictatorship, the extraordinary commands of Pompey Magnus, and the first triumvirate made that clear. In January 49 BC, Julius Caesar the conqueror of Gaul, crossed the Rubicon with his legions, occupying Rome and beginning a civil war with Pompey. In the following years, he vanquished his opponents, and ruled Rome for four years. After his assassination in 44 BC, the Senate tried to reestablish the Republic, but its champions, Marcus Junius Brutus (descendant of the founder of the republic) and Gaius Cassius Longinus were defeated by Caesar's lieutenant Marcus Antonius and Caesar's nephew, Octavian.  The years 44–31 BC mark the struggle for power between Marcus Antonius and Octavian (later known as Augustus). Finally, on 2 September 31 BC, in the Greek promontory of Actium, the final battle took place in the sea. Octavian was victorious, and became the sole ruler of Rome (and its empire). That date marks the end of the Republic and the beginning of the Principate. Wikipedia: Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.This episode includes AI-generated content.

Etruscan dominance.  After 650 BC, the Etruscans became dominant in Italy and expanded into north-central Italy. Roman tradition claimed that Rome had been under the control of seven kings from 753 to 509 BC beginning with the mythical Romulus who was said to have founded the city of Rome along with his brother Remus. The last three kings were said to be Etruscan (at least partially)—namely Tarquinius Priscus, Servius Tullius and Tarquinius Superbus. (Priscus is said by the ancient literary sources to be the son of a Greek refugee and an Etruscan mother.) Their names refer to the Etruscan town of Tarquinia.  Livy, Plutarch, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and others claim that Rome was ruled during its first centuries by a succession of seven kings. The traditional chronology, as codified by Varro, allots 243 years for their reigns, an average of almost 35 years, which has been generally discounted by modern scholarship since the work of Barthold Georg Niebuhr. The Gauls destroyed much of Rome's historical records when they sacked the city after the Battle of the Allia in 390 BC (according to Polybius, the battle occurred in 387/386) and what was left was eventually lost to time or theft. With no contemporary records of the kingdom existing, all accounts of the kings must be carefully questioned. The list of kings is also of dubious historical value, though the last-named kings may be historical figures. It is believed by some historians (again, this is disputed) that Rome was under the influence of the Etruscans for about a century. During this period, a bridge was built called the Pons Sublicius to replace the Tiber ford, and the Cloaca Maxima was also built; the Etruscans are said to have been great engineers of this type of structure. From a cultural and technical point of view, Etruscans had arguably the second-greatest impact on Roman development, only surpassed by the Greeks.  Expanding further south, the Etruscans came into direct contact with the Greeks and initially had success in conflicts with the Greek colonists; after which, Etruria went into a decline. Taking advantage of this, Rome rebelled and gained independence from the Etruscans around 500 BC. It also abandoned monarchy in favour of a republican system based on a Senate, composed of the nobles of the city, along with popular assemblies which ensured political participation for most of the freeborn men and elected magistrates annually.  The Etruscans left a lasting influence on Rome. The Romans learned to build temples from them, and the Etruscans may have introduced the worship of a triad of gods—Juno, Minerva, and Jupiter—from the Etruscan gods: Uni, Menrva, and Tinia. However, the influence of Etruscan people in the development of Rome is often overstated. Rome was primarily a Latin city. It never became fully Etruscan. Also, evidence shows that Romans were heavily influenced by the Greek cities in the South, mainly through trade. Wikipedia: Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.This episode includes AI-generated content.

