Episode 1: Who founded the Roman Empire and How Did Become So Vast? (History for Night Owls Podcast)

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Well, we can start with a simpler question: Who founded the city of Rome, and when did the Romans go about conquering their neighbors in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East?

Archaeologists tell us that Rome has its origins in the 700s B.C.E., or before the Common Era -- in other words, before the time of Jesus. At the time, the Romans were one of many people who lived in the Italian peninsula, and they spoke a language known as Latin. To the north were another group known as the Etruscans, who had their own language. Further south on the eastern borders of the Italian peninsula were Greek-speaking people connected with the Greek kingdoms across the Adriatic Sea.

By the 300s B.C.E. the map of the Italian peninsula began to change rapidly. Rome's military forces began to conquer all of the neighboring cities and kingdoms. The conquests gave Rome a more global character as ruling circles and populations from other kingdoms became culturally Romanized, especially in language. In other words, Latin became the dominant language of the Italian peninsula. That transfer of culture went both ways. The Romans themselves adopted many of the cultural practices of their neighbors, from the clothing and art of the Etruscans to the spiritual beliefs of the Greeks.

ARCH OF TITUS (circa 81 C.E.), Rome

What challenged the Romans' early aspirations of European conquest were the successes of the Greek kingdoms across the Adriatic. It was in the 300s when Alexander the Great of the Kingdom of Macedon famously conquered the Balkan peninsula, where present-day Greece and Bulgaria meet Turkey. Alexander's conquests continued beyond southern Europe into what is now Turkey, the Middle East, Egypt, and to the east, what is now Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

In those days, many of these regions east of the Greek isles were under the rule of the ancient Persian Empire, also known as the Achaemenid Empire. The Achaemenid Empire was founded by Cyrus the Great in 550 B.C.E. and met its end at the hands of Alexander, when Alexander's armies defeated the last emperor Darius III in 330 B.C.E. Egypt during Alexander's conquests was under the rule of the Pharoahs in their capital of Memphis, what is now the outskirts of Cairo where the pyramids still stand. After Alexander's conquests, the capital was moved to Alexandria, the city named after Alexander himself.

The Greeks, in other words, built their own global empire in the 300s B.C.E. before the Romans completed their conquests, but the Romans were not far behind. It would be another two hundred years in the 100s B.C.E. before the Romans' most famous ruler, Julius Caesar, completed Rome's conquests of North Africa and the Middle East, and the Alexandrian ruler he met in Egypt--Cleopatra--could speak with Julius Caesar in Greek precisely because Greek cultures had left such a strong cultural legacy throughout the eastern Mediterranean region since the days of Alexander and even earlier.

It's this Greek legacy that explains why Roman culture is usually talked about as Greco-Roman culture. The Roman Empire, in other words, was in many ways two empires: the European and North African lands of Rome's early conquests in the 300s, and the Middle Eastern lands including Egypt that were previously under Greek rule and that the Romans finally captured during the lifetime of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra.

But there was another empire that the Romans absorbed in the process: the Phoenicians of North Africa, more famously known as the Punic Empire. The Phoenicians spoke a language that had its origins in what is now Lebanon and that is related to Semitic languages that were also spoken in the Middle East at the time, including archaic varieties of Aramaic and Arabic along the trade routes connecting Petra and Palmyra to northwest Arabia. The Punic Empire's capital of Carthage, in what is now Tunisia, became Rome's sister city across the Strait of Sicily even before Julius Caesar captured Cleopatra's Egypt. Like the Greeks, the Phoenicians left a strong cultural legacy in Rome, from the lore of its most famous ruler Dido of Carthage to the commercial culture of the Phoenicians' ports. Even the script used to write Latin and Greek has its origins in the Phoenician script, and one of the later Roman emperors, Septimius Severus of Libya, was in fact a native speaker of Phoenician.

The Roman Empire, in other words, was many empires, and the fact that Rome held onto such a vast set of territories for so many hundreds of years, from Spain and Morocco to Syria and Egypt, became the primary reason why its memory and legacy looms so large in these countries today.

Review questions: (1) Who founded Rome? (2) How did Rome become large territorial empire?