Was the Roman Empire a Superpower? | Early European History And Religion

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ANCIENT ROME — A SUPERPOWER?

Roman Republic flag

Rome was the West's first true superpower. It began as a small village, grew into a kingdom, flourished as a republic and eventually expanded and matured into a kingdom. At its height, the Roman Empire was a 3,000-mile-wide territory that included parts of more than 40 different currents nations and ruled over 50 million people. [Sources: T.R. Reid, National Geographic, July and August 1997]

The scale of the Roman Empire, especially when compared to that of the Greeks, was huge. When it was at its height the city of Rome was home to around 1 million people. Many of the Greek city states where home to only a few tens of thousands if that much.

If you say that the Roman Empire ended with the sacking of Rome in A.D. 410 by the Visigoths, then Rome endured for 1,162, years. If you say it lasted until the defeat of the last Roman emperor at Constantinople in 1453, then it endured for 2,206 years.

Rome in many ways was more advanced than Europe in the Middle Ages. Among the things the ancient Romans had that medieval Europeans didn't have were plumbing, sewers, trash collection, parliamentary procedure, elected governments, political campaigns, art galleries and birth control. ["The Creators" by Daniel Boorstin]

Some people regard the Roman Empire as the Golden Age of Europe. The Romans created a legal and political system that endures to this day, and not only conquered a lot of territory but established an administration system to run it. They were also great innovators in bathing, blood sports and entertainment. Imperial Rome was also the precursor of the European Union. It established a single currency, a single code of laws, a single army for much of Europe as well as large chunks of the Middle East and Northern Africa.

In ancient times Rome was often described as SPQR, an acronym for “Senatus Populusque Romanus”, a Latin phrase meaning "The Senate and the Roman People". Mary Beard told Smithsonian magazine: “Two thousand years ago it was the instantly recognizable shorthand for the city, and the state, of Rome. And it still is. You see “SPQR” plastered on modern Roman trash bins and street lights. It must be one of the longest-lasting abbreviations the world has ever known. (And it has plenty of parodies too. As the modern Romans themselves like to say, 'sono pazzi questi romani' — 'These Romans are bonkers.') [Source: Smithsonian magazine, November 9, 2015]

Websites on Ancient Rome: Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Rome sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Late Antiquity sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; BBC Ancient Rome bbc.co.uk/history; Perseus Project - Tufts University; perseus.tufts.edu ; Lacus Curtius penelope.uchicago.edu; The Internet Classics Archive classics.mit.edu ; Bryn Mawr Classical Review bmcr.brynmawr.edu; Cambridge Classics External Gateway to Humanities Resources web.archive.org; Ancient Rome resources for students from the Courtenay Middle School Library web.archive.org ; History of ancient Rome OpenCourseWare from the University of Notre Dame web.archive.org ; United Nations of Roma Victrix (UNRV) History unrv.com

What Was Largest Empire in the World Ever?

Benjamin Plackett wrote in Live Science: At its peak, the British Empire ruled a quarter of the world's land area and population, but it still wasn’t the world’s largest empire of all time. According to Guinness World Records the Achaemenid Empire (Persian Empire) in 480 B.C. was the biggest — ruling over 44 percent of the world's population. Benjamin Plackett wrote in Live Science: However, perhaps unsurprisingly, not everyone agrees. That's because the share of the global population is only one way to measure the expanse of an empire, and some question whether it's really fair to use that metric when comparing empires from different time periods. For example, when the Achaemenid Empire was at its height, there were only 112.4 million people alive. The British ruled over a comparatively meager quarter of the world's population in 1901, but by then the global population had swelled to 1.6 billion people. Is it reasonable to compare the British and Achaemenid empires with this metric? Or are we comparing apples to oranges? [Source: Benjamin Plackett, Live Science, July 28, 2022]

That's without getting into the pros and cons of the other ways to measure size: largest land mass; largest contiguous land mass; largest army; largest gross domestic product; and so on. Instead, we should use a metric to measure long-term influence and stability, said Martin Bommas, an Egyptologist and director of the Macquarie University History Museum in Sydney, Australia, because it's one thing to embark on warring campaigns to amass land, but it takes a different set of logistical skills and infrastructure to keep and administer those territories. "For me, the metric would be counted in years," Bommas told Live Science. "Look at Hitler's Third Reich; it took a lot of territory to rival the Romans, but no one would call it an empire because it only lasted six years and in a period of total war.” "I think that to be classed as an empire, you need to have a period of peace to bring prosperity," Bommas added. That prosperity can then be exploited so that resources and wealth can be sent back to the motherland, Bommas said.