Ancient Rome timeline. Earliest history. Prehistory.  There is archaeological evidence of human occupation of the Rome area from at least 5,000 years, but the dense layer of much younger debris obscures Palaeolithic and Neolithic sites. The evidence suggesting the city's ancient foundation is also obscured by the legend of Rome's beginning involving Romulus and Remus. The traditional date for the founding of Rome is 21 April 753 BC, following M. Terentius Varro, and the city and surrounding region of Latium has continued to be inhabited with little interruption since around that time. Excavations made in 2014 have revealed a wall built long before the city's official founding year. Archaeologists discovered 9th-century BC walls and 8th-century BC pottery. The Palatine Hill may have been visited and settled around the 10th century BC. The site of Sant'Omobono Area is crucial for understanding the related processes of monumentalisation, urbanisation, and state formation in Rome in the late Archaic period. The Sant'Omobono temple site dates to 7th–6th century BC, making these the oldest known temple remains in Rome. Legendary origin.  The city's name was long credited to the legendary culture hero Romulus. It was said that Romulus and his twin brother Remus were the offspring of the rape of an Alban princess by the war god Mars and, via their mother, were further descended from the Trojan prince Aeneas, supposed son of the Greek love goddess Aphrodite. Exposed on the Tiber, they were suckled by a she-wolf and raised by a shepherd and his wife. Avenging themselves on their usurping grand-uncle and restoring their grandfather Numitor to Alba Longa's throne, they were ordered or decided to settle the hills around Rome's later Forum Boarium, an important river port connected in Roman myth with Hercules's tenth labour, capturing the cattle of Geryon.Disputing some point of the founding or its related auguries, Remus was murdered by Romulus or one of his supporters. Romulus then established a walled and roughly square settlement, whose sacred boundary and gates were established by a ploughing ritual. Romulus then declared the town an asylum, permitted men of all classes to come to Rome as citizens, including criminals, runaway slaves, and freemen without distinction. To provide his citizens with wives, Romulus invited the neighbouring tribes to a festival in Rome where the Romans abducted many of their young women. After the ensuing war with the Sabines, Romulus shared Rome's kingship with the Sabine king Titus Tatius. Romulus selected 100 of the most noble men to form the Roman Senate, initially serving as his advisory council. These men he called fathers (Latin: patres), and their descendants became the patricians. He created three centuries of equites: Ramnes (meaning Romans), Tities (after the Sabine king), and Luceres (Etruscans). He also divided the general populace into thirty curiae, named after thirty of the Sabine women who had intervened to end the war between Romulus and Tatius. The curiae formed the voting units in the Comitia Curiata. City's formation. Rome grew from pastoral settlements on the Palatine Hill and surrounding hills approximately 30 km (19 mi) from the Tyrrhenian Sea on the south side of the Tiber. The Quirinal Hill was probably an outpost for the Sabines, another Italic-speaking people. At this location, the Tiber forms a Z-shaped curve that contains an island where the river can be forded. Because of the river and the ford, Rome was at a crossroads of traffic following the river valley and of traders travelling north and south on the west side of the peninsula.Archaeological finds have confirmed that there were two fortified settlements in the 8th century BC, in the area of the future Rome: Rumi on the Palatine Hill, and Titientes on the Quirinal Hill, backed by the Luceres living in the nearby woods. These were simply three of numerous Italic-speaking communities that existed in Latium, a plain on the Italian peninsula, by the 1st millennium BC. The origins of the Italic peoples lie in prehistory and are therefore not precisely known, but their Indo-European languages migrated from the east in the second half of the 2nd millennium BC. According to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, many Roman historians—including Cato and Sempronius—considered the Italian aborigines to have been prehistoric Greek colonists. The Romans then considered themselves a mix of these people, the Albans, and the other Latins, considered a blend of Pelasgians, Arcadians, Epeans, and refugee Trojans. Over time, the Etruscans and other ancient Italic peoples were admitted as citizens as well. The Sabines—considered to be Gaulish along with the other Umbri peoples of central Italy— were first mentioned in Dionysius's account for having captured the city of Lista by surprise, which was regarded as the mother-city of the Aborigines.  Rome was especially large for Latial settlements; although the majority of larger Early Iron Age Latial cities were between 50-80 hectares in size, Rome had—by the same time—grown to a size of around 200 hectares. The archaeologist Francesca Fulminante suggests that Rome was uniquely predisposed to conquer Latium as it was significantly more powerful than its immediate neighbors. Upon unifying Latium, according to Fulminante, Rome was now more easily able to compete with the disjointed Etruscan city-states.  Italic context.  The Italic speakers in the area included Latins (in the west), Sabines (in the upper valley of the Tiber), Umbrians (in the north-east), Samnites (in the South), Oscans, and others. In the 8th century BC, they shared the peninsula with two other major ethnic groups: the Etruscans in the North and the Greeks in the south.The Etruscans (Etrusci or Tusci in Latin) are attested north of Rome in Etruria (modern northern Lazio, Tuscany and part of Umbria). They founded cities such as Tarquinia, Veii, and Volterra and deeply influenced Roman culture, as clearly shown by the Etruscan origin of some of the mythical Roman kings. Historians have no literature, nor texts of religion or philosophy; therefore, much of what is known about this civilisation is derived from grave goods and tomb findings. The Greeks had founded many colonies in Southern Italy between 750 and 550 BC (which the Romans later called Magna Graecia), such as Cumae, Naples, Reggio Calabria, Crotone, Sybaris, and Taranto, as well as in the eastern two-thirds of Sicily.Wikipedia: Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.This episode includes AI-generated content.

