An Empire Across Three Continents

Written and reviewed by Subhra Gupta, Humanities faculty at UniDrill (M.A. Sociology, University of Delhi · 7 years teaching Humanities). Based on NCERT History Class XI (Themes in World History), Chapter 2.

Who wrote on the walls of Pompeii?

In 79 CE Mount Vesuvius buried the Roman town of Pompeii under ash. When archaeologists dug it out, they found scribbled messages on walls: election slogans, shop advertisements, jokes. Ordinary people wrote casually, which tells us a lot about the empire that held them. This chapter asks how Rome governed so many different people, who did the work, who held the wealth, and how an empire that began in Italy ended up changing into something else.

Two superpowers and three continents

For six centuries, from the birth of Christ to the 630s, two empires ruled most of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East: the Roman and the Iranian (first Parthian, then Sasanian). They were separated only by a narrow strip along the river Euphrates. Rome's heart was the Mediterranean. Its northern boundaries were the Rhine and Danube rivers, its southern boundary the Sahara. At its peak in the second century it stretched from Scotland to the borders of Armenia, and from the Sahara to the Euphrates.

The line between Latin and Greek ran through the middle of the Mediterranean, between Tripolitania and Cyrenaica.

The early empire: emperor, Senate, army

Before the empire, Rome was a Republic (509 to 27 BCE), in which real power lay with the Senate, a body of wealthy landowning families. Julius Caesar's adopted heir Octavian won the civil wars and, in 27 BCE, took the name Augustus. He did not call himself king. He styled himself Princeps ("leading citizen"), out of respect for the Senate, and his system is called the Principate. He was in fact the sole ruler.

Three forces shaped imperial politics:

Augustus adopted Tiberius (ruled 14 to 37 CE) to make the transfer of power smooth. Expansion mostly stopped in the early empire. Trajan crossed the Euphrates in 113 to 117 CE, but his successors gave up those conquests. Instead, Rome turned dependent client kingdoms, whose rulers had backed Rome in return for being left alone, into provinces.

How Rome ruled 60 million people. The answer is urbanisation. Great cities such as Carthage, Alexandria and Antioch lined the Mediterranean. Each had its own magistrates, council and a territory of villages. Local upper classes helped raise taxes, and over time provincial elites supplied governors and army commanders. Gallienus (253 to 268) went further and kept senators out of military command. Cities also had food security that the countryside lacked, because grain reached them even in famines.

Roman cities offered public baths and spectacles. One calendar lists shows on 176 days of the year.

The third century crisis

From the 230s the empire was attacked on many fronts at once. Between 235 and 284 there were 25 emperors.

Pause and predict: why would an empire facing invasions on two fronts end up giving more power to soldiers from the provinces?

Check your answer: because survival needed experienced commanders in the field, not senators in Rome. Gallienus kept senators away from military commands, and generals from provincial families rose in their place.

Family, women, literacy and culture

The Roman family was typically nuclear. In the late Republic, a married woman kept her property rights in her father's family and remained an heir, and divorce needed only a notice of intent. But women married in their late teens or early twenties, men in their late twenties or thirties, and fathers held legal power of life and death over children, including the right to "expose" unwanted babies.

Literacy was uneven. Pompeii shows casual literacy: graffiti and shop advertisements on walls. In Egypt, many people used professional scribes for transactions. The empire spoke many languages besides Latin and Greek: Aramaic in the Near East, Coptic in Egypt, Punic and Berber in North Africa and Celtic in Spain and the north west. Coptic had a Bible translation by the mid third century. Armenian was first written in the fifth century. Celtic stopped being written after the first century.

Money, trade and land

Harbours, mines, quarries, brickyards and olive oil factories were part of the empire's economic life. Wheat, wine and olive oil dominated trade. Historians read this trade through amphorae, the clay jars in which they travelled.