That's where Genghis Khan's Mongol Empire fails as a contender for the world's largest empire. While it can legitimately claim to be the largest contiguous land empire, it didn't last that long. Just 88 years after its founding, the empire was cut into four separate khanates because Genghis Khan’s descendants squabbled over the line of succession, and most of the Mongol Empire's relatively brief unity was spent engaged in battle with outsiders, aggressively expanding its borders at what proved to be an unsustainable rate.

The British Empire may not have been contiguous, but it beats the Mongols in terms of land mass under its control. "It was so massive that we almost struggle to comprehend it today," said Bommas. "The sun literally didn't set on the British Empire and it wasn't just land that it controlled; the seas were dominated by the British."

The British Empire emerged in the late 1500s when the then-separate kingdoms of England and Scotland established their first overseas colonies in the Americas and the Caribbean. On a technical level, you could make an argument that the British Empire still exists — albeit in a dramatically diminished sense — through its continued possession of 14 relatively minor overseas territories including Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands. There are also 16 independent countries, also known as Commonwealth Realms, where Queen Elizabeth II is still the head of state, including Australia, Belize, Canada, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and several Caribbean countries. But most agree it ended in 1997, when the United Kingdom handed Hong Kong back to China, Bommas said.

If we also agree with Prince Charles, then the British Empire lasted roughly 400 years, which means that though the British conquered more parts of the globe than anyone else, they still can't be called the largest empire when measured by longevity. The Ottoman Empire, governed from modern-day Turkey, outlasted the British Empire because it ruled for at least 600 years. But it was the Romans — assuming you agree that the Roman Empire persisted when it split in two to create the Western Roman Empire and the Eastern Roman Empire — the latter of which lasted the longest at close to 1,500 years. "If you look at it through years lasted, the Romans won this competition hands down," Bommas said.

Roman Model in the Modern World

Twelve Tables, Rome's first laws

“When the Roman Empire fell and was broken up into fragments, some of these fragments became the foundation of modern states—Italy, Spain, France, and England. Rome is thus the connecting link between ancient and modern history. She not only gathered up the products of the ancient world, she also transmitted these products to modern times. What she inherited from the past she bequeathed to the future, together with what she herself created. On this account we may say that Rome was the foundation of the modern world.” [Source: “Outlines of Roman History” by William C. Morey, Ph.D., D.C.L. New York, American Book Company (1901) \~]

The Roman Empire set up many of the structures on which the civilization of modern Europe and the West depend. Andrew Wallace-Hadrill of the University of Reading wrote for the BBC: “A gap of 2,000 years may seem to have put the Romans at a safe distance from our own lives and experience, but modern Europe with its Union is unthinkable without the Roman Empire. It is part of the story of how we came to be what we are. The Romans are important as a conscious model, for good or ill, to successive generations. [Source: Professor Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, BBC, February 17, 2011 Wallace-Hadrill is Professor of Classics at the University of Reading. His books “include Suetonius: The Scholar and his Caesars,” “Augustan Rome,” and “Houses and Society in Pompeii and Herculaneum.” |::|

“A century ago, for imperialist Britain (and for other European states with imperial ambitions), the Roman Empire represented a success story. Rome's story of conquest, at least in Europe and around the Mediterranean, was imitated, but never matched, by leaders from Charlemagne to Napoleon. The dream that one could not only conquer, but in so doing create a Pax Romana, a vast area of peace, prosperity and unity of ideas, was a genuine inspiration. |::|

“But the efforts of 20th-century dictators such as Mussolini, peculiarly obsessed with the dream of reviving an empire centred on Rome, left Europe disillusioned with the Roman model. The dream of peace, prosperity and unity survives, but Roman style conquest now seems not the solution but the problem. Centralised control, the suppression of local identities, the imposition of a unified system of beliefs and values - let alone the enslavement of conquered populations, the attribution of sub-human status to a large part of the workforce, and the deprivation of women of political power - all now spell for us not a dream but a nightmare.” |::|

