Upon hearing the news that her king is to be deposed and expelled from Rome, the lady of the house covers her face with her hands and begins to cry. As a trader, her husband relies on connections with King Tarquinius for patronage and protection. The two women embrace to comfort each other, agreeing that nothing good can come of this foolishness—with the already strong dissent coming from the Roman rabble who would like to do away with the monarchy once and for all. Their concerns prove well-founded. King Lucius Tarquinius Superbus—whom his subjects call “Tarquin the Proud”—is the last Etruscan king to rule Rome.
“The Rape of Lucretia” detail of a painting by Titian.
In the two millennia that have passed since her rape, Lucretia’s tragic fate has been painted by Titian, immortalized in Shakespearean verse, and sung by opera companies around the world. In 510 BCE, the soap opera that began with the violation of a royally connected Roman wife by an arrogant heir to the throne toppled the entrenched Etruscan political dynasty. Lucretia was the epitome of Roman feminine virtue, making her rape a property crime against her husband, one that necessitated that his honor be restored by any means necessary—even if it meant the end of the “family business.” A moment of human weakness and indiscretion paved the way for another trial run for participatory democracy and laid the seeds for the Roman Empire. It would not be the last time a powerful government toppled because of a sexual indiscretion by its leader.
THE STORY OF ROME REALLY began in 509 BCE, when the Roman people revolted against the Etruscan dynasty of kings that had ruled the city for almost two hundred years. After ousting the last Etruscan king, the Romans initially set up an aristocratic, republican form of government, ruled by a three-hundred-man senate and two consuls, who were chosen each year by the Senate. Tension between plebeians and patricians was a constant factor in Roman society. Over time, government in the republic moved closer toward democracy with the institution of a popular assembly open to any man of any social class.
In theory, from 267 BCE until the end of the Republic in 31 BCE, Rome was a democracy in which power derived from the people. In practice, the senatorial class remained firmly in control. Patricians and plebeians were linked through client relationships in which patricians looked after the economic and legal interests of individual plebeians in exchange for their political support. Patrician power, based on wealth and influence, was further supported by patricians’ willingness to allow successful plebeian leaders to join the senatorial class.
At the same time that the Romans were busy creating the most powerful state on the Italian peninsula, they faced nearly constant war with their neighbors.
Cicero, a Roman senator from the Republican period.
CARTHAGE
Founded by the Phoenicians in 814 BCE, Carthage had become a powerful maritime empire in its own right by the sixth century BCE. When the First Punic War began, Carthage was the leading power in the western Mediterranean, with colonies in North Africa and along the Mediterranean coast as far west as Spain. At the end of the Third Punic War, the Romans razed the city and sowed the ground with salt, ensuring that nothing would grow there.
Julius Caesar resettled Carthage in 29 BCE, making it the capital of Rome’s North African province. In the fifth century, this North African port city became the base of operations for the Vandals’ takeover of the western Mediterranean, culminating in their sack of Rome—the death knell of the Roman Empire.
artist’s rendition of ancient Carthage
The First Punic War has been compared to World War I: a series of small incidents and alliances that dominoed into a major conflict. The war began when a group of mercenaries known as the Mamertines, or “Men of Mars,” raided eastern Sicily and seized the town of Messina. Neither the Romans nor the Carthaginians had obvious reasons for intervening in the conflict, but once they became involved, the war escalated. Faced with war against the most powerful maritime power in the Mediterranean, the Romans scrambled to build a navy, capturing a Carthaginian ship to use as a model. Roman crews trained on land, learning to row their vessels on the safety of solid ground before they put to sea.
Together, the three Punic Wars lasted almost 120 years. By the end of the Punic Wars, the Romans had replaced Carthaginians as the dominant power in the Mediterranean, ruling not only the territories of defeated Carthage, but Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily, and large portions of Greece. The Roman sphere of influence reached from Spain to Rhodes.
The Romans used a system of alliances to expand their empire eastward. The Roman Senate was quick to accept alliances with smaller Aegean states that felt threatened by the power of Macedonia or the Seleucid Empire. As in the Punic Wars, alliances soon led to war. Between 200 and 189 BCE, the Romans waged a series of small wars in Greece and the Near East, defending their allies against Macedonia and the Seleucids. In the process, they slowly expanded their power over the Hellenistic states through a combination of treaty and conquest. In 146 BCE, Rome annexed Macedonia as a province. In 133 BCE, the Romans added a second eastern province to the empire when the last king of Pergamum willed his kingdom to Rome.
mosaic from ancient Carthage
Only after these victories could the Romans legitimately begin to call themselves an empire.
The republican form of government, born in revolt during the second century BCE, did not survive Rome’s rapid expansion into a global force. Wealth poured into the city of Rome, exacerbating the ever-present tension between patrician and plebeian, wealthy and poor. Political disorder became a way of life. It also led to challenges to patrician control of the state.
Roman territory before the Punic Wars and after the Third Punic War
THE SECRET OF ROMAN CONCRETE
From the remains of a volcano churning and spewing molten lava from the earth’s crust, the Romans discovered an essential ingredient for man-made construction—at their feet.