History of Rome.  The history of Rome includes the history of the city of Rome as well as the civilisation of ancient Rome. Roman history has been influential on the modern world, especially in the history of the Catholic Church, and Roman law has influenced many modern legal systems. Roman history can be divided into the following periods:Pre-historical and early Rome, covering Rome's earliest inhabitants and the legend of its founding by Romulus. The period of Etruscan dominance and the regal period, in which, according to tradition, Romulus was the first of seven kings. The Roman Republic, which commenced in 509 BC when kings were replaced with rule by elected magistrates. The period was marked by vast expansion of Roman territory. During the 5th century BC, Rome gained regional dominance in Latium. With the Punic Wars from 264 to 146 BC, ancient Rome gained dominance over the Western Mediterranean, displacing Carthage as the dominant regional power. The Roman Empire followed the Republic, which waned with the rise of Julius Caesar, and by all measures concluded after a period of civil war and the victory of Caesar's adopted son, Octavian, in 27 BC over Mark Antony. The Western Roman Empire collapsed in 476 after the city was conquered by the Ostrogothic Kingdom. Consequently, Rome's power declined, and it eventually became part of the Eastern Roman Empire, as the Duchy of Rome, from the 6th to 8th centuries. At this time, the city was reduced to a fraction of its former size, being sacked several times in the 5th to 6th centuries, even temporarily depopulated entirely. Medieval Rome is characterised by a break with Constantinople and the formation of the Papal States. The Papacy struggled to retain influence in the emerging Holy Roman Empire, and during the saeculum obscurum, the population of Rome fell to as low as 30,000 inhabitants. Following the East–West Schism and the limited success in the Investiture Controversy, the Papacy did gain considerable influence in the High Middle Ages, but with the Avignon Papacy and the Western Schism, the city of Rome was reduced to irrelevance, its population falling below 20,000. Rome's decline into complete irrelevance during the medieval period, with the associated lack of construction activity, assured the survival of very significant ancient Roman material remains in the centre of the city, some abandoned and others continuing in use. The Roman Renaissance occurred in the 15th century, when Rome replaced Florence as the centre of artistic and cultural influence. The Roman Renaissance was cut short abruptly with the devastation of the city in 1527, but the Papacy reasserted itself in the Counter-Reformation, and the city continued to flourish during the early modern period. Rome was annexed by Napoleon and was part of the First French Empire from 1809 to 1814. Modern history, the period from the 19th century to the present. Rome came under siege again after the Allied invasion of Italy and was bombed several times. It was declared an open city on 14 August 1943. Rome became the capital of the Italian Republic (established in 1946). With a population of 4.4 million (as of 2015; 2.9 million within city limits), it is the largest city in Italy. It is among the largest urban areas of the European Union and classified as a global city.Wikipedia: Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.This episode includes AI-generated content.