Similarities Between the Roman Empire and the United States

Some of the U.S.’s most important institutions — namely the Senate to the Capitol — are modelled on those of the Roman Republic. Adam Kirsch wrote in The New Yorker: “To read the Federalist Papers—in which Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay wrote under the Latin pseudonym Publius—is to enter into a running debate about Roman history, in which the Roman example is one to be alternately emulated and shunned. For if the Republic flourished, starting in 509 B.C., and brought most of the Mediterranean world under Roman sway, it finally gave way, five centuries later, to the autocracy of the Empire. [Source: Adam Kirsch, The New Yorker, January 2, 2012 ]

Thomas Jefferson was an admirer of Roman culture

Dr Mike Ibeji wrote for the BBC: “By 146 B.C., the Romans found themselves the undisputed masters of the Mediterranean world. But they had achieved this without ever really intending to, and consequently they were unprepared to take on that mantle. This is the position that the United States of America finds itself in today. Like the Roman republic, the US is now the policeman of the western world. Its armed forces are unstoppable, its influence is everywhere and just like the Romans, it got there by mistake. [Source: Dr Mike Ibeji, BBC, February 17, 2011. Dr Ibeji is a Roman military historian and associate producer on Simon Schama's “A History of Britain”. |::|]

“Some commentators have said that the key difference between Rome and the US is that Rome was proud of her empire and America is not. The US, so the argument goes, will not forge an empire like Rome’s, because the US does not have an imperialist culture. This argument is based upon a fundamental misunderstanding of what drove these two great superpowers. In fact, both Rome and America were founded upon the same myth, and that myth has shaped their respective destinies. |::|

“The whole concept of the separation of powers, with its checks and balances, was lifted virtually wholesale from Rome and given a new, modern gloss. You only have to read the names of key institutions in United States' government – the senate, the veto, the governor – to see just what a debt the American republic owes to the republic of Rome. And if you read the writings of the founding fathers, you will see just how consciously they pursued the creation of a new Rome. They even debated whether they should have two consuls, just like the Roman republic, instead of a single president.

“The problem with the myth of liberty for a republic founded upon freedom is that it is supposed to be fighting against tyranny. After all, republics only annexe territory that is rightfully theirs. Don't they? Tyrants invade their defenceless neighbours and impose their will upon the defeated population. Tyrants annexe vast tracts of land that don't belong to them. Tyrants go to war on a whim. Republics only go to war in defence of their people. If this happens to expand their empire, then that’s not intentional, it’s just a natural consequence of a perfectly justified act of self-defence. After all, republics only annexe territory that is rightfully theirs. Don’t they?” |::|

Roman Empire, the United States and Just Causes and Wars

Dr Mike Ibeji wrote for the BBC: “Both America and Rome spread like a virus into the bodies of their home continents without ever admitting that they were empire-building. They did this by creating yet another fiction, what Rome called the casus belli - the 'cause of war'. It was enshrined in Roman law that the republic could never go to war without a 'just cause'. The law even defined what these just causes could be, and in all cases it ultimately boiled down to an act of aggression by another power. This gave rise to the concept of the defensive war, espoused by all republics and democracies in history. The people will only go to war to defend their (and others') liberty against oppression, and as far as Rome and America were concerned, that’s exactly what they did. [Source: Dr Mike Ibeji, BBC, February 17, 2011. Dr Ibeji is a Roman military historian and associate producer on Simon Schama's “A History of Britain”. |::|]

US President George Bush addressing Congress After the 9-11 attack

“An appeal for help from certain Greek cities prompted Rome’s conquest of southern Italy. An appeal from San Francisco brought California into the United States....Such 'absent-minded' expansionism has its consequences. In 264 B.C., Rome intervened in Sicily on behalf of a group of Latin pirates called the Mamertines. These Mamertines were using the town of Messana in Sicily as a base from which to pillage the area. This naturally annoyed the local inhabitants, who tried to throw them out. |::|