Volcanoes occasionally knocked Roman buildings down, but the Romans’ use of volcanic ash in their concrete mix is the reason so much Roman concrete is still in good repair after two thousand years.
Modern concrete is made from varying combinations of water, lime, sand, and aggregate (small rocks or gravel). Engineers call the proportions in which these ingredients are combined the “mix design”; different projects call for different mix designs. The mix design for Roman concrete didn’t include sand or aggregate. Instead, Roman builders used pozzolana, volcanic ash from the area around Mount Pozzola.
The Roman use of volcanic ash in its design mix isn’t the only difference between Roman and modern concrete. Today contractors typically pour liquid concrete into molds, and strengthen it with lengths of steel rod called reinforcing bar, or rebar.
Instead of casting concrete in molds, Roman masons built concrete in layers. Water, lime, and pozzolana were mixed together into a mortar that was too thick to pour. A layer of aggregate was covered with a layer of mortar, which was tamped down into the aggregate by hand, using a special tool called a “beetle.” Reinforcing bar was an unheard-of concept, and apparently not needed. The Pantheon in Rome is holding up just fine without it.
Today, concrete is the most common building material used around the world. Houses and offices are built from it, rivers are dammed with it, and millions of cars drive over it every hour of every day. Yet few of us appreciate that the concrete first used by the Romans is more durable than that which was used in most twentieth-century buildings. These newer buildings will require regular and expensive renovations to last as long as the Roman Pantheon or Colosseum.
Amazingly, with the fall of the Roman Empire, the secrets of concrete manufacturing were lost for over a millennium. Only toward the end of the nineteenth century did concrete come back into common use around the world.
The Pantheon in Rome, completed in 126 CE, has been in continuous use since it’s completion. Its dome is still the largest un-reinforced concrete dome in the world.
THE FIRST MEGACITY
Rome is most often recogn
ized for its success as an imperial power and, though a republic, for its early experiment in democracy. Equally significant, during both periods, is the record of technological innovation and construction that made Rome the world’s first megacity.
The Romans constructed aqueducts to serve their large cities as well as some small towns and industrial sites. Water for the city of Rome was supplied by eleven aqueducts constructed over a period of about five hundred years. These structures served drinking water and supplied Rome’s numerous public baths and fountains. Aqueducts also emptied water into sewers, where once-used “gray water” performed its last function by removing waste matter.
The first Roman aqueduct was the Aqua Appia, built in 312 BCE during the Roman Republic. Aqueducts were ordered to be built on a larger scale by Emperor Claudius after he came to power in 41 CE. The largest, which came to be known as Aqua Claudia, presented an extraordinary engineering challenge. To begin with, the source springs for Aqua Claudia were located some thirty miles outside the city. Between the water’s source and its end users, the structure had to traverse a series of hills and valleys. Trickier still, the aqueduct had to maintain a precise gradient—typically declining just a few feet per mile to ensure that the water didn’t overflow or dry up. Amazingly, the flow of water through a Roman aqueduct was powered by gravity alone.
Hundreds of slaves, as well as skilled laborers and freemen, worked tirelessly to complete the Aqua Claudia, a monumental task of precision engineering using only basic tools by modern standards. In addition to masonry aqueducts, the Romans built many more leats: channels excavated in the ground, each usually having a clay lining. Leats were much cheaper than the masonry design, but all aqueducts required good surveying to ensure a regular and smooth flow of water.
A model of ancient Rome with the Circus Maximus, a chariot-racing venue, in the foreground.
Infrastructure was a key to Rome’s success as a civilization. The Romans built a vast network of roads, as well as water and sewage systems, using standardized weights, measures, and currency. From the model of engineering excellence provided by this first-century Roman aqueduct, we have continued to build our megacities outward and upward, while still copying Roman original designs in places as far-flung as California and Abu Dhabi.
The first challengers tried to work within the system. The patrician-born tribune Tiberius Gracchus passed laws designed to redistribute public lands to the poor in 133 BCE—and was murdered by a mob organized by obstructionist senators. His brother, Gaius, elected ten years later, revived Tiberius’s land law and passed additional measures designed to create a political party that could challenge the strength of the Senate. He, too, died at the hands of a mob of senators and their dependents.
In the years after the Gracchus brothers, the Romans divided into two factions: the remaining supporters of the Gracchus brothers, known as the populares; and supporters of the Senate, called the optimates. Twice the people of Rome flared into civil war. Each time the rule of law slipped a little farther away.
In 59 BCE, three powerful Romans—Pompey, Crassus, and Julius Caesar—seized power together, forming the First Triumvirate. The formation of the Triumvirate did nothing to heal the constitutional wounds of Rome. Pompey, Julius Caesar, and Mark Antony each seized power in turn, plunging the Romans into another two decades of civil war.
The people of Rome finally achieved peace with the rise to power in 31 BCE of Caesar’s adopted son, Octavian, who became Rome’s first emperor. Like Julius Caesar before him and George Washington after him, Octavian refused to take the title of king. He claimed to be a defender of the Roman constitution. At first, the offices and titles he held were modifications of those traditional to the Republic. Over time, new words developed to describe his position. Octavian began to use the title “Imperator,” traditionally a temporary honor given to a victorious general by his army. In 27 BCE, the Senate voted to give him the title Augustus, meaning “venerable.”