How an amphora speaks: the shape tells the region (Dressel 20 is Spanish olive oil) → the clay is matched to kilns → stamps name the producer → the shipwreck or rubbish heap dates it → the total number shows the scale of trade. Monte Testaccio in Rome is a hill made of the remains of over 50 million amphorae.

Pause and predict: a hill in Rome is made of the broken remains of over 50 million oil jars. What can a historian read from that?

Check your answer: the scale of trade. Oil from distant provinces reached Rome in enormous quantities, and the shape, clay and stamps of the jars show where each came from, so the hill works as a record of the empire's economy.

Spanish oil peaked in 140 to 160 CE. North Africa took over in the third and fourth centuries, and after 425 the eastern Mediterranean led.

Roman mines used hydraulic power in Spain, and gold and silver output there was not matched again until the nineteenth century. Money was widely used and there were commercial and banking networks.

Slaves, workers and social classes

Under Augustus, Italy had about 3 million slaves in a population of 7.5 million. That share did not hold across the whole empire. When peace after the first century cut the slave supply, owners turned to wage labour and to slave breeding. Christianity, when it triumphed in the fourth century, did not seriously challenge slavery.

Owners controlled workers harshly. Columella advised working slaves in squads of ten, while Pliny the Elder called slave gangs the worst way to organise work. At a frankincense factory in Alexandria, workers were masked and sealed into aprons and searched before leaving. A law of 398 CE branded runaway workers, and debt contracts trapped free workers.

By Constantine's time senators and equites had merged into one aristocracy. Below them were the humiliores, the "lower" mass: rural labour, miners, migrant harvesters, artisans, casual workers and slaves.

Late Antiquity: Diocletian, Constantine and Christianity

Diocletian (284 to 305) cut back territory, fortified frontiers, reorganised provinces into about 100 in 297, separated civil from military power and gave military commanders (duces) more authority. Constantine introduced the gold solidus, a coin of 4½ gm of pure gold that outlasted the empire. The earlier silver denarius had 4½ gm of pure silver. Constantine also founded a second capital, Constantinople (old Byzantium, now Istanbul).

Christianisation was gradual. Before it, Romans worshipped many gods (Jupiter, Juno, Minerva, Mars and Greek and eastern gods), and Judaism was diverse, not a single block. Constantine converted in 312. In the west, bishops fought polytheism in the fourth and fifth centuries.

The empire's western half broke into Germanic "post-Roman" kingdoms: Visigoths in Spain, Franks in Gaul and Lombards in Italy. Justinian recaptured Africa from the Vandals (533) and Italy from the Ostrogoths. The east stayed prosperous well into the sixth century, even after the plague of the 540s.

Then came the Arabs. Within ten years of the Prophet's death, by 642, they had overrun the whole Sasanian empire and large parts of the eastern Roman empire. The chapter calls this perhaps the greatest political revolution in the ancient world.

Two views. For the exam: the Roman world in Late Antiquity broke up in the west and changed hands in the east, ending with the Arab conquests. Another reading: Edward Gibbon wrote of a long "decline and fall". Peter Brown and later historians of Late Antiquity prefer to speak of a transformation, with Roman law, cities, languages and Christianity continuing in new kingdoms and in the eastern empire.

Two views. For the exam: the Roman economy was sophisticated, with money, banking and long distance trade. Another reading: M.I. Finley argued that the ancient economy stayed mainly agrarian, and that status and landholding mattered more than profit. Other historians stress the evidence of trade, such as amphorae, as proof of a more market driven economy.

How historians know: the three kinds of sources

Timeline

Key terms

Exam traps

60-second revision

Where this chapter connects

• Previous: Writing and City Life shows the first cities and records; Rome is the same story at the scale of a continent.
• Next: Changing Traditions picks up in western Europe after Rome, from the feudal order to the Renaissance and voyages.
• Class XII link: Kings, Farmers and Towns lets you compare Roman coins, trade and cities with those of early historic India.