“When Rome stepped in, the Sicilians appealed to Carthage - the great North African trading power that dominated the Mediterranean. All of a sudden, Rome found herself thrust out of the local concerns of Italy and fighting a war on a world stage. Three wars and a hundred years later, Rome had lost more than a quarter of a million men and the African city was a pile of rubble. Suddenly Rome was a force to be reckoned with. A power you could appeal to. |::|

“In 146 B.C., the hawks in the senate pointed to evidence provided by Rome's allies that Carthage was rearming and preparing to strike once more. Never mind the fact that these allies had most to gain if Carthage was ground into the dust. 'Delenda Carthago est!' they thundered: 'Carthage must be destroyed!' And destroyed it was. |::|

“Rome's victory changed everything. Suddenly Rome was a superpower - a force to be reckoned with. A power you could appeal to. Such power inevitably breeds arrogance. Even before the destruction of Carthage, when the Persian king Antiochus invaded Egypt in 168 B.C., the Romans despatched an envoy called Popilius Laenas to deal with the situation. He did so by drawing a line in the sand, stepping back and telling Antiochus that if he took one step further onto Egyptian soil, Rome would declare war. Antiochus decided not to cross the line. |::|

“America now finds itself in a very similar position to the Roman republic of 146 B.C. It is the dominant power on the world stage. Its armies are unstoppable and its culture permeates everywhere. It controls its foreign interests through what the Romans would have called 'client' kings - local rulers propped up by the superpower. If it doesn't like what a 'rogue' state is doing, it flexes its military and economic muscle until that state backs down or succumbs to war. |Yet the pressures of such dominance inevitably warped Rome until it was a republic no more. How the United States fares in the same position will depend on what it can learn from the histories written by Rome.” |::|

Fate of the Roman Empire: A Warning to the U.S.

Adam Kirsch wrote in The New Yorker: “ Discussing the dangers of a standing army, Madison observes that while the Roman legions conquered the world, “the liberties of Rome proved the final victim to her military triumphs.”After the Second World War, it was common to wonder if America’s national-security state represented the imperial phase of our history. In 2007, Cullen Murphy, in his book “Are We Rome?,” concluded that the resemblances are close enough to make us worry: “What draws us now is something . . . elemental and emotional: the brutal reminder of impermanence. That, and from time to time an anxious flicker of recognition—the eagle in the mirror.” Deborah Eisenberg’s story “Twilight of the Superheroes,” an astringent parable of America’s post-9/11 reckoning, ends with an inhabitant of New York remembering a Roman image from a school textbook: This one’s a photograph of a statue, an emperor, apparently, wearing his stone toga and his stone wreath. The real people, the living people, mill about just beyond the picture’s confines. . . . Are the people hidden by the picture frightened? Do they hear the stones working themselves loose, the temples and houses and courts beginning to crumble? . . . Closing his book Lucien hears the thrilling crash as the bloated empire tumbles down. [Source: Adam Kirsch, The New Yorker, January 2, 2012 ]

“If anyone ought to be immune from this kind of apocalyptic hypnosis, one might think, it is Niall Ferguson, the conservative historian who has spent the past decade urging America to take up Britain’s old role as beneficent empire. Yet in his new blockbuster, “Civilization,” Ferguson’s antennae for the Zeitgeist lead him to ruminate darkly on the ways that America is following in Rome’s doomed footsteps. Gibbon’s “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” Ferguson writes, “tells the story of the last time the West collapsed. Today, many people in the West fear we may be living through a kind of sequel. When you reflect on what caused the fall of ancient Rome, such fears appear not altogether fanciful.”

“Such writers are carrying on the centuries-old tradition of seeing America in, and as, Rome. The comparison is necessarily a loose one, but it preserves the customary understanding of the Roman Empire as a peak of human civilization, a fragile accomplishment that could all too easily be undermined by its own hubris. But this season brings a number of new works on Roman history that focus not on the glories of Roman culture but on its notorious brutalities. The perspective is, in its own way, just as unsettling as any apocalyptic fantasy of decline and fall. What if the true meaning of Rome is not justice but injustice, not civilization but institutionalized barbarism? What if, when you look back as Freud did at the Eternal City—a sobriquet that Rome had already earned two thousand years ago—you find at the bottom of all its archeological strata not a forum or a palace but a corpse?”