Under Augustus’s reign, the territory controlled by the new Roman Empire doubled in size. Roman armies, some of them led by the new emperor himself, campaigned in northern Spain, the Alps, the Danube, Germany, Ethiopia, Armenia, and Arabia. The army conquered new provinces and expanded the border of old provinces. Despite being backed by the power of the Roman Empire, the legions sometimes suffered failures, most notably in Germany, where a revolt by local tribes in 9 CE wiped out the occupying Roman army.
At its height, the Roman Empire covered an immense territory that stretched from Britain to Syria, with occasional gaps and bumps. Tin and silver from Britain, olive oil from Spain, grain from Egypt, lions from Africa, and sophists from Greece flowed into Rome. Merchants and soldiers carried Hellenistic culture and Roman engineering with them. Surveyors laid out new Roman cities on a grid plan that left room for aqueducts, bridges, public baths, and amphitheaters, built of concrete faced with brick.
The Empire was linked together by more than fifty thousand miles of hard-surfaced roads—one of Rome’s most impressive and longest-lasting achievements. Roads were laid out by professional surveyors and built by specially trained army units. They were straight whenever possible and pitched for drainage. Depending on what materials were available locally, they were generally built with multilayered foundations of timber, rubble, and sand, and then paved with tight-fitting stones or gravel. Unpaved pedestrian paths flanked each road. Major roads had milestones placed at regular intervals, showing the distance to the next city. In many parts of Europe, Roman roads continued to be used well into the seventeenth century.
Emperor Augustus’s rule ushered in a period of two hundred years of peace within the eastern Mediterranean, if not the whole empire, a period known as Pax Romana. It was a peace that depended on the strength of the Roman army, which became a permanent professional force for the first time during Augustus’s rule. The army built the famous Roman roads—and then policed them. It patrolled for bandits, escorted public officials when they traveled, and collected taxes.
At this point, despite its reach from Western Europe to Mesopotamia, the Roman Empire still did not comprehend the size and cultural sophistication of its Far East counterpart, Han China. That would soon change.
Roman authorities had long heard rumors of a significant land in the Far East called “Sinae,” or “Thinae.” This remote power was in reality the Han Empire, the great political regime that rivaled Rome in both its territorial scale and the size of its subject populations. In 70 CE, a Roman author noted that “the land of Thinae is not easy to reach, saying few men come from there, and seldom.”
Han histories describe the first Roman visitors to China in 166 CE as official ambassadors from the Roman leader. In fact, the first Romans invited to China were ambitious merchants who wangled their way into the Han court, seeking an advantage as importers of silk and other Oriental rarities.
The Roman Empire under Augustus, c. 14 CE.
ROMAN TRADERS
APARTY OF ROMAN MERCHANTS SAILS TO Vietnam by way of Malaysia. After months of waiting for word through intermediaries to China’s Han regime, the traders are losing faith in their mission. Some among them argue that they should cut their losses and return to Rome with goods they’ve amassed at other Southeast Asian ports. When representatives of the Chinese emperor Huan finally arrive to take them to a waiting caravan for the trip to the emperor’s palace in the capital of Luoyang, the Romans are pleased but less sure of themselves. They are told an audience with the emperor requires a high-value diplomatic gift. Without such a gift in hand, the Romans scramble, settling on elephant tusks, rhinoceros horn, and turtle shell—items they acquired en route.
The travel overland to the Chinese capital in the company of the emperor’s escorts lasts several days. The landscape is strange and dramatic, since the Romans carry no preconceived notions of Chinese geography or the distance to be covered. Upon arriving in Luoyang, the merchants are driven in rickshaws through streets teeming with people and industry. They marvel at
the distinctive Chinese architecture and goods offered by street vendors and storekeepers, including fine silks of every color and exotic produce they have never before seen or tasted.
The Roman traders are brought to the emperor at the imperial palace, and for the first time, men from the world’s two greatest empires stand face-to-face in the same room. Standing within feet of the emperor, the Romans are told to bow humbly on the stone floor as they present their gifts. They do so uncomfortably. The emperor accepts the Roman tribute, giving no outward indication of his disappointment. In fact, Huan finds the traders’ offering paltry, at odds with the reported wealth and power of the great empire they purport to represent. Still, he does not doubt the word of the intermediaries who have vetted these men as legitimate representatives of Rome, a state with which the emperor knows it is wise to make friendly contact. As a result, the gratitude he expresses for the trinkets laid at his feet is no less than what his guests would have received had they brought a more deserving tribute of Roman gold coins, jade, and amber—and the visiting traders are none the wiser as they leave the emperor’s palace that day.
The Roman trading ships depart Han China stocked with the finest Chinese silks and spices, making the mission a historic breakthrough in global trade and diplomacy. Even so, given the inherent difficulties in traveling the five thousand miles between Rome and Han China by land or sea, the nomadic middlemen who link East-West trade will not disappear for the foreseeable future.
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