In his book, “Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History,” Kirsch wrote, Robert “Hughes Hughes also takes note of some cautionary similarities between Rome and America. Both tolerated a vast inequality in wealth: “For the top 5 percent, life took on a character of manic overindulgence and extravagance, unpleasantly reminiscent of the life of the American super-rich today.” Then as now, the art world was one of the best places to observe this excess: “Just as today, the prices of fashionable ‘fine’ art were fantastically inflated: ancient Rome, it seems, had its equivalents to the hysterical, grotesque pricing of Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, and Jasper Johns. The orator Lucius Crassus paid an incredible 100,000 sesterces for two silver goblets engraved by Mentor, a famed Greek silversmith, ‘but he confessed that for shame he had never dared use them.’ ”

Plebeians (Commoners) in the early Roman Republic

Roman Provinces Illustrate the Extent of the Roman Empire

Chief Roman Provinces (with dates of their acquisition or organization): Total, 32. Many of the main provinces were subdivided into smaller provinces, each under a separate governor—making the total number of provincial governors more than one hundred. [Source: “Outlines of Roman History” by William C. Morey, Ph.D., D.C.L. New York, American Book Company (1901) \~]

EUROPEAN PROVINCES
1) Western.
Spain (205-19 B.C.).
Gaul (France, 120-17 B.C.).
Britain (A.D. 43-84).
2) Central.
Rhaetia et Vindelicia (roughly Switzerland, northern Italy15 B.C.).
Noricum (Austria, Slovenia, 15 B.C.).
Pannonia (western Hungary, eastern Austria, northern Croatia, north-western Serbia, northern Slovenia, western Slovakia and northern Bosnia and Herzegovina. A.D. 10).
3) Eastern.
Illyricum (northern Albania, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina and coastal Croatia, 167-59 B.C.).
Macedonia (northern Greece, modern Macedonia, 146 B.C.).
Achaia (western Greece, 146 B.C.).
Moesia (Central Serbia, Kosovo, northern modern Macedonia, northern Bulgaria and Romanian Dobrudja 20 B.C.).
Thrace (northeast Greece, A.D. 40).
Dacia (Romania, A.D. 107). \~\

AFRICAN PROVINCES
Africa proper (Libya, former Carthage, 146 B.C.).
Cyrenaica and Crete (74, 63 B.C.).
Numidia (Algeria, small parts of Tunisia, Libya, 46 B.C.).
Egypt (30 B.C.).
Mauretania (western Algeria, Morocco, A.D. 42). \~\

ASIATIC PROVINCES
1) In Asia Minor (Anatolia, modern Turkey)
Asia proper (western Turkey133 B.C.).
Bithynia et Pontus (northern Turkey, south of the Black Sea, 74, 65 B.C.).
Cilicia (southeast coast of Turkey, 67 B.C.).
Galatia (central Turkey, 25 B.C.).
Pamphylia et Lycia (southwest Turkey, 25, A.D. 43).
Cappadocia (eastern Turkey, A.D. 17).
2) In Southwestern Asia.
Syria (64 B.C.).
Judea (Israel, 63 - A.D. 70).
Arabia Petraea (A.D. 105).
Armenia (A.D. 114).
Mesopotamia (A.D. 115).
Assyria (A.D. 115). \~\

ISLAND PROVINCES
Sicily (241 B.C.).
Sardinia et Corsica (238 B.C.).
Cyprus (58 B.C.). \~\

Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, Roman culture living on in Byzantium

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons

Text Sources: Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Rome sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Late Antiquity sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; “Outlines of Roman History” by William C. Morey, Ph.D., D.C.L. New York, American Book Company (1901) ; “The Private Life of the Romans” by Harold Whetstone Johnston, Revised by Mary Johnston, Scott, Foresman and Company (1903, 1932); BBC Ancient Rome bbc.co.uk/history/ ; Project Gutenberg gutenberg.org ; Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Live Science, Discover magazine, Archaeology magazine, Reuters, Associated Press, The Guardian, AFP, The New Yorker, Wikipedia, Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopedia.com and various other books, websites and publications.

Last updated October 2024